To mobile, or not to mobile?

Net Magazine has an article by Josh Clark, in which he takes Jakob Nielsen to task for suggesting that companies need to provide distinct mobile websites, optimized for the mobile experience.

Nielsen is confusing device context with user intent. All that we can really know about mobile users is that they're on a small screen, and we can't divine user intent from that. Just because I'm on a small screen doesn't mean I'm interested in less content or want to do less.  

Stripping out content from a mobile website is like a book author stripping out chapters from a paperback just because it's smaller. We use our phones for everything now; there's no such thing as "this is mobile content, and this is not."

Of course there's some truth to that. Mobile web usage is skyrocketing, and it's increasingly difficult to say with confidence that you know much of anything about the mobile user. When mobile web browsers sucked, you could say that you were designing a mobile site just to alleviate the suffering of trying to view the regular website on that tiny screen. Now, though, iPad, iPhone, and Android users might be perfectly happy with the same view as desktop users.

However, there's a subtle risk to Clark's point of view, because it gives you a reason not to make a choice. Nielsen's approach is to choose a user scenario and optimize for that; Clark appears to be arguing that you should optimize for everyone, in every scenario. And, if that seems like a difficult task, his advice is to just do it better:

Responsive design, adaptive design, progressive enhancement, and progressive disclosure give us the technical tools we need to create a single website that works well on all sites. We're still learning to use those tools the right way. Just because it's a design challenge to use them correctly doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to do it right.

This is great advice for creative geniuses. For everyone else, it's a recipe for failure. I was once peripherally involved in a website redesign project in which the target audience was carefully mapped and defined and put into a series of boxes that, taken together, amounted to everyone who can read. Even people who almost certainly lack the physical capacity to access the website were included in the target audience. It was a complete planning disaster, because when you design for everyone, you design for no one.

That project eventually went off the rails, and it was no surprise to anyone, because one thing that had clearly been established is that the people in charge of the project were not making decisions. Design is about decisions. It's about cutting the cake into smaller pieces, and discarding what you're not going to use. It can be agonizing; the second-guessing can go on forever. But if you choose instead to make no decisions and build your site for everyone, you are headed down the path of creating a site that will delight no one.

Clark, in short, is both right and wrong. He's completely right that we know nothing about mobile users other than that they are using a mobile device, but he is completely wrong in arguing that it is a mistake to optimize for a mobile scenario. Even if the scenario you choose is only partially correct for your visitors, you still stand a better chance of creating a site that users will want to visit.

Words are so 1995

In the midst of an excellent article on Facebook's purchase of Instagram, Paul Ford writes two paragraphs that will strike fear into the heart of any seasoned web editor:

It used to be that web people "published websites" — like the site you’re reading now. But today people who work on the web “manage products.” I'm not sure when that changed, but clearly a memo went around. At one time, in the nineties, everyone was a “webmaster,” then for a while they were “site editors” or “site managers” and now they're “product managers.” A website — even one as simple as Twitter — is no longer a singular thing; it’s a multitude of things from all over the place. 

See what happened? On the web, “product” has gone meta. Companies once made sleds or dreamcatchers or software, but that’s all outsourced; an Internet product is very often a thing that lets other people make things — a kind of metaproduct — and you can get 30 million people working for you, for free, if you do a good job of it.

If you've been paying attention even a little bit, you've seen the same thing happening. When I worked at Microsoft Game Studios I used to joke that the sites we produced were "post word" because -- with great effort -- we had transitioned from boring, ineffective, text-and-image articles to videos and multimedia presentations introduced with a bare minimum of text. That was the market: if you're promoting video games, and you're using a lot of words to do so, you're doing it wrong.

I'm in a different job now, but the experience is the same: articles perform poorly, videos do somewhat better, while photo galleries do the best of all. The visitors to your site are ready to give you perhaps 30 seconds of their time; if your stock in trade is words, you don't have many good options.

The very nature of communications is shifting in response, from words -- in email or face-to-face -- to tools like Twitter, Yammer, and Facebook. The job of communications professionals is now to drive adoption of platforms and engage in real-time dialogue, leaving precious little time for the careful word-crafting that used to be our stock in trade. These can be bewildering times for old school communicators, but if you're comfortable with change it also can be exhilarating. The possibilities are endless, and there's no guarantee that everything will turn out well, but at least it won't be boring.

It's in the increments

Glenn Fleischmann has a very smart article up on TidBITS arguing that Apple's competitors keep trying to match it with big-splash innovation -- LTE, bigger screens, 3D -- when what makes Apple different is its commitment to ongoing, incremental innovation within existing products. The consequence of this disparity is computer and phone makers like Dell and Samsung are hoping that you'll buy every new device when it comes out, while Apple assumes that you'll own your device for three years or more and continues to deliver updates throughout that lifespan. The outcome: customer loyalty.

In part this disparity is a function of different business plans, but I also suspect that companies other than Apple just don't respect incremental innovation. I've seen the same in my work. When leaders speak of innovation, they're generally thinking of big, disruptive, change-the-world thinking. That's the sort of product that Clayton Christensen wrote about in The Innovator's Dilemma, and it's also the sort of sexy change that gets people excited.

Unfortunately, it's a conception of innovation that leads businesses right over the cliff.

There's no doubt that big-splash innovation happens, and when it does the world truly does change. The smart phone, the personal computer, television, radio, the automobile, antibiotics; these had enormous effects. However, truly disruptive products only come around once in a while, and it's very difficult (perhaps impossible) to predict which drawing-board ideas will be disruptive and which will fail to find a market. Betting the company on big-splash innovation is like gambling with money you can't afford to lose: it's bold, it's exciting, you do have a chance to win big, but it's more than likely that you'll lose your shirt.

In the meantime, there's another style of innovation that anyone can pursue, at much less risk. It's not as sexy, and when you win the winnings may not be quite so big, but it has significant potential. That's incremental innovation: the sort of innovation that pursues the improvement of products, services, and processes that already exist.

I believe that innovation is the job of everyone in the company, but that's not to say that everyone should be working on the next big thing. Instead, everyone should be looking every day for ways that they can do what they do better, look at it in a new way, see new possibilities, new ideas, and new ways of measuring outcomes and applying what they've learned to the next version. In a well-run business, there should be a restless, ceaseless striving to learn constantly and do everything better. My experience, though, is that very few businesses take this approach. If innovation is a business goal, it is likely that one team -- or maybe even one person -- will be charged with being innovative, while everyone else is just supposed to do their job.

But imagine if incremental innovation was part of every worker's job description. What if you used the capacity for incremental innovation to guide your hiring? What if your managers were tasked with maximizing the innovative potential of their direct reports? You might be allowing a little bit of creative chaos to enter your business, it's true, but the bottom-line results could be incredible.