Twitter visuals: They matter

Now that everyone's a-Twitter, a quick look at the visuals. While part of Twitter's beauty is its simplicity of setup and use, visuals still matter.

A few points, many obvious, but important:

1. Twitter avatars are small. Most people looking at your Twitter avatar will see it about the same size as a mugshot in the current skinny Charlotte Observer: 44pixels wide, or 3.6 picas or so. If you're using your face, crop tight. Consider radical crops that only expose eyes, or other pieces of you.

2. Twitter avatars are displayed in groups. So the color and design, or lack thereof, need to be simple and clean to stand out to be remembered. My three favorites, from designers, are in the Twitter block at the top. Can you pick them out?

3. Twitter avatars and backgrounds convey your brand, your visual sense and the amount of time and care you put into your product. If you use a standard theme, you're demonstrating your lack of originality and commitment to your brand. If you don't want to take the time to do a quality background that will tile (or not) and look good (settings/design/backgroundimage), then consider not using a background image and only changing your design colors to be easy on the eyes. Consider color-blind people and others with accessibility issues. Consider recruiting a friend with visual issues to test the ease of your avatar and page.

4. Technical tip: At times, it appears Twitter doesn't like photos in .gif format. Try .jpg instead.

5. Fun matters: Laughter, whimsy and fun matter on Twitter. Putting on a Santa hat, no matter how cheesy, or changing your avatar to reflect a season in some other subtle way will help endear you to your community. But numerous changes will confuse your followers. If your avatar reflects a standing brand, take care in changing too frequently: A touch of seasonal color might be all you need.

6. Numerous websites exist that will customize avatars for you, and trends, fads and fashion come and go. Dress accordingly.

Learning about layout from blogs

This just in from Social Median:
Learn about blog layout from the world's top 50 blogs, as measured by Technorati.

Key quote:
"When taken together these sites have a readership bigger than all newspapers in the western world combined."

See some numbers about how they design at Subhub.

Making readers' opinions work

Readers and commenters at the McClatchy Next wiki are abuzz about anonymous comments at newspaper web sites and blogs.
Don't click away -- I know this subject has been done to death. I promise a different approach.
Many of the comments have been fueled by the vitriolic name-calling recently in comments at Etaoin Shrdlu, the blog of McClatchy's vice president for news, Howard Weaver.

Let's face it: Weaver's public blog and position make him an easy target these days, much like Tony and Peter and Par were in previous days. I'm sure he doesn't feel quite as rich, but I'm sure he feels just as targeted with anger.

So let's take a different path, as job cuts hit editorial departments and as McClatchy sites look at new technical toys for enabling and highlighting comments.

Let's take a look at what works: The Observer's letters to the editor, and a couple of Observer blogs. I'm sure there are other examples of print features and sites that work, but I offer these up as ones I know best. I'd love to hear about others.

One of the major reasons I was attracted to The Charlotte Observer 20-some odd years ago was the vibrancy of the editorial pages. Much of that vibrancy came from the letters to the editor.
These days, Lew Powell is still editing those letters (as far as I know. I've been away from work email for a few days), and The Observer still kicks butt with the feature.

I'll be more specific: The Charlotte Observer still kicks The News and Observer's butt and many other papers with its letters to the editor. The Observer's printed letters cover a wide variety of subjects, are concise, quick and to-the-point. The News and Observer has plenty of letters online, but they're less concise. A recent printed News and Observer also had fewer, longer letters than The Charlotte Observer's daily printed product.

In addition, some Charlotte Observer blogs have fostered vibrant, often thoughtful commenting communities, with questions and thoughts that resemble the salons, not saloons, of days of yore.

So let's find out why, while we still have Lew Powell with us and while those bloggers still have time to engage those communities.

Then, perhaps, we can figure out how to make money from those communities without destroying them, or share their content on a wider basis, or emulate their success to give other readers a place for thoughtful comments that they seem to crave.

Here's the letters policy, in part:
"Please sign and include your address and daytime telephone number. We edit for brevity, grammar, clarity and accuracy, and we reject letters published elsewhere. Letters typically address a single idea and do not exceed 150 words."

Yes, 150 words.

That policy is backed up by Lew, (and others on the editorial board. Added 7/30). Here's what was published for the Sunday, July 27, edition:
12 letters
11 subjects
At least 7 with reference to specific previous stories, editorials or letters.
8 from male writers
4 from female writers
1 from a writer under age 13.
The longest letter included 147 words: the letter from the young person.
3 letters included less than 50 words.
All letters are signed with a name and home town. Phone numbers and addresses are not published.
(This example actually was produced by esteemed Editorial Page Editor Ed Williams, who retires this year. Lew was on vacation. But they back up each other's standards, and Lew says he won't let Ed get letters published more than once a month after his retirement. Added 7/30.)

Stuff I don't know:
How many letters are received each week? How many are rejected? How many have to be edited to that 150 word limit or shortened further? How many are from repeat writers? How could new tech tools ease the workload, integrate the letters more with online comments, or enrich information, links and visuals to the letter writers, so readers can know more about specific letter writers while protecting privacy for those writers who want it? Is it worth the time it would take? Does Lew call every letter writer each time they write?

Compared to comments on blogs, Lew's published version of the letters gives me a chance to hear what people are thinking on a wide variety of topics, quickly and concisely. It's what's left out that's important here.

No wasted words.

Blogs, on the other hand, give commenters unlimited space and quicker interactivity with other posters as well as the original blogger. I can't afford the time to visit them frequently, but here are some details about two of my favorites.

The Naked City, from Mary Newsom: The latest post, "Any hope for '60s suburbia?" poses a detailed question in 121 words and asks for comments. It was posted Thursday, July 24. As of Sunday, July 27, at noonish, it had 31 comments. 10 comments used pseudonyms or names. 20 used anonymous. One was pure spam, but the others were generally thoughtful and positive.
32 visitors came to the blog as of about 1 p.m. Sunday, July 27 (the slowest day of the week). 1,146 came on Thursday, the day of the last posting. 1,746 hits came on Tuesday, with a posting done at 6:05 p.m. The timing of comments and hits appears to indicate that many readers are using RSS feeds to watch for new postings. (Hit stats are from a Sitemeter bug at the blog. I wonder whether that immediate feedback tool will disappear with our site redesign. Will be a shame if that happens).

And another:
Sacred Space, from Jane Pope: The latest post, "Are we born cruel or kind?" poses a detailed question in 126 words and asks for comments. It was posted Friday, July 25. As of Sunday, July 27, at noonish, it had 42 comments, one of which had been removed by the author. Comments frequently referred to specific other commenters by their pseudonyms or names. Only two people posted completely as anonymous.
Gamecock made 15 comments.
Iztok made 8 comments.
Pete made 7 comments.
Others made one or two comments.

Things I don't know about Sacred Space: Hit counts. But I'd suggest that Gamecock and Iztok get a little credit for those hits -- not from just themselves, but from all the other readers coming back to watch their dialog.

Something else I don't know: How much total time these bloggers estimate they spend on writing and moderating comments, and how they are moderating comments. Are they autopublishing any comment, and then catching up later to edit? Or are they approving each comment separately? (Surely not).

I do know both Mary and Jane have had to remind -- and perhaps scold -- commenters to remain civil. Mary has had to delete the worst of the inflammatory, nasty comments. I assume Jane has had to do so as well. If one wants a well-kept saloon, or salon, setting some standards is necessary. Real people seem to work better than automated technology, in this case.

So what's next?
It's clear that creating online (or print) communities with a high level of discourse and value requires some human intervention. It's clear that creating enclaves of reasoned thought is possible even in a broader online (or print) free-for-all of anonymous comments.

Not so clear, and worth discussion:
Could some advertisers aiming at specific audiences be missing out by not advertising on some of our blogs? Will our online redesign give an opportunity for such ads in a not-in-your-face way? Is there a sales rep. in the house who can gather some more numbers and target tasteful advertisers who aren't already spending money with us? How will we preserve the time for folks like Lew, Jane and Mary to moderate, edit and encourage those communities? How much time are those communities worth? How can we avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater as we streamline our staffing? And how can we connect some of these subject-specific communities for cross-pollination? (Some of the most frequent commenters do jump around or migrate from blog to blog already.) How can we reward the most thoughtful commenters? How can print benefit from the online comments?

Interesting questions, as we go forward.

Let's hope we make the right decisions.

Turning the pages, online

The Sporting News is launching an e-edition, emailed to subscribers and delivered in an electronic page-turning format. The publication, now based in Charlotte just about a block away from The Observer, has hired some talent from The Observer and elsewhere, with big names in visuals, including Charles Apple.

Mygazines is offering myriad magazines, with the same kind of page-turning feel. Its version of In Style is in the picture.

Scribd offers a similar service, community-based, where readers can upload and download publications in a page-turning format, comment on each other's documents and see most-viewed, most likes and top users.

Smaller publications like The Raleigh Downtowner are offering similar technology to view their work, or they're offering PDFs.

It makes sense in a publishing world of diminishing resources to leverage and reuse the design work already done for a publication. But do the designs of print and web really work together? Is there a way to please both the lovers of print and the lovers of online interactivity at the same time, without having to redesign or re-template for different mediums?

And now, with the IPhone and similar toys, online publishers are forced to reinvent design to fit the small screen, with varying levels of success.

I tested Mygazines on the big consumer of magazines at my house: an 18-year-old who loves visuals, fashion and the computer. Results: too slow to load, and not clickable enough. If it's on a screen, there better be plenty of links.

We didn't even get into the other benefits of printed, glossy magazines -- the passalong ability and portability of visual, beautiful information.

Update Aug. 16: The Magazine Publishers Association has sued the owner of Mygazines, which is incorporated on Anguilla, a British territory in the Caribbean. Details here.

So as all kinds of publishers try to cut costs and leverage work, it's a bit heartening to see that design still matters, and fitting design to the medium is still relevant.

And as I was thinking about this post, something called S3 or "Simple Storage Service" from Amazon went down. Visuals in all kinds of places, from Twitter to Scribd, disappeared. The Internet still worked, mostly, but many sites lost the visual elements of their services.

Change is sometimes frighteningly fast these days, and glitches will happen. As journalists a block away in Charlotte try to make a go of new technology with an interesting format, I wish them luck. We all need it.

Again, we live in interesting times.

More:
(Added July 26) Steve Cavendish, graphics director at the Chicago Tribune, critiques the Sporting News PDF version.
(Older:)
Jakob Nielsen on differences between print and web design, 1999.
Coding Horror, aka Jeff Atwood, on the New York Times' Reader and its format vs. the web format.

Kansas City wins at SND

Congrats to sister paper The Kansas City Star for winning an award of excellence in SND judging in Syracuse.
Results for other papers are unclear at the moment: the SND judges are designers, not database experts, and they want some time before posting the full results database. They're great at posting pictures though.
Please note: Kansas City uses CCI to produce their paper. The winning front page uses a tried-and-true formula for breaking news: great photos, played well; a locater map, a breakout box. What looks like the planned centerpiece was squished downpage while retaining its graphic elements.
Six of the Top 10 list of winners use CCI: the Los Angeles Times; The New York Times; The Boston Globe; Hartford Courant; Chicago Tribune, and the San Jose Mercury News.
Thought for next year's SND judging: invite a database geek or two to help get the full results posted faster. It's possible, as The New York Times demonstrates with election results.
Or develop one from within. Avoid fields; jump fences.

Notes from the Intertubes

• The latest in photo manipulation: content-aware resizing. And I thought Photoshop's rubber stamp tool was cool...
  
  


• Over at VisEds, Robb Montgomery and David Dunkley Gyimah post a clip on what it takes to be an "interactive multimedia video journalist." Whatever you want to call it, it's a pretty cool clip (imagine a news segment produced by the director of "Se7en." Much different from anything you'd see each night on the TV news. But is something like this feasible in a world filled with deadlines?
  
  


• Given that we're in the midst of a redesign, I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion here (or even in my nook of the newsroom) about how the Merc is going about its redesign. I like the idea that they're trying to make things transparent, opening up the discussions, etc. I'm not sure I like the three-section idea they're going with. But desperate times do call for desperate measures. What do y'all think?
  
• Here's the Merc's Rethink site ...
• And the blog about the redesign (which features a lot of talk about "how to stay innovative").
  
• There's an interesting Google Groups thread.


• Finally, I'm not sure who to credit, but there's a pretty cool (and helpful) Google Maps mashup of Mecklenburg's missing people. Wonder if we could use these sorts of features as a springboard to a full-out crime map a la Raleigh or Chicago. Now, we need to get advertisers on board to sponsor these sorts of Web features. With all the investment we've made in video, why do we still not have ads accompanying the videos? I'd much rather watch those than have to deal with one of those accordion ads that floats down from the top of a page, or from that annoying guy who pops up at the bottom of the home page and starts talking to me.

Carolina wins SNDies

UNC's photojournalism program gets honored through the SNDies online multimedia journalism again.
Mindy McAdams has the headlines and links. UNC's dean of the j-school, Dr. Jean Folkerts, visited The Observer recently and expressed a wish that the great work from the program would have a wider audience. So go visit.

Busy, busy international web

Tim Johnson, Beijing bureau chief for McClatchy, talks about how Chinese website design is vastly busier than U.S. website design. He describes the "hot and noisy" design with a Chinese word, renao.
Interesting comparison, but I think he hasn't been watching what's been happening to mainstream media sites in the United States. We're all getting hot and noisy. Here's hoping we preserve (improve? create?) usability and findability, as local aggregator outside.in has. Some are saying it's the new Facebook.

Uncluttered sustainability

(That's not what the picture shows).

Tech President gets the big prize of $10,000 from the 2007 Knight-Batten Awards. Bluffton Today, former employer of Jim McBee, gets a notable mention.
You can gain hope and learn lots from looking around at the other winners and notable entries.

And you can learn lots by looking at previous sites noted for their innovation, like Baristanet. That "community journalism" site has joined the ranks of online sites assaulting readers, like The Washington Post and the Gaston Gazette, which both took money from Ford Motor Company for a drop-down ad with video this morning. The ad hindered usability by covering up search boxes. (Please, Ford web crawlers: come to this blog and get a clue).

Look around at the sad evidence of a failed effort at BackFence, or what passes for news at YourHub. Keep your fingers crossed that places like Loudon Extra will make money and encourage local reporting.

Seek hope in Dan Gillmor's ideas for sustainability.

Grants can buy some time, but that time needs to be spent pounding on sustainability. It goes beyond newspapers and community blogs to public TV stations as well.

Take a moment to toast and visit sites like Davidsonnet, Under the Water Tower and the fledgling Ballantyne Daily.

Then keep thinking about the uncluttered sustainability of real, complicated, expensive story-telling, like The Morning Call's multimedia narrative about one homeless man named Earl.

Online Journalism Awards

The Online News Association has posted the list of this year's finalists. Lots of nods for breaking-news coverage of the Va. Tech shootings. (For my money's worth, the best online coverage came from a site not listed -- the Collegiate Times.)

The list of finalists, though, is a good source of ideas. (Loved the Freep's media-rich look at Aretha Franklin's "Respect.")

New preps site lets readers get in the game

Talk about giving Web readers what they want... The Salt Lake Tribune has unveiled a bold new site that focuses on local high school sports. The site makes it easy for readers to find the most relevant content quickly, and it looks pretty darn cool. (Note the iTunes-style reflecting graphics.)

Readers can localize the site to their favorite sport, school or team. Eventually, it will feature reader-submitted photos and stories, in addition to staff content. I particularly liked the prominent "GameTracker" feature. (Something we could easily emulate...)More on the site here.

Rating newspaper Web sites

On the heels of its recent report on how well U.S. newspapers are incorporating current thinking on usability and Web 2.0 features into their sites, The Bivings Report has ranked the top U.S. newspaper sites.

No real surprises in the top 3 — NY Times, Washington Post and USA Today — but I found some of the other choices interesting.

4. Houston Chronicle

"We like the non-newspaperish feeling that this homepage exudes. It’s significantly different from any other newspaper site. Chron.com offers its users interactive features such as comments and blogs, has a great RSS system made available right on the homepage, and looks good while doing it."

6. Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel

"I’m not sure a newspaper website could look any better than this one. When we talk about de-cluttering sites and making them look “clean”, this is what we mean."

Some of the commonalities of the sites mentioned:

• An easy-to-navigate site that isn't too cluttered.
• Incorporation (and prominent display) of "Web 2.0" features that allow users to contribute content to the site — blogs, photos, comments, networking.
• Database applications — voter's guides, crime maps, congressional vote databases, etc.
• Strong presence of multimedia.

(Also, with the exception of the NYT and USA Today, each of the sites has a horizontal navbar at the top of each page rather than just one down the left side of the page.)

None of these elements are particularly eye-opening in and of themselves — they're all features we've been mentioning here for months, and most are features that non-newspaper sites have incorporated for years now — but they're good examples of the types of features sites are using to tell stories and invite reader participation in ways not possible with the printed product.

And they're ways to address some of the key challenges, listed in last month's Bivings Report study, facing newspaper Web sites:

• Lengthening the amount of time users spend on newspaper Web sites.
• Expanding the purpose behind newspaper Web site visits.
• Converting page views and stickiness into revenue.
• Improving advertiser incentives for purchasing online ads on newspaper Web sites.

(If these aren't already some of the explicit goals of Charlotte.com, they should be.)

Which newspaper sites would you list among your top 10?

h/t to Charles Apple for the link.

The Tribune and synergy

Very long article from the December/January issue of AJR details what synergy and centralization meant at the Tribune. Some of the stuff they've been talking about, like standardized design of websites, seems to be hitting reality, and folks at Visual Editors are discussing it.

The AJR article also deals with calendar listings online, a la Event Tracker, and centralized and decentralized efforts.
Advice on the AJR article: scroll down to the first large W dropcap, and start reading there.

Defining design

Start with a look at Apple's product design evolution.
Then visit Core 77, and read about how to define the word "design."


The short version:
Good designers share these intangible skills, useful for cross-functional teams:
1. Interpretation: Many designers are multi-lingual in different fields, they are fluent in consumer trends, marketing, manufacturing, and technology.
2. Tangibility: Many firms are plagued by 'smart talkers' who sound good in meetings, but get bogged down in abstract complexities. Designers are good at 'making it real.'
3. Synthesis: Not only do designers specialize in being generalists, they tend to be good at making new connections, pulling together threads from different fields and integrating them into a new whole.
4. Resolution: Good designers are smart at turning knowledge into action—they solve problems, resolve tensions, draw tangible and practical conclusions, and hit deadlines. Designers (and copy editors, I might add) live by real world limits.


Advice, for designers and all:
1. Adopt an agile perspective
2. Spot gaps
3. Make new connections
4. Teach yourself
5. Expand the industry.

"There is no one future waiting to happen," Gary Hamel said, "the future is something you create, not something that happens to you."

Do in-paper refers drive traffic?

Not for a blog about Harry Potter, at least not by 9:40 a.m. on a summer morning, even though a front-page story had a refer to this blog.
(Re-editing this post as new numbers come in. Certainty fades to uncertainty, the more facts you have).
By noon or 1 p.m., traffic had rebounded some, possibly because a link to the blog was posted at the very top of our website in a Harry Potter visual package.
Eventually, the day's numbers surpassed the 818 visitors that came on Saturday, just after the first Harry Potter post went up. Eventual number was 838.
In this case, it looks like many blog readers are using RSS or some other blog-watching software. The blog writer, Mary Newsom, believes the in-paper refer from her Saturday column was a major force in driving the Saturday morning traffic. The post was posted Friday night at 11:35 p.m., and the flood of hits came about 8 am. to 10 a.m. the next morning. I suspect it was a combination of RSS readers and the in-paper refer placed with her op-ed column.

To quote the Dayton managing editor awhile back: "Google is now the front page of the newspaper."

I think it's gone beyond that, to software that monitors particular sites and updates readers with headlines pointing to new content (often called RSS, but not all the software is "real" RSS, and not all of it is complicated).
But that software isn't perfect: The latest posting to Mary's blog was up about noontime. My Google Reader did not update with the new posting until 3:30 p.m. That lag might not mean much for overnight postings aimed at readers' morning reading habits, but for real news monitoring, it's unforgivable. There might be settings at Blogger or elsewhere that can speed this up.
Update: I created a Facebook group, Potterblog Fan Club, to push the blog, as an exercise in driving traffic. It brought a couple of hits, one at 10:40 p.m. Monday night. The timing seems obvious, for anyone who knows teenagers. I have a hunch that traditional newspaper readers are the ones logging in and reading in the morning, and the non-traditional younger readers are primarily the ones visiting later at night. Generally.
The Facebook group is up to five members as of 10 a.m. Tuesday -- obviously, the key is connecting with those viral folks who have lots of friends, not Facebook newbies like me.

Better navigation, fewer page views?

Some folks are wondering why traffic as measured in page views has dropped off at USA.com.
Could be the companies doing the counting, or it could be the way page views are counted, or it could be faster, easier navigation, suggest a couple of new comments at Howard Owens' blog.
Analogy: planned obsolescence? If we let traffic metrics drive our decisions too much, we'll make our pages more complicated to drive up page views. (We'll make cars that don't last so customers will buy more replacement cars.)
Honda and Toyota didn't go there.
I wish there was a way to measure quality time and satisfaction of visitors as well: did they spend lots of time reading and viewing, or did they spend lots of time trying to find what they needed? Sounds like a graduate degree research project, or Eyetrack study.
Can we quantify satisfaction? I.E., does a 1-minute visit mean a visitor was dissatisfied, while a 3-minute visit mean they found what they needed?

The idea of traffic

If you're ready for some heavy-duty reading about traffic and the structure of websites, see Buzz Machine from May 29.
If you'd rather have some edgy eye candy, try We Are Sharks and We Never Stop Swimming..
One of those pages links to a multimedia presentation on the effects of Chernobyl. Go there if you have a home high-speed connection and audio turned on.
Chernobyl photo essay.