Pemaquid Communications

Even if you’re operating on a shoestring, it pays to do some usability testing to gauge the performance of your Web site. Here are some simple things you can do without hiring a pricey consultant:

1. Get some greenhorns. Recruit people who have never seen your site before. These people haven’t “learned” your site.
2. Give ‘em a mission. Sit ‘em down at a computer and give them a specific set of tasks to perform (buy a widget, find the map, browse the gallery…)
3. Talk it out. Have them talk out loud while navigating the site so you can hear what they are thinking.
4. Must. Not. Lead. It’ll be hard, but resist the urge to assist or offer clues (now that you’ve got them talking out loud, they’ll ask questions).
5. Fine tune. Make adjustments to your site based on the feedback.
6. Lather, rinse, repeat.

You may also want to video tape the sessions to easily record commentary and movement through your site.

It’s year-end, the time of year when I clean out the file cabinet (the price of paper will go down once my contribution gets recycled into the supply chain).

I have a file for quotes, aphorisms, and other sayings that I like to pull out from time to time to help me stay focused on what really matters. I came across L.L. Bean’s Golden Rule for creating a successful business. I deemed it worthy of a post. So, for your consideration:

L.L. Bean’s Golden Rule

“Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit, treat your customers like human beings, and they’ll always come back for more.”

What is a Customer?

• A customer is the most important person ever in this company – in person or by mail.
• A customer is not dependent on us; we are dependent on him.
• A customer is not an interruption of our work; he is the purpose of it.
• We are not doing a favor by serving him; he is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.
• A customer is not someone to match wits with. Nobody ever won an argument with a customer.
• A customer is a person who brings us his wants. It is our job to handle them profitably to him and to ourselves.

Friday’s ice storm proved to be an interesting case study in how folks are using Twitter to get the word out (or not).

I was awakened that day by my iPhone, which received this tweet from the State of Maine’s Twitter account @ http://twitter.com/www_maine_gov. I follow it for this very reason – to get citizen alerts on emergency conditions (kinda like the “Emergency Tweetcast Network”).

I haven’t been keeping track, but it seems like their follow count has increased quite a bit over the weekend.

I also follow @WCSH6 and @PressHerald on Twitter, and it was interesting to see how these conventional media outlets used the service. In terms of providing news-you-can-use, IMHO the results were not great, though @PressHerald came through at times.

Here are some example tweets from conventional media over the weekend:

Good:

http://twitter.com/PressHerald/status/1053143263

Yes, OK, fair warning. I’ll be careful out there.

http://twitter.com/PressHerald/status/1053778059

I feel bad for them; at least I know it’s a bad idea to run my generator in the basement.

Bad:

http://twitter.com/PressHerald/status/1055263330

Yes, lots o’ folks are w/o power. But that doesn’t help me much. Tell me where the downed power lines are, the large traffic accidents, what local authorities are saying to people in their respective communities about ETA of electricity.

http://twitter.com/WCSH6/status/1053509213

I could’ve guessed that. But I’m in my car on my mobile device – where are those roads?

http://twitter.com/PressHerald/status/1053582227

Street flooding? Where?!?

http://twitter.com/WCSH6/status/1052326387

Really?!? Drivers are sliding around? How about telling me where those roads/accidents are so I can avoid them?

http://twitter.com/WCSH6/status/1053359047

No shit, Sherlock!

If you’re going to tweet, please make it useful. If your mission is to provide information to the public, make sure that tweet contains actual information. Please don’t tweet and say, in essence, “go to my Web site for complete coverage”. A lot of folks had mobile devices that worked (the AT&T network was rock solid for me and my iPhone) but could not get to the ‘Net (my tweet peeps and I were hard pressed to find it all day Friday – I hear Portland coffee shops were crowded).

So, to news outlets: Don’t try to drive me to your Web site b/c your advertisers need pageviews for your banner ads. Gimme some news on the spot! If you don’t, I’ll gravitate towards others who will fulfill that need.

Here are three tips, based on my experience in broadcasting and public relations as well as my time as a Web Silnger:

1. Write about what you know. It’s pretty simple. You’ll have more to say, and you’ll add more value to the online conversation when you talk about things you understand well.
2. Have an “editorial calendar”. This is tough with a blog, which works best when topics related to current events and are “newsy”. But planning your topics in advance will at least help get you thinking about that post you’re going to write on Friday.
3. Just put your head down and write it, without embellishments. Don’t think about what links you should make and what keywords you should drop in. Circle back to that stuff after you’ve banged out the copy, based on your idea, an idea worth writing about.

I realize I’m just scratching the surface, but here’s a list of some of the decent GTD apps I found recently while searching for an app to help boost my productivity. Maybe one of them will work for you?

• todolist.com
• tadalist.com
• toodledo
• Sandy
• Simple GTD
• vitalist

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m currently using Remember The Milk for immediate actions, and NetVibes for compiling checklists and long-term project lists. YMMV.

I’m a disciple of David Allen and his ever-popular Getting Things Done method for efficiently managing all the “Stuff” we need to do.

There are dozens of great tools our there to help you GTD. (See what I mean?)

For about the last six months I had been using NetVibes, a popular start page application, to create and shuffle todo lists. NetVibes lets you easily create and categorize todo lists and its ajaxy goodness lets you drag list items (and entire lists) around to prioritize them.

Still, in some ways NetVibes was lacking. I have an iPhone, but there’s no iPhone app for NetVibes, so I couldn’t add new todos directly to my list while on the go. And trust me, you don’t want to use the iPhone’s small view screen to browse NetVibes.

I also couldn’t set deadlines for my NetVibes todos – and moving a todo from the “Calls” list to the “Waiting for” list required a cut and a paste. I started to think I could do better.

So over the last two weeks I’ve been reviewing a veritable tag cloud of todo apps, and after creating countless user accounts, my vote for the best time-management app (at least during this election cycle) goes to…. Remember The Milk.

RTM was built to be a todo management tool, unlike NetVibes, which is really primarily an RSS feed reader. It’s also built for speed. It’s loaded w/ajax – I wonder how it performs w/a screen reader – which allows you to add and manipulate todos almost as fast as you can think them up. Items can be prioritized and assigned a deadline. And you can easily move items from one list to another w/a click or two.

You can search/sort your todos in a number of ways. Yep, you can tag ‘em too.

RTM is everywhere. There’s a widget that lets you integrate it with your Google Calendar; you can also tie it to other handy apps like Jott, and you can tie todos to locations.

SMS reminders? Check. iPhone app? Check.

I’ll still use NetVibes to compile long-term GTD project lists; and it’s a great feed reader.

If you’re feeling swamped trying to manage the crush of things you need to do each day, you might want to give RTM a look. As always, YMMV, depending on what you need to do and where/when/how you need to do it. Tomorrow I hope to post a list of some of the other time-managment tools I found while rummaging around the Internet.