EATagency - 8 Bit Strategy: The Golden Age of Video Games Can Help You Become and Better Designer...

by

Ian Alexander&

Brian Hughes

EATagency.com presents

8-BIT INSPIRATION:THE GOLDEN AGE OF ARCADE

GAMES CAN MAKE YOU A BETTER

STRATEGIST AND DESIGNER

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http://www.eatagency.com

YOU ARE IN THE CONTROL(S) 2/90

VISION.DIRECTION.DECISION.

The screen:

Look around. Every blinking screen is your competitor. Every brand is

teasing quarters out of consumers’ pockets. Standing out requires con-

sistency. #vision

The joystick:

You can take your product/service anywhere you want. Fancy, conser-

vative, freemium or enterprise. Navigating these digital waters is more

than a template and a press release. #direction

The button:

After you choose a strategy, you’ll have to pull the trigger

on tactics. Staying safe is a sure-fire way to become

irrelevant. #decision

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vision.direction.decision

COPYWRITING AND STORYTELLING

-CONTENT IS CONSUMED-

3/90

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COPYWRITING AND STORYTELLING 4/90

VIDEO GAMES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN

FERTILE GROUND FOR THE SURREAL,

BUT BURGERTIME STANDS OUT EVEN

AMONG THIS CROWD.

Hot dogs, pickles and eggs chase a hapless chef (Peter Pepper, for the

hardcore) through a scaffolded maze of platforms, ladders and giant

hamburgers. Players help Chef Pepper construct the hamburgers while

avoiding the murderous garnishes. Where do the burgers go? Who eats

them? Do they possess the gamey savor of a man’s fear? We can only

guess...


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The most important dimension of any creative or commercial project is your relationship with the customer, the ultimate user of your content. This is the person you must inform and delight. Any other goals you set, any other challenges you face and overcome, will be done for them and on their behalf.

For Peter Pepper’s customers, that content is food. In our trade, it centers around story. Encode meaning into your stories, and you will enable users to access greater depth of meaning more easily and consistently.

Clear stories are easy to remember because we are so familiar with their structure. We recognize the heroes, the

conflicts, the setbacks and eventual victories, from our own lives. If you can craft a story in which users feel familiar, you have thrown open the door and invited them home—where the heart is—where trust is.

In order for users to make sense of our words, they recall a constellation of meanings associated with those words. Some words contain within them whole stories. When Peter Pepper’s off-screen customers place their orders, they presumably don’t order “raw ground beef, seasoned with salt and pepper, grilled at 400 degree fahrenheit, placed between two buns, with a leaf of lettuce and a slice of tomato, symbolizing the unpretentious melting-pot ideal of the

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SEMANTIC RECEPTION

DEMANDS MEMORY.““

– Norbert Weiner


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United States.” They ordered a burger. “Burger” is a story that captures all the details of its recipe, history, preparation and cultural significance. That’s one of the primary reasons why the game caught on in the United States. “Sushi Time” would not have played nearly as well in heartland 7-11s and laundromats, no matter how dynamic the game physics.

Making the right semantic call might not be a simple question of accurate description. Internally, your organization understands its products/services in all their minute intricacies. It’s tempting to present users a litany of attributes, relying on their good sense to make the reasonable choice based on

self-interest.

The problem is that in order for users/customers to make that informed decision, you have to engage them first. That means packing a slew of attributes into a few emotionally resonant words and phrases. Fight against the reflex to see this as squishy emotionalism or dubious marketing slight-of-hand. It isn’t.

Metonymy is the rhetorical device that allows a writer to pack a universe of meaning into just one or a few words. It’s why “Hollywood” is more than just a zipcode—it’s the entire mechanism of American mass-culture. It’s why “The White House” isn’t a building—it’s a


political force. It’s why the phrase “The breakfast of champions” just made you think of cereal, the 1976 summer olympics and the color orange.

You’ll have to find those powerful few words that encapsulate the maximum amount of meaning and emotional resonance for your customer. But you’ll also have to expand on it, since most projects call for more than just a catchy slogan. That’s where you deliver your value: distilling meaning, and applying it to longer-form copy, graphic design, and the interplay between them.

Copy is component to UX, code, design and brand. And make no mistake: they are as much the grammar and

vocabulary of stories as the words themselves. We should be cautious not to fall into the trap of overlooking their importance in the construction of user narrative. In fact, narrative transcends even these boundaries, to be constructed across all touchpoints of the user journey.

You can see a clear snapshot of this if you spend just a few minutes on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter’s overarching narrative is this: independent artists use crowdfunding to create moderate-to-high budget projects without prior approval from the gatekeepers of art and commerce. And Kickstarter tells its

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BREAKING WORK INTO DIGESTIBLE

STORIES CREATES THE NEED FOR A

“MAP” TO TRACK AND LOCATE THEM IN

THE OVERALL USER JOURNEY. WHEN

KICKING OFF A SPECIFIC STORY, NEVER

HESITATE TO SPEND TIME SYNCING

AUDIENCE WITH CONTEXT.

“

“

– Huimin Li, “How Do You Develop a Shared Understanding on an Agile Project?”, ThoughtWorks Studios

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story by curating the site to put the most successful and well-realized projects at the fore.

First, we see faces—smiling—successful artists and inventors. We see clever and enticing designs. And we see success. A casual visitor to the site must typically dig down at least two levels before they find projects with less than 100% funding. This despite the fact that fewer than half of all Kickstarter projects succeed in reaching their funding goals.

The story conveyed through this design says: this is where artists get funding—not merely seek it. Whether a contributor or fundraiser, you won’t waste your time or come out

disappointed.

A well-curated partnership also has the potential to expand story beyond both the start and finish of a brand engagement. You’ll find a great example of this if you ever need to Google “How to wrap an extension cord.” The first result returns a link to The Art of Manliness, a blog cleaving faithfully to its kettlebells-and-moustache-wax brand gestalt. The site’s story is that of rediscovering lost masculine competencies—precisely that narrative in which a man finds himself when wondering how to properly wrap an extension cord.

As he reads the article he sees one of

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many prominent banners for Huckberry, a curated online retailer that specializes in durable, design-centric, small-batch products, which also hearken back to turn-of-the-century standards and aesthetics. In addition to a rotating stock of curated merchandise, Huckberry maintains a top-notch photo blog, whose themes reinforce the values of taking the best from the past while staying contemporary, design-conscious and unpretentious.

Order from the site, and the retailer provides consistently branded thank-you postcards. Thus does a unified story cross from one digital space to another, and into the physical world. The first is free, the second and third retail. The

first is internal, editorial. The second and third are curated from outside sources. But throughout the experience, the story, and its hero, is consistent—the user will never be confused.

Cheat Code #91: Creating attention-grabbing headlines can both drive valuable clicks and dilute your brand. If your content doesn’t do much more than pay off the lead, readers will feel duped.

If you haven’t done it already, experiment with split testing tools (Optimizely is a good place to start). Once you’ve winnowed through the noble failures, you’ll find real customers—people who want and need exactly what you’re offering.

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You wont always nail your copy/story on the first go round. So, if a tactic (a hypothesis) doesn’t pan out—if the wieners of customer disinterest and the pickles of technical unsustainability block your way—you have to be able to discard your strategy, and pick another one. Have faith, and head for customer interactions.

It’s not enough just to check the receipts, read the comment cards, and occasionally greet the guests tableside. You have to look at everything. Before all your best metrics and conversion funnels fail, bust out the coffee and bagels and invite some users over for a gab sesh. When you’re convinced that users are having trouble distinguishing

what they actually want/need from what they think they want/need, you can run back to metrics with a newfound, real-world clarity.

Which brings us to the final lesson of BurgerTime: Everything you touch is content (food)—but only some of it is edible. If a piece of content isn’t to your user’s advantage, it’s a threat to the message. Knowing what to say and how to say it is contingent on knowing your end user. And with that goes attention to the medium of delivery.

Technology, IA ,UX and design are both part of and shape your story. Technology assembles the practices and facilitates the audience. IA manifests structure. UX

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directs pacing while design formulates style. These aren’t “considerations”; they are every bit as much part and parcel of content as the “actual” service you intend to deliver.

The essence of any brand story is always to consistently communicate a solution: print, web, social and experiential. The result will be great copy and story—and orders that keep rolling in. And no matter what, deliver on your story’s promise. Everything else is methodology and execution.

With that out of the way, grab your roll of quarters and let’s venture further into the dark, blooping recesses of the arcade...

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-5 TIPS-

Work on your homepage content last. Instead, start with with a piece of content that is both distant from the pre-sale pitch and contains a singular CTA (sign-up email or receipt, for example). Your goal here is to reduce the friction of “homepage politics,” so that you can find and build on a tone that resonates.

Start thinking about fonts as soon as you begin to create content. You need to plan and draft based how your words will appear visually. Look at the content in context.

Think about your mobile content early on. Heds at 90px may look great on desktop, but what happens when you view them on a phone?

Brand when you can, but not at the expense of readability. Use brand-specific copy style for receipts, thank-yous and error messages. Eric Karajaluoto’s book Speak Human, is a good reference.

Analyze every available piece of content and ask: would any of this be better in a different medium? Should the article be a video? Would the slideshow be better as an ebook?

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UX AND VISUAL DESIGN

-CHASING DOTS-

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UX AND VISUAL DESIGN 16/90

WE SPENT CHILDHOOD BIRTHDAY

PARTIES PLAYING IT IN LIEU OF

BOWLING. PAC-MAN IS THE COCA-COLA

OF GOLDEN AGE ARCADE GAMES.

You know what it looks like. Players guide a yellow circle through a se-

ries of mazes, eating pixelated fruit and power pellets, while racing to

escape a quartet of colorful ghosts. Or is there more to it?

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Pac-Man is nearly impossible to win. In a way, it was intended to go on forever. There are 255 different mazes of yellow pellets, pixelated fruit and those pesky ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Sue. To date, only six people in the world have achieved the honor of playing a perfect game of Pac-Man. And they didn’t win by chasing random dots—they all succeeded by perfecting the paths and patterns that take players through the mazes as safely and quickly as possible. They learned that circling around one quadrant of the board and trying to devour every goodie before moving on is nothing more than a great way to get caught.

Most of us have muddled through

a quick game of Pac-Man, at the laundromat or in the back of whichever dive bar we haunted in college (nostalgia makes for sticky shoes). We never bothered to learn patterns. We had clothes to dry, rounds to buy and Journey songs to karaoke. So we dropped in our quarter, bellied up to the joystick and chased dots until the ghosts caught us. If we were really good, or lucky, we made it past level five.

That’s the trap you fall into when you narrowly obsess about one facet of project at the expense of seeing it as a whole.

Before you commit to a single pixel of your next digital project, you’ve got to

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understand your problem. Pinpointing that primary problem is a cross-functional bear. A clunky check-out flow might turn into a departmental tug-of-war. Those 3am site copy changes by the CEO may dictate structure and security for CMS templates. If you don’t account for these twists and turns, it’s easy to get caught in corner without a power pellet.

Rewinding a chapter, make sure you’ve got a good handle on your content. Amass, consolidate, dissect and arrange. Do this with as close to 100% of your content as possible before the first pixel flashes to life. And always stay cognizant of what users are trying to achieve.

Some content exists to spur user engagement—as in the case of calls to action—while other types, such as forms, already assume engagement. Consider for a moment how content can be subordinate to user-directed action, as in the case of most buttons and arrows, while some content functions solely in circumstances of user receptivity (video content, receipts). Most content exists on a continuum between the two. For example: a thumbnail image (user-agent) might lead to a product description in a purchase flow (user-patient).

Once you’ve answered these questions, it’s finally possible to create a design pattern and flow that will help users

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WHAT IS CONSIDERED WEB DESIGN

TODAY IS NOT REALLY DESIGN. IT IS

STYLING, PIXEL COLORING OR WHATEVER

YOU’D LIKE TO CALL IT. REAL DESIGN

IS ABOUT SOLVING PROBLEMS. IT

IS WAY MORE HOLISTIC AND DEEP

THAN THE ACTUAL WORK WE DO IN

PHOTOSHOP. REAL DESIGN IS ABOUT

CREATING A THOUGHTFUL, ENGAGING

USER EXPERIENCE. AESTHETIC STYLING

CAN BE THEN APPLIED TO ENHANCE THE

EXPERIENCE AS LONG AS IT DOESN’T

GET IN ITS WAY.

““

– Uzi Shmilovici, “User Experience and the Poison on the Tip of the Arrow,” Tech Crunch, 2012

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achieve their goals, whether active or passive, perceiving or utilitarian.

Design exists to stylize an experience, but its primary goal is to communicate. At the outset of any project, there will always be two audiences with whom you are communicating. The customer/user is the obvious one. But before you can even begin speaking to them, you’ll have to get sign-off and approval from internal and external stakeholders.

Deciding how many pixels to chase at a given time, and in which direction—these are patterns you need to identify.How do you decide? Research, that’s how. Aesthetically gorgeous design elements do not ensure that customers

will be engaged. Your UX needs to be functional first and beautiful second. At any stage of game—whether that game is Pac-Man or new product development—you can’t avoid some degree of polished pixel work. But at each stage of a project it’s necessary to identify distinct standards for pixel-perfection.

For example, if you’re seeking funding, for an iPhone app, initial high-res designs are going to be crucial. But pixel perfection isn’t going to help if the design has fatal navigation flaws. And skeuomorphic design flourishes won’t matter much if your app is targeting the wrong audience. If potential funders get tripped up on details and can’t visualize

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the offering, it’s an almost iron-clad guarantee the project won’t get funded. If the project can’t be funded, you will never get the chance to communicate with your user.

If this isn’t a solo operation, and you have stakeholders involved in your project, you’ll need to determine what level of fidelity to show them. How do you balance flexibility with sign-off?

It isn’t fair to your stakeholder to ask for the green light, with the caveat that everything is subject to change at your discretion. But if you never get your stakeholder’s sign-off, there will be no accountability for things going wrong if your advice isn’t followed. Better to let

them experience the challenges with you.

Ideally you would include them in the sketching process. Graph paper and a few Sharpies can cement buy-in by turning everyone into an architect. Customer and product insights exist throughout your organization. Your job is to extract, process and synthesize them.

You’ve heard of minimum viable product. Initiatory design is minimum shareable concept. Ask: how do we begin to create a design that elocutes and fosters our idea? How do we make it real enough that we can begin to pick it apart? Think of the minimum shareable concept as

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DESIGN IS NOT SOMETHING THAT YOU DO

ALONE IN A LOFT. YOU HAVE PARTNERS

WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. THOSE

PARTNERS CAN BE YOUR CLIENTS, YOUR

COWORKERS,THE PROJECT MANAGER OR

THE ACCOUNT EXEC.

“

“– Hillman Curtis

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the art on an arcade game cabinet. As revolutionary as these golden-age games were, their primitive pixels would not have captured our imaginations if it hadn’t been for the bold, lurid art on their housing. Design initiates

communiction for the simple reason that pretty things get more attention.

Cheat Code #582: If you can attract stakeholders with a beautiful cabinet—that is, style cards, UX mockups, copy samples, etc.—then you’re well on your way to sign-off on patterns and strategic frameworks that you can build on. This creates flexibility.

Stakeholders see results without paralyzing your ability to pivot. You get the accountability you need, while retaining the ability to try new approaches. Comps that grab stakeholders’ attention should be limited to small elements—enough to get them excited about a new visual

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direction, but not so detailed that you are locking down hex colors and perfecting the golden ratio.

Once you have that interest, that initial, exploratory 25 cents, you can start to create an elegant user experience, design your content and commence communication.

Whether you’re building an application, a website or a print newsletter, every dimension of UX can seem contingent on other practices. For instance, no project can start with perfect copy, because visual design can’t be nailed down at so early a stage of the process. And before design can be finalized, IA and CX need to be established in tandem. Preceding

IA, technology decisions may dictate all of the above. And what are your business objectives again?

Identifying one or two key pages in a user experience flow can be vital to a project’s success. Otherwise, afternoons disappear sweating the details before you’re ready. If your design solution hinges on choosing between a 960 grid and an 1170, the fine details may be moot. Getting too granular too soon is a rookie mistake. Do as little as possible, as often as possible—work big to small.Once you nail down an initial design, remember that design feedback, consumption and iteration always take longer than you expect. Fidelity setbacks are a frequent hidden delay.

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Delivering high-fidelity comps and getting back fundamental changes means you skipped step one: sketches. And when those low-fidelity comps come back with a post-it reading “this looks unfinished,” it means someone should have been at the table earlier.

The ghosts of past projects shouldn’t ever frighten you into chasing finished designs without proper input. The lessons you take from each prior engagement form your stockpile of patterns, but there’s a fine line between dipping into pattern libraries/templates and rote repetition.

When we provide too-specific solutions, rather than starting

by describing the problem, we rob the designer of his/her autonomy. We should help the designer work towards defining the problem, but that responsibility ultimately rests on their shoulders. You might appease a stakeholder if you “make that section bigger” or “change this font”—or you might create a bigger problem.

Receiving critical feedback is a learned skill. There’s a subtle difference between identifying, exploring and actually understanding a problem. We have to remember that while it may be “our” design it’s the client’s solution.

Cennydd Bowles, Design Lead at Twitter, uses a very helpful model called The

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UX AND VISUAL DESIGN

Vaildation Stack to facilitate feedback challenges.

The top layer of stack, User Evidence, receives the most weight. It answers the question: What did users say when they used the design to accomplish a task?

The second layer, User Research, speaks to the initial discovery and research. The third, and least empirical, layer is

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Design Theory. This layer offers insights such as: People click red buttons more frequently, but red buttons pull users out of the story more consistently than green buttons. You get the idea.

At any stage of game—whether that game is Pac-Man or new product development—you can’t avoid pixel work. You have to eat every power pellet in order to move on. But at each stage of a project it’s necessary to identify distinct standards for pixel-perfection. In the end, you’ll be amazed how many tokens you have left.

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-5 TIPS-

Design in-browser. Sitting down and making a Photoshop document is the “chasing pixels” way of thinking. Much of what you design can be done in CSS. If you can start there, do it.

Use style cards. Nail down style cards before you wireframe - or start comps - or begin to design in the browser. Make sure that design language means the same thing to you and the highest level of stakeholders.

Personas are created to shape and codify business rules, not guide UX. Design your tremendous UX to accomplish a goal—not to please Mary, an imaginary, single, 37-year-old fitness instructor with a Pez collection.

Design for mobile (and tablet) early on. Designs that look good on your desktop might look like gobbledygook on your iPhone - unless you plan for it. Plan for it.

Clever for clever’s sake is rarely clever. Don’t reinvent the wheel but do push your boundaries.

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CHANGE MANAGEMENT

-EXPECT THE FIRST HURDLE-

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CHANGE MANAGEMENT 29/90

THAT DAMN MONKEY...RELEASED BY

NINTENDO IN 1981, DONKEY KONG

WAS THE FUTURE OF VIDEOGAMES IN

EMBRYONIC FORM.

It was the first platform game to feature jumping and in-game narra-

tive development. Players control “Jumpman” (suspiciously similar in

appearance to the future Mario), who must navigate a vertical maze of

girders and ladders while avoiding barrels, bouncing springs and other

hazards, as he rescues his girlfriend Pauline from the titular wayward

gorilla...

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Before Jumpman takes his first step onto level 1, Donkey Kong—his own pet monkey!—tries to drop a barrel on his head. But instead of squashing our hero, the barrel lands in a nearby drum of oil and explodes in a fireball, which follows him up the scaffolding. As more barrels careen to the ground, they ignite in the same drum, lighting still more fireballs.

Mario/Jumpman doesn’t have the option to get rid of the oil drum. That’s the unsettling reality of life in the Donkey Kong universe. Luckily, we don’t have to live there.

So, before your next project begins, you’ve got to determine: What is your oil drum? What preliminary obstacle

threatens to turn every subsequent challenge into a ball of vengeful hellfire?

It might be a recalcitrant IT department who would rather you not go poking around their turf in the first place. Or it could be an organizational culture that is capable, but not yet equipped, to deliver the ongoing content your strategy calls for. Maybe your first big obstacle is to stitch together multiple agencies, with three different project management systems and a CMO who believes a new website is a waste of money.

“What’s in it for me?” That question is the flaming barrel at the starting line

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of all change management. Identifying and addressing how change will affect every party in your project is the key to success. The selection of one CMS over another can move content updates from a known IT budget to a non-existent marketing budget. Committing to excellence in customer service may present the need for new systems requiring multiple logins, which the COO’s pet system doesn’t support. These are big changes that may not have been an obvious part of the project scope.

Not everyone will admit it, but people and companies go through cycles of working hard and conserving energy. If your initiative/project is going to force someone back into the “working hard”

phase, expect some pushback.

The reality we must contend with, internally as well as with vendors and clients, is a paradox: Organizations generally don’t want to change much—but more often than not, they need to, badly.

But rethinking how a business works must inevitably coincide with determining what it does.

Adaptability has surpassed consistent specialization as the main determinant of an organization’s longevity, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the digital sphere. More than ever, organizations must be set up for change,

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START-UPS, SMALL BUSINESSES,

CORPORATIONS AND GOVERNMENT FEEL

THE PRESSURE OF RAPID CHANGE. NO

ONE BESIDES VENTURE CAPITALISTS

AND THE LATE SOVIET UNION REQUIRES

FIVE-YEAR PLANS TO TO FORECAST

COMPLETE UNKNOWNS. THESE PLANS ARE

GENERALLY FICTION...

“

“

– Steve Blank, Harvard Business Review

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iteration and quick pivots.

Labs and innovation centers need to be viewed as profit centers. Intraprenuership and skunkworks transcend mere R&D, especially in the digital world. These are organizational systems and company-wide philosophies that are shaking the tree of many organizations.

The struggle between inertia and the need to change is by no means confined to sub-management roles. One of the most striking examples is the role of chief marketing officer. Gartner/Experian estimate that, by 2017, CMO tech budgets will surpass those of the CTO. CMO expectations have become

radically more technical, and continue to become so at a rate that most current CMOs don’t understand.

A CMO may have successfully used just one or two tactics for the last 30 years. But today (and even moreso tomorrow) a CMO has to understand how to build products (if not build them him/herself) as well as know how to market them.

If your CMO doesn’t understand that Twitter’s lead-generation cards are an option, or that New Relic is now the best way to monitor and iterate an app live, you’ll be left behind in a wake of technical and process changes gone unrecognized. In fact, it’s a lot easier for an individual with technical expertise to

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adapt to marketing than vice versa.

Cheat Code #497: Transfer 50% of your marketing budget into making your product better. Create a lab or intrapreneur program and invest measurably in being amazing.

The gateway to effective marketing is, first and foremost, to have a product or experience that customers want to use. As you adapt your product to knowledge gathered during the validation cycle, your organization changes to complement that adaptation, your marketing becomes increasingly self-evident. You are moving toward the proverbial product that sells itself.

While some of this subject ventures into lean thinking (which we’ll cover in chapter 5), what we’re really getting at is the eradication of being average. Seth Godin calls this “racing to the bottom” and says “if you’re not going to be the absolute best, you may as well put a halt on your career now.” Part of change management is the nerve to admit that being ok isn’t going to cut it anymore. The other part is planning and executing a system to achieve change — Fortune 500, startup or freelance.

The threat the old guard feels in relation to organizational change is real. Where will they all work? What skills will they have to drop—or pick up? What if they can’t hack it in the new arrangement?

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THE MEETING OF TWO PERSONALITIES

IS LIKE THE CONTACT OF TWO CHEMICAL

SUBSTANCES: IF THERE IS ANY

REACTION, BOTH ARE TRANSFORMED.

“ “– C.J. Jung

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These are legitimate fears, and they have to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. But it does no one any favors to deny they exist. So whatever you do, don’t just walk away from the oil drum—get rid of it. If department X is dragging its heels, don’t begin the project by humoring them—insist on coming to an understanding before continuing on. You can’t necessarily change an entire culture or ethic in a single engagement, but you can’t allow it to go unaddressed either.

Even with the oil drum safely out of the way, obstacles will keep coming—that’s the nature of the game. So choose your battles and keep referencing your business goals.

Back to the game. As the barrels keep rolling, Jumpman can either hop over them and keep on running, or crush them with a mallet. So can you, metaphorically speaking. If you understand the end goal, you’ll know which obstacles to whack with a hammer and which to jump over—where change must be actively managed and where you have no choice but to use discretion.

The barrels of legacy will chase you until you take action. Here’s how:

Whacking: To whack an obstacle means to remove it from the scope. In order to remove it, you’ve got to talk about it. This requires identifying the right

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CAST (Champions, Agents, Sponsors and Targets) and talking to each of them in their own language. The myth of the one-size-fits-all PowerPoint presentation is not only a myth, it’s a trap. Authenticity respects its audience. Whacking isn’t about picking a fight, but rather removing low-hanging (sometime rotting, sometimes sweet) fruit. You’ve heard it said before: “Are we on the same page?”

Are you?

Hopping: means to compromise. Digital strategists are fond of fiery, idealistic manifestos, but the fact is that change management consists of a lot of buy-in, and getting everything you want is

an unrealistic expectation. Sometimes you just have to let things go. It might mean saying ok to a logo you don’t love, or committing to an enterprise software solution you don’t 100% agree with.

“CYA” gets a bad reputation, but it has value outside of hedging on your own behalf. Used judiciously, it can be a buffer against the bad habits that calcify organizations against meaningful change. Work to establish contingencies. Spread the word when you do. There are some barrels that you have to let just roll on by.

At the end of the day, the good idea is the one you can sell and implement. Roll up your sleeves and identify the

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NEVER FORGET THAT SOMEONE “ON

BOARD” IN THE BEGINNING COULD

SUDDENLY TURN INTO A DETRACTOR.

KEEP THOSE BEING AFFECTED UP TO

DATE ON THE PROJECT AND ITS STATUS

AND CHECK IN FREQUENTLY WITH THEM

TO BE SURE THEY ARE STILL FEELING

CONFIDENT AND COMFORTABLE WITH WHAT

IS HAPPENING.

“

“

– Gina Abudi, “Project Managing Business Process Improvement Initiatives,” BPTrends, Oct 2011

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outcome you’re chasing. Discover your princess on the other side of the obstacle. Look at that goal in light of all the project’s high level goals and ask: Will this single item block delivery? If multiple goals are truly contingent upon that one, and the obstacle is really unwhackable, then compromise is the only choice you have. It might not be the ideal solution, but if it’s really the only route to the princess, it will have to do.

Shaking an organization out of its rut really can feel like going up against a ten-ton gorilla. But you will always have an advantage. As an individual hungry for change, you are nimble and driven, just like Jumpman.

Just remember: that damn monkey’s got your girl.

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-5 TIPS-

Determine who has the power. Very early in the process establish a decision rights model and nail down where the buck stops.

Start simple. Work hard for early results. Know where you are headed. Invest in growth over fixes. Be good to your people.

Have a Beer. You can initiate this meeting. For the duration of the project, you‘re basically dating an agency or another team inside your own organization. Hang out, understand what makes the other folks tick and find common ground.

Create/Identify some baseline numbers. You can’t measure progress unless you know where you started. Sounds obvious, right? But sometimes analytics are poorly set up. Sometimes fiefdoms hide failures. Sometimes spreadsheets are el diablo.

Keep a Project Journal. Document meetings, milestones and phone calls like a teenager. The business versions of this might look like: “Why did she mention that ACMECORP thought our SEO plan was weak?” or “The agency’s presentation felt rushed.”

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41/90

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

-DON’T STAY BEHIND THE SCENES-

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT 42/90

IF YOU SET FOOT IN AN ARCADE OR

TOUCHED A COMPUTER BETWEEN 1978 AND

NOW, YOU’VE PLAYED SPACE INVADERS.

FOR THE HANDFUL OF AMISH READERS ON

THEIR RUMSPRINGA, HERE’S A QUICK

SUMMARY:

A phalanx of space squids descends from the top of the screen. You play

a green tank (or something like that), and zip back and forth shooting

lasers while the squids drop bombs on you. You’re equipped with four

barricades, which dissolve pixel-by-pixel each time they’re hit by a stray

projectile. When the squids land, or your tank is hit by a bomb, you lose.

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First things first: The stakeholders aren’t the aliens. They are all those invisible, offscreen users on whose behalf you’re fighting. The aliens are all the pitfalls and challenges that come up in the course of a project.

No doubt it’s tempting to cocoon yourself in the comfort of a project puzzle, to disappear into that rich inner Lawnmower Man world of Gantt charts, Graffletopia and Pandora stations where You. Are. God!

But that’s a luxury you can ill afford. According to a study by Microsoft, “virtual distance”—that is, disconnects in geography, operations and affinity—reduce trust among team members by

up to 83%(!), while cutting success metrics by a full 50%. Innovation and job satisfaction likewise suffer (-93% and -80%, respectively).

While you’re busy zipping out from behind the barricades, launching daring volleys of lasers into the green and black sky, your vendors/partners/colleagues are firing helter skelter into the barriers, turning them to Swiss cheese from the inside. While you’re in the lab crafting solutions of grace and beauty, your stakeholders are busy spinning expectations that are guaranteed to butt up against the work you’ve done in private. Good luck zapping their expectations after two weeks incommunicado.

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THE DISCUSSION AROUND A NEW

FEATURE OR TEMPLATE LAYOUT BECOMES

A QUICK CALL OR GOOGLE HANGOUT TO

GO OVER WHAT’S WORKING AND WHAT

ISN’T RATHER THAN A 60 PAGE DECK

WITH 48 HOUR FEEDBACK PERIODS AND

A HIT OR MISS MINDSET...THE CLOSER

PRIMARY STAKEHOLDERS CAN BE TO

THESE INFORMAL ITERATIONS, THE

QUICKER OUR TEAMS CAN GET TO AN END

PRODUCT THAT UNILATERALLY MEETS OUR

SHARED GOALS.

““

– Mike Kenny (@formerteenager), Kettle

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Breathe deep. Walk around the arcade and gauge the temperature of the players (the team) and the game (the project). Remember that project management is everyone’s job. Some of the most well-run projects don’t have a PM, but every department and practice plays its part in creating transparency and accountability. If you do have project managers, it’s vital that your organization supports and empowers them. A PM without authority is an expensive note-taker with an admin account and a Gantt chart program.

Cheat Code #229: Don’t be a toll collector on a free bridge. That is, a project manager who insists all conversations and information go

through them. Instead, be the most helpful, organized person on the team.

And while the challenge of disagreeing without being disagreeable is frankly more than most people want to take on, you’re the one person without the option to avoid it. Embrace the role.

Creative differences are inevitable. You risk being labelled the wet blanket, or worse yet, “difficult to work with.” Visions of the corner office explode into a pile of green digital dust. But conflict can (and should) lead to better results. It’s the way in which you manage that friction that will determine success or failure.

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Some tips for success: deliver bite-sized blasts of information. Consolidate your requests into one email instead of five. When possible, link directly to referenced information. Strive for clarity without overwhelming your counterparts with minutia. Put users before stakeholders, and ask stakeholders to do the same. The first few weeks of a project might be prone to awkward conversations. Just remind everyone, there are two finish lines you are tracking: Business goals and user goals.

From time-to-time, Space Invaders likes to send you a little surprise in the form of an angry red saucer that soars across the top of the screen, raining down

digital hellfire. In our office we like to call him The Hidden Stakeholder.

Maybe it’s the mysterious exec who didn’t want to bothered with this project—until now. Or maybe it’s a parallel department that isn’t involved in the project itself, but will be affected by it. If you and your team have been lurking behind the barricades, these hidden stakeholders are going to fly right through you.

Get in front of stakeholders as quickly and often as possible. Take tangible articles, which must be evaluated then and there and pin them on the wall for feedback. The easy abstractions of circling back and crossing bridges when

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IT TAKES TIME AND EFFORT IN THE

FORM OF EXECUTIVE SPONSORSHIP TO

SWITCH FROM A CULTURE OF INTUITION-

BASED TO EVIDENCE-BASED DECISION

MAKING...THE MOST EFFECTIVE

ANALYTICS PROJECT MANAGERS ARE

AT EASE SPEAKING WITH PEOPLE IN

MULTIPLE DOMAINS, FUNCTIONING AS

‘TRANSLATORS’ AND ‘INTERPRETERS.’

““

– “Culture and the Myth of the Black Box,” Quappe, Samso-Aparici and Warshawsky, The Deloitte Review

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you get to them will cease to function as escape-hatches for indecision and fear. If you’re met with a table of nodding heads, followed up with an email that documents a polite 180, it’s a sure indicator of an unresolved change management issue.

It’s a sad but true fact: some projects just aren’t meant to succeed. Project management often introduces innovation that can threaten established departments and fiefdoms within an organization. So be visible and flexible.

The growth of lean methodology and the “fail smarter” ethos has changed our perception of what it means to fail. Gartner estimates that a 20-28% rate

of project failure will become the norm by 2016. Failure isn’t a defeat, per se, so long as it leads to new knowledge, backed up with the ability to pivot. Impress this upon team members and the higher ups whom you’re trying to please.

However, that doesn’t apply to projects that are undermined internally. If partner or team recalcitrance is the cause of a project’s failure, that tells you nothing about the merits of the product, service or experience.

Never forget that: you and your organization are on one side, and the space squids are on the other. Stakeholders are collaborators and

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your job is to extract their knowledge, engaging them from discovery to delivery.

Until you zip out from behind the barricades, your project is much more vulnerable than you. Get in front of everyone. Introduce yourself and make friends during discovery. Use the tools and processes that everyone is familiar with. Document past decisions with scientific precision. Research future decisions with the understanding that you may hold the missing link between success and failure.

Your cohorts are not the challenge; the challenge is the challenge. If you stay behind the scenes, hiding behind

barricades you wont last, neither will your project. But if you come out of hiding, and engage with the challenge in view of all, the space squids won’t know what hit ‘em.

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-5 TIPS-

Show Your tools at work. Instead of laying down the law (“We’re using Basecamp and Dropbox.”), create a sample project demonstrating how you would use tools to manage your project.

Celebrate milestones. When the sprint ends, or the build is accepted, it’s easy to jump right into the next phase. Take time to congratulate the team, eat some cake, print some “I Survived Phase 1” T-shirts . Remind them that process is integral to product.

If at all possible, try to avoid using a project manager whose only job is to project manage. If you can self-manage, you’ll move faster and transfer knowledge with less information lost in the shuffle.

Don’t nod your head in the meeting, only to follow up with an email that flips the script. Project conflict comes in three flavors: decision rights issues, budget issues and discovery issues. Assign each conflict a category and solve for it.

Calculate Meeting Hours. Break down everyone’s salary to an hourly rate and keep track of how much each meeting costs, including prep time. Now compare that to the actual value of the meeting.

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51/90

LEAN

-MOVE QUICKLY IN ALL DIRECTIONS-

@EATAGENCY | 2013

LEAN 52/90

FROGGER PUT PLAYERS IN THE BIG

WEBBED FEET OF A FROG, WHO IS

TRYING TO FIND ITS WAY ACROSS A

BUSY HIGHWAY TO THE (RELATIVE)

SAFETY OF A SWAMP.

True, the frog might technically have been the same size as the cars that

threatened to squish him, and the risk of drowning never seemed quite

as great as the game presented it. But the controls tested players’ abil-

ity to give equal priority to every direction on the axis, and that is what

makes it so instructive.

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LEAN 53/90

Frogger is hard. With the possible exception of Missile Command, it’s the hardest game in this whole extended metaphor (we’ll tackle Defender some other time). Despite having only two dimensions, four direction-controls and a predictable series of obstacles, you’ll be hard pressed to get froggy across the road on the first try. Why is that? Because in order to beat each board, a player has to move forwards and backwards, plus left to right.

The culture of the West is forward-thinking to a fault. We’re not accustomed to the standing option of moving in any direction we please. “Backtrack” is practically a synonym for failure. A lateral or circular move

implies some disappointment or unachieved potential. But in lean methodology, as in Frogger, it’s the only way to win. You must move quickly in all directions to reach your goal.

The advantages of lean have been well-documented. From iPhone apps to sports cars, products go to market at an ever-accelerating pace, in increasingly brief development-to-release cycles. From 2000-2010, the lifecycle of a product shrunk by a ratio of 4:1. During that same period, product development cycles across all industries shrunk by nearly 100%, from an average 47 months to 24. In the digital and tech worlds, that average is probably the upper limit.

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LEAN 54/90

Luckily, a compensatory toolbox is constantly being refilled with new tools to meet these changes. In the past, only those with capital, backing and a minor personality disorder could survive the cycle of trial and error that is product development. Now anyone can do it. Every industry is in the middle of its own cupcake revolution, and the competition is as insane as the fact that there was ever a cupcake revolution.

Cheat Code #55: Stop researching and start building something—now! You’ll learn more by doing than by planning.

Lean methodology allows you to stick your neck out and validate a good idea, to discover something buildable,

which someone will actually pay for. It allows you to fail faster by establishing and testing your hypotheses with real customers.

Lean Method Step One: state your hypothesis. “Everyone loves cupcakes!”

Lean Method Steps Two-Through-Infinity: build, iterate and find someone to buy your cupcakes.

To make it across the metaphorical highway, from the forest of hypothesis to the lilly pad of a developed product, you’ll need to be able to move as fast as the market and its concomitant technology.

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LEAN 55/90

TRADITIONAL DEPARTMENTS CREATE

INCENTIVE STRUCTURES THAT KEEP

PEOPLE FOCUSED ON EXCELLENCE IN

THEIR SPECIALTIES. BUT WHAT IF THE

COMPANY’S BEST INTERESTS ARE SERVED

BY CROSS-FUNCTIONAL COLLABORATION?

““

– Eric Ries

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LEAN 56/90

Ship often but don’t ship shoddy. Whether genius or terrible, ideas need to be communicated well to be judged fairly. Lean lets you know if you are on the right track as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

Ok. You may already know that you need to pivot and iterate quickly. So, how do you actually do it?

The traditional sprint form calls for everyone on a project to work in the same room, slamming tasks day after day for a couple of intense weeks. You should be applying this principle to every project, even if you can’t follow it to the letter, and even if you’re not building software.

Imagine your team is the Frogger frog, with each department representing a direction on the joystick. The UX designer should work with the copywriters and visual designers to build an experience that’s both graceful and engaging. They should all work with the developer to manage feasibility, and so on, back and forth, forward and backward, taking two steps forward, one back and to the left—maneuvering their way past a testable beta, to a successful launch.

Don’t underestimate the value of proximity. Despite our sophisticated telecommunications technology, the fact remains that messages deteriorate over distances—call it the “game of

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LEAN 57/90

HIGHER TEAM MEMBER MORALE IS

ATTRIBUTED TO THE AGILE PHILOSOPHY

IN WHICH PEOPLE ISSUES ARE AT

THE HEART OF THE AGILE MOVEMENT.

AGILE METHODS RECOGNIZE THE

VALUE COMPETENT PEOPLE AND THEIR

RELATIONSHIPS BRING TO SOFTWARE

DEVELOPMENT. TEAMS WORK BY PLACING

PEOPLE PHYSICALLY CLOSER, REPLACING

DOCUMENTS WITH TALKING IN PERSON

AND AT WHITEBOARDS, IMPROVING THE

TEAM’S AMICABILITY AND ITS SENSE OF

COMMUNITY.

““

– Adash Kumar Kakar, “What Motivates Team Members and Users of Agile Projects?”

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LEAN 58/90

telephone” principle. About 55% of communication consists of body language. Telephone communications remove that vector, while video chat distorts and crops it. Emails lose the most, since some 38% percent of communication is carried in vocal tone.

Of course, lean isn’t a call to arms against telecommuting. But the fact remains that iterating, for most teams, is easier when they can tap each other on the shoulder. An IM about an email with a Dropbox link to an interactive comp is never as efficient as scribbling something on a whiteboard and pointing like a chimp.

There’s even more than technical and

communicative benefits to what we call the Frogger method. The benefits to morale are just as significant. Some 75% of VersionOne survey respondents cited agile, a lean analog, as improving overall productivity. Another 71% reported faster time to market. And a full 72% reported that agile noticeably improves morale.

That’s partly because resistance develops between team members who only meet in times of crisis, or to make requests and demands of each other.

We should also extend this principle to our vendors and partners. We should make it company culture to welcome them into your offices—create both

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LEAN 59/90

a physical and cultural space that outsiders will want to visit and work in. People tend to interpret email and text communications more negatively than face-to-face communications. Better you should walk down the hall, or at least pick up the phone.

Everybody is a part of a lean sprint—the partners, the vendors, potential users and you. Everyone is on-hand or readily available for contact. Everybody is engaged, according to their ability, in the tangible construction of strategy and delivery. Every stakeholder, every developer, every freelance graphic designer can see the products and race cars zipping along. Here’s one more lesson Frogger teaches us : Don’t stay in

the same place for too long.

Get out of the building. Send teams of two (one interviewer, one note-taker) on the road with the low fidelity prototypes to gather feedback from the intended audience. These prototypes can range from a low-fidelity Omnigraffle wireframe to an HTML clickable. Make it fast. Get feedback fast. Fix it fast. Get more feedback.

Cycle times accelerate—iterations go out at faster and faster speeds. The project, like the organization itself, has only as much room for error as it has bandwidth and budget to pivot. As in Frogger, you have to move decisively, because a frog pulled in all directions is

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LEAN 60/90

a squished frog.

Keep moving until you’ve either found something that users will pay for, you pivot to an entirely different product, or you fail altogether.

The beauty of lean is the way it spreads understanding and learning across all teams, supported by a continuous deployment system to (and through) potential customers.

Lean is a topsy-turvy world where assumptions usurp functional requirements, design is a team sport and failure is often the best path forward. And just when you think you’ve reached that final lilly pad, the screen will

refresh, and you’ll be confronted with an entirely new set of colorful obstacles, a new destination and the chance to rack up even higher scores. When this happens, just remember to stay light, remain flexible, and always keep moving.

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LEAN 61/90

-5 TIPS-

Failing faster requires organizational change. If not everyone involved in your project is on board with lean thinking, then you’re a waterfall org with lean trimmings.

Every lean project is made up of two complementary stories. The first story inspires team members and stakeholders and clarifies your assumptions. The second validates that hypothesis with prospective customers.

Ask your grumpy uncle Ed. We all fall in love with our own ideas. Some are game-changers, but most are duds. Put your idea in front of someone lacking your domain knowledge.

Some projects aren’t products but are still worth completing if there is a lesson and a (limited audience). But be ruthless with your side-project roster.

Organize a trusted group outside your organization to take the first pass at your ideas. Make sure your group has different vantage points: marketing, UX, code, legal and sales, etc.

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62/90

CONTENT STRATEGY

-YOU CAN’T SAVE EVERYTHING-

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CONTENT STRATEGY 63/90

MORE THAN ANY OTHER, MISSILE

COMMAND IS AN ARTIFACT OF THE

ERA THAT SPAWNED IT.

Players take on the role of a surface-to-air missile defense, firing at in-

coming missiles (presumably from Russia with love). Glowing red and

green vectors criss-cross their way toward the cities below, and players

must use their limited arsenal to intercept as many ICBMS as possible.

Resources are limited. Losses are inevitable. In order to save America,

players learn to strike as many incoming missiles as possible at one

time.

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During a digital project, you can’t meet every incoming crisis on its own. Good news: This isn’t the cold war, and your company isn’t the Pentagon. As in the game, you’ve got options.

There are two methods for tackling content issues. Either you can make the first strike, or you can do it later in a state of impending WW3 panic. Digital projects always have a content component, so you can’t hide for long.

Incoming in 5-4-3-2...

No one is likely to object to thoughtful selection and reorganization of your existing content. The hard part comes when you explain to the new brand

manager that they’ll need to sacrifice a legacy custom publication in favor of new video case studies. Or that IT’s CMS solution requires duplicate content entry for mobile. Or that comps, which already have signoff from Singapore to Soho, don’t work for any of the legacy content.

The goals of building a better product, service or tool, and maintaining a balance of power within an organization, are often at loggerheads. You have choose what to save. Maybe that choice is a no-brainer, but as stated earlier—change is difficult. Convincing the gatekeepers that 150-word blog posts have more value than 500-word posts, when the former are

@EATAGENCY | 2013


harder to write. Or just try to restructure a database while maintaining an inefficient, legacy interface so users don’t have to be retrained.

Therein lies the valuable lesson of Missile Command: you can’t save everything.

At its most basic, this is what we do when we conduct a content audit and merge into a new sitemap. We make a list, highlight the similar items, strikethrough the redundant or unnecessary content, and rearrange it. Highlighter colors become demarcation lines. The strikethrough mark, a red flag.

In the end, we must pose three essential

questions: (1)Who is this for? (2)What is the problem? (3)How will this solve that problem? In Missile Command the answers are obvious: (1) the Free World, (2) the Commies, (3) Ka-Boom. You likely have different answers.

Content strategy is no panacea—and that’s coming from a team of content-first thinkers. Neither is it CS’s fault that it has become a fad. The refrain “Content is king” rings as implausible as a speech by Brezhnev if it fails to take into account content’s complements: UX, graphic design, IT, customer service, etc., etc., etc.

The discipline is improving, but content strategy still needs to play nice(r).

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Strategists shouldn’t bang their shoes on the table and demand compliance from every other department. For, together, we are armed with a powerful solution called story. Rejoice, comrades!

Story is experience in narrative form. It’s the thread stitching together the disciplines, informing our decisions, and, when done correctly, allowing you to take chances. When your story is strong, honest and true-blue, there’s less posturing and your brand can afford to be transparent. At the macro-level it means creating an environment where story is the hub of your communication strategy. At the micro-level, it means nuking anything that muddies your message.

Cheat Code #284: When egos get involved—kill yours first. Then kill your favorite turns of phrase, your slickest video content, your most exhaustive white paper.

Content strategy should make room for what’s next, so that all content works in harmony to create—you guessed it—your story.

But you can’t always save the consistency of a strategy.

Example: digital is no longer moving toward multi-screen content consumption; it’s been there for years. Bootstrap or another foundation won’t

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CONTENT CREATED WITHOUT AN

OBJECTIVES-BASED STRATEGY BEHIND IT

WORKS EXACTLY AS WELL AS HEADPHONES

MADE FROM COCONUTS – IT MAY LOOK

LIKE THE REAL THING, BUT IT WILL

NOT BRING ABOUT THE RESULT YOU

WANT.

““

– Edward Baldwin, WeAreCurve

@EATAGENCY | 2013


always solve your responsive problem (in all candor, let’s admit it often will). But the multi-screen solution is less a function of technological capabilities than planning.

Assuming you have a good content strategist, you should include content strategy thinking on every project activity: business strategy, brand strategy, persona creation, competitive analysis, analytics review, technical assessment and creative brief.

It’s a 99.9999% guarantee that whatever project you are currently working on hinges on the development, curation, editing, display or findability of content. We’ll avoid the “content strategy vs.

content marketing” proxy war, but it’s worth repeating that content is something a User eXperiences (eh? get it?). The UX designer and the content strategist have access to the same tools. Depending on the task at hand and resources available, you may lean more to the design or content side, but you are fundamentally the same player with a trackball and fire button.

The UX designer may use a sitemap to help establish a tricky navigation element, while a content strategist could take the same sitemap and synthesize content blocks across templates. They’re both crafting the same story. They’re just approaching the target from slightly different angles.

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A workable content strategy combines the two approaches, creating a story that minimizes loose ends while achieving all the goals of a great user experience. You have to be willing to let go of anything, at any time. A well-played game of Missile Command only needs one city to survive. And a great content strategy is one that is laser (forgive the pun) focused, where every decision hinges on one pivot point.

Content creation requires sacrifice. Content management requires discipline. Content design requires cooperation. And content strategy combines all three modes of discrimination. We can’t fall in love with a portion at the expense of the whole,

whether that’s a block of copy, a line of code or the greater part of L.A. County.

@EATAGENCY | 2013


-5 TIPS-

Push for the best solution but in the end you’ve got to work with what you have. Starting from scratch is not always an option, or the best answer. There exists an optimal solution for the contraints you are facing, find that solution.

Create a journey map. Identify every piece of content and every customer touchpoint. Compare this map to your analytics tracking. Make unhappy face and adjust accordingly.

Since you’re ‘wickd smaht’ and already performing a content inventory, add a column to tag each piece of content with: CTA (asking user to do something); Informational (telling a user how to do something); or Trust (telling a user about your brand). Is there balance or imbalance?

More is rarely the best strategy when it comes to content. Break content down to its bullet points to distinguish between what’s essential, explanatory, and merely decorative.

Always return to those three crucial questions: (1)Who is this for? (2)What is the problem? (3)How will this solve that problem? Do it for every draft, iteration and drop.

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71/90

SOCIAL

-WE HAVE A WINNER-

@EATAGENCY | 2013

SOCIAL 72/90

RELEASED TO THE UNITED STATES IN

CELEBRATION OF THE 1984 SUMMER

OLYMPICS, KONAMI’S TRACK & FIELD

WAS ONE OF THE PIONEERS OF MUL-

TIPLAYER GAMING.

Up to four players competed in 100m dash, hurdles, hammer throw,

javelin, long jump and high jump, by jamming on three buttons - two

for running (L/R) and one for jumping. Button-tapping speed was what

counted most for the win, which meant that first-generation cabinets

got smashed into unusability in a matter of months. Only a few gamers

had the nimble fingers it took to win the game - these were the players

who broke records and became unbeatable.

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SOCIAL 73/90

The steps an individual can take to master the game Track & Field are vague. It’s a system of controls that are simple to memorize and next to impossible to master. And unlike the other games, you’re not merely competing to rack up points. While many early arcade games had two player action, these consisted of players taking turns competing against the computer. Track and Field was unique in that it pitted up to four players head-to-head.

The social media game is similar—it’s much more zero-sum than simple product/experience/service creation. The competition is more direct and the victories and defeats more public.

Social Media, it is the most crowded marketing space anywhere today. Brands are shoulder-to-shoulder, hammering away against a field of competitors, the size of which has never been bigger.

Some 96% of brands measure their fans and followers via social media. Another 89% measure traffic, while 84% measure mentions, 55% track share of voice and 51% track sentiment. 56% of respondents use social to gain clarity about who their customers are and what they like.

A recent Forbes study reports that 92.5% of companies had at least one full-time employee dedicated to social

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SOCIAL 74/90

THE SHEER VOLUME, CONSTANCY,

AND COMPLEXITY OF COMMUNICATIONS

ARE TOO HARD TO CONSCIOUSLY MANAGE

ANYMORE. THEY MUST BE REGARDED AS

THE EXPRESSIONS OF A LIVING CULTURE

WHOSE GROWTH AND FERTILITY ARE

INEXTRICABLY LINKED TO ONE’S OWN.

““

– Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock

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SOCIAL 75/90

media. Agencies like VaynerMedia and Ahology are specializing in social, managing the mashup of technology management and content delivery on behalf of their clients.

There’s a dubious similarity between T&F and the social media game: the fact that so few people seem to understand quite which buttons do what. Track & Field was notorious in its heyday for being a cabinet you won by mashing buttons until you came down with a case of carpal tunnel. But frenzy is not the same as speed, and speed wins in social media. (Speed + relevancy that is.)

Some larger organizations, such as Gatorade and the Red Cross, already

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commit resources to social media command centers, to optimize their listening speed. Inside, you’ll see computer monitors scrolling through reams of analytics, highlighted influencers and customer service folk answering questions on social media.

When Marissa Mayer accidentally (but very publicly) trashed Yahoo’s on-hold music, NYC agency JinglePunks caught the news on social media and rapidly composed a new hold song featuring 90s rapper Snow—in two days—which in turn made the social media rounds and garnered lots of good, free publicity.

Cheat Code #006: Speed can also kill. Amassing millions of customers is not

SOCIAL 76/90

that easy and not that useful if it isn’t part of a broader strategy. Cramming content fields with countless #s and @s, is lazy, desperate or wasteful—take your pick which is worse.

Make your followers care because your content is about them—not you. RT requests, +1 Likes, pins and favorites are symptoms of engagement, not goals to pursue in and of themselves. Social engagement is a two-way street. The balance between talking and listening has never been more important.

Every public communication a brand makes is directed at both the singular user and the using collective. When a user receives a 20% off coupon before

getting a real response to their service ticket, it feels like a personal affront. It’s not, but it feels that way.

The CVS long-receipt meme of 2012 is one example. CVS customers were posting photos of their ridiculously long paper receipts to Twitter and Facebook. Some receipt photos were next to measuring tapes, others stretched out next to their children.

CVS got the message, but rather dryly announced they would reduce the receipt length by 25%. They could have embraced the social equity and established a contest to prove they were listening. Instead they treated social like a problem instead of an opportunity.

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SOCIAL 77/90

SOCIAL MEDIA IS A UNIQUE

COMPONENT OF THE CONSUMER DECISION

JOURNEY: IT’S THE ONLY FORM OF

MARKETING THAT CAN TOUCH CONSUMERS

AT EACH AND EVERY STAGE, FROM

WHEN THEY’RE PONDERING BRANDS AND

PRODUCTS RIGHT THROUGH THE PERIOD

AFTER A PURCHASE.

““

– From “Demystifying Social Media,” McKinsey Quarterly, Divol, Edelman and Sarrazin

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SOCIAL 78/90

Social media is a tremendous opportunity to turn negatives into positives. Its momentum is difficult to initialize and hard to stop, but a quick pivot.

For social to work, it has to break down internal barriers and force an organization to work together. While multiple departments need to digest and internally react to social data intelligence, there can only be one voice heading back out to the social media conversation.

That’s hard. You know that. Here’s why:

First, social feeds the dark parts of our ego (business or personal) with

instantaneous feedback. It rewires our orientation, away from the long-view, and onto immediate gratification.

Secondly, creating content for social media is more difficult than it seems. It isn’t a one-size fits all Sunday circular. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube—every outlet require significantly different narratives, contextual expertise and broadcast chronology. Trust means different things on different platforms. Some platforms are relationship-first and others are interest-first. Any content that’s meant to cut across these platforms needs to be tailored accordingly. The basic functionalities of each tool have to be grasped and, if not mastered, at least

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practiced, before smashing buttons willy nilly and hoping for a high score.

It’s unrealistic to expect organizations to keep their teams apprised of best social practices, across platforms, in a top-down training style.

A recent HootSuite white paper reported that 35% of those in sales rate their training in social media as far below adequate, while only 15% rated it as somewhat or very adequate. When “very adequate” is the high water mark, it’s the individual who must to take matters into their own hands.

To determine what social will work for your unique situation, you have to

devise effective means of measuring social ROI. The “High Score” for websites, traditionally measured in page views, visit duration and search engine ranking, means very little when applied to social media. Likes, RTs, 3 star ratings and repins are difficult to compare and contrast. Content visibility (a Tweet or Facebook post) can’t be measured like a static webpage, or with advertising metrics. That said, the request to measure ROI will come and you will need an answer.

Tying ROI to detailed initiatives is the only way to win here. The Altimeter Group identifies six ways of measuring social media ROI in their 2012 Social Media ROI Cookbook.

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These are:

1. Anecdote - mentions that lead to sales2. Correlation - the ratio of likes to dollars3. Multivariate Testing - A/B testing of social media usage vs. non-usage4. Links and Tagging - shortlinks and cookies 5. Integrated - SaaS analytic tools6. Direct Commerce - ecommerce storefront

The entire report is worth a read—check it out at altimetergroup.com.

Prematurely going all-in usually leads to a lack of understanding down the line.

Participate in others’ social mediaendeavors. Not as a way to get attention, or put your brand out there—it’s probably better if you practice pseudonymously. Do it to experience in brand social interaction from the user’s perspective.

Then, you can pick, or create, low stakes projects to simultaneously test the utility of several platforms. This is where the scientific method is so important. Your tools to measure ROI will be a work in progress, so select one of the six measurement types and start small. If you’re looking for user feedback on a new product/service, make that the mission of each social media tool for a fixed, finite span of time. The best

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altimetergroup.com

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tool will be immediately apparent, and you’ll know to use it in similar future circumstances.

It’s the equivalent of spending fifty cents to learn the game’s basic controls and scoring system. While you’re taking all comers to the cabinet, you’ll see more techniques that you can experiment with.

Start slow, watch others, and fail your way to a more nimble, dextrous social strategy. Then you can seek out the kid with the Farrah Fawcett haircut and ‘Keep On Truckin’’ shirt, and make an informed decision as to whether he can really help you improve.

Give, give and give some more before you ask for a single thing. Tap that run button as fast as you can before you hit jump. Tooting your own horn is fine but make sure you can delivery what you promised.

Chance favors those who were previously generous. Be generous.

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Follow the outliers. Did you know that Jolly Ranchers’ Twitter account follows both Sarah Silverman and Raekwon? When one of these entertainer’s followers check out the Jolly Ranchers account, they find a weirdly kindred spirit. Discover your outliers and use them to build your brand.

Integrate your naming. Knowem.com allows you to check every major social network to see if your preferred handle, or something like it, is already occupied. Avoid sharing similar or interchangeable names with sketchy or inappropriate sources.

Focus on your primary outlets. Identical posts across media don’t reinforce your message—they devalue it. Better to park an account than jam it up.

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-5 TIPS-

Stay generous. Use social media to educate, inspire and entertain your users. Social media gaffes happen when brands puff themselves up, insinuate themselves into unrelated controversies and go to war.

Establish dummy accounts. These are your labs for experimentation, for research and play. They’ll help you observe the social ecosystem without altering your own corner of it.

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Knowem.com

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KILL SCREEN

-PHASE 2-

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GOLDEN-AGE VIDEO GAMES DON’T

END, AT LEAST NOT THE WAY GAMES

DO TODAY.

With such limited processing power, storytelling was mostly confined

to the art decorating the game cabinets themselves. The “kill screen”

refers to the point at which a game consistently crashes, despite player

actions. The 256th level of Pac-Man, for example turns into a waterfall

of colors and letters, effectively making level 255 the final one of the

game. This was as close to a victory as players could hope to get. There

was no beginning, middle and end, no narrative arc. There was just a

premise - and the point where you couldn’t go any further.

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It’s hard to imagine today, with our increasingly cinematic gaming products, but except for Donkey Kong, there are no narrative victories in these golden age arcade games. Success is based solely on score and/or levels beaten. Did you rack up points to put you in the top ten gamers ever to touch this machine? Did you top your personal best? The criteria for victory were more nebulous and subjective.

Engagements don’t have tidy endings, either. They keep going indefinitely, or they reach a point where nothing more can be done.

All the markers of success spring from the customer’s experience. If you set

a team of designers, developers or engineers loose, they improve and expand on any given product on a weekly-if-not-daily basis. But after six months of that, you might be left with an impeccably crafted product that no one outside of your organization cares about. In other words, there’s a difference between feeding quarters into the machine and actually building your skills.

Despite several claims, and innumerable attempts, no one has positively beaten a kill screen. This points to the fact that there are always secrets to be discovered. The search for new tactics, and all the unsought discoveries that crop up along the way, continues as long

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NARRATIVES ARE OPEN ENDED. THEY

DON’T HAVE RESOLUTION. THERE IS

SOMETHING THAT IS IN THE PROCESS

OF UNFOLDING. THE END IS YET TO BE

DETERMINED…THERE’S AN INVITATION TO

ALL OF US TO PARTICIPATE IN THAT

NARRATIVE, TO HELP DETERMINE WHAT

THE OUTCOME IS GOING TO BE.

“

“

– John Hagel, Deloitte, at SXSW

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as you do.

Even when you’ve done your job to perfection, a moment will come when you belly up to the cabinet, and the game freaks out.

What was known becomes unknown once more. Methods and processes fracture against the algorithm of repetition and the inevitable flux of markets, technology and turnover. Up is down, left is right, and the pathways of last year are an unnavigable hash of familiar, but inchoate icons. Today’s innovations soon become tomorrow’s best practices. And today’s best practices fall into obsolescence.

That’s the moment when you’ll need to draw on all the skills you’ve learned in the previous chapters and improvise.

There is no princess waiting at the end of your engagements. Only you and your customers can set the criteria for success. There’s relative value, best-use-case, dollar amounts. There’s customer acquisition and retention, positive/negative feedback. You can go for the high score, or levels completed. It’s your quarter, and your call.

The beauty of it is that there are no limits in the real world. Unlike these

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amazing artifacts of gaming’s past, the world is pure sandbox. We build with the fundamentals, but our own journey is completely open-ended. As long as we never forget that we’re not the only players in the arcade—that our users (and competitors) are right there, playing alongside us, we can always keep improving and the game doesn’t ever have to end.

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s -CREDITS-89/90

THIS BOOK IS BASED ON A TALK GIVEN BY

IAN ALEXANDER AT THE NEW YORK CITY LEAN

UX CONFERENCE IN FEBRUARY OF 2013.

BRIAN HUGHES

is a writer and Senior Strategist at EAT Agency. He still judges vacations by the quality of the hotel arcade.

IAN ALEXANDER

is the co-founder and Creative/Strategy lead at EAT Agency. He considers invincibility stars to be cheating.

IRA BRONSON

owned Journey Escape for Atari and concedes that it wasn’t the greatest game ever.

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TWITTER@EATAGENCY

TWITTER@MRBRIANHUGHES

s

SETH GODIN

All things you do and say.

DOUG RUSHKOFF

Present Shock: When everything happens now — Penguin

SPEAK HUMAN

Eric Karjaluoto — smashLAB

-CREDITS-90/90

UNDERCOVER UX DESIGN

Cennydd Bowles and James Box — New Riders

LEAN UX

Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden — O’Reilly

CHANGE-FRIENDLY LEADERSHIP

Dr. Rodger Dean Duncan — Maxwell Stone Publishing

@EATAGENCY | 2013

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EATagency - 8 Bit Strategy: The Golden Age of Video Games Can Help You Become and Better Designer...

Design

Transcript of EATagency - 8 Bit Strategy: The Golden Age of Video Games Can Help You Become and Better Designer...