True Story.
A large consumer internet company where I worked sent in a team of lawyers to check over the fledgling social network I was building. The registration flow concerned them. There needed to be a check where the person registering was required to submit their date of birth so that we could ensure they were over 13.
The advice of the lawyers was to throw an error if someone underage tried to register.
“What kind of error?” I asked.
“A generic error, something like, Your registration has failed or The system is down for maintenance.“
As a product guy, if there is one thing I hate more than a generic error message it’s a deceptive one. I want to give the user a specific error message that tells them what went wrong.
“Can I just tell them that they are too young to use the service?”
“No, then they would just adjust their date of birth and re-register,” said the legal department.
We all know this is what happens anyway, it’s one of the great collective nod and winks of the internet along with checking the [I understand and grok completely] boxes on the End User License Agreements we find across the web.
I argued that we must give them a more specific error so it doesn’t look like our service is broken. Legal didn’t want me to tip our had too much. What to do? We compromised.
The new error message? The agreed upon language?
You cannot use this service . . . at this time.
Tagged as:
user interface
It’s gone now but someone that I follow on twitter pointed out that it’s been six years since Adrian Holovaty posted, A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change In this post, Holovaty, the man behind the micro-news site everyblock.com, and, as far as I’m concerned, the original data-journalist, speaks to the new landscape in which newspapers sit and how they need to change to serve their new readership that is used to links that let them dig thru to the original source of information.
He also speaks of an ancillary value to taking data out of the content blob which is a newspaper article and storing it as meta-data alongside a story.
Then there’s the serendipity advantage. When I worked for LJWorld.com, we worked with the local weathermen to create a weather site that displayed the weathermen’s forecast for the next few days. I made them a Web interface that let them enter the predicted high temperature, low temperature and sky conditions — all in separate database fields. There really wasn’t any reason to use separate fields for these values other than the fact that the site’s design called for presenting the temperatures in a different color than the conditions, and we didn’t want the weathermen to have to remember to insert the HTML coloring codes in the right place. But it wasn’t until several months later that we reaped some real benefits of databasing the information, when we were putting together Game, an exhaustive database of local little-league teams and games. (Yes, you read that right.) We created a page for every little-league team and every little-league game, and when it came time to create the game pages, one of us said, “You know, these games tend to rain out a lot. It’d be really cool if we could somehow display the weather forecast for each game.” And, boom! One of us realized that we already had weather forecast data, in nice, sliceable-and-diceable format, thanks to our database populated by the weathermen. Ten minutes later, our little-league pages displayed weather forecasts. Serendipity.
This is the fundamental lesson so-called old media is still learning. There is hidden value in saving your content into a form that machines can read. SEO is more than just a “black art” to help goose traffic coming from Google, it’s also an important part of your editorial workflow that will pay off dividends in the future when you respond to new opportunities.
Tagged as:
journalism,
media,
newspapers
