In our industry it’s common knowledge that a DYO (or “Design Your Own“) website is one of the trickiest things a web/interactive/design company can undertake.

First of all, paid work always comes first. So despite your best efforts the DYO falls by the wayside, only to just get going again before another paid job sweeps everyone off their feet.

Then you have internal wrangles – we are all “the client” – as well as “the experts” – as well as, well, “everything else!”

So that’s why the Click Suite website redesign, in dribs and drabs, took around 12 months.

I led the Strategy and Information Design.

Here’s a reminder of what the old site looked like:

CLICK SUITE HOMEPAGE (2008)

Where it got to now isn’t a happy accident…

BASED ON A STRATEGY

Click Suite decided to “walk the talk” and kicked-off the DYO process by working with me to create their own ‘Interactive Strategy’.

The Strategy included:

• A vision statement for the company.
• An analysis of where we believe Click Suite sit in the marketplace (and where they want to get to).
• Profiles of their diverse target audience, their goals (and how Click Suite will meet them).
• How Click Suite will measure the success of the new website.

You can design a website or interactive without a strategy, but having one makes the intention of the website more focused and with purpose.

Here’s what it looked like…

VISION

So why have a website? Is it just an online brochure? A portfolio? A place for people to find our email address? Well, all of those, but what makes it special?

Click Suite’s vision statement was about making it clear that they do (great) interactive media and want to “wow!” people with their work and ideas.

MARKET DIFFERENTIATORS

Click Suite picked six similar companies in NZ and I conducted a competitive analysis (based on each company’s website presence).

It was clear that the Click Suite website (built over six years ago) was showing its age. Most of its competitors had freshly designed websites. But despite this, in terms of content and services, all the websites felt fairly similar.

WHERE THEY CAN BE DIFFERENT

It’s tempting to be different just for the sake of it, but in some cases it’s OK to be like everyone else. For example, it is important to establish to the user they are in the right place and what they can expect to find, so the new website has an upfront explanation of what Click Suite does.

I also identified areas where Click Suite can be a little bit different and where they could be very different from the competition.

GAP ANALYSIS

TARGET AUDIENCE

Who will visit the website? Click Suite works closely with their customers every day so already had a good understanding of their audience.

Industries they frequently work with include Museums, Government, Business, Ad Agencies and Software/Web companies. The roles of the people inside these companies include Curators, Communications Managers, Marketing Managers and Ad Agency executives.

Their ideal client is someone prepared to try something new. They want their business/offering to stand out from the crowd. Typically the Managing Director of a company, this person organises and takes responsibility for the effective operation of their organisation as well as its overall strategic direction.

GOALS

I listed the questions customers were likely to ask (in their heads) when they visit the Click Suite website.

For example:

• Who is Click Suite?
• So, what do they do?
• Who have they worked with?
• What does their work look like?
• How does it stack up against the best?
• OK, so lots of awards, but how has their work been successful? (for their clients).
• Can I trust this company to deliver?

The website attempts to answer all these questions.

SUCCESS MEASURES

How will Click Suite know their redesign has succeeded?

Here’s a few of the factors I recommended they measure:

• You get inquiries via the website.
• Engagements for work via website referrals.
• People say “I saw that on your website”.
• Subscriptions to their newsletter.
• They get comments on their blog.

I also measured success by conducting usability testing on our site and monitoring usage statistics. One such measurement is Google PageRank.

The old Click Suite website had average visibility on Google with a PageRank of five. To ensure good exposure in New Zealand a ranking of six is desirable, and for international a rank of seven or higher.

I’m happy to report that the new site now ranks a six. Their latest goal is to get to a seven (the same as Trade Me).

PROMOTION

The old Click Suite website had a small ‘foot print’ on the web with average visibility. I changed their thinking to view the website as part of a much wider network – the world wide web.

You’ll now also find Click Suite on twitter, Vimeo and LinkedIn.

CONCEPTUAL DESIGNS

Click Suite set its designer loose on some early concepts. The themes were ‘play’, ‘learn’ and ‘explore’.

EXPLORING THEMES

ROADMAP

The roadmap is like a high-level plan split into three stages of work. Each stage has a focus – with an explanation of how it will add value to both the business and customers.

The focus of the first stage was to show that “Click Suite has got great ideas”. Future phases intend to add more detail about Click Suite’s team and services and provide the ability for visitors to add their own contributions to the website.

INFORMATION DESIGN

The Information Design started with the concept of allowing the user to switch between different modes of navigation (Relationship, Pictures, Text).

Here’s an early concept for the ‘relationship’ mode…

EXPLORING NAVIGATION APPROACHES

But Click Suite decided this was too ambitious with the limited time and people available, so ‘Plan B’ kicked in.

Plan B focused more on the portfolio viewer – which allows you explore projects in sequential order or filter the portfolio to view projects within a certain industry (e.g. Museums) or technology (e.g. Touchscreens).

HOMEPAGE PAPER PROTOTYPE

VISUAL DESIGN

The visual design had to showing off Click Suite’s work as well as complement a variety of visual styles ranging from 1995 to the present.

The swirly animations help guide your way through the new website – these were hand-drawn and are now extending their way into our document templates, presentations and, eventually, our business cards.

VISUAL DESIGN MOCKUP

DEVELOPMENT

If you’re technically inclined you might notice that the website is created in Adobe Flash, but it acts a lot like an HTML website!

The back button remembers where you’ve been, you can bookmark specific pages and lots of other clever stuff invisible to the naked eye.

USABILITY TESTING

Here are the results of the first round of usability testing on a working prototype of the website.

We tested the site with both staff and customers – setting them tasks followed by a questionnaire to gauge their impressions. We then worked to fix the issues and move the green line to a rating of four and above.

USABILITY TEST ANALYSIS (SURVEY)

THE RESULT

So how did Click Suite go with the DYO?

Only time will tell and Click Suite would love your feedback!

While it was tempting to design a wildly creative website with whacky navigation and hidden content, the new website mixes a bit of the traditional with a bit of the new.

The site is visually rich, but still looks and acts like a website. The large portfolio images can be presented in a variety of formats – still images, animation or video.

The case study text underneath each project has the flexibility to change and extend over time. For example, in future we plan to add cross-links to related projects and technologies.

Check it out…

• Extensive work portfolio (Tip: to move through the portfolio you can click the on-screen arrows or use the left and right arrows on your keyboard)
• Some fabulous ideas
• Dozens of awards
• Top notch services
• About the company, its people and how their clients have benefited from working with them
• Where to find Click Suite and keep in touch

Still coming… (sometime in 2010)

• HTML version of the website (for the few organisations which block Flash).
• SmartPhone version.
• Ability to filter projects by client.

They respect tsunamis in Japan

When the recent 6 metre tsunami hit the Samoan region, killing 189 people, there unfortunately wasn’t time to warn their people.

But there was time to warn their neighbours in the South Pacific.

We failed.

New Zealand had several hours to crank-up the tsunami warning machine. The police did their best to round up people on the shoreline, but apart from that all we got was out-of-date news reports, government websites which were light on detail and the internet rife with speculation and rumours.

In New Zealand SMS (text) messages warning people in high-risk areas arrived 3 hours too late. How many people on the East Coast of New Zealand could have been killed if this was the big one? Potentially thousands.

My previous article covered how bad the information out there was at representing where the tsunami could strike, the risk and what to do. The graphics which were available were highly technical, easy to misinterpret and in most cases was retrospective data of what had actually occurred – not predictions of what was coming.

And we have to take into account human nature. In New Zealand when we hear a tsunami is coming a fair number of us just assume it’s yet another false alarm. Hundreds even go down to the shoreline to watch it coming in.

Why? Saying “go to higher ground” isn’t specific enough. Some will think that means the big sand-dune a few metres from the shoreline.

I believe we need to give people a clear message at a glance, and just enough detailed information that they’ll take it seriously.

So, while I don’t claim to be a tsunami expert, I decided to have a go at creating a ‘general public’ information graphic which could be populated with data in real-time (or by hand and published online within minutes).

I encourage your feedback, or if you are a designer, have a go at improving on my design and let me know when you do.

Here’s my first attempt (click on the image to enlarge) or download the PDF (84KB) if you want a closer look.

The left panel shows a regional breakdown of the risk level, how high/inland to go and the deadline:

The map shows the risk level, how high/inland to go and the deadline for the major population centres:

The modular design allows the information graphic to be easily reformatted for different layouts. Here’s a snap-off of the map on it’s own:

And here’s a snap-off of the regional warnings:

Information Components

Good idea

The purpose of the graphic is to act as an early warning system to explain the following things I thought most people would be interested in:

• Earthquake magnitude.
• Wave height.
• Arrival location(s).
• Arrival time(s).
• Power of the wave (extent of inundation).
• How high I need to go up or/and how far inland.

Earthquake magnitude is easy, I included that.

Wave height is variable and actually a misleading factor as people wrong assume a small (say 3m) wave is not dangerous. It actually depends on the power or force of the tsunami – a small tsunami could still go a long way inland and cause devastation. So I deliberately left wave height out.

The other questions I have done my best to answer in the graphic.

Inundation

The extent of inundation was hard to represent in “birds-eye view” graphic as it depends on so many factors (such as being by a river estuary).

This could work if the map was interactive, like a Google Map where you could zoom into your region and see an overlay of the areas which are likely to be affected. I’m sure this sort of thing is coming.

Colours to Represent Risk

Another aspect I struggled with was the use of colours to represent risk.

At first I used the traditional red/orange/yellow to show risk levels. I decided this wouldn’t be useful for people with red/green colour blindness (the most common form of colour blindness).

I felt that using of shades of blue further emphasised water smashing into the shoreline, so this won in the end.

Red/Orange/Yellow or shades of Blue?

Your Thoughts?

Says it all.

Whether you’re a tsunami expert or not I’d love your feedback.

Keep in mind that the intention of this Information Graphic is to act as one way to communicate the risk and guide people to take action.

I realise it’s imperfect as the risks can be hard to assess due to dozens of complicating factors. But in all I believe it’s better than ‘almost nothing’ – which is what we get every time a large earthquake hits the Pacific.

PS: Thanks to Click Suite who unknowingly allowed me work-time to design this graphic last Friday while my bosses were holidaying in Fiji (I was thinking of you insanely relaxing on a beach during the tsunami season!)

When disaster hits it spreads on the internet like wildfire. But the information graphics the public are served up are next to useless for making an informed decision on whether or not you’re in imminent danger.

Yesterday morning I arrived at work, opened Twitter and found out about the shocking Samoan earthquake – my contacts on the social networking site said the tsunami was heading toward New Zealand and would be here within hours.

So we’ve heard this before – a tsunami is on the way – don’t panic (yet). Do some quick research – so how big is it? 10cm or 10metres? Where will it hit? Should I phone home and warn the family?

The main New Zealand news websites gave conflicting information and seemed at least an hour behind the news on Twitter. Who could I trust? I found a lot of misleading information and hype from both the public and officials.

So I turned to the New Zealand, Australian and US government websites for the facts – they’d be accurate and up to date right?

A number of local Twitter posts pointed to the following tsunami gauges published online by GeoNet – a New Zealand Government owned geological hazard monitoring system in New Zealand:

So in the heat of the moment how would you interpret this diagram?

• A really massive wave will, or has, hit North Cape?
• A tsunami of approximately one metre will, or has, hit Wellington?
• A tsunami of approximately 10 metres will, or has, hit Auckland?

Source: GeoNet

Yesterday the above graph looked nonsensical to me.

I’m sure it makes sense to experts but it’s plainly a bad information graphic for the general pubic who just want to know – where will it hit and how large will it be?

It also turns out that this graph is retrospective – it measures actual sea levels – so is not a prediction. But, yesterday, in the heat of the moment I didn’t realise that.

So I ended up relying on Twitter reports that a wave of around one metre would be hitting New Zealand’s East Coast with some minor effects in Wellington harbour and the West Coast of the North Island.

After going back to the graph today and reading the small print it appears that the wavy lines represent the normal variations of the daily tide. The grey jagged lines represent abnormal variation, and I’m guessing, intensity of force – the effect of the earthquake and resulting tsunami. You determine the height not by the height of the graph, but by the ‘One Metre’ ruler – imagine this ruler slides up and down the graph.

So based on this interpretation, Raoul Island and East Cape were hit by an intense tsunami of around one metre. North Cape and Chatham Islands hit by tsunami of less than half a metre. The other New Zealand locations hit by a minor tsunami just a few cm high, barely noticeable.

But GeoNet is not alone – even worse – this ‘Water Column Height’ graph from the US Government’s NOAA (National Data Boy Centre) could give the distinct impression the wave is over 4963 metres. Help!

Source: National Data Bouy Centre

Other information graphics from NOAA were more useful than most but on the whole too little, too late and not enough detail.

Source: NOAA

Source: NOAA

I believe we need a better way to quickly inform the public, not just where the tsunami originated, but where it will hit, when, with what intensity and height and who is in danger.

Information graphics could play a key role in informing people who might be in a panic and not thinking straight.

Ideas welcome!