I’ll be posting at Econsultancy around once a month. My first post is about content audits.

Also worth mentioning: our colleague Damion Brown is presenting a variety of Econsultancy’s training courses in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. These courses have a fantastic reputation and Damion is, needless to say, a brilliant trainer, so get on board!

For most public-facing websites, the meaning of “intuitive” is pretty simple – in theory, if not in practice. For example, if you’re building an online shop, you want to create a site structure, navigation scheme and labelling system that will help your potential customers find the products and information they’re looking for with as little guesswork as possible. (It’s Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” principle.)

Not that most online shops achieve this goal – few of them do, because execution is hard and because other, less customer-centric priorities get in the way. But at least most website owners will agree with the basic idea that a website which mystifies and frustrates users isn’t cool. (Again I stress, most website owners.)

With intranets, “intuitive” gets slippery

Intranets are different from public websites. They’re different because organisations think of the audience for their intranets as “people who work here”. What that means is that the standard for what’s “intuitive” becomes slippery. If everyone in your organisation knows what a TPS Report is, then it’s perfectly intuitive to have a link that says “TPS Reports”, right?

Right…unless you’re a new employee who’s been plonked in front of the intranet on their first day to “get acquainted with the business” while your manager scrambles to get computer access granted, security passes printed and induction sessions organised. (This describes my first day in every large organisation I’ve ever worked for – yours too, I bet.)

At Weave Web, we’ve recently been doing an information architecture and content strategy project involving an intranet for a large not-for-profit organisation. This intranet has exactly the problem I’ve been describing: it’s been built for people who already work in the organisation and are presumed to know about stuff. (It has lots of other problems too, but this is a good place to start.)

As a way of avoiding this kind of “everyone knows” argument, we came up with what we call “the newbie test”. It’s a simple principle:

The intranet should be organised and labelled so that an employee who is brand new to the organisation can easily find their way around.

Why the newbie test?

There are two good reasons for using brand new staff as the litmus test for what’s intuitive.

Firstly, new staff are heavy intranet users, not just on their first day, but in their first few weeks, as they desperately scramble to not look stupid in front of their colleagues and boss.

Secondly, in just the same way as making a website accessible to disabled people ends up being good for all users, the newbie test is good for everyone in the organisation.

After all, those assumptions about what “everyone knows”? Most of the time they’re wrong. Especially in big organisations, different divisions develop their own internal jargon, their own acronyms, their own shorthand. This is a big reason why information silos develop. If your intranet doesn’t make assumptions about what people already know, it has a much better chance of breaking down those silos, which means the whole organisation wins.

But here’s a tricky question that’s cropping up a lot: if I’m a business, how can I develop my presence on Google+ when businesses are specifically prohibited from using the network?

Just so we’re clear, the situation at the time of writing is as follows:

• Google+ is for people not brands. Okay, so there’s Ford, but that’s got Beta slapped all over it, and those 20,000 people who are engaged with the account would probably be at least 70% “interested marketers”.
• If you use a pseudonym or internet nickname, your account will be removed. This means no “first name Dave, second name ‘s Automotive Transmission Repair Shop“.
• The active Google+ user base is highly engaged, but they’re engaged on their terms and don’t take kindly to being spammed or marketed at. The record label guys who had their accounts removed were probably reported by users, with Google reviewing the reports. The point is that while Google has the final say, it’s the users that are more likely to call you up on your content.

At a recent brand strategy meeting I was asked to put forward some ideas on how a business might “ready itself” for Google+. I’m sharing the bones of that strategy in this post.

Before crunching down into this, let’s make a few (logical, intelligent) assumptions:

• Google+ is going to grow and not shrink. More people will engage more with Google’s social features via greater integration with search, Gmail, Android, Chrome OS, and stuff we don’t even know about yet
• Google Places will become more figurative for businesses as G moves away from scraping citations from Yelp, TripAdvisor, and similar sites
• Adwords advertisers will be pushed toward a “new” model of advertising that merges PPC with Google+ functionality, in some crazy way
• Increased use of Google+ on mobile devices will be part and parcel of the network’s overall growth

I don’t think any of these assumptions (they’re not really even predictions, in the real sense of the word) are wildly out-there, although they do presuppose a kind of  stagnation in growth on Facebook.

And of course we’re also silently supposing that at some stage businesses and brands will be allowed to use Google+ — probable, but certainly not definite and one while would be a fool to try and pull a date out of thin air, we should probably behave as though it was on the cards.

Given these wild and risky predictions, here’s my list of ways to help ensure that you get off to a flying start when the Google Plus tradesmens’ entrance finally opens:

Build a Personal Network

Get active on the network as an individual. Find, share and post interesting content and invite debate. If someone comments on your content, engage back with them: add them to a circle, watch for opportunities to comment on their content. Set aside a half hour each day to explore.

Push your Content

If you’re blogging on behalf of your business, share your content on Google+. Ensure users can +1 your content. If you have friends, colleagues, family or a league of hamsters that use Google, ask them politely to +1 your stuff. Monitor how Google+ behaves as a referrer in your Analytics. Does the pattern differ from FB and Twitter, and if so what does that tell you about how the audiences might be different?

Find Influencers

Google+’s built in search has been pretty despite recent improvements to search including real-time as well as new support for hashtags. If you want to make connections within your area or industry, try http://gplussearch.com/ instead. It’s not perfect (sort by date please!) but some time spent finding people that are talking about your vertical can really help open up doors. Find someone, add them to a circle, share content with them, comment on their content. Get noticed, and get noticed for the right reasons.

Tighten Up Your Site

Using schema.org? Tagging blog authors with rel=author? Marked up your contact us page with microdata? Answer yes to all three and pat yourself on the back. (Incidentally, if your web developer is struggling with these concepts, find a new one.)

Get Places Working

It’s a fairly safe bet that when Google+ launches, it’ll have some kind of integration with Google Places which is, after all, the only place that Google actively requests businesses add their info. Make sure your Places page is complete, compliant and current.

Encourage Google Reviews

We all know that Google is moving to a model where they discount reviews on third party sites, so you’re going to need more reviews by Google users right on your Places page. Use promotion, request and reach-out to gain more reviews. What is a review if not a +1 waiting to be integrated?

Get Friendly With Adwords

We can expect some sort of paid advertising model to be part of Google+ for Businesses, so it’s worth spending some time getting fully comfortable with the platform. It’s useful for any business to be able to know the best time, location, device, ad copy and keyword match that best engages their customers. Moreover, Adwords teaches businesses to answer questions and not to interrupt — something that given Google+’s userbase is going to be hugely important.

The main theme, I guess, is to spend the time now learning about how the Google+ platform works, how people are engaging with it, and how to leverage your business’ current Google properties to their current full.

This exercise isn’t just about Google+ of course (indeed, several of these areas crop up again and again in digital marketing, and they’re worth doing for their own sake, regardless of endgame.)

In all of this, the key is to stay informed, stay current, and stay flexible — three things that a business really needs to be. It also goes without saying that you’ll want to be able to react as soon as possible as soon as the floodgates open, so keep your ear to the ground.

You can follow me here, there, or there to benefit from my perma-ground-affixed ear if you feel so inclined!

Damion Brown is Weave Web’s SEO and Analytics specialist. His own blog on Search & Social is here.

The next day, you get an email. “Your website isn’t working”.

The good news is that people are actually looking at your website! The bad news is that for at least one of them, something has gone wrong: your home page doesn’t display the way it’s meant to, your fancy embedded video won’t start, or worst of all, your shopping cart won’t let them check out.

So what’s going on? If your website’s been tested, shouldn’t it just work?

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. To understand why, we have to think about what a website really is.

Why websites are like recipes

Your website is really just a bunch of code. This code contains a set of instructions telling a piece of software (the web browser) what’s supposed to happen when someone goes to your site – what it looks like, what the site does when someone clicks a button, and so on.

Think of these instructions as a recipe for your website, and the web browser as an oven. If everything goes to plan, something emerges from the oven that’s more or less what you had in mind:

Mmm, cake.

But if something’s not quite right with the oven, you can easily end up with this:

Oops.

A good web developer – like a good test kitchen – will know in advance about the most significant variations in web browsers, and will make the “recipe” robust enough to survive most of them intact. But the fact is, there are so many possible variations – so many different possible combinations of hardware, operating system, browser and internet connection – that it’s impossible to even predict them all in advance, let alone build a website that copes with all of them.

Here are just a few reasons why a particular user might look at your website and see a collapsed cake:

• They might be using a really old web browser that hardly anyone uses any more.
• They might have JavaScript turned off.
• They might have cookies blocked.
• There might be a problem with their internet connection.
• Their browser might be trying to read an old (“cached”) version of your site.
• They might have additional third-party software (“extensions”) installed in their browser, which might be interfering with the site.
• They might have malicious software (“malware”) installed on their computer without knowing it.

That’s not to say that website issues are always the user’s “fault”. Sometimes users do come across genuine issues that haven’t been identified during testing. (The only way to prevent this would be to spend a whole lot more money on testing.)

Other times, even if the problem is an exotic one, your developer might be able to tweak the recipe in a way that fixes it without introducing problems for others.

But ultimately, no website will work perfectly with every possible configuration of software and hardware – just as no recipe will work in every oven. All you can do is try to make sure that as many users as possible have a problem-free experience.

As for the minority of your users who do have problems, that becomes a customer service issue – you need to make sure those users can easily get in touch with you to sort their problems out.

Getting money out of an ATM must be one of the most meticulously designed user experiences in the world. ATMs have been around – at least in prototype form – since the early 1960s, so designers and engineers have had plenty of time to refine how they interact with customers.

Most of the time, they’ve got it down to a fine art. Getting cash from an ATM has become such a streamlined experience that we hardly need to think about each step as it happens.

But sometimes, someone decides to throw a spanner in the works.

About a year ago, the NAB, one of Australia’s “big four” banks, suddenly introduced a new step in their ATM workflow. Right after you’ve told the ATM whether or not you want a receipt, when the machine would normally start counting your money, you get this prompt:

“Do you want to save this withdrawal as your favourite transaction?”

You then have to select “Yes” or “No” before the transaction proceeds.

So let’s weigh it up.

This prompt appears every single time you use an ATM. At a rough guess, it adds 2 seconds to every transaction.

On the other hand, let’s just say there are people out there are actually grateful for this feature, and go ahead to save a favourite transaction. This will presumably save them time on future transactions, by reducing the number of buttons they have to click. Let’s be very generous and say it will save them 6 seconds a time.

So in order to save one group of customers 6 seconds per ATM visit, the bank is wasting 2 seconds per visit for the rest of its customers.

Even assuming a perfectly linear, utilitarian world where all time was equal, the bank would need at least 25% of its customers to use the favourite transaction feature, in order to “break even” on the time they wasted for the other 75%.

It’s actually not that simple, because all time is not equal: customers’ annoyance when you waste their time is stronger than their gratitude when you save them time. (Human nature, I’m afraid.)

Who actually wants this feature?

Let’s give the bank the benefit of the doubt, however, and say our 25% figure is valid as a rough guess. Does one person in four actually have a favourite ATM transaction? Even if they do, do they really want to “save” it? Is saving a few seconds worth adding mental clutter to an experience that’s otherwise second nature? (If they use the feature, they’re now going to have to make a choice every time they visit an ATM about whether to use their favourite transaction or a non-favourite one.)

Now, I don’t really know the answers to these questions. It’s possible that this favourite transaction feature comes out of extensive user research, and is actually something the bank’s customers are clamouring for. Sure, it annoys me, but maybe I’m the exception.

If that’s the case, I apologise, but I have to say, every instinct I have tells me that this feature isn’t based on user research at all. I’d be willing to bet that almost every customer, when faced with the “favourite transaction” prompt, scratches their head a bit and ends up choosing “No”.

What I suspect really happened is that one of the bank’s executives became obsessed with the idea of “personalisation”. You can almost hear the thoughts whirring away: “We want it to look like we treat our customers like individuals. I know, we’ll personalise their ATM experience!”

I’d be equally willing to bet that somewhere within NAB, there are user experience professionals who’ve spent their whole lives optimising the ATM experience, and are now tearing their hair out that a directive from above has effectively vandalised their good work.

Of course, I’m not saying a new feature can never be useful. There have been some really great features added to ATMs in the recent past. Being able to choose between different languages is a good example. Not only does this feature have a clear use case (you’ll appreciate it if you’ve ever travelled overseas), it was also added in a way that doesn’t interrupt your flow when you don’t need it.

The lesson for websites

So what should website owners take out of this? Don’t add features just because you think they’re cool, especially if they’re going to add extra steps or mental clutter to a common user task. If you’re selling underwear, your customers might not be keen to share their purchases with their Facebook friends. If you’re providing medical information, your readers probably don’t need to be able to customise the background image. If you’re a paper supplier, nobody wants to read your Twitter feed.

To get a website that works, find out what your users actually want to do, and help them do it.