China Hackers Accessed U.S. Chamber Systems for More Than a Year

China Hackers Accessed U.S. Chamber Systems for More Than a Year:

Hackers in China had access to U.S. Chamber of Commerce systems for possibly more than a year, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

All information stored on the interest group’s systems were compromised, including information about its more than 3 million members, six weeks of email from four employees who worked on Asia policy and fewer than 50 members’ communications. The intruders used tools that allowed them to search the chambers’ documents by key word, though the investigation has not determined what documents were retrieved based on those searches.

Sources familiar with the matter told the Journal that evidence indicated the hackers were operating from China. One said the hackers appeared to be state-supported. The intrusion was shut down in May 2010 after the FBI noticed the Chamber’s data was being stolen by servers in China.

Hackers who appear to be operating from China have recently accomplished similar intrusions, though nothing this broad. A report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission last month detailed a number of such incidents in which hackers in China stole Internet data from other countries and concluded that some of these incidents suggest state support.

When asked about the intrusion that was shut down in May 2010, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy told the Journal that cyberattacks are prohibited by Chinese law and the issue shouldn’t be politicized.

Since the attack, the Chamber says it has beefed up its Internet security measures. For instance, employees who travel to certain countries, including China, are required to leave the mobile devices they use daily at home and are instead issued loaner devices.

More About: china, hackers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Study: Eating less keeps the brain young

Study: Eating less keeps the brain young: Overeating may cause brain aging while eating less turns on a molecule that helps the brain stay young.

Technology Cannot Disrupt Education From The Top Down

Technology Cannot Disrupt Education From The Top Down:

Editor’s note: Guest contributor Patrick Gibbons is a Las Vegas-based writer and researcher focusing on education policy and reform.

Computer technology has penetrated the classroom for thirty years with little impact. After hundreds of “disruptive” education startups, the best innovation in education is still the chalkboard. This isn’t the fault of the entrepreneurs, but the fault of an education system which resists innovation at every turn.

Many K-12 education technology startups target teachers and administrators by offering tools to become more productive: Lesson plan sharing, gradebooks, training tools, whiteboards and more. Devin Coldewey called them “practical” in his TechCrunch post “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” Inadvertently Touches On Sad Education And Tech Truths.” Coldewey concludes that education needs top-down reforms that utilize these practical technologies. He sincerely believes these technologies can improve teacher and administrator efficiency so the “overworked” staff can gain control of their “oversized” classes in the “pitifully insufficient” resourced schools.

Unfortunately, the top down “practical” approach won’t work for some very good reasons. Essentially, the education establishment doesn’t want to be disrupted and they will leverage the $597 billion spent annually on K-12 public education to prevent true disruption.

To innovate in education, entrepreneurs need to understand some key education statistics. The fact is, despite thirty years of technological progress and innovation, American schools provide the same results with more resources at their disposal. Between the 1959-60 and 2007-08 school year, per pupil spending grew from $2,741 (in 2009 dollar values) to $11,134—an inflation-adjusted increase of 306%. Over that same period the number of students per teacher fell from 26 to 15.3 while the number of students per school employee fell from 16.8 to 7.8.

Finally, while Devin believes public schools have “few computers” the data shows the number of pupils per computer fell from 12.1 in 1998 to 3.8 by 2005.

Despite more money, more teachers and more computers per pupil, student achievement in K-12 education has been stagnant for forty years. So why hasn’t money, teachers and technology worked?

American public education is a monopoly where the bureaucracy and administrators act more like Soviet commissars than corporate CEOs and entrepreneurs. They don’t want to be disrupted—they like things just the way they are.

Let me give you an example from my research in Clark County Nevada (you may know it as Las Vegas) home of the fifth largest school district in the nation (operating budget of over $2 billion!).

In 2009, I interviewed several local principals. One principal discussed how his purchase request for new Dell computers was denied by the district bureaucrats because the computers came with 21 inch monitors. District rules prohibited monitors larger than 19 inch—despite the fact that Dell was selling the 21 inch monitors for less than the 19 inch. There were many similar stories of frustration.

Anyone who has ever run their own business should immediately see the problem. Principals have little control over the resources in their school. Everything from teachers to textbooks is rationed by a central office commissar – sometimes approval requires the rubber stamp of several bureaucrats (up to seven in Clark County). The central control of public schools is an essential ingredient to prevent disruption—it allows the establishment to build alliances by co-opting players from the teacher union to the for-profit corporation.

The result means technology is treated as a cost, not a means to increase productivity and reduce costs. Using technology to actually increase productivity and reduce costs would mean reducing the demand for teachers, administrators and central office commissars. Co-opted for-profit corporations also prefer the larger, less competitive market because it is easier, and cheaper, to sell to the “edublob” than hundreds of thousands of autonomous and competitive schools.

In other words, you can’t sell technology that increases productivity and truly disrupts—only technology that pretends to do both.

For the disruptive education startups, forget about selling to the public school districts. Take your products to the entrepreneurial schools—private schools, virtual schools, charter schools, home school networks or even directly to the students. These schools and organizations only exist by convincing parents to enroll their children—they are hungry for ways to improve.

Finally, if you are up to the challenge, figure out ways to improve access to high quality teachers. In a country where it is almost impossible to fire bad teachers, the teacher quality gap in the United States is a major problem. According to Eric Hanushek at Stanford University a good teacher averages 1.5 years of learning gains from their students while a bad teacher averages just 0.5 year gains. In other words, a good teacher gives a 1 year learning advantage for their students compared to bad teachers. Now multiply those results over several years.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of education startups trying to attack the problem from the bottom up. Several tutoring services like WizIQ, Udemy and BlueTeach (to name a few) connect teachers with students. At the other end you have peer-to-peer education networks like Student of Fortune and OpenStudy. There are also startups mixing tutoring with adaptive-learning (the program adapts to provide lessons covering the subjects where the student is most deficient) like Grockit and Sophia Pathways. There are even specialization services like CodeAcademy which provide students a platform to develop computer programming skills.

Finally there is, Khan Academy, a free service offering more than 3,000 lessons on YouTube. Khan also integrates quizes to assess student ability and redirects students to the relevant lesson when they struggle.

Not all of these programs will succeed, but they’re all bypassing the flawed school system to offer education services whenever, wherever to whoever. This is the only way to have a chance at disrupting education.

Image credit: Getty Images/Sean MacEntee.

Driverless cars will redefine public transportation

Driverless cars will redefine public transportation:

In a short essay about The Unintended Effects of Driverless Cars (like the kind being tested by Google), Koushik Dutta guesses at what they might mean for the future of transportation.

Currently, a car spends 96% of its time idle. Compare that with planes which spend almost their entire lifetime in operation/airborne. Idle planes aren't making money, and they need to recoup their hefty $120M price tag. There is an unforgiving economic incentive to make sure it is always in use.

The proliferation of driverless cars will have a similar effect. Cars will spend less time idle: why would a household buy 2 (or even 3) cars, when they only need 1? Ride to work, then send the car home to your spouse. Need to go grocery shopping, but your kid also needs a ride to a soccer game? No problem, a driverless car can handle that.

Most people don't need cars most of the time but pay for the convenience of having one nearby when they do. Schedule-able on-demand driverless cars could eliminate that need, with the added bonus of expanding effortlessly to fit current capacity (e.g. imagine a family of four needing to go in four different directions at four different times...just schedule four Hertz Driverless pickups from your phone). Of course, people said similarish things about the Segway...

Tags: cars

Google Awarded Driverless Vehicle Patent

Google Awarded Driverless Vehicle Patent:
theodp writes "On Tuesday, Google was awarded U.S. Patent No. 8,078,349 for methods and devices for Transitioning a Mixed-mode Autonomous Vehicle from a Human Driven Mode to an Autonomously Driven Mode. From the fast-tracked patent application, which was filed last May and kept under wraps at Google's request: 'The autonomous vehicle may be used as a virtual tour guide of Millennium Park in Chicago. In the example embodiment, the vehicle may have an instruction to drive to the Cloud Gate (Silver Bean) sculpture at Millennium Park. When the vehicle arrives, the autonomous instruction may tell it to wait in the location for a predetermined amount of time, for example 5 minutes. The instruction may then direct the vehicle to drive to the Crown Fountain at Millennium Park and again wait for 5 minutes. Next, the instruction may tell the vehicle to drive to the Ice Rink at Millennium Park and wait for another predetermined amount of time. Finally, the vehicle instruction may tell the vehicle to return to its starting position.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NAO Developer

NAO Developer:

'via Blog this'

Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA)

Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA):

Anti-aliasing has an intimidating name, but what it does for our computer displays is rather fundamental. Think of it this way -- a line has infinite resolution, but our digital displays do not. So when we "snap" a line to the pixel grid on our display, we can compensate by imagineering partial pixels along the line, pretending we have a much higher resolution display than we actually do. Like so:

As you can see on these little squiggly black lines I drew, anti-aliasing produces a superior image by using grey pixels to simulate partial pixels along the edges of the line. It is a hack, but as hacks go, it's pretty darn effective. Of course, the proper solution to this problem is to have extremely high resolution displays in the first place. But other than tiny handheld devices, I wouldn't hold your breath for that to happen any time soon.

This also applies to much more complex 3D graphics scenes. Perhaps even more so, since adding motion amplifies the aliasing effects of all those crawling lines that make up the edges of the scene.

But anti-aliasing, particularly at 30 or 60 frames per second in a complex state of the art game, with millions of polygons and effects active, is not cheap. Per my answer here, you can generally expect a performance cost of at least 25% for proper 4X anti-aliasing. And that is for the most optimized version of anti-aliasing we've been able to come up with:

1. Super-Sampled Anti-Aliasing (SSAA). The oldest trick in the book - I list it as universal because you can use it pretty much anywhere: forward or deferred rendering, it also anti-aliases alpha cutouts, and it gives you better texture sampling at high anisotropy too. Basically, you render the image at a higher resolution and down-sample with a filter when done. Sharp edges become anti-aliased as they are down-sized. Of course, there's a reason why people don't use SSAA: it costs a fortune. Whatever your fill rate bill, it's 4x for even minimal SSAA.




2. Multi-Sampled Anti-Aliasing (MSAA). This is what you typically have in hardware on a modern graphics card. The graphics card renders to a surface that is larger than the final image, but in shading each "cluster" of samples (that will end up in a single pixel on the final screen) the pixel shader is run only once. We save a ton of fill rate, but we still burn memory bandwidth. This technique does not anti-alias any effects coming out of the shader, because the shader runs at 1x, so alpha cutouts are jagged. This is the most common way to run a forward-rendering game. MSAA does not work for a deferred renderer because lighting decisions are made after the MSAA is "resolved" (down-sized) to its final image size.




3. Coverage Sample Anti-Aliasing (CSAA). A further optimization on MSAA from NVidia [ed: ATI has an equivalent]. Besides running the shader at 1x and the framebuffer at 4x, the GPU's rasterizer is run at 16x. So while the depth buffer produces better anti-aliasing, the intermediate shades of blending produced are even better.

Pretty much all "modern" anti-aliasing is some variant of the MSAA hack, and even that costs a quarter of your framerate. That's prohibitively expensive, unless you have so much performance you don't even care, which will rarely be true for any recent game. While the crawling lines of aliasing do bother me, I don't feel anti-aliasing alone is worth giving up a quarter of my framerate and/or turning down other details to pay for it.

But that was before I learned that there are some emerging alternatives to MSAA. And then, much to my surprise, these alternatives started showing up as actual graphics options in this season's PC games -- Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Batman: Arkham City, and so on. What is this FXAA thing, and how does it work? Let's see it in action:

No AA	4x MSAA	FXAA

(this is a zoomed fragment; click through to see the full screen)

FXAA stands for Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing, and it's an even more clever hack than MSAA, because it ignores polygons and line edges, and simply analyzes the pixels on the screen. It is a pixel shader program documented in this PDF that runs every frame in a scant millisecond or two. Where it sees pixels that create an artificial edge, it smooths them. It is, in the words of the author, "the simplest and easiest thing to integrate and use".

FXAA has two major advantages:

1. FXAA smooths edges in all pixels on the screen, including those inside alpha-blended textures and those resulting from pixel shader effects, which were previously immune to the effects of MSAA without oddball workarounds.
   
2. It's fast. Very, very fast. Version 3 of the FXAA algorithm takes about 1.3 milliseconds per frame on a $100 video card. Earlier versions were found to be double the speed of 4x MSAA, so you're looking at a modest 12 or 13 percent cost in framerate to enable FXAA -- and in return you get a considerable reduction in aliasing.
   

The only downside, and it is minor, is that you may see a bit of unwanted edge "reduction" inside textures or in other places. I'm not sure if it's fair to call this a downside, but FXAA can't directly be applied to older games; games have to be specifically coded to call the FXAA pixel shader before they draw the game's user interface, otherwise it will happily smooth the edges of on-screen HUD elements, too.

The FXAA method is so good, in fact, it makes all other forms of full-screen anti-aliasing pretty much obsolete overnight. If you have an FXAA option in your game, you should enable it immediately and ignore any other AA options.

FXAA is an excellent example of the power of simple hacks and heuristics. But it's also a great demonstration of how attacking programming problems from a different angle -- that is, rather than thinking of the screen as a collection of polygons and lines, think of it as a collection of pixels -- can enable you to solve computationally difficult problems faster and arguably better than anyone thought possible.

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Eye Tracking Could be the Next Natural User Interface

Eye Tracking Could be the Next Natural User Interface:

You've seen those eye tracking heat maps that show where most people look first when they land on a web page - why not turn eye tracking technology like that into a replacement for your mouse or your finger on a touchscreen?

That's what a Danish startup called Senseye claims to be doing; they say they've got software for Android that uses the front-facing camera to track a user's eye movement and then uses that to control what happens on the phone's screen. They're not alone in working on doing that kind of work, either. Eye tracking could be a big new way that users interact with their devices.

Sponsor

If the company can really pull this off, Senseye could join the ranks of Microsoft's Kinect, Surface and the touchscreen mobile devices in what people are calling the Natural User Interface (NUI). A Swedish company called Tobii announced in-car eye tracking technology this week as well and these aren't isolated innovations.

First there was the command line for controlling computers, then there was the Graphic User Interface - now there's the NUI. A natural user interface is defined as a human-computer interface that is transparent or invisible. It's exciting but just beginning to be explored. Eye tracking as NUI? Apple has been rumored for several years to have licensed Tobii technology for tablet use, but it's not clear that such use would really work very well.

It seems a little hard to believe that the same level of detailed control over a cursor that you can get from your finger touching the screen can be captured by watching your eyes, but Senseye says it works and it's winning European startup awards. Blogger Martin Bryant profiled the company on The Next Web last night and posted the video you can also watch below.

Robert Stevens, CEO of THiNK Eye Tracking, wrote an in-depth post almost two years ago about the challenges that eye tracking technology faces before it can enter consumer markets like this. The biggest issue is that eyes move around a lot, they need to in order to see, but they are far harder to track accurately than fingers touching a screen.

Let's assume it really works though. I don't know if you're really going to keep it running all the time so it can catch you peeking at your phone and turn it on, for example. I'm also not sure that eye movement is really going to be a faster system of input than the options we've already got. Maybe it's just different and appropriate for different circumstances.

I never understood speech interfaces either until I was riding my bike down a street a few weeks ago, unsure of the exact address of the business I was headed to. I pulled out my iPhone, launched the Google App and said its name. The address popped right up and biking while talking to your phone is less risky, I suppose, than other types of input.

Most of the time speech input is slow, imprecise and socially awkward but it clearly has its place, like when you're in transit.

See also: 6 Ways Eye Tracking Is Changing the Web

Tobii, the company with the in-car eye tracking, lets users unlock their cars with their eyes and control dashboard software by looking around. (Just keep your eyes on the road!) The company's big pitch is that if it notices your eyes are falling asleep, it can wake you up and save your life.

Tobii introduced its own eye-tracking video game last month, too. Asteroids, it seems, is a particularly good use case. Angry Birds? We'll see. Stevens of THiNK Eye Tracking called Tobii's game "Brilliant PR" but emphasized that "eye control is of little practical utility for most people in most situations."

In response to Stevens' critical comments, Tobii UX designer Joakim Isaksson offered the following in a LinkedIn thread last month.

"When eye tracking first starts making its way into the mainstream market, it will simply complement current methods of user input, such as mouse, keyboard, touch and voice. My favorite example of this so far is a nifty feature we have developed called MouseWarp, where the mouse cursor jumps to where you are looking when you start moving it towards your point of regard. It's extremely simple, but especially when used in conjunction with a trackpad on a laptop it is also very powerful. [See this prototype Tobii eye tracking system for controlling a Lenovo laptop which made an appearance this Spring.]

"As the market matures, we will start seeing computers and devices that anticipates what you want to do, for example pre-loading content when you look at something instead of when you click it. As for computer games, eye tracking makes it possible for the game world to react to your gaze; imagine walking in to a bar in GTA7 and when you accidentally gaze at the dodgy guy in the corner he flips out and pulls out his baseball bat. On top of that, graphics rendering can be made more intelligent; why render everything on screen with full Vertex count and Anti-Aliasing, when you're only really looking at 1 % of it at any given time?

"There are countless other possibilities that eye tracking enables, and most of them have yet to be discovered."

The Read/Write Implications

There's certainly a lot of gee-whiz going on here, but there are also read/write implications to consider. If eye tracking can prove a faster, more efficient way to do some things on computers, then that could mean those things get done more often. It's nice to think about the human eye being an active participant in media, not just a passive recipient of broadcast messages. If I could sort assets, navigate large maps or otherwise interact with large quantities of information with my eyes, I think I would do more sorting of information.

Is sorting a form of writing? I don't know that it is, but I don't think eye tracking is likely to facilitate richer input than that.

But it's probably a mistake to think of eye tracking happening in isolation. Used in conjunction with multiple other forms of input, like touch, mouse, sensors, keyboards, etc. it could be a great asset to a more complex set of user interface options.

Discuss

Content Strategy Within The Design Process

Content Strategy Within The Design Process:

The first thing to understand about content strategy is that no two people understand it the same way. It’s a relatively new — and extremely broad — discipline with no single definitive definition. A highly informative Knol on content strategy defines it as follows: Content strategy is an emerging field of practice encompassing every aspect of content, including its design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, management, and governance.

This definition is a great place to start. Although the discipline has clearly evolved, this breakdown of its scope makes perfect sense. The aspects of content strategy that matter most to Web designers in this definition are design (obviously!), development, presentation and production. In this article, we’ll concentrate on the relationship between content strategy and design in creating, organizing and displaying Web copy.

As a writer and content strategist myself, I’ve worked with designers in all of these areas and find the creative process highly enriching. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with designers who are quick to challenge ideas that are unclear or unsound, who are brilliant at creating striking visual representations of even the most complex concepts. A lively interplay between design and content is not only fun, but is how spectacular results are achieved. This is why content strategy should matter a great deal to designers.

What Is Content Strategy, And Why Should A Designer Care?

Content strategy is the glue that holds a project together. When content strategy is ambiguous or absent, don’t be surprised if you end up with the Internet equivalent of Ishtar. When content strategy is in place and in its proper place, we’re on our way to producing beautiful and effective results.

Slide from The Language of Interfaces by Des Traynor.

While wrapping one’s head around content strategy might be difficult, the thing that makes it work is very simple: good communication. Sometimes a project moves along like a sports car on a superhighway. Other times, the road is so full of bumps and potholes that it’s a wonder we ever reach our destination. As we explore the relationship between content strategy and design, I’ll detail how I keep the channels of communication open and go over the workflow processes that I’ve used to support that effort. I hope that sharing my experiences (both positive and negative) will help you contribute to and manage projects more effectively and deliver better products to clients.

How To Get Started: The First Step Is The Longest

Project manager: We need a landing page for client X.

Designer: I can’t start the design until I see some content.

Writer: I can’t start writing until I see a design.

You may find this dialogue amusing… until it happens to you! At our firm, we find that the best way to get past such a standoff is to write first. This is because content strategy, at a fundamental level, frames a project for the designer. As a content strategist, my job is to articulate the why, where, who, what and how of the content:

• Why is it important to convey this message? This speaks to purpose.


• Where on the website should the message appear? This speaks to context.


• Who is the audience? This speaks to the precision of the message.


• What are we trying to say? This speaks to clarity.


• How do we convey and sequence the information for maximum impact? This speaks to persuasiveness.

Bringing it down to a more detailed level, let’s consider a landing page. A content strategist will determine such things as the following:

• Audience
  
  Is the audience sophisticated? Down to earth? College-level? Predominately male? Female? Etc.


• Word count
  
  Some pitches scream for long copy, while others must be stripped to the bare minimum. SEO might factor into the equation as well.


• Messaging priorities
  
  What is the most important point to convey? The least important? What needs to be said first (the hook)? What needs to be said just leading up to the call to action?


• Call to action
  
  What will the precise wording be? What emotional and intellectual factors will motivate the visitor to click through?

Clear direction on these points not only helps the writer write, but helps the designer with layout, color palettes and image selection. When we start with words, we produce designs that are more reflective of the product’s purpose.

Landing pages are a great place to try this workflow, because in terms of content strategy, they are less complex than many other types of Web pages. A product category page, on the other hand, might have a less obvious purpose or multiple purposes, considerably greater word counts, more (and more involved) messaging points, and a variety of SEO considerations, all of which would affect its design.

Quick Tips for Getting Started

• Make sure someone is specifically responsible for content strategy. If strategic responsibility is vague, your final product will be, too.


• Slow down! Everybody, me included, is eager to dive headfirst into a new project. But “ready-aim-fire” is not a winning content strategy. Make sure everyone is on the same page conceptually before cranking out work.


• If content strategy falls on your shoulders as a designer, cultivate an understanding of the discipline. Resources are listed at the end of this article to help you.


• Make sure designers and writers understand what their roles are — and are not. There’s no need for writers to tell designers how to design, or for designers to tell writers how to write.

Perfecting The Process: Break Up Those Bottlenecks

Project manager: How are things coming along?

Developer: I’m waiting on design.

Designer: I’m waiting on content.

Writer: I’m waiting on project management.

Web development projects in particular involve a lot of moving parts, with potential bottlenecks everywhere. The graphic below describes our Web development process, with an emphasis on the design and content components. Chances are, whether you are freelancing or at an agency, at least parts of this should look familiar:

Link: Larger version (Image credit: Chris Depa, Straight North)

The process is by no means perfect, but it is continually improving. In the next section, we’ll look at the many types of content-design difficulties you might experience.

To help our designers lay out text for wireframes and designs, we utilize content templates based on various word counts. These templates also incorporate best practices for typography and SEO. When the designer drops the template into a wireframe, it looks like this:

SEO content template in a wireframe.

The use of content templates not only takes a lot of guesswork out of the designer’s job, but also speeds up client reviews. When clients are able to see what the content will roughly look like in the allotted space, they tend to be more comfortable with the word counts and the placement of text on the page.

Communication can be streamlined using project management software. We use Basecamp, which is a popular system, but many other good ones are available. If you’re a freelancer, getting clients to work on your preferred project management platform can be an uphill battle, to say the least. Still, I encourage you to try; my experience in managing projects via email has been dismal, and many freelance designers I know express the same frustration.

The big advantage of a project management system is that it provides a single place for team members to manage tasks and interact. Internal reviews of design templates is one good example. The project manager can collect feedback from everyone in one place, and each participant can see what others have said and respond to it. Consolidating this information prevents the gaps and miscommunication that can occur when projects are managed through multiple email exchanges. Designers can see all of the feedback in one place — and only one place. This is a big time-saver.

Quick Tips for the Creative Process

• Make sure someone is specifically responsible for project management.


• Whether or not your process is sophisticated, get it down in writing and in front of all team members before the project starts. This really helps to align expectations and keep communication flowing.


• Meet at regular intervals to discuss status and problems. Hold yourself and others accountable.


• Get approvals along the way, rather than dump the completed project in the client’s lap. Having clients sign off on a few pages of content and one or two templates really helps to align the creative process with client expectations, and it reduces the risk of those massive overhauls at the tail end that demolish budgets and blow deadlines.


• Writers and designers should discuss issues as quickly, openly and thoroughly as possible.

Conflict Resolution: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Designer: All these words are boring me.

Writer: All these images are confusing me.

Project manager: All these arguments are killing me.

No matter how clear the strategy, no matter how smooth the process, design and content will conflict somewhere along the line in almost every project. In fact, if creative tension is absent, it may well indicate that the project is in serious trouble. Here are the issues I run into on a fairly regular basis, as well as ideas for getting past them.

Making Room for SEO Content

Big chunks of content are bothersome to designers; even as a writer, I worry about high word counts turning off some of our audience. However, when SEO considerations demand a lot of words on a page, there are ways to make everyone happy:

1. Tabs are a nifty way to hide text.
   
   Tabs allow you to keep the page tight vertically. Even more importantly, they enable visitors to easily find the information they need — and ignore what they don’t need. Below is a tabbed product area in the Apple Store.
   
   
   
   The Apple Store


2. Keep SEO content below the fold.
   
   This is a compromise, because an SEO strategist would prefer optimized content to appear above the fold. However, if a website is to have any hope of converting traffic brought in by SEO, then visitors need to see appealing design, not a 300-word block of text.
   
   
   
   The Movies Now landing page.


3. Step up creativity on non-SEO pages.
   
   For many websites, the pages that are most important to SEO have to do with products and services, where conveying features and benefits is needed more than wowing visitors with design. Conversely, pages on which awesome design matters most are often unimportant for SEO: “About,” bio and customer service pages, for example.
   
   
   
   Carsonified’s team pages.

Clarity vs. Creativity

We fight this battle over what I call “design content” all the time — primarily with navigation labels, home-page headers and call-to-action blocks. At a fundamental level, it is a battle over the question, “Which wins over the hearts and minds of visitors more: awesome design or straightforward information?”

Navigation

Making the labels for navigation straightforward is a fairly established best practice. Predictability is important: if visitors are looking for your “About” page, and they finally stumble on it by clicking on “Be Amazed,” then the emotion you will have elicited is irritation, not adoration. Be as creative as you want with the look and feel of the labels, but to maximize the user experience, the text and positioning of the labels must be as vanilla as possible.

For insight on how to achieve clarity, read “The Language of Interfaces.”

Design of the header on the home page

Rotating header images and other types of animation are rather in vogue these days, and they’re a good way to convey a thumbnail sketch of a firm’s capabilities and value proposition. Content must convey information, but the header must work on an emotional level to be effective. Writers must take a back seat to designers! The Ben the Bodyguard home page (below) starts to build a connection using a comic character and storyline. This is different than most sites that simply talk about feature after feature.

The design should tell a story. (Ben the Bodyguard)

Call-to-action blocks

Before all else, make sure your website’s pages even have calls to action, because this is your opportunity to lead visitors to the logical next step. A call to action could be as simple as a text link, such as “Learn more about our Chicago SEO services.” Generally more effective for conversion would be a design element that functions almost as a miniature landing page.

Much like landing pages, the wording of the call-to-action phrase must be crystal clear and be completely relevant to the page to which you are taking visitors. Yet impeccable wording is not enough: the design of the content block must be captivating, and the text laid out in a way that makes it eminently readable.

Designers can get rather snarly when I tell them their design for a call to action needs five more words: it might force them to rethink the entire design. Many times, though, a discussion with the designer will make us realize that we don’t actually need those extra five words; in fact, we’ll sometimes hit on a way to reduce the word count. The creative interplay mentioned earlier makes a huge difference in this all-important area of conversion optimization.

Calls to action require excellent design and content.

Quick Tips for Conflict Resolution

1. Keep the lines of communication open between all team members and the client.


2. Select a project manager with great communication skills and an objective point of view.


3. Stay focused on the purpose of the design: is it to persuade, motivate, inform or something else? Creative disagreements should never be theoretical; they should always be grounded in what will increase the real-world effectiveness of the work at hand.

Long-Winded Writers Vs. Lofty-Minded Designers

One thing I run up against continually is my own tendency to say too much and a designer’s tendency to say too little. Ask a writer what time it is, and they’ll tell you how to make a clock. Ask a designer what time it is, and they’ll give you a stylized image of a pendulum. Neither answer is particularly helpful!

These opposing mentalities pose challenges in Web design. Does an image alone convey enough information about a product’s key benefit? Will the length of a 200-word explanation of that benefit deter people from reading it? How intuitive can we expect visitors to be? How patient?

This is when having a process that encourages communication between team members makes a difference. I wish I had a secret formula for resolving conflict, but I don’t. I know of only two ways to balance design and content philosophies, and one of them is to talk it out as a team. As I said, communication is at the heart of an effective content strategy, and we have to resist the temptation that some of us have to withdraw into a shell when we encounter confrontation.

The other way to resolve conflicts — astoundingly underused, in my experience — is to get feedback from target users. Simply showing people a Web page and then asking for their key takeaways will tell you just about all you need to know about how effective you’ve been in getting the point across. Our opinion of our own work will always be subjective. Furthermore, because we’re emotionally invested is what we’ve created, discussing its flaws calmly and collectedly is difficult. Users are the ultimate judge of any creative effort, so why not take subjectivity and emotion out of the equation by going directly to the source?

Resources

• The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott
  
  Explains content strategy better than anything I’ve read. The third edition was published in July 2011.


• “Content Strategy,” Google Knol
  
  For a thorough overview of content strategy and links to books, blogs and other resources, check out this fantastic Knol.


• “Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices,” Jacob Gube
  
  To promote creative compatibility, designers and writers alike should study this Smashing Magazine article.


• “Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management,” Jakob Nielsen
  
  For insight into design-related project management, read this post by the brilliant Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen.

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© Brad Shorr for Smashing Magazine, 2011.