Non-Line Blogging

I don’t get much chance to talk about Danish thinkers but maybe we can learn something about running our businesses more effectively from a couple of them, so here goes...

I blew the dust off my copy of Jakob Nielsen’s Prioritizing Web Usability and, as usual, I have been reminded of lots of vital design principles.  There are a few books that I dig into on a regular basis simply because I seem to take away different business benefits depending what I’m obsessing about with clients at the time:  I have been doing a lot of work on a web site re-design and so was lapping up all the lovely stuff about page load times, content above the fold, and aiming for readable fonts not font size rules (more of that in another blog soon).

I know that Danish Jakob has his detractors who say that he dogmatically insists on fast page load times in a world of fast internet and even faster browsers (have you tried Google Chrome yet?).  However, most of what he says is good common digital sense and all the other usability folk tend to concur with his principles, If nothing else it re-assures us that common-sense design principles have been validated by people like Jakob and in Steve Krug's excellent Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability 

Anyway, whilst thinking about Denmark’s contribution to digital thinking I was reminded that Soren Kierkegaard, an 18^th century Danish philosopher, came up with an interesting view...

“Life is lived forward but understood backward”

So indulge me whilst I attempt a “Danish web usability and philosophy mash-up”: Jakob is an advocate of the “iterative web site design processes” and believes that you need to try things, review them and improve them otherwise you will not get anywhere.   In the testosterone-fuelled world of 21^st century digital marketing this is now called “rapid iterative design” and comes complete with its own intense seminar programme...

Kierkegaard, were he alive today, may suggest that only by delivering different web experiences will you learn which ones work best, so the Danes, 100 years apart concur on the best way to deliver business results.

But the Great Danes are not the only ones who ascribe to the "live life forward" approach:  The evergreen Jim Sterne coined the rather jaunty “TIMITI” (Try It, Measure It, Tweak It) model many years ago and is still a great believer of testing, measuring and optimising.  In my digital marketing training courses I regularly flash up a quote from John Caples from way back in 1932 who said:

“In planning an advertising campaign the first step should be to clear the decks of all opinions.  The next step should be to find a scientific method of testing”

So maybe the answer to all digital success lies in the work of Kierkegaard.  We could even link his "live life forward but understand it backwards" to the "aggregation of marginal gains" concept to deliver a new philosophy for digital marketing.  For the record, Kierkegaard was not a marketer and would probably not have made a great web-master. Apart from his “Live life forward” quote his next best soundbite, referring to the inaccessible nature of most of his writings, seems to have been:

“The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted”

Funnily enough, there are a few sites out there that seem to design by that philosophy and so maybe he could have cut it as a web master after all.

Go and see Kiva.com.  The principle is simple - rather than your money swilling around in your bank account making money for big nasty banks maybe it should be put to work helping the less well off.  Kiva offers a matchmaking service for third world entrepreneurs to access funds from a new generation of global investors - people like us.

I thought it was an engaging site with a meaningful purpose.  You browse a nice clean interface looking at people with small businesses in the poorer parts of the world.  There is a summary of what they do, how much money they need and what they will do with the money.  Lots of ways to select partners (good use of meta-data!), and plenty of lovely web 2.0 stuff that shows you who is currently investing in the partner.

Funnily enough, I gave a small amount to a partner without reading the small-print, thinking it was a charity.  But once the scheme is up and running I GET MY MONEY BACK.  So is this a charity or a bank and am I a donor or an investor?  Frankly I don't care.

The digital marketing point here is that there are many ways to view the world, and the business models that make it tick.  Are your customers only customers, or should they be harnessed into some more worthy social cause or business movement?  The social point is that maybe our current account balance should be put to good use funding worthy programmes and changing lives rather than giving big banks even bigger profits.