Category: Work

Getting Started is the Hardest Part

Posted by Megan Jonas On March 17, 2015

Why is getting a project started always the hardest part?

I have a number of big projects waiting in the wings and I know that once I get them started I will be obsessed with finishing them. These are truly the types of projects I love to do.

But I always have the hardest time getting them started. I procrastinate. I clean, I cook, I write blog posts and yet there those projects are, waiting to be started, finished and invoiced, and I just can’t seem to do it.

I told myself last week that if I could just get through that crazy week at my day job, then this weekend, I would have hours upon hours to dedicate to these projects. Then yesterday, I told myself that if I could just get this basic housekeeping work done (a proposal that needed finishing, a couple of profile sites that needed basic setups, grocery shopping, Target, a new windshield wiper blade for my rear window – see, I really know how to procrastinate), then I could get started.

Now it’s 6pm on a Sunday night and, while I feel like I accomplished a lot this weekend, I don’t feel like I’ve done enough for these clients. But maybe if I just have dinner… then I can focus…

Do your clients give good feedback?

Posted by Megan Jonas On March 3, 2015

Clients come in a variety of sizes and experience levels. Sometimes I am working one-on-one with a client to develop a new website. Sometimes my client has more people in their marketing department than I have working with me at the agency.

Regardless of the client, one thing that we struggle with is how to encourage clients to give good feedback. That is, feedback that is helpful to the designer, developer or creative, and feedback that accurately reflects the client’s views on the project.

Setting the tone and standards of feedback early is key. Once a client has devolved into a bad habit (say, completely rewriting my copy minutes before the print deadline), it’s hard to break them out of that.

So here are a few things that I tell clients early on in the relationship to encourage constructive feedback:

1. Tell me why: You may not like this color or that image, but please, tell me why. How does it make you feel? What feeling were you hoping that element might create? What is your goal in changing that element?

2. Tell me early: Feedback is best when it comes early. When you see the wireframes, if there’s something you want to change, it’s much easier to change in that stage that it is once I have built your navigation. Same thing with more general feedback on the feel, styling, and substance of the end product.

3. Tell me straight: The number one thing I hate that clients do is to sugar coat their criticism. My graduate school professors can tell you I have never been a fan of the compliment sandwich. You are not going to hurt my feelings if you don’t like something. I am a grown woman and can handle it, so please don’t water it down for me. The only thing that accomplishes is creating another round of edits when I thought I made the changes you requested and you think I have no idea what you said.

4. Finally, Let me explain: You hired me because I am the expert at what I do and you are not. So let me explain to you why I made the choices I did. They are almost always based in research, data analysis, or best practices. You and I may ultimately agree to deviate from those standards, but let me explain to you why I did what I did so that you can make a decision based on all the facts.

Continuing Education

Posted by Megan Jonas On March 1, 2015

Part of the reason that I love the work that I do is because it is always changing. Just when I think I’ve mastered a technology or a technique, something new comes out that changes everything I know.

Because of this, it is crucially important to refresh my skills from time to time and to learn about new technologies before they become the industry norm.

Now, I was one of those people who loved school. I mean loved it. I went back to school after being out in the workforce for four years because I loved it so much. I loved that so much that after only about three years out, I’m starting to think about going back for a Ph.D. so that I can teach and never leave school again.

How do I maintain this kind of schooling when I’m not formally enrolled in classes? Well, lucky for me there are a number of web-based tools that can help me refresh and expand my technical skills.

Codecademy is a great place to start. It’s also a fun place to go back to when you need a quick refresh on some coding skills. And it’s free.

Lynda.com is a low-cost way to continue to expand my knowledge. I particularly like their “updates” series, which covers just what’s new in updates of software like Adobe Photoshop. And the “Up and Running” series that gives you just enough knowledge of a technology or application to dig in on your own. Lynda now covers everything from Adobe software to strategies and philosophies of design, marketing and more.

Google Developer Tools has a number of high-quality, free tutorials that you can use to learn about web development, Google Analytics, and other products.

And finally, the applications themselves often have extremely good support, documentation, and even interactive tutorials of their own. This is especially true for open source applications like WordPress, but is also true of MailChimp and other proprietary software/web apps.

Central New York is Cold and They Know It

Posted by Megan Jonas On February 18, 2015

You may have seen this latest marketing gambit by the city of Ithaca, N.Y. and their travel and tourism website. It involves and unlikely message for most travel marketers: “Don’t come here, go to Florida, instead.”

As someone who spent four cold years just 30 minutes north of Ithaca in Syracuse, let me tell you. They are right. February are dark days for central New Yorkers. It’s been at least a month since they’ve seen more than a day above freezing. They’re digging out from yet another snow storm that would grind any other area of the country to a full, week-long halt. And the sun, when it makes a rare appearance, seems to only make things colder (All former or current CNY residents know that clouds are actually positive because they trap what little heat the area has).

And so, the Visit Ithaca site decided to have a sense of humor about all of this and gently suggest that maybe this isn’t the best time of year to visit. Maybe you might want to consider a warmer climate for your February travels. Oh, and, by the way, it’s a great place to visit in Spring, Summer, and especially early fall, when the gorges that the area is famous for (Ithaca is Gorges t-shirt, anyone?) are lit up with fall colors.

Most tourism bureaus would shy away from this, seeing it as a risky move. But honesty and integrity go a long way, and so has this campaign. It’s now trending in some areas on social media, and people who never even knew where Ithaca was are visiting the site and poking around. Next time your agency suggests something a little out of your comfort zone, don’t be so quick to say no. You might just have the next viral campaign on your hands, or at the very least, you might have the ability to convey that you have a sense of humor about yourself and your destination/brand.

And no one will hate you for that.

Owning Up to It; or, how not to model your customer service after the airline industry

Posted by Megan Jonas On February 17, 2015

Yesterday morning, I was laying in bed, wishing that I somehow got a miraculous second Sunday instead of having to haul my butt into the cold and go into the office.

To kill time (re: make myself impossibly late to the office), I was looking through my twitter feed on my phone and came across an article that had unexpected connections to my life.

This Washington Post Article, by Travel Columnist Chris Elliott, outlined how airlines use the “force majeure” excuse to prevent them from owing passengers any compensation for flights that were cancelled or re-routed. In the past, airlines used this excuse, which essentially means “due to forces outside our control,” for weather related events, or political events (i.e. war) that affected flights. Some call this the “act of god” excuse.

Now, it seems, airlines are deploying this excuse even when the cause for delays, cancellations or reroutes are seemingly in their control – maintenance issues, employee strikes, etc. The columnist, who often acts as an advocate for jilted passengers, notes that travelers do not have to settle for this excuse and can often get past it simply by asking “why?”

And so, everyone hates the airlines. Even passengers who have generally good experiences hate the process and experience of flying. Seriously. If you’ve ever sat in an airport waiting area during a flight delay, you know this is true. And I think part of the reason is because the airlines are increasingly refusing to take responsibility for their role in any delay or cancellation, because they owe passengers compensation for events that are their fault. And so passengers feel like the relationship is adversarial, rather than a customer service transaction like it should be.

The lesson here is this: don’t be like the airlines. Take responsibility for events that were in your control and let clients know that you will work to do better next time. No one is perfect all of the time, and the vast majority of clients would rather have a hearty apology along with a plan to improve than a million excuses on why it’s not your fault.

Treating the client-agency relationship like a partnership rather than a battle earns trust for those times when you do have forces outside your control that affect projects. For example, my car this morning looks like a glazed donut – there is a thick layer of ice that has totally encased it after a storm last night. That, combined with a slick, steep driveway, means I won’t make it to the office today. But clients know that I don’t use excuses like this often, and so their trust in me allows them to laugh at my iced-in car with me, instead of feeling like I’m just making excuses not to make my deadlines.

If the airlines went back to their policy of only blaming weather/geological events on “force majeure,” they could probably go a long way toward earning back the trust of their passengers. After all, we’re all in this giant airborne metal tube together, and we just want to get home safely.

Hosting Your Site or Why Your Developer Really Wants to Handle This For You

Posted by Megan Jonas On January 26, 2015

A few months ago, I attend WordCamp in Raleigh. One of the earliest sessions discussed how to turn this whole web design and development hobby into an actual, pay-the-bills kind of job. The head of that session explained that he handles the hosting for most of his clients – not actually physically hosting their sites on his own machines, but he purchases and administers the remote hosting from reputable third party companies and passes along the cost to the client.

At the time, the only think I could think is why would a client pay you $60 a month when they could easily set up a hosting account for somewhere around a fifth of that cost. It felt, frankly, like a little bit of a money grab and was, in all fairness, explained as a great source of passive income. I quickly forgot about that as an option and moved on.

Fast forward to the last three weeks, during which I have fought tooth and nail for clients to give me access to their FTP and hosting accounts so that I could make significant changes to websites. (P.S. why does everyone suddenly want a website facelift in January? Is this a new resolution trend, like going to the gym more and trying not to eat exclusively from the office snack machine?)

The first client involves a third-party go-between who doesn’t understand exactly how this all works. The second client hosts their site themselves and was extremely hesitant to give me access to their servers. Because of these back and forth and a general misunderstanding of how websites actually work, I am now three weeks behind on at least one of those projects.

And so I say to you, person who wants someone else to handle their website, please allow me to handle not only the design and development, but also the hosting. I promise I won’t gouge you on prices, and you get the added benefit of me being the person that handles server issues, instead of someone in IT, or even you yourself.

Brainstorming and UX Development

Posted by Megan Jonas On December 11, 2014

Nothing quite strikes dread in the heart of the account executive like a Vice President inviting clients in for a “brainstorming session” to involve account, design and creative. These sessions, which have the potential to devolve into multi-hour, tangent-filled meetings where the client or creative over powers all other discussion to rail on about “this is how we’ve always done it” or “I’m the expert here.”

Which is 100% not the reason why we’re holding the brainstorming session to begin with. The very nature of brainstorming, love it or hate it, is to get new, out-of-the-box ideas out on the table. These sessions are often held when nothing else is working, or when new clients come online.

Brainstorming, in many cases, takes place for all the wrong reasons. Some managerial level employee went to a leadership conference or read a book that said that effective teams hold brainstorming sessions and so we do them. But the art of brainstorming isn’t that simple. Effective ideas meetings require experienced leadership, a culture of creativity, and, yes, structure.

In the world of user-experience (UX) focused design, these brainstorming sessions are of crucial importance. But they’re never free-for-alls with no goals or structure. Some lessons that any organization can take from these designers are:

1. Start with a purpose in mind – what problem are you trying to solve? What goals are you reaching for?
2. No ideas are bad ideas – this is said by everyone and acted on by practically no one. We all judge each other, that’s human nature, but the worst offenders on this topic are often leaders or creative types who feel that their processes or prestige are being threatened by a process that values all ideas
3. Create a structure – set a start and (loose) end time; use brainstorming activities to add value to ideas; never just sit in a room for an hour and throw out ideas – this is almost never effective and leaves many people sitting in the room feeling overpowered by the more dominant personalities.
4. Act on ideas – creating a work structure that shows participants that their ideas (collectively) will be acted on at some point encourages buy-in from everyone. Who likes going to a meeting where nothing happens with any of the topics discussed in there? In other words, don’t brainstorm just to brainstorm. Have a clear action plan in place and share that plan with your fellow participants.

Brainstorming works best on teams or in organizations that have more horizontal power structures, but even the most rigidly traditional company can create a temporary horizontal team by making the goals of the session clear to all participants and then actively valuing everyone’s contribution. Not everyone will contribute equally. Some participants will come up with initial ideas, others are much better at building on the ideas of their colleagues. The ideal team leader will assemble a team with a variety of strengths and encourage active participation by all team members.

A New Chapter… Again…

Posted by Megan Jonas On February 11, 2014

As many of you may already know, exactly a month ago, I quit my job and moved 7 hours South to Asheville, N.C., for a fantastic new job in Advertising. That’s right, I am now a real, live Mad (wo)Man.

I first got the inkling that I wanted to leave Washington sometime last summer. There was a time when I was in love with the city of Washington, D.C., but like many great loves, it fizzled, and I found myself focusing on all the ways that Washington had failed me in our relationship. It’s public transportation system never picked me up on time. I fought lines at the grocery store, the post office, the Chipotle, pretty much everywhere, actually. I started to think that maybe it was time to move on.

At about that time, I visited my friend Sarah in Asheville and it felt like home. I started making plans to make a move and in December everything started to come together, including a job offer from that ad firm I mentioned earlier.

Fear not, readers, for this does not mean that I no longer plan to write about Journalism or the media. It does probably mean that most of my posts will no longer be thinly veiled case studies from work, however…

So… keep reading… and come visit me in the fantastic Western Northern South (blog to come…).

Government Shutdown; Or Why News Teams Need Slack

Posted by Megan Jonas On October 8, 2013

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past nine days, you know that the federal government is shut down. There are a million stories about why it’s shut down, what exactly is affected, and how Congress is going to get themselves out of this mess.

This is not one of those stories.

This is a story about why a news team needs slack, which can also be described as people sometimes doing nothing, which is why managers don’t like slack. There’s no such thing as an average day in the newsroom, but most news managers try to keep their staffing at a level where, on a regular day, everyone is pretty busy, but there is some slack in the system. There is a person who can take on an additional task, such as a quick breaking news story or one added event to cover.

Slack is relative. Large teams often have more slack, while small teams by nature have less. A team with 10 people working Monday-Friday can often find at least one person to volunteer to come in for a weekend shift or work a late night once in a while. This works best when every member of the team is equally inclined to volunteer, since each member then knows they only have to do it once in a while.

A team with four members will have less slack than this team of 10 and will need a good manager to determine what is possible, but with enough slack built into the system (i.e. not using your team of four members to do the work of six or more), the team can still be flexible and dynamic.

Where this system falls apart, however, is when that one-time added event or breaking news event becomes two solid weeks of breaking news with no end in sight.

Enter the government shutdown.

While many people in D.C. are staying home, wondering if they will be getting a paycheck next week, my team and I have been busier than ever. We have been trying to cover breaking news 16 hours a day, 7 days a week with a staff of four for two weeks. My best prediction is this will last through next week, when we will be trying to cover the same number of hours and stories with just three people on all but one day, and potentially into the following week, where we will be covering the same hours with three people all week.

Because of the sheer number of hours in the day divided by the fact that we each work 8-hour shifts, you can see that there is very little overlap. Add in a few meetings or technical problems (such as, say, a streaming video issue), and you see a team stretched very thin. At some point, something has to give.

Or else you end up with people who are burned out, frustrated with each other and the management, and just generally feeling taken advantage of.

Because the hiring process takes weeks (instead of hours, which is about as much warning as we get that we are going to need extra staff), it seems to make more sense to have one too many people than one too few. If there was a perfect number, then this wouldn’t be the news business.

When you are rock climbing slack refers to the amount of loose rope you have. It is the amount of room you have to climb higher before someone needs to give you more slack in the rope. It is also how far you are going to fall if you lose your grip. That is why it is important to have just the right amount of slack so you feel like you can reach higher and cover more rock, while still feeling like you have the support you need to reach and fail.

And finding that balance in your staffing is the key to being able to cover breaking news without sacrificing your staff or the quality of your product.

Have I Read Everything on the Internet?

Posted by Megan Jonas On August 6, 2013

I work in news. Some days I can barely make it to the refrigerator to grab my lunch. Other days, I do practically nothing. It’s the nature of the business. On the latter days, a former coworker and I used to joke that we’d “finished the Internet,” as in, “I’ve read everything on the Internet, want to go get a smoothie?”

Obviously it is impossible to read everything on the internet, in a literal sense, but lately I’ve been finding these strange loops in my reading habits online, where I find myself back at an article that I’ve already read, though my path to get there was different.

An example:

Wired Magazine recently celebrated 20 years of publishing by producing a special issue with some of the best articles from the past 20 years. This anthology included Disneyland with the Death Penalty by William Gibson, from the Sept./Oct. 1993 issue. I am a tablet subscriber to Wired and read the article, along with most of the special issue, during one of those slow days at work. Just last weekend, I picked up a book that I had purchased after reading an article on the Nieman Journalism Lab site about journalists learning to code. That book: a collection of essays, forewords and speeches by William Gibson, Distrust that Particular Flavor.

Not being good with names, and not being a particular fan of science fiction, I had no idea who William Gibson was, until I made it to about the halfway point of the book, and came across “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” again, which got me thinking about this particular circular phenomenon.

In this case, the reference came from two different media entities, but just as often I find that I read an article straight off the homepage of something and a few weeks later circle back to it through a Facebook or Twitter recommendation. Sometimes it’s been so long since I read the article the first time that I end up reading several paragraphs before the deja vu feeling sets in.

Some days it feels like I could never read everything I want to read on the homepages and twitter feeds of my favorite news sites. But on other days I find myself wondering if there is really that much new out there. When you narrow your sights from “everything on the internet” to everything worth reading on the internet, the list sometimes seems very short, indeed.

Megan Jonas