Uncategorized – University of Derby – Digital Marketing Team blog

The Curse Of Knowledge

Have you ever played a game of charades at Christmas and been frustrated by your team-mates’ inability to guess even the simplest of your acting efforts? Have you ever tried showing somebody how to perform a simple task in Word and been wound up by the fact that they just can’t seem to grasp it, no matter how simply you explain it?

Congratulations; you’ve just been visited by The Curse of Knowledge.

The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias inherent in all human beings which, in a nutshell, means the more familiar you are with something, the harder it is to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who isn’t familiar with that thing.

The term was first coined in 1989 Journal of Political Economy article by economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber. In 1990 an experiment by a Stanford graduate student, Elizabeth Newton illustrated the curse of knowledge by the results of a simple task. A group of subjects were asked to tap a well-known song with their fingers and to predict how many of the group would guess correctly. It was found that the tapper would always overestimate the number of correct guesses, by a very large margin. This simple experiment has far-reaching ramifications; in effect, it means that it is almost impossible for somebody with knowledge of a thing to accurately predict the actions or outcomes of somebody who does not have the same knowledge.

As digital marketers and web developers the Curse of Knowledge has huge implications for the way we design and develop. We design and plan based on our expected or desired outcomes, but everything we do is biased by the fact that we already know what the desired outcome is. It is almost impossible for us to predict how our users and customers will react because we cannot “un-know” this knowledge and we will always suffer from this cognitive bias. Users will behave in unpredictable ways because they don’t know what you know, there will be things they don’t understand that seem very obvious to you.

What can we do to combat this natural prejudice? Trying to think like a new user or customer is impossible; your brain won’t allow you to. No matter how hard you try, you cannot un-know what you know, and it will always, always, taint your judgement. The only way to counter this effectively is with extensive user testing. Make no assumptions and no predictions. Build, test, feedback, iterate. If you can afford the services of a professional user-testing organisation, you may find this a worthwhile expense, otherwise you can perform smaller scale testing with your own customers, perhaps through the use of site surveys and session recordings – although bear in mind that your customers may suffer from the same biases as you do, ideally your test subjects should have as little exposure to your testing environment as possible. The most important thing is not to “go with your gut”, because your gut is cursed.

Look out for my next post where we’ll be exploring some common User Testing techniques like the 5 Second Test and Blur Testing

How To Write The Perfect Alt Text

What is alt text?

Alt text is the descriptive text that is supplied alongside an image in a website. It is the text that is used if an image doesn’t load or for other reasons may not be visible to our users. As they aren’t often seen, they are easily overlooked, however, for sight-impaired users they can be an absolutely essential part of your web page. Blind or partially sighted users, for example, will probably rely on a nifty bit of software built into all mobile phones and most browsers called a “screen reader” which will read a web page’s content out loud, including the alt text. So you can see that it’s absolutely vital that they are well written so that everybody has the opportunity to understand our content equally.

Additionally, accessibility is the law. There is a requirement for websites to meet minimum accessibility standards. As a University, our aim is to not only meet but exceed those targets, not just because the law requires it but because it’s the right thing to do.

Writing the perfect alt text

Take a look at the following image taken from the University’s website which we’ll use as our example:

A smiling female University of Derby student sitting on a settee in halls holding a mug of coffee

First and foremost, alt text needs to describe the image. It should help users who read it to understand the content of the image. There can be a tendency to write alt text in a way that supports the content of the page but doesn’t describe the image. For example:

“Find out more about our halls”

This kind of thing is no good at all. That won’t help anybody understand the content of the image. It tells us that we’re looking at the accommodation section – but we already know that. It tells us nothing about the image. A much better alt text would be:

“Woman drinking coffee.”

We’ve immediately given the alt text purpose. It’s describing the image. It’s still not great though. We should try to give the image some context. Images on our website should tell a story; they should have a reason to be there. How about:

“University of Derby student drinking coffee”?

Better. We’ve given the image some context. This is no longer a picture of a random stranger drinking coffee, this is one of our students drinking coffee, which makes more sense in the context of the website. Of course, there’s still an issue with this. This alt text could also describe any of the following photos:

A group of alternate photos about coffee to show that alt text can be ambiguous

The recommended maximum number of characters for alt text is 125, as a lot of screen readers will stop reading out the alt text if it’s longer than that. Let’s see if we can use some more of those characters to give our alt text some clarity:

“A smiling female University of Derby student sitting on a settee in halls holding a mug of coffee”

Now that’s an alt text, and we’ve only used 97 characters!

We’ve described the image in a way that makes it distinct. We’ve given it context within the page and we’ve described the content of the image in detail. If you’re struggling to write an alt text, it might be useful to find another image that’s thematically the same and try to write alt text that fits your image but not the other. A bit like spot the difference. Use a character counter to check the length of your text – you’ll be surprised how much you can fit in just 125 characters!

When to not use alt text

There are a couple of situations where you may not need to add an alt text to an image:

If the image is purely decorative or structural. For example, if you have a fancy underline that’s been done as an image or perhaps a background gradient image. Those images don’t convey any meaning, so they won’t need an alt text.

If the image is already fully explained by the supporting page content. You might have a bar graph that is supported by a table. You wouldn’t need an alt tag for the bar graph as its content is fully supported by the table.

If you’re a web developer, it’s important to remember that the alt text property itself should always be included to meet accessibility requirements but, in these cases, it can be empty.

As a general rule of thumb: if in doubt – use alt text.

In summary:

There are some basic rules that you should follow to make sure your alt text is truly outstanding:

It needs to describe the image
It needs to give the image context within the site
It needs to be fewer than 125 characters
Do not use phrases like “image of” or “picture of”, let the screen reader handle that

Why we are looking for Gold Standard case studies – and how to create them

Content marketing is the new rock ’n’ roll. Possibly. You’d probably have to speak to a marketing expert to confirm this.

What is certain is that creating engaging, compelling content about our students, our graduates, our researchers, our business partners, our university is hugely important. It consolidates and builds on our reputation, our profile.

This is why we are working on a series of case studies. We want these stories to be interesting to prospective students but also to current students, parents, business, the wider world. People who will share the story.

More than interesting

In fact, we want them to be more than interesting. We want to make it difficult for people not to read them. We are looking for a Gold Standard in our case studies.

This means giving them the best title, the best images, the best introduction. And we want to keep people on these pages so they can see all the great things we are doing, get to see all the links and promo blocks we have put in for them. But also so they get to know us, get to understand what we do, what we are good at. Get to like us, to respect us. And, if they do, they may well tell their friends about us. Share us. Spread the word.

Something I prepared earlier

We started this process by publishing a small handful of case studies. These case studies have a specific focus but also have a broad appeal.

For instance, our Business Studies case study is about a TV show that everybody watches or has at least heard of. And our Architecture students’ piece is about positive public reaction to their designs for Derby city centre and the Assembly Rooms. We also have a Forensic Science student working in a CSI unit – you know, like on the telly. And Paul Cummins’s poppies that marked the centenary of the First World War. Oh, and a Data Science case study about some research that could turn your laptop into a mini supercomputer. And we have links to these case studies from promo blocks on subject and course pages.

Joining in the fun

Since I first wrote this, our product teams have rolled their sleeves up and produced some excellent case studies. Some are finding it easier than others but there is no doubt that the stories are compelling, such as Gaming student lands dream job with Xbox, The student who redesigned our University and From the office to the ice wall: Dainora’s leap of faith.

And that is the crux of what we are trying to do. Compelling stories. You need an angle, a hook. Something you can pull out and say, in old Sun newspaper lingo: “Hey, Doris, look at this!” It needs to be a story worth telling. Because, if we produce great stories consistently and put them out there, people will keep coming back to us, sharing us. And so it builds

A how-to guide

If you haven’t got to grips with it yet, I have created a case study template. It is full of hints and tips.

These will help you get a handle on what is required for one of these case studies – and give you an idea on how to construct them. But also read the case studies other people have produced. If you rate them, let them know and ask them how they went about it.

Keep using your Q&A forms. Learn which questions work best and share these with your colleagues. Also remember that not every Q&A response will be worth a case study. Recognise that. If you’re not sure about it, try to sell it to the person sitting next to you. And also note that some of the case studies we have created are simply a repurposing of already-existing material from news articles and blogs. So keep your eyes peeled.

What Derby did for us

One thing that all these case studies need is for our students, graduates, business partners to tell us what we have done to help them become amazing. That’s the most important thing we can share, intertwined with the compelling story: how we at the University of Derby have added value to their lives by giving them skills, contacts, opportunities etc. We want people to see this and think: “That could be me.”

Remind me why we’re doing this?

We’re doing this because case studies, gold-standard case studies, are a great way to engage with our audience. Take a look at this lovely Twitter-related spike …

And here are some visitors to our Forensic Science course page who may not have got there without our case study …

Some figures

The new approach is measurably better than the old approach. Here are some figures for our newest set of case studies:

Xbox: 100 page views and 4 min average view time (live for one month).

Student redesign: 130 page views and 4.5 min average view time (month and a half).

Ice wall: 16 page views and 3 min average view time (one week).

And here are some more figures which relate to case studies that were on the old site and have been reworked in the new format for the new site.

New site

Ed Hollands: 370 page views, 5 min average view time (five months)

Forensic Science: 350 page views, 3.5 min average view time (four months)

Paul Cummins: 180 page views, 4 min average view time (two months)

Old site

I have taken a snapshot of these figures over a similar period that the case study has been live on the new site – and have also added the total number of page views they received.

Ed Hollands: 107 page views, 3.5 min (total 189)

Forensic Science: 80 page views, 2 min (total 96)

Paul Cummins: 17 page views, 3.5 min (total 71)

And, yes, that last one is why I put Dainora’s ice wall case study figure up. She received almost the same number of views in one week as Paul, the star of the First World War centenary, did in two months. It is clear the new approach to case studies and how they are being used and shared is getting our message out there so much better.