The Newfangled Blog

Another day, another set of data... I've been investigating what I call "peripheral" data sets in order to get a different perspective on how previously unseen or unmeasured activity affects the overall operation of our company. In my last post, I looked at how our busyness could be represented by the volume of communication over our internal project management system from one month to the next. In looking at that picture, I realized that the volume of activity is much more drastically affected by maintenance work for our clients than by new projects. I classify "maintenance" as any work done for an existing client- it's a pretty broad spectrum, but since our new project process is so regimented, the split in categories is pretty realistic as far as our company's day to day experience is concerned. When I noticed that October of 2008 had the highest volume of communication, I wondered what our maintenance sales were that month and how they related to new project sales. Sales data is the easiest information for me to dig up, but I wasn't interested in the particular sales totals as much as the relationship between the numbers...

In my last post in what is becoming series on measurement, I started off with my hypothesis that our company is like an ecosystem, "comprised of many areas of unseen activity" in addition to the sort of seen activity you'd expect (sales, individual projects, relationships, etc.). So, in trying to verify my hypothesis, I've been gathering data representing all kinds of unseen and unmeasured activity to see how it relates to the big picture as I've understood it so far. I started with looking at our blogging activity over the past three years and noticed that the months where we posted less loosely corresponded to what we tend to think of anecdotally as "busy" times for our company. That made me wonder- how else could I measure "busyness"? Looking at sales data wouldn't quite do it, because those numbers would correspond to the beginning of a project, so the trendline of sales may not match up exactly with that of volume of work over time. However, looking at the volume of communication using our internal project management system might help me discern at trendline for "busyness"...

I have a hypothesis that our company is much like an ecosystem--comprised of many areas of unseen activity in addition to the very visible activity. With that in mind, I've been collecting data for the past few weeks that is a bit different from what I might normally look at (i.e. website and financial data). I want to see what unknown connections there might be between what we do intentionally and what we do unintentionally...

Informal prototype usability testing meetings with the other Newfangled project managers have proven so valuable that I now consider them necessary to every new project. In even a fifteen minute review, two new sets of eyes clicking through a prototype can pinpoint usability issues that the project team might miss. It is surprisingly easy for simple efficiencies to be invisible, and since there is not usually time to leave a project and return with an objective eye, usability review sessions are an efficient way to get fresh ideas.

A user-centric view towards your site's content, information architecture, and calls to action are the best path toward optimization.

If I had to identify one of the biggest themes from the past year at Newfangled, one of them would definitely be measurement. In fact, ever since we started a serious resourcing effort back in 2007, we've been learning just how valuable data is to us in general. Having access to real data is necessary to evaluating just about anything--whether it's the performance of a newlsetter campaign, the pages of your website, or even the people at your firm. Without it, you wouldn't be able to answer the questions that really matter, like, "What is this worth?" "Is this working?" "What should we change?"

As a secret grammar nerd working at a place where a lot of writing takes place, I end up doing a fair amount of editing. Chris has recently provided a lot of good advice on professional writing; this is my take on the other side of the process.

I just read/listened to Sarah's great post about the soundscape of the Newfangled office and got inspired to write down a few things I've recently learned about our historic digs. When we had our last front porch social with BlogAds (our upstairs neighbors) the mayor showed up, and he told me the history of our building.

Our building was actually the first public building in Carrboro. It was built because the train tracks happened to end at this location. They were supposed to continue on a half mile into Chapel Hill, but they ran out of funding so they stopped where they happened to leave off. The original use for the rail line was as a drop-off point for the local farmers to bring their cotton and tobacco. The man that happened to own the few hundred acre farm that abutted the tracks decided to build a building (our glorious office) to hold the offloaded wares overnight. Before long, he decided to outfit the building with the area's first steam engine. This was first used to power a cotton gin and later a grist mill--both of which resided inside the building. At some point between then and now more funding was acquired and today the rail continues on that half mile to a plant that powers UNC. The line is mostly used for coal transport to that plant.

Is it preferable to read long format content on a screen or on the printed page? This is a question that I think we're going to be wrestling with as a culture for some time to come. In the meantime our tendency is probably to do much of our day-to-day reading online (I've seen plenty of posts lately declaring all kinds of ridiculous things to the tune of "I don't read books anymore, therefore books must be dead"), though I know there are still plenty of people holding out for actual books. I read quite a bit, both online and in books. In fact, I often bookmark articles that I know I'd be more likely to read if they were in print than I am with them on a screen. This is particularly true of longer content (much of it written by my favorite publications like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and WIRED). So, after reading a post by Emmet Connolly, I began collecting those longer articles and creating printed anthologies of them on Lulu.com. The one pictured above is my third, which I just printed last week. This time, I kept a bookmarks folder of articles that I felt represented the most important ideas I'd encountered in 2009- so I called it "A Year of Ideas"...

Two ways that sound travels around 103 Lloyd Street.