"If you’re bootstrapped and have an email list of 1,000 people and want to grow that list, you don’t need a full-time email marketing manager, a writer, a designer and a junior marketer to execute on a content marketing strategy for you...You need a motivated, scrappy content marketer who can do all of those jobs at once."
I agree about the time-wasting meetings, but not about the above, since I'm directly in that situation. You could hope to find one person to fill any two of those jobs, but all you'll get out of a 'scrappy content marketer' is a vacant position and a series of burnouts. That's hard work, where you have to invest resources to reap rewards.
To add to your point: people often make the mistake of trying to replace former team members with people who fit the exact skill profile of the person who left. It's highly improbable you'll find the perfect match.
Instead, identify the bundle of tasks that person did and find people who can take them on separately, and perhaps accomplish other tasks you didn't even realize your team could do.
If you were to identify every task your business needs, then you have the flexibility to direct those tasks to the right people. Further, if you're in a high-growth environment, you can continue to scale by motivating your people to fire themselves from their worst tasks and focus on their best expertise.
If your team continues to evolve in this way while your company keeps sound unit economics, then congratulations! You've solved the scaling problem.
>You could hope to find one person to fill any two of those jobs, but all you'll get out of a 'scrappy content marketer' is a vacant position and a series of burnouts.
One person can easily manage all of this and more very affordably with freelancers, tools, and a decent process.
Where you go wrong is when the person managing is "figuring it out on the fly."
Use canva or stencil for design, use textbroker or copypress for content at scale, all that is left is building an editorial calendar, planning content promotion, blogger outreach, all of which can be done with tools, etc...
...if you have clarity about what exactly needs to be done from ideation to promotion, its really not that hard for one person with tools and freelancers to execute on.
A good marketing manager with a few years under her belt should be able to do this without breaking a sweat. Unfortunately, like a non-tech company hiring programmers, non-marketers seem to be pretty bad at recognizing good marketers.
It's hard enough to find a single semi-competent employee by "overpaying". I don't think it's as simple as increasing the salary on the job listing by 20% and watching the super qualified candidates pour in.
I'm not privy to what my employer is advertising for senior DevOps positions, but I can tell you it's not nearly enough: I get resumes where "installed htop" is a prominent bullet point. Literally.
The last two hires have been somewhere between oxygen thief and chair warmer.
TL;DR: If you are getting crappy candidates, you are likely offering too little and could tempt better candidates with a better offer.
I've looked into the market for Sr. DevOps positions lately and unfortunately found exactly that to be the case. No one is willing to offer enough to lure me away from my current gig, where I'm reasonably happy. The employers that don't immediately scoff at the proposed salary tend to give me grief about it, which makes it not worth the time.
When you say "overpaying", what is that number for you? For context, in 2011, Clorox and other established Bay Area companies paid marketing managers with a few years of relevant experience ~$120,000. Visa is starting fresh Economics grads at $70,000 for marketing roles.
If you're not in that neighborhood, good luck. Startups don't seem to value marketing as much as the big companies, and then they wonder why they need 4 people for one job. Offering under $100K for a Director of Marketing (sadly common in startups) is a joke.
Honestly, these salaries seem like a lot as is, from where I come from.
Instead of guessing what's a fair pay wouldn't be better to pay or get paid on results - revenue you bring in. The marketing director or others in the team are close enough (in terms of agency they have on revenue) to revenue generation that this should be possible, no?
It's not quite that easy. Some marketing content, like blog posts, has long-term value that can't be easily measured in the same fiscal period it was created in. A huge task of marketing is to increase the awareness and value of a brand, getting better search result rankings and helping more people find and trust the company. These effects absolutely affect the bottom line, but they can be pretty hard to measure.
Marketing also generally has multiple touch points before a sale actually occurs. Maybe you see a Google paid result that you ignore, then a YouTube pre-roll that you tune out, and then you see their logo on a train ad during your commute. None of those result in a sale, but you finally see the company at a conference, grab some swag, talk to one of their salespeople, and become a customer. In this example, their revenue looks like it was generated by the efforts of the sales department, but in reality marketing had a lot to do with it, too.
If your company has all the right tracking in place, you can determine the path your customers took when they ultimately bought your product, provided that they bought it online. That still ignores their prior exposure to the product that helped convince them during the current session. More importantly, if you were to measure marketing performance based solely on those metrics, your marketers would have little incentive to do all of their other important functions.
I'm not in your situation at all, but it does not pass the smell test that you need more than one person, much less four, to work on growing a 1000 person email list without burnout.
Agree with so much of this, but definitely not with #28. White space has become a design curse. I know how to manage information; I'm not bewildered if I see a lot of it in one place, and I don't need to be guided through it.
And I'm truly tired of clicking ellipses to 'see more' Just load the damn page, load the damn comments and paginate. Abandoned Gawker for this reason long ago.
White space is super important. It can serve as a delimiter between pieces of your UI for example. It can serve as an emphasis on content or an important UI element. It has a ton of different uses you are completely disregarding... because
> I know how to manage information
But you really don't, though. If I replied with a 20 lines efficiently-packed wall of text with no paragraphs or linebreaks, you'd complain. If you were looking at a UI that was simply packing UI elements like the lego set for a giant cube, you'd be the first one commenting on its poor usability.
You know, this exact attitude pisses me off. The #1 complaint in open source software is how poor the UX is in most of it. Famously, the software is "designed for its programmer", with the interface built to be as simple to code as possible.
It doesn't change because the community is full of devs arrogant enough to think that their users "know how to manage information" and will make sense of it all. They "don't need to be treated like children" because, obviously, intuitive interfaces are for kids.
OK, I get it, you've had bad experiences with whitespace. The G+ homepage is an abomination. Author isn't arguing a tiny column of text surrounded by two giant white columns is good design. Doesn't mean it's always bad.
No, I really do, you know. Sure, if there's a logical structure in information, you'd do well to highlight it - as well as any relative relevance of pieces of info (IFF you know what task I'm solving). But I'm not 3 y.o. anymore, I can handle more than 5 lines of text on a page. Please don't hide information from me just because you think it's not relevant to the most basic use case.
I'm strongly with Tufte on this one. Presenting information is about dumping it all on the person with minimum artsy bullshit, and helping the viewer make sense of it efficiently. Modern UX paradigms however go in the completely opposite direction - hide everything, remove features, decrease information density.
There's a reason NASA mission control look like this:
even though the latter is exactly what modern UX guidelines would call for.
If you want to build tools to help people solve problems efficiently, make tools. If you want to make a safe-for-work mental masturbation art piece, which is what most mainstream UX guidelines boil down to, then by all means. I just don't want to have it anywhere near me when I have problems to solve.
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> intuitive interfaces are for kids
There's only one intuitive interface in the world, and that's the nipple. Everything else is learned.
Are you seriously comparing NASA interfaces, which require months/years of training, to interfaces which are meant to be as intuitive and immediately-useful as possible?
It was a hyperbole, yes, but the general point stands - a proper tool will present all the things you need (or may need) to know in an organized fashion, to let you work efficiently. What we currently have in UX is a trend of making your work as inefficient as possible, by hiding everything behind interactions or removing it altogether, because... well, because what exactly? Does someone really believe that e.g. people are too dumb to understand "2015-01-01 - 2016-10-30" and need to be limited to the choice of only "Today", "Yesterday", "Last month" and "Last year"?
As for months/years or training - sure, there maybe (or maybe not even training in the tool per se, but more like general education; you need to know what the data shown actually means). But in a typical tool, 10 seconds or even 5 minutes of training won't kill anyone and would vastly improve efficiency. Want a proof? Video games. Each one has a custom, specific UI. RTS games have so many stuff on screen that they often have tutorials and in-game help. And 8-year-olds have zero problems with understanding all that in under 5 minutes. Outside of gamedev, people seem to have forgotten the concept of introduction, tips and tutorials.
You're literally just saying "a proper tool should have good UX".
Please backtrack a minute: What we're trying to debunk is that "Whitespace is always bad". The rant you're going into, here, is that some tools are oversimplified or don't give you immediate access to functions you need. That's the tool not doing its job - it's bad UX. Nobody will argue against that.
It also has nothing to do with whitespace.
> Outside of gamedev, people seem to have forgotten the concept of introduction, tips and tutorials.
SMB 1-1 is often praised as having outstanding video game level design. One of the reasons is exactly because it doesn't use "tips and tutorials". It intuitively teaches you to run towards the right, to jump, how to kill enemies and discover secrets without ever popping a tooltip on the screen. Not that those are always bad, mind you, but intuitiveness is game design by excellence.
It can serve as a delimiter between pieces of your UI for example.
If you want a delimiter then use a delimiter, perhaps a line? One of my main gripes with "modern" UI are UI elements which have no defined border on them. For example, how do I know where's the border between two buttons, or whether there's any inactive space between them, when I see only text separated by whitespace (or for that matter, whether they're buttons at all or just text labels, which I argue should have no border)? It's quite disorienting.
Lines and whitespace have different affordances. For example, a thick or double line may scream "drag me" whereas whitespace can mean "more things may go there in the future".
The thing is, you're talking about very specific examples. My point is that especially in UX design you can't use absolutes like that, such as "whitespace is always bad" or "whitespace is always good". This was also the author's point and this idea that "instead of whitespace we should use lines", "instead of whitespace we should pack things tighter" and so on is absurd.
Now here's UX Myth #35: "Modern UIs have good, established UX". Desktop, web, most everything I've seen are UX disasters blindly following trends. And just because you throw UX designers at a problem doesn't mean they will do a good job at it.
UX design is very much a "fake it till you make it" industry. It's based on good principles and mostly the scientific method, but it has a lot of reproducibility issues because it deals with a lot of subjectiveness. Also, some good UX principles may not apply in all situations.
And think about this: Most people are actually bad at their job. The majority of devs and web designers aren't working at Google/Facebook, they're making awful wordpress sites. This is less visible in UX design but it's still true - the majority of UX devs aren't good.
This is the problem here. User experience is subjective. It's based on who your users actually are. The myth, for example, says people don't read, they scan. In the general case, maybe, but I don't because I search for content that I actually want or need to read top to bottom. The footnotes touch on this but what good will scannable, text light design do for a site with articles directed towards experienced programmers? You'd have a job. User experience is all about the users and knowing who your users are is the fundamental step - not a general list of what to do and not to do.
The second point: that's incredibly annoying and to me the motive looks more like increasing eyeballs on the ads directly below the content and not really about the experience. I understand on Wikipedia, where a particularly long article may kill render times and scrolling experience.
Best thing to do is understand your audience. A 60 year old researching dental implants will need a much different experience than a 21 year old learning Java or a 5 year old reading fairy tales.
White space should be used for padding between elements. Users will however be annoyed if there is too much unused screen area, especially if the content is cramped together with little padding.
I agree about the time-wasting meetings, but not about the above, since I'm directly in that situation. You could hope to find one person to fill any two of those jobs, but all you'll get out of a 'scrappy content marketer' is a vacant position and a series of burnouts. That's hard work, where you have to invest resources to reap rewards.