My heart sank.

Clicking through to the whole post, though, the picture became clearer. A couple that had no complaints about the actual service had lost a pair of sunglasses. They thought that they left them in the car, but the car company couldn’t locate them. So they went on to TripAdvisor and wrote a bitchy review.

Really? You lose one of the two uninsurable travel items somewhere and assume it’s the car hire company’s fault and slag them off on the Internet?

Stay classy.

Accountability in advertising

It is no wonder that TripAdvisor has recently been pulled up for claiming that you can trust their reviews. Which is a pretty damning indictment of a company whose value is in providing … trustworthy reviews.

The Advertising Standards Authority looked into complaints about TripAdvisor’s use of phrases that included, ‘real reviews’ and ‘trusted advice’ from ‘real travellers’, as well as ‘honest travel reviews’ and ‘reviews you can trust’.

The review-monger responded that the ASA’s view was ‘highly technical’, which it doesn’t seem to be at all. If the reviews aren’t trustworthy, then you can’t claim that they are. I wish more companies would be technically honest about what their products and services actually do.

I imagine most of the reviews on TripAdvisor are real and honest. But the problem is that whatever they claim about their monitoring of suspicious activity, it seems reviews are still unverified. I could go on the website right now and write a cruel story about a hotel I have never even heard of, never mind stayed at. And it would be published. This gaping hole allows disgruntled, blackmailing customers, malicious competitors and any number of the Internet’s trolls to have a pop at anyone they choose.

Reviews count. They are important social proof. So is there a way to make them fairer than an open, lightly moderated forum, and yet still scalable?

A convenient partnership

Checkatrade are one of our clients (they don’t know that I’m writing this). They host a directory of tradespeople, about whom they publish customer feedback, or reviews. But their model is different.

When it comes to the reviewers and the reviewed, TripAdvisor are impartial. They make their money from third parties: advertisers and affiliates. As long as the traffic keeps coming to the website – and a negative headline on the first page of Google is going to help – then there is fuel for advertising dollars.

Checkatrade, on the other hand, make their money from the reviewed party. Tradespeople pay to be first vetted by the company (and not every business makes the grade), and then monitored by customer feedback. So the reviewed party are the paying members.

One thing that the members certainly cannot buy is good feedback. Their customers go onto the Checkatrade website and submit reviews of their work, good or bad. Each review is linked to a job that the member has completed – submitted (though not published) with real names – to rule out fictional reviews.

Still, what happens if a customer is in a vindictive mood? Because Checkatrade want happy members, they do everything that they can to ensure that the feedback is fair. This involves many measures, including moderation, speaking to the customer, opportunity for negotiation between the parties over issues raised, and a right to reply from the tradesperson.

Does this stack the odds against the consumer, the reviewer? Actually, no. Members are valuable to Checkatrade but what is valuable to the members is consumers trusting and using the directory. If the review system is not kept fair, then people will stop using the service. The three parties need each other – and that keeps the system in balance.

TripAdvisor, on the other hand, needs traffic. It is not in bed with either the reviewer or the reviewed. If hotel owners feel that TripAdvisor doesn’t care about them, it’s because it doesn’t.

There are other differences, but this seems to be the obvious point of departure. If the review site, the reviewer and the reviewed all depend on each other more closely, then I suspect that a natural balance is achieved more easily.

As for those critical reviews on TripAdvisor, I do think that genuine bad service should be exposed. But I’m more in favour of rewarding the good stuff. The next time you are delighted by a service or enjoy reading an article, make sure you shout about it one way or another, even if you’re an introvert.

The would-you-rather that Fluent encounters repeatedly with clients is: would you rather have some sales or more enquiries? Usually the question relates to the hiding of key information. Tell prospects everything and they might not buy. Conceal something vital and they’ll have to get in touch.

For example, in the hunt for more bookings, one hospitality client is being tempted to remove the availability calendar. The reasoning is twofold: first, that an empty calendar might scare people away; and second, that forcing an enquiry form request gives the company an opportunity to sell alternative dates or holidays if the original dates are not going to work out.

Sellers gotta sell

The first point is pretty compelling. An empty calendar is negative social proof. It drains confidence from the consumer. What do other people know about this place that I don’t?

However, if you’ve got no bookings, it’s probably not your calendar to blame. Make people want your product enough, through rich descriptions, compelling marketing and social proof, like positive reviews – and the empty calendar won’t matter. It might even be seen as a stroke of good luck – we found this gem before anyone else did.

The second point is more convincing. It is similar to the argument for concealing price. It gives prospects a reason to get in touch with you. Instead of a few sales, you can get many enquiries. Some of our clients feel that this puts them in control of the sales funnel – instead of people just bouncing off their website, they get to talk to potential sales. They can explain the benefits that justify the price in person. Or offer alternative dates. They can put on their sales hat, roll up their sleeves, and do everything within their power to convert each lead.

Which is my idea of hell.

I hate being sold to. I just turned down a better phone contract from a company because of their hideous sales technique. I would rather pay to keep my dignity and be afforded, calmly, the space to make my own decision.

It’s no surprise then that I also hate having to sell. But there are plenty of other people who are good at it. Who love it. Perhaps for them, creating some intrigue and drumming up enquiries is the way to go.

User experience and the long-term

I do wonder, though, if some of the businesses keen on getting direct enquiries don’t trust their own websites. If they suspect that prospects are slipping through the net, and that the only way they can know for sure is to talk to the leads in person.

Obviously that doesn’t scale so well. But also – you’ve got to create a website for your company that you trust. Take time to craft a compelling sales message with all the information that users need to make a decision up front. Create an easy, useful, delightful user experience. That is, after all, what our hospitality client said himself:

When I look for places to stay I find it really frustrating when they don’t show when they are full because I have to complete so many enquiry forms and then try to keep track of who have replied.

Exactly. Doesn’t helpfulness and clarity make people’s lives easier and make them more likely to buy from you? You may not get all those enquiries, but you’ll get some bookings, and, crucially, you’re playing a longer-term game of building trust with your users.

It’s do unto others – with UX. Create the experience for users that you would like to have yourself.

Have cake, eat cake

Surrendering to a helpful user experience doesn’t have to mean being in the dark about what is happening on your website. You can measure specific behaviours in analytics to see how people are using your site –what they look at before buying, or at what point they turn away.

And there is a middle way with sales versus enquiries. Why not be as useful and informative as possible up front but provide an opportunity for enquiry as well? Under the calendar put ‘get in touch if you’d like to know about cancellations’. Under the price put ‘call us to find out what discounts we are running this month’.

At Fluent we lean towards fashioning the most useful user experience: to create a strong, trustworthy image online for our clients. Having said that, if they are salespeople, and like nothing more than a hot lead on the end of the phone … we don’t stand in their way.

Of course, there are much more significant questions for us all to consider anyway. How can we worry about our websites when there are such vital decisions to be made as: crushed to oblivion by a rhinoceros or tickled to death by monkeys?

What’s more, the talks were condensed into 5 minutes each – slavishly tied to 20-second slides so that there was no room at all for expansion. That meant we cut straight to the chase of the good stuff, and the less interesting ones were over quickly. Actually, it was a gratifying way to hear the content about content.

It also meant that we heard about 11 varied subjects in an hour, from Open Source CMS to specific copy production models and from case studies to the importance of context. I did the student thing and took notes (I have a lot to learn).

London content strategy meet up January 2012 – lightning talk summaries

Mags Hanley talked about content strategy for very small business, with an example from a client who runs a website business on her own. The crucial question is what content will make her money, and bring people into using the site? She had to be aware of the three main audiences using the website: the consumers, advertisers, and the owner herself – as she is the editor and publisher. It’s important to think tactically as well as strategically.

Tom Bamford gave a little walkthrough of semantic content. We’ve all seen the mess that is a copy from Word into a rich text editor. Content creators need a distraction-free basic toolbar and a decent grasp of semantic markup so they don’t make it even worse. Always customise your rich text editor. Then they’ll make content that reads well, to humans as well as Google, and which is more accessible.

David Farbey pointed out that 90% of corporate company content is offline. Some of that will inevitably inform what ends up on the website. A strategy is needed not just for the website content but for all the content. The problem is that people work in silos and they don’t read style guides. Get people working together, sharing content, get the tech writers involved. Oh, and you’ll need a sponsor within the company to make this happen.

Steve Parks’s subject was Open Source CMS and its use in enterprise. Open source’s popularity has grown. For it to work, it’s got to be about collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. He gave a great example of Sony using a Drupal system for an artists’ website. When Warner copied the code Sony was at first hacked off. But when Warner improved it, and shared it back with Sony, they got married and had beautiful babies. All this does mean that open source developers need to approach what they do as a professional service.

Rick Yagodich emphasised the importance of context to meaning – it is the third musketeer along with content and presentation (structure). Marketers know this. They talk about segmentation. But digital takes things out of context again. Deal with your customers, contextualize for them, and for your message at the word level.

Magus were the evening’s sponsor, and Simon Lande gamely stepped up for a lightning talk to pitch their product, ActiveStandards, which cleverly tracks errors in website content.

Francois Jordaan played Eeyore. His final slide was a car half submerged in a flood. Content strategy is a great idea he said, but still mostly doomed to fail. Most companies are not ready to become publishers when it comes to the web. And training them is hard. Content is going wrong for human reasons, which we have the least power and remit to solve. We could get better at spotting lost causes at least. Has anyone seen my tail?

Joanna Pieters lifted the mood again by sharing her model for ensuring the best copy makes it to a website in the prominent position it deserves. Fraudulent copy is the copy that look good but take attention away from the best stuff. Her ‘benefits checker’ model creates practical statements for a user persona – first factual and then emotional. All copy is checked for its ability to make these statements true.

Jonny Rose charted the shift to talking about ‘experiences’ when it comes to content. This is about people as much as content. And we’re lucky to have lots of data to measure. Put this together and your CMS can start to read people. For example, drawing from peoples’ social media output to give them what they want, and pushing relevant stuff to people. Next thing you know your CMS goes bad and won’t let you back through the pod bay doors. No, wait, he didn’t say that last bit.

Michael Alves said never be content with your content. It should inform and entertain. Make it interesting fer Chrissakes! Do this, in this order: analyse, strategise, categorise, structure, create, review, approve, publish, update, archive. People don’t read advertising – they read what’s interesting to them.

Peter Springett reminded us with a twinkle in his eye that CEOs know content is important, but want to know how much it costs. It boils down to value. How are we going to deliver value? One way is to make the publishing process repeatable and reuse content. Top tip for making the most of original content is to capture and store source materials whenever you research and create content. Archive everything. That way you can get loads of articles from one piece of research. Another way to deliver value is to seek out the talent. Audit your intelligence in the business. And remember, metrics are everything. Speak the language of a CEO.

There you have it. An compact evening reduced further to a blog post. If you were there – what struck you out of the lightning talks?

So here I am, on a page featuring the particulars my house, faced with Tweet and Facebook ‘Like’ buttons.

My first thought is: I’m not putting the link on Twitter. Mainly because my followers include hundreds of people to whom my house is completely irrelevant. Why would people I’ve connected with, loosely speaking for professional reasons, want to see inside my house? That would be a bit weird.

Facebook though – that’s mostly my real friends. Or at least people I have really met and who have probably been inside my house at some point. It’s nice to throw up the odd conversation starter on Facebook, so I click the button.

Within an hour two of my wife’s distant friends text her about how tidy our kitchen looks. When she picks the kids up from school another parent is concerned that we are going to remove our son from her child’s class. I get a message on Facebook from a friend I’ve not seen for some time, asking where we are moving to. Others comment on the post.

All this is fine – but a bit strange. It feels like we are not in control of the conversation about our moving plans. I’m not so bothered about people scrutinising the pictures and the price (you can’t afford to be too precious when your underpants are visible on Google Streetview) – although I know others who would be. But I probably wouldn’t do it again.

It turns out my house sale is not something I actually want to share via social media.

The sharing buttons are there for other users too, not just vendors. But, more generally, as we pursue fans and followers across sundry social media platforms are we forgetting to ask the question: why on earth would anyone want to share this anyway?

Do people really want to share your thing?

There are still things that people want to keep quiet. Britons selling houses might be one example. We don’t want people to know that we want to move. Nor how much our houses are worth. Nor what colour our bed sheets (or pants) are.

People like to share trivial personal news, funny items, coupons and offers, and interesting articles. After that there is such a thing as too much information, and a whole slew of content that is too boring or pointless to share.

Are all social platforms equal?

I shared my house on Facebook but not Twitter because I use those two platforms differently. I don’t really use Google+.

Which social networks would be best for your users to share items from your website? Do you know how they are using the different networks? Has anyone yet found a good reason for a business to be on Facebook?

Do people really want to share every part of your site?

It must be a fallacy that the more social media buttons you put on your pages the more people will share your content. Apparently the main way of sharing content is still cutting and pasting the URL, rather than clicking a button. That suggests that offering more ways to share is not the most effective way to get people to do so. They’ll share (or ignore) the content that they want to, regardless.

I dislike the sight of a rack of social media buttons on every page of a website, and also the hassle of having to edit auto-sharing options, such as a formulated tweet. Others in the office distrust those auto-share widgets from a privacy point of view, because they are unsure what is being tracked.

Let’s keep the user experience healthy and exercise some restraint. More importantly, let’s try to understand what and why our customers want to share and on which platforms.

When might users want to share?

Also, at what point in a process might your customers want to share? One of my favourite sharing examples is when the Wiggle website invited me, just after I had submitted a review of a product I bought from them, to share the review on Facebook. One little click of a button pushed the work I had just done out to a whole new audience without any further effort on my part. (Yes, that’s the writer talking).

Most of this understanding, like my experiment with the estate agent, comes through giving it a go and seeing what happens. Overall, it is not a given that it is better for people to share your stuff and follow you on social media. Ask anyone who has had their fingers burnt by a miscalculated Groupon deal. But if you do want to encourage sharing of your content, the key is not the buttons but creating content that people want to share in the first place.

Of course, once I had talked about it, I found that not everyone in the room was quite as corporate a type as I had assumed. Even those who were quickly pointed out that it’s all the same thing really, because at any one time they are only working with a small set of people, trying to sell something to the next person in the chain.

So what is it like doing content strategy for smaller companies? New article follows the video and slides.

Budgets are squeezed and projects are little

I’m sure everyone would say that money is short. Seriously, in three years, I am yet to work on a single project with enough money apportioned for a thorough job on the content.

Our clients vary from a one-off-website-in-three-days to businesses with employee numbers in three figures who pay for continual development. From a content point of view, it is rare that a project would entail more than two week’s work.

No one buys content strategy

We talk about content strategy in our sales pitch because it shows an intelligent and ordered approach to projects. But we don’t write it into proposals because no one will pay for it as a discrete set of items.

Clients will, however, pay for design, because they have an opinion on colours and fonts and don’t know how to implement them. They will pay for development because they have no idea how that works. Same with SEO. Many clients will also buy blogs, blogging help and copywriting. All of these things act as Trojan horses for sneaking content work through the gates.

It should be said, that with longer-term clients, they begin to trust us and like what we do, so content strategy is less of a snake-oil concept. (Although take a moment to appreciate the initial topsy-turvy world where SEO is paid for hand over fist and content strategy is suspected as a con).

They may or may not have content

Some want to lift the iceberg, and put every bit of corporate marketing that they’ve ever produced on the website somewhere. But a problem that is just as common is a client having little or no content at all. This is a bit disturbing, especially when combined with a small budget and short timescale, but it’s also a fine opportunity to shape all of the content from its inception, and have a lot of input into the final substance of the application.

Doing a bit of everything

My job title is Content Strategist, although sometimes in the office I’m simply called Microcopy Man. I do a healthy amount of copywriting, and have to look at everything I do, including social media and mailing, through the lens of user experience, information architecture and marketing. To clients I’m a content expert, so that turns into consulting as well.

Smaller businesses are simply not loaded with people creating content, never mind content that is any good. Working at this level means being prepared to fill in gaps and make content happen, even if that means taking the photos or inventing the business model.

Nowhere to hide

That’s a rather negative way to say that your mistakes will be noticed and you can’t hide from the client. So good relationships from the outset are vital, and depend on constant communication. A content strategy of some sort is essential to relationships too, even if it’s basic, even if it’s not billable. Having on paper a record of what is needed and who is responsible gives you a schedule and language to deliver the project smoothly.

Satisfyingly hands on

All of this means that I get to create, and my work brings a little sunshine to those corners of the web in which it appears. It means I get to educate, to train, to see clients learn how to blog well, or start to take more care with their content. It means that I get to work closely with a fun team, doing a variety of jobs for a high turnover of projects.

Doing content strategy for small businesses is challenging, and sometimes I feel like there is not much of a roadmap for what I’m doing. But ultimately it is satisfying, and I love it when a great website comes together.

• Create once, publish everywhere
• Content creators need help
• What customers want: to accomplish tasks, quickly
• The best content supports business goals
• Sharing: marginalia and pay fences
• Even the smallest word can change the course of the future
• Nail the names and message

The post contains some links to slides, video and notes from the conference if you want to find out more.

The follow up November Event, taking place Wednesday 16 November in the same venue, picks up some of the conversations that were firing at the conference, and hopefully turns up the heat under them:

1. Kate Kenyon – Content strategy, content management tools, and the happy ending
2. Gabriel Smy – Content strategy for small businesses (yes, that’s me)
3. George Webster – What content strategy can learn from Hollywood
4. Anne Caborn – Digital governance and risk: a comparison with the NHS

My own short talk will be a summary of what I’m learning doing content strategy for smaller projects and smaller companies. It’s great to have some theory about how content strategy fits into the overall picture, but when you’ve got a tiny budget and few days to deliver a website what can you really do to make sure that content gets to shine?

Expect crafty shortcuts and random animals.

I have a friend who switched political parties when he realised that basically, his people were in the other one. The people at these content strategy events are basically sound and amazing – down to earth, creative, at times ingenious but always pragmatic. My kind of people.

So I’m looking forward to hanging out with them on Wednesday, and chipping in my tuppeny-worth. Hope to see you there too.

Show don’t tell is a core design principle here at Endis Solutions. But what does it actually mean?

Given the choice between telling someone something and showing it to them, you should almost always show it. Here’s how, and why:

1) Show me the money

If you sell, say, wigs on your web site, there is no need to write ‘we sell wigs’ on your front page (nor, for that matter, ‘welcome to our wig-selling web site!’). A picture of a wig with a ‘buy’ button will better communicate what you do and be more immediately useful to someone wanting to purchase a wig.

Why better? Because if you have to explain everything, it is tiring to read. And clamorous. And patronising. And obstructive. It puts an extra step between your customers and what they are trying to achieve.

If you have to explain what and where things are, then your site has failed. Most sites need very few words. Let the graphics and the products and the important items speak for themselves.

You have to give people what they are looking for. Show them the gallery, the archive, the offer, the details. Make it easy to see, recognise, and browse. Give them what they want without talking to them about it. Imagine entering a physical shop and being talked at by the manager before you are allowed to see any of the products!

Just browsing, thanks.

People are after something. If you’ve got it, give it, instead of asking them to solve your web site clue by stupid clue.

2) Shut up already

After visiting Cambridge for the first time, my father’s overriding impression was of being nagged. Everywhere he walked there were signs saying ‘don’t walk on the grass’ (in 7 languages), ‘no entry to the public’, ‘beware rising bollards’ and ‘bicycles attached to these railings will be removed and sold to students in Oxford’.

The words you write shout at people. It is one of the main things I hate about Windows – all those dialog boxes and pop-ups about updates and statuses when all I want is for my computer to be on.

You simply don’t need to talk at your visitors so much. Don’t write ‘click here to download the document’– simply write the name of the document and make it a link. Don’t write ‘to get in touch with us click on contact’ – simply put the word contact somewhere prominent and expected, say the menu bar.

If you can remove an instruction or description, remove it. Just like George says. If you can encourage comprehension through a graphical element such as a button or arrow instead of text, then do.

Grasp this paradox: the more you say, the less people will understand.

And if you’re blogging, don’t make the rookie mistake of writing about your writing. Instead of saying ‘Today I am going to tell you about pigeons…’, just tell us about the damn pigeons. That’s why it often pays to behead your blog posts (and 39 other useful writing tips).

Give your visitors a break and step away from the vuvuzela.

3) Do what you claim to be

The third application of show don’t tell is that if you’re not showing, then don’t tell.

In other words, don’t make claims that are undermined by your own web site, or as the Argentines might have it: ‘don’t crap higher than your ass can reach’.

Don’t say you pride yourselves on friendliness when your order process is broken and the error messages are accusatory and confusing. In fact, don’t say it at all – be friendly; in your tone, in your messages, in your support and service. Then people will believe you. And you won’t be a hyprocrite.

Instead of saying ‘our customers love us’ display a huge list of recent, affectionate testimonials. Instead of saying ‘the largest in our industry’ demonstrate your size in some way. Instead of saying ‘award-winning’ put the badge (and year) on your site.

Show, don’t tell.

As a content strategist and writer am I doing myself out of a job here? Not at all. Content strategy is coming up with a way for all that content, not just the copy, to work together (and get produced, and continue to be high quality in the future). Secondly, the few words that are necessary on your web site will be all the more valuable for their scarcity. I can help you get them right.

It makes me think of the way in which many businesses want to present themselves through their web sites.

To you, your business is a complex organisation, with a history, with staff, with processes and systems and targets. It is a many-tendrilled thing. You almost daily have challenges and triumphs, great ideas, and mistakes from which to learn. You invest in training or new software or take the staff out for team building. You get recognised in an industry award or perform way better than this time last year or have a great story to tell about your new management structure.

The question is, how much of all that do your customers need to know about?

Let’s start with absolutely none at all.

Be useful

The main difference between you and your customers is that they do not care a monkeys about your company. Harsh, but true.

So when you create a new web site, they simply don’t care about your history or your team training. About your new recruits or internal reorganisation. About your annual goals or your stated core values. Even, about your new web site.

What they care about is whether you are useful to them, right now, for doing what they are trying to do.

Everything else is noise. Adding everything else to your web site is the certain way to make it ungapatchket. You are not sharing the love; you are hiding it behind an ornamental clock made of shells that you picked up on holiday because there was nothing else to buy at the airport.

Instead of starting with all the things that you could say about your company – start with absolutely none of them. Nada. Zip. Now ask yourself, what one story should you tell your customers about how they can accomplish something on your site better than anywhere else, right now?

Find the message, the thread, the line, that explains simply to an online visitor why they should give a crap about your product or service.

One story, two trees

Once you’ve got the story, share it simply and clearly. Start by showing it, with a few images – a way to visualise the story. You’ll need a few words, too, but only a handful. Use sparingly. You need to interrogate mercilessly every element that wants to be on the site, grilling it on how it helps, uniquely, to tell the customer story. Otherwise don’t let it anywhere near.

Too many websites are trying to lift the iceberg to show customers what goes on at their companies, when customers need only see the tip.

And my solution for an ungapatchket Christmas tree? Buy two. A small one for the kids to have in their own bedroom on which they can hang anything and everything that they once made/found/ate, and a family one in the living room which has stringent editorial guidelines to keep it looking pretty.

There must be somewhere else you can hang all that other stuff.

On the one hand, I’m guessing few of us are enamoured by the language of estate agents. Although clichés can be useful for getting a standard set of information across to a loyal audience, the problem with estate agents’ lingo is that there are simpler, more honest ways to say the same thing, if it needs saying at all.

So should we be rejoicing that one estate agent, in an effort to desist from trundling out the same-old phrases, sent their staff on a poetry course? Instead of ‘direct sea views’ we are told ‘without feeling lonely, the room has an echo.’ Or try this:

Crossing the threshold
Passing into history
Near seafront and shops
Cobbles and tarmac meet

Historic Hove and the new come together in a mews house, light, comfortable and homely … and with parking.

As a lover of the way poetry shuffles about in ordinary words and situations, I think this is fun. As someone with an eye on marketing I see that the stunt has generated widespread publicity for the company. But will it sell more houses?

Solving the wrong problem

Estate agent owner Paul Bonett said he was fed up with the ‘meaningless jargon that potential buyers could see through in an instant. Boring old clichés like immaculate condition, delightful, compact and bijoux are hindering, not helping sales.’

So he wants property descriptions that we can’t see through?

At Endis Solutions we have worked with a few property agents now, as well as hunting for properties ourselves. We’re beginning to get a feel for what people want from an estate agent’s web site. And it’s not poetry.

Most people looking for properties online are trawling through hundreds of descriptions, trying to filter out the irrelevant ones as quickly as possible, flicking through what’s left to see if any of them meet their requirements and desires. It is not particularly fun and they do not have all day to do it.

Anything that slows down the process – animated picture galleries, long download times, unclear or protracted navigation, confusing text – is a pain in the neck the first time, never mind the fiftieth. And then for people to have to decipher a poetic riddle that does not actually tell them what the house is like – what a terrible idea.

Home-hunters do not dislike ‘compact’ because it is boring. They dislike it because it’s disingenuous. And no, they would not rather read draws the evenings into charming cosiness – they would prefer an agent to come out and say: it’s small. And ‘bijoux’? What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Delightful’? Isn’t that up to the customer to decide?

The problem is not that we’re bored with estate agents’ clichés, it is that they are unhelpful and unnecessary at a time when, rather boringly, we just want the facts, and fast.

No one reads the description anyway

Or at least they shouldn’t have to. If our clients are to be believed, people go straight for either the photo gallery or the floorplan to find out what a house is like. The best thing you can do on the property description page as an estate agent is make your gallery large, prominent and full of decent photographs that are easy and quick to scroll through, with a big, clearly labelled, detailed floorplan next to it. Here’s a good example.

Apart from the square footage for city dwellers, that’s pretty much everything we need to know. At a glance. It’s a classic case of show don’t tell.

It’s great to hear about estate agents getting creative in the way they present properties. My tip: give visual information, quickly. If you have to write anything after that, bare facts will do just fine.

Or am I just a killjoy? What do you find helpful when looking for properties online?

This isn’t about how smart my child is (although he can complete a Cat-in-a-Hat jigsaw in under 5 minutes reverse-side up and calculate the exact opposite of everything we ask him to do instantaneously, before implementing it without flaw).

No, the point is that in iPlayer the BBC have designed a web site so easy to use that a 2-year-old can master it.

After turning the computer on he clicks the browser icon and iPlayer opens as the homepage. From there, he clicks on an image that he recognises – perhaps Charlie, Lola or Mister Tumble – or on one that looks like it’s for kids.

Admittedly, the homepage is set to the Children’s page. But I’ve seen him get there from the front page too, by clicking on ‘Last Played’ or one of the many pictures in ‘Highlights’ or ‘Most Popular’.

Once one kids’ programme is open, he skips through a chain of large thumbnails displayed below in ‘More’ and ‘Recommendations’ until it brings up something appealing. Then he clicks the play and full screen icons, and kicks back with a little bowl of whatever he found at toddler height in the cupboard (dry noodles, honey, an unripe plum, that sort of thing).

How easy is that?

Elements of toddler-friendly design

iPlayer is doing something right that children as young as two are able to operate it. This is not news. But that someone so young should be comfortable navigating a web site made me wonder what design elements enabled his success. Here are some of my suspicions:

1) Navigation is image-based

My son can’t read a word. Not a single word. He gets the content he wants by clicking on the pictures. An adult might take shortcuts by reading the text – find the right episode straight away or employ the search box – but a preliterate child can get to the same place in time purely by clicking on pictures.

2) Images have good affordance

It is not just that the menus are images, but that the pictures are instantly recognisable (a character he has seen before) or representative (something that looks like it is for children). This provides the simple experience of seeing what you want and clicking on it to get it, otherwise known as show don’t tell.

3) Many points of entry into content and many routes between

Searching iPlayer my son rarely gets stuck. There are always more images to click on in some type of menu, scrolling gallery, or after-play recommendation. He can enter the content many ways and because they are all connected together can hop between programmes easily.

4) Identifiable and simple buttons for universal actions

iPlayer has buttons big and conventional enough for a 2-year-old to click on; for selecting, sideways scrolling, playing, pausing, and enlarging to full screen.

5) Key content above the fold, and all in one window

He doesn’t scroll down yet which shows that all this navigation is accomplished in the top part of the page.

6) One-screen experience

It helps that iPlayer works without popups or multiple windows. Otherwise he can accidentally click on the wrong window and get confused, poor chap.

Just because a web site is well designed for a non-reading 2-year-old doesn’t mean that it is well designed for anyone else. But this example proves that even with complex navigation and copious content a site can be simple to get around.

And the hardest part of the process, apart from tackling the plum? – Trying to do all of that clicking on only one side of a clunky, domed, single sprung piece of white plastic. My two-year-old might be a whizz on iPlayer, but he’s no fan of Mighty Mouse.