We’ve been huge fans of information graphics at Velocity ever since Edward Tufte self-published his brilliant ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information‘ book. But as the B2B marketing world has gone B2B infographic crazy in the last year or so, we’ve been much more likely to be disappointed than delighted.

Most B2B infographics are really just simple data charts (bars & pies) made pretty. Or they take a bunch of different data points, give them to an illustrator and turn them into an editorial-like page with big, fat numbers, twitter birds, logos and lots and lots of explanatory text. The data didn’t really have to be visualised. The chunks of stats don’t really hang together or interact or contribute to each other. It’s just a pretty page that might as well be text.

For us, a great information graphic is one in which:

• The visualisation actually adds value – it’s not about making data attractive to children; it’s about making data sing
• The picture tells the story – or many different stories; very little text is needed
• That story is BEST told in graphic form – it’s not just text & data with colours and shapes
• One glance makes you lean forward – making you want to know more & dig deeper
• The graphic combines many dimensions – change in a single value over time is a chart; great B2B infographics have layers
• But there is almost no ink that doesn’t contribute – no twiddles and bar-chart-as-city-skyline (what Tufte calls ‘chartjunk’)
• The final effect is beautiful – they can’t help but be so

The Chartball posters by Andrew Garcia Phillips, Senior Graphics Editor/Programmer at the Wall Street Journal, tick all these boxes and are an absolute delight. (Joel Avery, the newest hire in our design department turned us on to these. And we’re really glad he did. The Chartball posters are fantastic.) Here’s a small detail on the pitching staff of the 2009 Yankees, strikeouts against walks (pardon the png quality):

Andrew clearly loves data (not just illustration) and that passion leaps off the page. You could spend hours with any one of his poster-sized summaries of a single sports team’s season. And as you absorb the data, the season actually comes to life. You can see, touch and feel the texture of the season. Star players pop out. Winning streaks emerge and fade back to normality. And, best of all, the data sub-plots relate to each other, adding insight and suggesting causation as well as correlation.

We’ve seen very, very few B2B infographics that do all this (and we’ve struggled with it ourselves). But this is what we aspire to.

Anyone out there have any great examples in B2B?

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B design, B2B infographics, B2B marketing agency, Content Marketing

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The background was made by tin toys, inked up, wound up and let loose.  Happy Christmas from all of us to most of you:

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B design

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We’ve been working with the company and its CMO John Watton and CEO Paul Ostergaard since the end of 2007. For those of you that don’t know the company, it’s the leading maritime e-marketplace, helping the buyers and sellers of ship supplies to reduce the costs associated with doing business together and more than $1 billion-worth of trading goes through TradeNet, the company’s  electronic trading platform.

The success is testament to CEO Paul Ostergaard’s determination to stick with his e-marketplace vision when every other e-marketplace was falling by the wayside. And John’s innovative, creative approach to marketing is propelling ShipServ to new levels.

Congratulations to both of them and the rest of the team.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B consulting, B2B design, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B marketing communications, B2B marketing strategy, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Technology Marketing, website build, website design

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If you do them thoroughly, personas mean you can develop better sites faster, ones that meet the needs of your customers, prospects and other stakeholders more effectively. They force everyone to think about what users might actually want to do when they visit your site and then shape the design accordingly.

So what are they? Personas are idealised, but specific, portraits of real users. We try to imagine a real person visiting the site – what sex are they, how old, what job do they have (we try to be as specific as possible, down to the precise company if possible), what type of information are they looking for and what do they want to do it with it once they’ve found it. Properly done, personas should replace guesswork with a clear understanding of what actually motivates people to visit your site and their needs when they get there. If you think about, it’s obvious that someone at the early stages of putting together an RFQ has very different requirements to someone who’s already put your firm on the shortlist and is looking to prepare a briefing document for his management team. Industry analysts and prospective employees have different requirements yet again.

For large consumer sites, it certainly makes sense to conduct research and intervews with consumers to identify the user groups you want to come and use your site. But in the B2B world, we’ve found that there’s really no need for this. A few hours in a room with some key stakeholders in the business – a senior marketing person, a sales guy, a partner manager and a senior techie are usually sufficient – as well as some telephone calls with people in the field, some actual partners or customers should get you pretty close.

That’s because there’s no call to overburden personas. It ‘s all about identifying the precise needs of your visitor groups and then using that to identify the site’s success factors, the navigation structure that best meets those needs, the content you require, the elements missing from your site and the features that are unnecessary.

We speed the process up by using a cool tool call Mind Manager from a company called Mindjet  – a mind mapping application – that let’s us quickly identify all our über-user types and then, on a single sheet of paper, permits us to summarise our mythical user’s background, his needs when he visits a vendor’s website and a typical scenario – really a detailed exposition of why he or she might be prompted to visit the site.

Here’s an example we prepared earlier.

Once we’ve got the personas done – there are usually no more than eight  – we can get really specific on the brief for the web designer.We find doing this can cut the early stages of design by half, because the designer has real people in her mind when she gets to work.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B consulting, B2B design, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B marketing communications, B2B marketing strategy, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Technology Marketing, website build, website design

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