Author Archives: Josh Kinal
About Josh Kinal
Josh Kinal specialises in content strategy with Soupgiant. A writer and broadcaster since 1993, he turned his hand to the web in 2005 and has not looked back since.
He hosts and produces the weekly Boxcutters podcast, bringing people information about the whole world of television since 2005.
Content Strategy: Clout by Colleen Jones: book review
September 12, 2011
Colleen Jones lays the premise of influence firmly on the table and discusses ways to begin thinking about content strategy as a means of influencing audiences on the web. The title of the book is explicit and confronting but how does the content itself stack up?
Tags: books, communication, content, Content Strategy, professional development, review
Quick Notes: How Google Damages Its Own Brand
August 10, 2011
Google Reader allows me to send to Twitter but not Google+. What is this doing to Google’s own branding?
Tags: brand, google, google plus, user experience
Content Strategy: Check Your Content
July 13, 2011
Testing content before publishing is important and there are many quick and cheap ways to achieve a good result that will save your brand. It’s all about having a content strategy in place and keeping to that strategy.
Tags: brand, content, drafting, marketing, reputation, strategy, testing, user experience, vodafone
Quick Notes: Website Policies and SEO
July 7, 2011
Looking through the RACV website policies I noticed this item: 7. linking to this web site 7.1 If you wish to establish a link to this web site you must, in the first instance, use the Contact Us link at the top of the page and provide the following information: a) the URL of the [...]
Content Strategy: Vodafone, Confusion, and Content Strategy
July 5, 2011
Recently, Vodafone Australia sent its customers an email that caused a great deal of confusion. We have a look at what it could have done differently and how a simple rewrite and a bit of content strategy could have saved the brand a lot of difficulty.
Tags: brand, content, drafting, editing, email, strategy, telecommunications, vodafone
Design: Usability, Trust and the iPad
June 9, 2011
Apple are known for their beautiful design and their “it just works” mentality. It’s one of the things I love about my own Apple products. My parents, on the other hand, are known for not being me.
The only computers my parents have ever used are Windows machines and English is their third language.
I wanted to see how easy it would be for them to set up an iPad 2 for themselves.
Tags: Accessibility, Apple, expectations, iPad, usability
Design: Details Prevent User Paralysis
January 4, 2011
User paralysis is a horrible side effect of lack of attention to detail. Recently I saw a TED Talk by Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman for the Ogilvy Group in the UK. In it he describes how it’s the small things that make all the difference.
I saw, first-hand, how simple it is to both bring on and avoid user paralysis.
Tags: details, user experience, user interaction, UX
Quick Notes: Branding is hard
December 5, 2010
Making a great brand starts with having a great name and that means being able to buy a great or, at least, good domain name as Jason Calacanis explains.
Quick Notes: How @font-face loads in different browsers
December 3, 2010
Why do you sometimes see the fonts change on a website after it loads? This is just one of the many ways browsers behave differently, as explained in this quote from Richard Rutter.
Tags: @font-face, chrome, CSS, fonts, internet explorer, JavaScript, safari
Design: Poka yoke UX design
November 15, 2010
There’s a theory of Japanese car construction called poka yoke. It was described to me as meaning a form of idiot-proofing but it really means “mistake proofing”. Pieces of the car are manufactured in such a way that they can only be used on one particular part of the car. We need to apply this theory to website design.