We can get into almost any car and drive away without much trouble. Find the ignition, put the car in gear, grab the steering wheel and go. The readout on the dashboard might be a slightly different color from car to car, but we don’t need much more than a quick look around to get started. We can do this because the controls from one car to the next are very similar. Standardization makes the interface transparent. We drive away without a problem.

Corporate web sites are much the same. (Jakob Nielsen calls these Web sites “About Us” Web Sites.) Again and again we see the same buttons at the top: About Us, Products, Services, News & Events, Contact Us. From site to site, the information is categorized into a similar set of organizational buckets and the labels on the options are similar (often identical). Again, a standard set of controls helps make the interface transparent, bringing site content to the forefront.

If we were to rank the importance of words on your Web site from most often viewed to least often viewed, a news headline on the home page would rank relatively highly compared to a VP’s bio three levels down on the site. However, that news headline on the home page is only going to be viewed once before the user moves on to a another page on the site. The words in the navigation bar, however, are persistent throughout the user’s entire experience on your site. Along with your corporate logo at the top of the page they are the only elements in front of the user throughout the site.

How can we take advantage of these persistent words in the navigation bar  and use them to express a company’s value and personality?

One way is to change the labels that already exist into something more expressive. Boston Consulting Group does this by using the label ‘Impact and Expertise’ rather than something more bland like ‘Research’ or ‘Services’. Nelly Moser,a provider of mobile services platforms, is another example. It uses the descriptive name of its services, ‘Mobile 2.0,’ in the navigation bar.

Another way to express personality and value through the navigation is to add a section to the Web site describing the company’s differentiators. The Web site for DLA Piper, an international business law firm, is a great example of this. The last item in the navigation bar is titled “Social Responsibility”. Not a standard item on a corporate Web site, but in this context it expresses the importance that the firm puts on social responsibility in relationship to its brand.

In the same way that trying to drive a car with the gearshift on the left side of the steering wheel would confuse most drivers (in the US, at least), using non-standard navigational labels on your Web site might introduce confusion for users expecting more familiar wording. This can be a delicate balance. It can be easy to go too far unless you know your users well or conduct usability testing.

The moral: Look for opportunities to take advantage of your site’s navigation to express the value and personality of your organization. But be careful, going too far can result in an incoherent mess.

Photo credit: heavenboundalso

Right. The biggest casualty of the current financial crisis is trust.

Wall Street, already viewed askance by Main Street for it’s lavish ways, now conjures images of the Strip in Las Vegas after a losing streak. The self-styled “Masters of the Universe” that Tom Wolfe skewered so justly in Bonfire of the Vanities, have duped us again – and themselves in the bargain. Lehman Bros., a brand that was almost a synonym of trust, has vaporized overnight. Banks are taking money from the Fed for nominal interest and hanging onto it, afraid even to loan it their fellow banks. Credit is “tight” because trust is the scarcest resource. Collateralized Debt Obligations? Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.

We spend most of our lives, and particularly our economic lives, walking on air, supported by the trust we place in the financial institutions we take for granted. We measure our sanity on the shared belief that our world is governed by reliable, predictable rules and behaviors. To question everything that is questionable is annoying and paralyzing, and in its extreme forms, even clinical. We know in our minds that “historic performance is no guarantee of future results,” but in our hearts we believe that if we just walk fast enough and don’t look down, we will stay aloft.

The good thing about falling is that it usually wakes us up, at least for a while, to the reality – or maybe unreality – of the stuff we call money. Money is based on a web of agreements, assumptions and contracts. Money is not, and never was, “your money,” in spite of the slogans of the anti-tax ideologues. As we have seen in dramatic form recently, no government, no money. The dollar may carry the slogan “In God We Trust,” but the real trustee is the U.S. Treasury, which, as of this writing at least, is still solvent. This solvency is based purely on the trust we place in one another as citizens and as taxpayers. The self-indulgent party of the few is now over, and we on Main Street are looking anxiously at one another and the resources we have left, testing the ground before we take the next step. There is something bracing about this alertness, this focus on what is really important and where value really lies. But it is only a matter of time before we tire of our vigilance and drift back into our dream. Trust me.

The past week of debates by the presidential and vice presidential candidates prove one thing – if you create a bar so low, it will be difficult to lose.

If the bar is set high, it is harder to succeed. Pretty simple, but when applied  in things like the vice presidential debate, it can be perplexing. The days leading up to the debate, there were attempts to raise expectations by different pundits authoring articles in the Huffington Post, but her interviews with Katie Couric set the stage and as long as she said something, anything that came  close to a complete sentence, she “passed the test”. That is some expectation for someone who is trying to be vice president of the United States.

As frustrating as this may be, it is part of human nature. At CMN, we work in the area of subjective – be it words or art. People personalize it and try to project a POV as if it is not personal, but it is almost impossible to do. We always say our job to take the subjective and make it objective. We remind the team about the objectives, the audience, etc. When we present strategy, it works. When we present design, someone always hates the color orange.

Setting the stage for our work is based on grounding expectations. But expectations should be higher than normal when you work with us. We are not scared of that; in fact we welcome it. Added bonus: we speak in complete sentences.