E-Media Tidbits

WSJ.com "Tech Diary" -- great video podcast, but too hard to share. And sharing counts, if you want to grow your online audience.

One of my favorite video podcasts is "Andy Jordan's Tech Diary," from WSJ.com. Today I just watched an intriguing episode called Lost in Translation about how you can use cell phones to overcome language barriers with taxi drivers in Beijing. That's something that certainly can be useful to the many US journalists who will be traveling to Beijing to cover the Summer Olympics.

...But I almost didn't tell you about that video. Why not? Because WSJ.com made me jump through unnecessary hoops to find the direct link to the video.

Creating barriers (even minor ones) to direct inbound links to multimedia content is, in my view, a huge mistake for WSJ.com or any media company. Making it easy for people to link to specific audio or video episodes is more than just a convenience for the audience. It's also a key way to raise awareness of and drive traffic to podcasts, and increase subscriptions to them.

Check out the WSJ.com podcast page. Tech Diary is listed there. The blurb about the show includes a promo for the current episode about Beijing taxis. Unlike most podcasts, the episode title is not given, with a direct hyperlink. That's problem #1: When most podcast sites mention an episode, that episode gets its own Web page (like a blog post) with a permanent and unique URL. So right off the bat, WSJ.com transmits signals that this will be a confusing podcast experience.

At the bottom of that blurb is a button that says "watch." When you click that, a script runs that opens up a popup player window, and the latest episode (which may or may not be the one you want) starts playing. If you study that player window, you'll see there's a small button under the video that says "get link." When you click that link, the video shrinks to a thumbnail and a window inside the video player displays a hideously long direct URL for that video. Then you must click the "copy link" button to get that URL onto your computer's clipboard. (You can't select the URL text, as many people might expect.)

From the perspective of someone who enjoys podcasts and online videos, this process is needlessly complex. It basically requires learning a new interface. While that interface may seem trivially simple in this case, it comes down to the cognitive burden: We're all busy and impatient, so every task you need to think about and perform (however minor) is a potential obstacle.

For online interfaces, anything unfamiliar increases users' cognitive burden. And with internet users, ANY extra burden, however slight, is likely to cause people to go away. (Or in this case, at least to not recommend your great content to others -- which is a significant loss for the publisher.)

People who like podcasts and online video generally like to share. That's very good for online multimedia publishers, because it's a strong avenue for building audience. But these users also have habits for online interaction. Even if your interface is more "slick" or "cool" than the average podcast site, if you don't offer conventional interface options as well, you will lose people.

What to do: At the very least, when people find a cool piece of multimedia content, they like to be able to quickly and easily tell other folks to check it out. In Internet terms, "quick and easy" means "provide a very obvious direct link, in an expected place." That link should be intuitive to copy and paste, and it should take people straight to the recommended content in a single click from an e-mail, instant message, Twitter post, blog post, etc.

Also, since people who like online multimedia may well be interested in browsing or sharing items from your back catalog, it's important to make your show archives available from a conventional Web page. WSJ.com doesn't do this. If you click the "archive" button under the Tech Diary blurb on WSJ.com's podcast page, a script runs and it tries to open iTunes on your computer. From the perspective of the online user, that process is not only unnecessarily complex but may also appear presumptuous (or even suspicious). WSJ.com should not be trying to "take over my computer," even in minor, safe ways. It's especially bad that their "archive" button doesn't warn me that it will try to launch a different program.

WSJ.com: Just direct me, through my Web browser, to your show's archives. Then I'll decide what to download, watch, or link to -- and how.

...That said, Jordan's video about communicating with Beijing taxis is excellent and very useful. So rather than force you to navigate WSJ.com's podcast system, I'll just embed the video here. (I got the embed code the same way I got the direct link used in this story's first paragraph: by clicking through the custom player window.)

Like many mainstream media companies, WSJ.com relies on Brightcove to package and deliver its podcasts. I don't know whether Brightcove offers its clients options to overcome these usability obstacles, so I'm sorry if it seems like I'm leveling too much criticism at WSJ.com. However, typical Internet users won't care about Brightcove or any other service provider. As far as they're concerned, they're interacting with the WSJ.com brand. And if they're frustrated, WSJ.com is probably who they will blame.

WSJ.com isn't alone among media companies in making such fundamental usability errors, of course. Another mainstream media podcast I enjoy is Colorado Matters, from Colorado Public Radio. As far as I've been able to tell, they make it completely impossible to directly link to specific episodes.

In this case, Colorado Public Radio does publish the Colorado Matters archives on a regular Web page, listing titles, dates, and descriptions for individual episodes. Each episode title is a hyperlink. But when you click that, it does not take you to a Web page for that show with a unique permanent URL. Rather, it tries to launch iTunes and stream the audio to you there.

Therefore, even though Colorado Matters is an excellent show with many episodes I'd like to share with to many people (and I know a lot of people), I almost never do so because such referrals would be too much work for me and for the recipient. If I think making that referral is very important, I'll generally e-mail the entire MP3 file I downloaded from the podcast to the recipient. That's probably not what CPR wants, but it works much better than their options.

Fortunately, some media organizations understand the importance of making their multimedia (especially podcasts) easily linkable. For instance, I also love the podcast of Future Tense, from American Public Media. This show's site originally presented inbound-linking obstacles similar to (but not as extreme as) those of Colorado Matters.

I mentioned this problem to Future Tense's producer and host Jon Gordon, whom I met at a conference earlier this year. He then talked to his Web team, and they reworked the site to make inbound links to specific episodes easy and intuitive. Well done, APM! You'll undoubtedly be seeing many more inbound links coming from me, and other listeners, as a result. Thanks.