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Yankees.Com Hits A Home Run
Yankees.com is a home run, a beautifully-conceived website that blends technology, interactivity and information architecture, and that brings a musty old cultural tradition into the Digital Age.
Media people and dusty old cultural institutions and businesses, take note.
Venerated print and text industries like journalism and publishing are almost desperately trying to figure out how to respond to the Internet. Their urgency is at least an improvement on the favored solution of the late 80's and 90's: throwing up clunky, non-interactive Web pages known online as "shovelware."
Print media have spent countless millions of dollars rushing to establish these generally dreary, online versions. Imagine how much better newspapers and magazines would be if they'd spent the same money hiring staff, improving graphics and modernizing their news coverage? And used the Web to draw some new readers?
Meanwhile, no book publisher has yet produced a striking, effective or innovative website. Inside publishing houses, publicists and marketing consultants emphasize the importance of placing stories on the relatively tiny Slate and the more trafficked and interactive Salon.com (both of which attract an infinitesmal fraction of Net and Web traffic).
Beyond that lazy impulse, they don't seem to have a clue as to how to use the Net or what it might mean for them down the road. Ten years ago, this lack of imagination was understandable; these days, with Grandma likely to be online downloading videostreaming software, there's less excuse.
Only a handful of news organizations - the San Jose Mercury News? Mercurycenter.com, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today - have broken through, establishing themselves as truly interactive (sometimes even profitable) -- not just traditional media organizations with Url's. The huge difference is interactivity. And sensitivity - knowing and fighting for Web users.
From e-trading to eBay, the lessons of the Web are that if you give people new means of connecting with the products, advertising or information they want, they will come.
Information architecture and design, therefore have become critically important to companies making the transition to the virtual world. Web information is complicated, write Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, in "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web," published by O'Reilly ($US24), one of the most accesssible, coherent and useful guides to the principles of Web design. You can't create a website that works, the authors argue, until you understand the basic principles of Web architecture and use, any more than you can design great buildings without real world architecture.
"You can't become a proficient web site architect unless you first know what it's like to really use the Web on a regular basis," write Rosenfeld and Morville. A site, they suggest, must grow from a carefully planned information architecture for users to be successful in finding pages and accomplishing tasks. Confused users, lost users, and unhappy users can quickly turn into former users or none at all.
"In other words, the best web site producer is an experienced consumer. You must become the toughest, most critical consumer of web sites you possibly can. Determining what you love, what you hate, and why, will shape your own personal web design philosophy?."
This statement invokes the striking revamped Yankees site, (www.yankees.com), a boon n ot only to the baseball team's fans, but more significantly a model of the kind of consumer empathy, design and understanding Rosenfeld and Morville are talking about.
Yankee.com shows how a well-designed, interactive site can make a traditional produce (a ball game, a book, a newspaper) more accessible and appealing, instead of simply more digital.
Amazon.com has generated enormous publicity and confusion in the media and business world (it has yet to make money) but much of Amazon's success flows from the fact that it was designed by planners who understood the Web. It's architecture was, especially at the time of its inception, simple and user friendly, designed very much with Web browsers in mind. Yankee.com does the same thing, but with more relevance to institutions trying to leap into the Digital Age.
In design, concept and architecture, Yankee.com shows how connectivity can reinforce name- brand institutions, using the Net to hook them up with old and new customers. It follows Rosenfeld's and Morville's advice to seriously ponder what the target audience likes about the Web and doesn't, and then to incorporate a lot of the former and eliminate a lot of the latter.
Major League baseball is curiously analogous to journalism and publishing in a lot of odd ways: an older institution, threatened by ferocious competition from new forms of entertainment and information technologies, from cable wrestling to online gaming. A reactionary institution, like journalism and publishing, it has been bitterly and justifiably criticized for being slow to change, seeing the Web at first as a menace, not a boon.
But what draws consumers to the Web is that it gives them new ways of getting to the things they already love - music, movies, Persian rugs, stocks, TV listings. L.L. Bean was one of the first large retailers to get this; it moved its catalogue business online and created a website that was highly user-friendly; it didn't start offering virtual campires. In fact, it emphasized its traditional virtues - reliability and familiarity - online.
The designers of Yankee.com also understand the importance of figuring out what people most like about the thing you're selling and then using the Web to bring it to them.
In the case of baseball, fans love to yak about their team, follow stats and scores, buy gew-gaws for themselves or their kids, and get tickets. All are radically simple on Yankees.com, a complex site whose dimensions are simple, clearly portrayed and easy to grasp.
First off, the Yankees have made it an interactive delight to buy a ticket. Customers who click on the Box Office icon are linked to a list of upcoming games, click on the one they want to see and the money they want to spend. They can pull up a seating plan, even see a photo of the field from their perspective seat. By punching in a credit card number, they can receive tickets (by mail or UPS, ground or next day), or pick them up at the box office.)
In addition, they get animated tickers providing news of the latest Yankee games, video "tours" of the team's clubhouse, easy-to-use and very fast forums on which to chat with other fans and ask questions (members have to sign up: topics are posted and listed and the conversations are surprisingly coherent and civil) and the opportunity to buy Yankee junk. The site is crammed with advertisers.
Just as Rosenfeld and Morville might suggest (what do you hate about the Web?), Yankees.com uses "cookie" and other recognition software to recognize your computer, thus freeing users from the insane and annoying need to memorize ID's and track down passwords and usernames.
There's almost nothing in theory more culturally endangered than a baseball game. Why travel long distances, braving crowds, high prices and traffic jams, to watch guys in funny uniforms smack a ball around with a stick? But people's feelings about technology and tradition are complex and unpredictable. It's quite possible for the same person who trawls the Web for hours to still savor the experience of selling a baseball game. Or reading a book.
What does this have to do with media, journalism or publishing?
A lot. I've yet to encounter a publishing website in America that's as interactive, graphically appealing or technically savvy. Yankees.com requires some relatively sophisticated programs to run its color and animation. The site figures out what programs users will need, links them to the right downloading sites (automatically reading the difference between Macs and PCs), and guides them through the simple downloading process. Building it probably cost a bundle.
But it was a wise investment. The site is intensely participatory, offering users a wide range of options and activities - including news, search engines, Internet access and free e-mail. The Yankees have embraced what journalism and publishing resist so bitterly - interactivity.
Newspapers and publishers have already blown myriad opportunities to draw consumers into their websites. Daily news meetings could be simulcast via webcams - allowing readers to offer their ideas and reactions. Editors retain control, but could also get input. Websites could guide news consumers through the editorial process -- readers could see some stories before and after they were copy-edited, perhaps even be offered the chance to correct factual errors or misconceptions before they appear. They could see the reaction journalists get to their work, offer questions for public officials, chat live with reporters and editors after major stories, or at certain times of the day. Papers could also offer Net access and free e-mail as a way of bringing customers onto their sites, keeping them connected to papers.
Book publishing offers as many opportunities, if not more. Instead of throwing up sluggish and useless promotional websites, or mailing books to a handful of snooty literary websites hardly anyone reads, publishers could draw readers into the process. They could organize websites by genres, and bring readers closer to the process of assigning, editing, producing and publishing books.
When a new catalogue is published, a book might automatically get its own corner of the website. Interested readers could follow its status -- what print run is anticipated, where the book is being ordered, what publicity is scheduled, where the writer is in the production process, what covers are being contemplated and designed. Invisible elements in publishing - designers, for example - could get invaluable feedback from readers on what covers attract them in bookstores, for example.
Publishers could have some fun, too. They could learn if readers would like the author to visit their town, if there's a local group that might be interested in a particular book. Readers could access lists of chain and independent outlets where they could buy the book. As with the Yankee's ticket software, they could enter their zip codes and get a list of every bookstore within 20 miles that stocks it. Such a site could also give publishers valuable databases, and a better sense of how well a book might do, how many copies to print and distribute, eliminating some of the voodoo guesswork that publishing sales departments rely on.
What the Yankees organization has figured out is that a website has to be truly empathetic to and knowledgeable about its users. It has to go to bat for battered Web-browsers snagged and derailed by confusing sites that don't work generate more problems than they solve.
It's strange that a baseball team would get this idea while publishers and editors resist it so fiercely. Admitted to the party, given choices, the public rushes to embrace technology and interactivity and uses it to get to the games, books, CD's, movies, hiking boots - and news - it wants. Excluded and kept at bay, the people move quickly on, almost surely leaving a string of Millenial dinosaurs behind.
To me this site is everything that is wrong with the web. This thing is a grossly graphics intensive site gives the user a very small amount of information per byte downloaded. If you want to see a GOOD web site, look at photo.net.
Pagh.
As a professional webmaster, I'll say what most of you probably have realized. Yankees.com isn't anything special. The graphics take too long to load, the design is very inconsistent, the navigation needs work, and there's plenty of bugs on the page, like how I can't read a damn word of that font they use on this linux box and how the store opens up not one but two browser windows. No amount of java applets is going to make up for this.
The website also doesn't have anything revolutionary. Cookies to keep track of users? Even slashdot does that. Message forums? You're looking at them! Message forums with a very polite membership? (Where's the fun in that?) Check out C|net's Builder Buzz. I can think of half a dozen sites just on my daily rounds alone that are just as interactive, if not more so than yankees.com. Better designed to boot.
As a webmaster, I also know what the designers were thinking when they built the website, (I know, I think this way too). They weren't thinking "let's do something revolutionary", they were thinking "Look at all these other sites (slashdot) that have message boards, voting booths, and news! We better to do that too!) They relied on the yankees name to draw people there. the truly revolutionary websites don't have that kind of help. They were thinking of how to make money and how to sucker in yankees fans like Katz. It worked for the yankees fans, the rest of us aren't that impressed.
First of all, Katz has an excellent point about "shovelware." I've seen plenty of those sites, and they suck. Having a Web page only for the sake of having a Web page strikes me as useless.
However, there are a lot of sites (and yankees.com has this tendency as well) that go to the opposite extreme. The "gadgetware" sites sometimes have good content, yes. But only the fastest and newest machines with completely up-to-date software can truly take advantage of it.
My home machine right now is a 486 with a 14.4 modem, and I usually run Lynx. It's aggravating when someone with a flashy site makes it unreadable to anyone who doesn't have InternetGadget 9.9.9. It makes me LESS likely to do business with them, not more.
We shouldn't be encouraging "shovelware." Katz is absolutely right there. But "gadgetware" is every bit as bad.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
No book publisher ever made an effective website? http://www.oreilly.com/.
The Yankees have a site worth spotlighting on Slashdot? I'm sorry, I'll go with the professionals who checked it out and reported their findings: over-the-top sites are Web pollution, and I'm told they don't even get decent cross-platform results. Is Jon Katz getting kickbacks or something? First Apple, now this.
Lastly, 'shovelware' is more accurately a relic of the CD-Rom boom days, when people thought anything on a CD-Rom was instant riches. CD-Roms are capacious, especially back in those days, so it was indeed like 'shovelling' data onto them, and there were a lot of disks made that were total garbage to cash in on the (hypothetical) boom- hence, shovelware.
Isn't there anybody who could at least _edit_ Jon Katz and stop certain articles like this from being run as articles? Sometimes it's awfully obvious that he's blown it again. I use a Mac and really like it and think Apple's doing great things, but I still think his lovefest of Apple was _also_ inappropriate for Slashdot. Stop The Madness... (str)