Joe Barsness: Thanks for joining us on the mind your own marketing business podcast. I'm Joe Barsanis from web and software development team Fjorge. And today on our show, we'll be talking with Chris Mauck from Abelson Taylor. Thanks for being on the show, Chris.

Chris Mauck: Hey, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Joe Barsness: All right. First, super high level. Just short answer. What is your position? What is your role at your agency? Abelson Taylor?

Chris Mauck: I am the vice president, director of interactive technology. Basically, we make it static images into awesome, interactive pieces.

Joe Barsness: Wonderful. Wonderful. All right. We'll dive into that in a little bit, but I always like to give people a little bit of a background.

I would love to hear about your kind of like personal background and how you ended up in this role, both from your passion to your first couple of jobs, if you want to talk about that. And then I know you've been at Abelson Taylor for a while, so there's been some growth there as well.

Anything you want to share around the history and the makeup of getting to that seat?

Chris Mauck: Sure. Yeah. So before I came to Abelson Taylor, my background ranged from being a salesperson and volunteer firefighter to a licensed contractor and small business owner. In fact, one of those small businesses was finally taking the reins and creating my own website design and development business.

One day, Abelson Taylor, they called me out of the blue. I had no reservations and simply jumped at the chance. Come on. A chance to get paid a salary for doing what I already loved in my spare time. So I have an issue with needing to see something through. On or off the clock. The focus is the goal.

And I started at the agency as a standard level developer writing code for basic websites and emails. In the 13 plus years I've been there, I've moved through a different, the different levels of developer and management to my current position of vice president today. And I still have an incredible issue, putting things off until tomorrow.

Joe Barsness: Every, every person with that passion is an incredible web developer. I know them here at fjorge and that sounds great. It may not be a. As great for some personal aspects or from maybe overextending oneself, but it certainly is something that makes the clock tick and makes things move forward.

So then tell me a little bit about your team, the team that you lead. How many folks work with you, what are their roles and what are you trying to accomplish as a small group within your larger organization?

Chris Mauck: Yeah. I oversee a team of developers, digital producers, and quality assurance personnel.

And in that type of a role, you need to not only understand how to manage a team well and ensure their time is allocated effectively, but you have to have a critical eye for the work being created. It isn't enough to simply understand how all the pieces work together, though that is very important.

It's also understanding how the creative, the art and the copy. Is implemented on top of the technology. So we service all of the brands in the agency. No one has assigned a specific brand on the development team and they work on all project types from emails and banners to websites and conference pieces.

So one of the big parts is understand the audience. Today we have to ensure that we're taking a critical look at things like accessibility. It's become one of my top areas of interest and I feel it's for good reason. If we don't consider those who. May have an impairment or disability when we're designing and building our projects.

We stand to lose a large portion of the client's audience. Can't have that.

Joe Barsness: Wonderful. And within that group is part of a larger whole, which is Abelson Taylor. Can you talk a little bit more about where you're located, what your specialties are, what kind of, what you all stand for?

Chris Mauck: Sure. So we are located in Chicago, just outside of the loop.

We've had a couple of different locations downtown over the years. Currently, we are located in the old post office building. We've been in the pharmaceutical advertising space for over 40 years, about 43 to be exact. We've always been privately owned and operated in order to ensure that the work that we do is governed by those that are doing the work and not a board somewhere.

And we've created some great campaigns for some of the leading pharmaceutical brands in the world. And while our work has evolved, so has our vision and our sense of purpose. I guess in its simplest terms, we help the world choose better health.

Joe Barsness: Ah, good way to sum that up. Did you grab that from some marketing materials, or is that something that just

Chris Mauck: That's in our marketing materials.

Joe Barsness: Good. And they, Hey, they got it stuck. We're fjorge built, right? It's good to have those in, the back of your mind and constantly be striving towards that goal for your clients. What I, my favorite, I interview a lot of folks who work at agencies and my favorite question to ask.

Always is. What is the coolest thing you've ever gotten to do in your career? Whether it's a like a client that you've had or an experience that you created or a new technology you got to work in? Is there anything that like really stands out that got you super excited on a more personal level?

Chris Mauck: This is going to be a little bit of a self serving, response, but the coolest thing that I quote unquote get to do is work with incredibly talented designers and developers on a daily basis. One of the cool things I was fortunate enough to be a part of in the past was to travel to Lisbon, Portugal, to provide technical support for a convention piece that we had developed.

Coolest thing I've built for myself or my team is built would have to be our internal build processes. Sure, we make great products for our clients, but the amazing team I have putting together some truly future forward build processes was really exciting to be a part of.

Joe Barsness: Oh, that's cool. Yeah. You and I could talk, build processes and deployment pipelines and CICD.

But we'll skip over that for today and have that as another discussion, but I'm sure our sys admins would love to hear about your awesome deployment pipeline and build processes and all of that. I do want to hear, though, more about what you did. In Portugal for the display. So the I know from developing a few, touch screens and experiences but I'd love to hear what you did and was it unique and maybe if it was years ago, explain the time, because now it might not seem so complicated.

Chris Mauck: It was a couple of years before COVID. So it was probably around 2018, maybe. It was cool for the novelty of the fact. So what it is there were two separate brands housed by the same parent company and the display had information for each brand, one on each side. And we had devised a method by which you have an iPad that is on a track.

And as you slide it down, it picks up the background imagery and plays a different video or ask the user a question. And then when you continue on, it changes the video and the questions, et cetera. And then it keeps track of the answers, the correct answers or whatnot. And depending on how many people were involved and, yay, we did it.

This many people had interactions. The reason for being on site, we learned pretty quickly over the years that we always have issues with the vendors setting up our technologies, a convention piece that's a touch panel, typically pretty easy, but it got to the point where we're going out there and just double checking, we'd get there and make sure the website was set up on the device or the app was set up on the device run through it a few times, sometimes even wait for the next day for the show to start, and then make sure that it was good to go.

Same thing happened in Portugal. I was there while they were still building the entire conference booth. It was great because I didn't speak the language, anybody else was speaking, but the Italian gentlemen that were putting the booth together kept offering me espresso, so that was pretty great.

But yeah worked on setting up the environment and then. It was the middle of the night for my developer, I believe, but I got ahold of him to help make a quick change to propagate, to make sure that it worked properly for the launch of the conference and all went well.

Joe Barsness: Oh, very nice. And you got to go to Portugal.

Chris Mauck: I got to go to Portugal.

Joe Barsness: Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. You don't travel often travel for work and oftentimes be fun. If you travel often, it may not be that fun. All right. And I want to, so I know you lead a team of developers. You're working in creative technology, which is very similar to what we do as a larger organization.

I want to hear about your, like a pet peeve or something that, that drives you bonkers with Internal or the perception of your field, like what makes it easy or hard. And I'll start my biggest pet peeve is, and I even say this myself because I am not by trade a developer. It's the quick, that seems easy.

Chris Mauck: Yes.

Joe Barsness: And that's not, you should not assume that to be the case. And some people ask like, why does it cost so much? Why does it take so long? All of those things. Is there anything similar to that? It doesn't have to be the same story, but is there anything that, that drives you nuts or is it the same thing?

Chris Mauck: That is one of the biggest things. Loosely I'll say people don't understand the level of effort that goes into not only planning stages of the project, but. But the execution, as you said, I feel people tend to skew towards the can't you just nudge this item on the screen so we can keep the project moving without understanding just how complex the responsiveness and the output overall may be and how that all fits into the surrounding UI there's just.

As a lack of understanding and a lot of times unwillingness to learn and it happens repeatedly. We tend to align the teams on the proper methods and then the teams change.

Joe Barsness: Yeah, exactly. And you've been through the different stages with me, with us, I'm sure with it's not as much of an issue anymore, but which browser are you using?

Or I think one of my favorites was when somebody called us and to QA, they were, it was a client QAing some of our work and they had a ruler on their screen. Like talking about the distances and obviously in our world, that's pixels and it doesn't work to measure things that way because there's individual settings that you have on your device that can change, or the, just the pure size of your screen or the resolution of your screen all can affect those things.

And yeah, that, that lack of understanding, I'm sure that's true in any industry. The other thing that I know is everything you, as a developer, you have to think about all of the sorts of interactions you can get, right? The simplest one from that perspective that I can think about is like hover states on mobile.

For example, so like when you're clicking your mouth or when you're dragging your mouse around the screen, something might light up well in a mobile device, there is that not that and so we have to think about if somebody says, Hey, I want this to be a hover state. It's we need to turn that off on mobile and dot, there are all these things that you have to think about and do beyond just the apparent task at hand that others, when they're not building it, don't have to think about necessarily. So anyway, that was my long, maybe I just complained for five minutes, but

Chris Mauck: no, it's so true. It's so true.

Joe Barsness: A topic that we connected on early on Chris was accessibility. Our organization at Fjorge got involved early with a partner Siteimprove when it was very new to that world.

And we've grown with that and had some experience, but I want to hear from you because I know you've written some articles about this and I read them and I follow you. Like, why is it so important? You alluded to this earlier, but why is it so important to think about accessibility?

Chris Mauck: Digital accessibility is important, and not just for legal compliance, but for inclusivity, user experience, market reach, ethical responsibility, innovation, and overall business success.

It's about creating a digital world that works for everyone. And in that, I mean that everyone, regardless of their abilities, has equal access to the information, the services, and opportunities on the web. Accessibility features often improve the overall user experience for everyone, and not just for people with disabilities.

And I think that people tend to gloss over on that because they think, oh, we're making special accommodations. But in the end, when those changes are made, it tends to make it better for all. And I'm sorry, I was gonna say lawsuits highlight the legal risk of noncompliance adhering to accessibility standards helps organizations avoid litigation.

Joe Barsness: Yeah, of course. That's some of the fear that people have, but it, you really should be doing it for other reasons as well. The other thing I wanted to ask you about is that do you feel like quality accessibility leads to better SEO as well because of the structure that you're thinking about?

Or have you not associated that collectively?

Chris Mauck: No, that's a great point. I think that Because considering accessibility and properly structuring the content of the site has to intrinsically lead to better SEO because not only are you making sure that the structure is correct, but it's semantically accurate, because then your headings are in H1, H2, H3 order, they're not all over the place just for styling reasons.

Alt text on images is very important for people using screen readers, but I see a lot of people even adding more content there for SEO purposes, which is fine as long as they are balancing the SEO nature along with accessibility because you don't want to overdo it with the alt text. But yeah, I can definitely see a benefit.

Joe Barsness: Yeah. And I think I heard from a birdie one time that that Google crawls, Google is. Not a person with eyes. And they crawl the code the same way a screen reader might, or very similarly to it. And so that is another reason for proper indexing and all of those sorts of things. So glad to hear your perspective on, on that piece.

As far as accessibility goes, is there any. Is there a way that you go about making sure that something is accessible? Are there tools that you like to use? Are there processes that you like to use? Anything like that, that, that helps you and your team meet your goals there.

Chris Mauck: Sure. There's all kinds of browser plugins available or there's platforms that you can become a part of and one of which site improved, as you mentioned.

Right now, I think that our quality assurance team is using the axe developer tools and the level access plugins to double check the automated test. But then they're also doing manual testing for keyboard accessibility and using screen readers to read the content allows there's a lot of manual testing that goes along with the automated testing and just to ensure that I personally am able to see the results of those tests the way that I want to see them as soon as possible because I'm a developer at heart.

I actually use the axe core JavaScript library and built my own local instance that I can paste URLs into and it'll give me the full breakdown of automated testing across all those URLs in a single report.

Joe Barsness: Yep. Absolutely. I love it. That's a great strategy. And I think you made a great point.

There's, there are these tools out there that do automated testing, but that's not fine, that's not the end of the work. Certainly that's better than doing nothing. But, there is an element, at least to this point, that involves some manual "Hey, if I'm a user, can I literally get to where I'm trying to go?"

And there's going to be that element, I think, for a while. Will AI maybe catch up? Yes, it'll help. It'll do those things. But there still is a person using.

Chris Mauck: Yeah, there still is that human component to actually make the judgment calls. And you point out the automation isn't always enough. And that's a great use cases. Last week, we had a third party reach out to us and say that their client site had some contrast issues. The automated test tells me yes, there's contrast issues, but it also says needs review, and it's because the text was over a background image. So we had someone from our access our user experience team rather go through.

And he would use the color picker tool that samples all around the text and the color of the text to make sure the contrast was indeed passable. They're all large fonts, but still, because there's no background color, it's an image, it's hard to say that it passes or not. So human review.

Joe Barsness: Yep, and there also is some business sense in all of this as well, as you likely know, is that if, let's just make this up let's just say Coke's two colors were red and orange, and they weren't accessible next to each other.

You know that? But you're not about as if you're building a micro site or a small thing for them. You're not about to change their 100 years of marketing history to make something completely accessible. You may choose for a business reason to make that inaccessible, barring the other information, like changing a brand at that level.

There are tricks and there are different things they can do, but there are situations where you have to make a business decision to your thoughts on that.

Chris Mauck: Yeah. So there's, there is some leniency given to brand colors, but what we've found as we're working on some of these sites where brand colors are causing the issue is how are we using them?

If those two aren't going to work together, we can still incorporate those colors throughout different portions of the UI or the content that's being used, but ensure that the contrast between say navigation elements. Maybe that's not using both brand colors. Maybe it's using one. So instead of the red and orange example, maybe the navigation is red.

Maybe the page you're on is highlighted orange. As long as that text within there. Is the contrast is sufficient between the text and that background. Then we're good. Never orange text on a red background though. That's an extreme case.

Joe Barsness: Yeah, of course. I was trying to make something up that would be obvious even to me who's not artistic and maybe a little colorblind. Other than that, I'm basically Van Gogh. So one other topic that I wanted to talk to you in particular about, because we do similar things from a certain perspective is AI what is your team using to find some efficiencies in using either AI tools and is it cutting out any jobs or anything, from that perspective at this point, what are you seeing in that world and maybe what are you excited about?

Chris Mauck: Of course, I'm really excited about AI, but what we're using it for right now is we're doing a couple of tests with different platforms.

We bought into things like Microsoft co pilot. At an agency level, enterprise level so that our data remains our data, and it's not part of the future training models at the end of the day, copilot is. It's open AI, right? It's like an open AI partnership. So we do have guidelines in place at our agency that prevents using certain things like proprietary names or client names or product details.

Gotta be very strict with how we word things in there. So if we can be vague to ask a question, try to get a response, I do that all the time myself with some code. I'll go to chat, GPT or a cloud and I'll say, Hey, this is a thing I want to do, here's where I'm at. Can you help me?

And nothing in there is client related. It's not necessarily proprietary. I'm just building a tool. I'm building my widget and I want help building said widget. They do make mistakes. I'll often say that didn't work. I had to change this and they're like, Hey, thanks for fixing what I did wrong. Ah, interesting.

Joe Barsness: Yeah. I haven't heard about it from that perspective.

Chris Mauck: Yeah, so there's legitimate concerns about AI and its impact on jobs, but it's important to recognize that those who can use AI will have better opportunities in the future versus those who are quote unquote afraid of it because it's a technology don't get too deep in the weeds, but high level concepts could be automation versus augmentation.

Tools being created to replace us versus helping us create jobs. I don't know. It's iffy because I understand how people are afraid of it. It really doesn't do it all on its own. It needs human interaction. So if we can be the humans that are putting in the prompts to get the responses, whether it's for text or it's for image or for video, there's a lot of cool avenues out there and we try to play with those at the office.

Every few weeks we have. A sandbox on what someone did cool in AI. And they show it off. Yeah.

Joe Barsness: And that's the same way we're using it here. We're not building AI, we're maybe using it for a specific purpose on a client request, or we are using it to improve our code or processes or something like that at this point.

And then me personally not a specific developer. I like to just like you do you use it as you can use it as the person sitting next to you. What do you think of this? Or can you get me started on this? I'm really good at critiquing other people's writing, but I'm not good at starting from scratch.

And so it's great to generate something. So you have something to react to. And jump ideas off of, but it's not something that's like necessarily yes, I'm a slightly more efficient using it, but, and I'm sure I could be more. But it's not something that's like completely changed at least to this point, what I'm doing on a daily basis.

I know we could talk about AI and accessibility and code pipelines and all those things all day. But Chris, unfortunately, that's all the time we have today on the Mind Drone Marketing Business Podcast. I just want to give a huge shout out for Chris. Thank you for joining us. It's been great having you.

Chris Mauck: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It was a good time.

Joe Barsness: All right. You can find Chris. We're going to point you to Abelson Taylor and or Chris's profile on LinkedIn. Chris, C H R I S Mauck M a U C K. If you look him up on LinkedIn and find him at Abelson Taylor, that is probably him. And.

We wanted to last thank our listeners for joining us. You can download episodes of our program by going to fjorge.com slash mind your own marketing business or subscribing to the show on iTunes, SoundCloud, and Spotify.

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