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It’s time to talk about the user experience part of content strategy. In part 1 of this series, we talked about content. In Part 2, we talked about your capabilities. In part 3, we talked about your audience.

Without an effective user experience, you’re going to lose your audience, and all that money you just spent on formulating processes and creating content will be for nothing.

What do we mean by user experience? First let’s look at what nathan.com says it is:

The overall experience, in general or specifics, a user, customer, or audience member has with a product, service, or event. In the Usability field, this experience is usually defined in terms of ease-of-use. However, the experience encompasses more than merely function and flow, but the understanding compiled through all of the senses.

And of course, there’s Jesse James Garrett’s famous graphic on the elements of user experience, which he expanded into a very readable book on the subject. He moves from the more abstract (user requirements, business goals) through information architecture and into visual design, bifurcated because Web sites are not only visual mediums of communication, they are also software products in their own right (or can be).

These definitions and infographics can be a bit difficult to grok, so I’ll break it down to its atomic parts, again using the face of a pyramid. I think I can get it down to one sentence, actually:

A Web site’s user experience should present information, in whatever way it is encoded, in such an easy-to-use manner that your users are unaware of “user experience.”

That’s it. Think about this for a minute. Have you ever walked into a public building in your city and been amazed at the beautiful architecture, the grand entry, or the little design googaws on walls and ceilings? Were you impressed by its beauty? By how well it was laid out?

A few minutes later, when you tired of waiting for the creaking 40-year-old elevator, did you finally just give up and take the five flights of stairs to the office that you needed? Were you annoyed by the fact that there was inadequate signage and you had to keep asking passing clerks and visitors where to find the DMV or the Hall of Records or somesuch? Were you surprised to find only one harried clerk behind the desk trying to serve three dozen folks in line, while everyone else behind the counter was either taking their lunch or talking leisurely on the phone?

If you’ve ever had this kind of experience, then you know what I’m talking about. Yes, when you first went into the building, you loved the architecture. You couldn’t believe the grandeur of the place. But once you had to start interacting with the place, it became a chore. That’s when you started to notice the user experience.

User experience, when you notice it, is very much akin to good service. Good service is expected if you hire a company or eat at a restaurant. Outstanding service is good, but that might not get you talking to others as fast as bad service. One little annoyance, or a string of annoyances can amount to bad word of mouth.

So how do we pull off a great user experience? The answer is….”it depends.” Sorry to be so oblique here but effective user experience is equal parts objective and subjective. What have we learned here at Triple Dog Dare Media?

Effective user experience depends on the audience. It also depends on the organization’s goals and capabilities. It also depends on the kind of content you have on your site. Audience-goals-content, the troika of good user experience.

The best way to picture it is to think of user experience as having various components:

1. Effective organizational structures. Group like things together. If you have a section on your web site that covers industry solutions, make sure to keep them grouped together. If you’re not sure how to do this, use card sorting (or hire someone like us to do it for you) to map out the information space inside your users’ heads.
2. Effective labeling. What makes the most effective labels? Depends on the users of the information. Speak to them in their language. If they expect to see jargon, then don’t be afraid to use it. Don’t make folks translate things.
3. Effective linking. Sometimes content can relate to content in totally different parts of the site. For example, you may want to publish all your white papers in the part of your site you’ve labeled “White Papers.” But you may have white papers in there that relate to certain industry solutions you have, so it’s probably a good idea to include sidebar links from industry solutions content to those white papers.
4. Effective search capabilities. Those users who can’t find what they’re looking for by browsing will turn to a search engine, so you’d better have one. Even a mildly effective search engine is better than none at all. What should you be indexing? Filenames, titles, short descriptions, abstracts, and keywords. If you can index entire articles or white papers, do that by all means.
5. Effective visual design. Make it easy for folks to gather information. Keep the line lengths short. Keep backgrounds uncluttered with images. Don’t distract users with a ton of blinking, hopping, strutting banner ads. Use high-contrast values between text and background. Stop using tiny nano fonts so beloved of all graphic designers everywhere–or at the very least, make it easy for users to bump up the fonts. Provide printer-friendly versions of your content. Allow users to email content to themselves or someone else.

If you’re missing one of these, the whole thing starts to unravel. Lay your site out perfectly, provide tons of cross-linking, give me good visual design and great labeling that’s familiar to the way I talk, but forget search and the entire user experience suddenly has a time bomb planted in the heart of it. Things may be okay today, or all next week, or even until the end of the month, but one day I’ll come to your site and will want to find something without remembering the path I took the last time. Without a search, I’m sunk. And frustrated. And having a “user experience” moment that may cause me to never come back.

One more thing: always make it easy for users to contact you for more information. Providing feedback mechanisms that actually get responded to is a basic requirement in this game. Otherwise, what’s the point of having an interactive web site?

In a few days, I’ll post the final post in this series.

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In part 1 of this series, I introduced you to the content strategy pyramid and talked about content strategy as one of the faces of the pyramid. In part 2, we talked about another face of the same pyramid, content capabilities. Now it’s time to talk about your audience.

Unlike the first two faces of the pyramid, the audience face is not tiered, because that would imply somehow that only technical folks read the content from the bottom part of the content face, or that executive decision makers only read stuff from the top. Although this may be true in most contexts, what we find is that your audience is best visualized as participating in a lifecycle of interest.

This lifecycle of interest should always be aligned to your organization’s goals, no matter what they are. Does your organization want to sell more products or services to this audience? Does the organization want them to contribute to a charitable cause? Does the organization want them to buy products and services from affiliates? No matter what the goal is, the lifecycle of interest is something that every audience member will go through.

Entering the lifecycle of interest is a highly personal thing–some in your audience may hit your web site and bounce right off (they don’t enter the lifecycle at all), or they may come in at different points. They may stay in a certain phase for a long time, or they may move from phase to phase with every word they read, ending with a fevered call to your sales reps or an immediate purchase from your site.

Since you can’t control how they enter, where they enter, or how long they stay in the lifecycle of interest, what can you do? For that matter, do you really want everyone who visits your web site to enter this lifecycle?

The answer to the second question is very easy, and that answer is NO.

Let me go off on a slight tangent here. The #1 mistake that’s perpetrated by most web sites content-wise is internal focus. In other words, the content talks all about the organization, how many awards it has won, how many employees it has, blah blah blah. Nobody cares! Certainly not your prospect or customer. They only care about what you can do for them.

The #2 mistake content-wise is being boring. You know what I mean. You hire a copywriter to inject your copy with some spine and verve and then it gets rewritten by a committee of lawyers and execs until nobody really understands what it is you do, but nobody could stay awake long enough to come to that conclusion anyway, so no worries, right?

The #3 mistake content-wise is appealing to everyone. WRONG. We always encourage our customers to use language, terminology, and rhetorical approaches that filter out those people who are a waste of time as defined by the ultimate organizational goal. If your organization wants to attract prospects who are interested in purchasing a $50,000 piece of manufacturing equipment, then weed out those visitors who can only afford $5,000 worth of equipment, or who are there for other purposes (some of which may be huge time-sinks for your sales force).

The answer to the first question is a bit more complex, so before we get into that, we’d better look at the different phases of the lifecycle of interest.For most people, the lifecycle goes like this:

1. Cold contact. They’ve found you through Google or other research, they know nothing about you, they don’t even know if you’re a good match for them or vice versa. They usually don’t stay in this phase very long. Why? Because they either read something on your web site that makes them stick around a bit longer, or they get confused, bored, or otherwise uninterested and leave, probably never to return. (If they leave, it’s always best that they leave for better reasons than those!)
2. Qualified prospect. At some point, if they haven’t left, your content qualifies them at some level, and the same is true vice-versa. They may be entry-level buyers for your service, or they may see that their budget is too small. You and your products may become runners-up for an invitation-only RFP. Note that many folks might come to your site already qualified. They may have been to your booth at a convention, talked with one of your sales reps, or gotten a glowing recommendation from someone they respect about your products and services.
3. Repeat visitor. Repeat visitors have usually qualified themselves into one of various categories, and now they’re coming back to dig around a bit more. They may also be spending time doing comparison shopping with some of your competitors, trying to figure out how you’re different or if you’re a good match to their culture, processes, and requirements. In this age of content syndication, it is possible to have a “repeat visitor” who has read your syndicated blog items or e-newsletters numerous times without ever having come in contact with your main Web presence.
4. Champion. Champions are few and far between. They may be trusted partners, big customers, or even one-time customers who refer you a lot of business or write about you on their blog sites (for example). They love you, they promote you, they buy lots of stuff from you.

At any point in the lifecycle, a person can leave; yes, even long-time champions can get turned off by a change in editorial direction (for instance). At any point of the lifecycle, a person can decide that they’ve digested enough content and then want to buy your product, hire your consultants, or do whatever it is that you want them to do. At any point in the lifecycle, a person can decide implicitly that they will stay there indefinitely; for example, they may choose to become a repeat visitor to your white paper section and never ever make a buying decision no matter how much you bombard them with sales reps and emails.

So what can you do? Every page, and I mean every page, has to have some kind of content that appeals to the different folks in their own personal lifecycles.

If you have a page full of white papers, you’d better have one that says “Company Overview and Capabilities” for those folks who are Cold Contacts.

You’d also better have stuff that goes into more detail for the Qualified Prospects, and you’d better believe that they will be using that information to make some kind of decision about buying your stuff versus somebody else’s stuff.

You’d better have freshly baked content for the Repeat Visitor, because they may get bored and move on.

And for the Champions? Links to special invitation only, password-protected pages that provide them with nitty-gritty white papers and case studies, the good stuff chock full of vitamins and data, the stuff that isn’t available on the street.

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In a previous post, I talked a bit about the content strategy pyramid. As a brief recap, I stated that you should put your how-to content on the bottom of the pyramid (they are the most plentiful in your info-ecosystem), place white papers and case studies in the tier above them, and so on until you get to the top of the pyramid, where you put your roadmap pieces that tie everything together for the customer.

It’s time to make this a true three-dimensional pyramid. A pyramid has five sides–four faces that are vertical and a flat foundation (aha! gotcha!). In this post, I’m going to ask you to turn the pyramid a bit so you can see the next face, which we’ll fill in with your capabilities. In a few days I’ll ask you to turn the pyramid once more, and that’s when we’ll talk about your audience. A few days after that we’ll cover user experience design. Finally, we’ll cover the foundation for any good content strategy pyramid–research & improvement.

For right now, though, let’s talk about your capabilities.

Like the content face of the content strategy pyramid, the capabilities face is also tiered. No groaning allowed–this face only has three tiers:

• The bottom tier is all about infrastructure. Do you have a CMS or electronic publishing system? A database to hold information? Tools like Dreamweaver, Framemaker, Robohelp, Photoshop, Fireworks? Do you have Documentum or Subversion for keeping track of versioning? More is definitely not better–the key to success with infrastructure is having the right tools to take on the job before you. No way are you going to be able to keep up with a 2000 content item Web site with text editors and Photoshop.
• The second tier is all about workflow. This is where the rubber meets the road in any publishing endeavor. Who does what with which documents and assets, who has access to which file repositories? Who needs approval from legal to publish documents? Workflow is usually run by some kind of computerized system, but don’t limit yourself. Workflow is also about office politics, working well together, and staying within regulatory boundaries. For example, posting a press release too soon may not be a big deal if you are a privately held firm, but public firms have to follow rules about disseminating information to the public.
• The top tier is about policy. A strong editorial policy will help you define who your audience is, what you will and won’t publish, how your content effort supports the goals of the organization, what kinds of advertising you show visitors, how often you publish, and what would constitute a good reason to stray from the rules. For example, you may only publish every few days, but a late-breaking story that affects your customers might prompt you to not only publish materials on your web site but also push out a special unscheduled e-newsletter.

PWI — policy, worfklow, infrastructure. Do you need all three to succeed? Of course not. We’ve seen plenty of organizations that have no written policies, haphazard workflow, and next to no infrastructure. Yet they manage to add lots of content to their web site…but that’s just it. They use the “let’s see if it sticks to the wall” method, without any idea if the content actually aligns with organizational goals, say, or if it complies with good regulatory practices.

So long until next time.

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Customer: Time Warner Cable Media Sales
Problem: TW needed an easy way to maintain their web properties
Solution: We customized and installed TopDog.
URL: http://www.cableadvertising.net and http://www.kaboink.com

Two of Time Warner’s online properties in Texas, kaboink.com and cableadvertising.net, needed to be updated on a regular basis. Time Warner needed a simple yet flexible technology that would keep their marketing staff productive.

We provided customized versions of TopDog for both properties. The system allows them to update pages, upload files, manage testimonials, thus keeping both sites current. TopDog’s built-in WYSIWYG editor, xinha, flattens the learning curve for staff members who may be unfamiliar with HTML.

One of Time Warner’s special requests made it back into TopDog’s core code base: they wanted to log in to the administrative section and then open a new window to browse their sites. They wanted the web site to be smart enough to see that they were already logged in and then provide them with an edit link that would let them jump right to the edit screens to update a page as they navigated.

We took existing visual designs and skinned TopDog with them, made further tweaks to the underlying framework, and delivered training to key employees.

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I’ve been undertaking a very interesting exercise these past few days. I purchased and downloaded a list of top B2B advertising/creative agencies. All of these firms have been classified into different buckets: “small”, “medium”, “large”, or “interactive.” Some have a dozen employees, some 50 to 100, some have *thousands* of employees (McCann Erickson, others).

More than 70% of the web sites run by these agencies either start with or are completely built in Flash. Can I tell you how much I dislike the use of Flash in this regard? Every bit of the experience I find irritating: waiting for the intro movie to start playing (some didn’t give me the option to skip), turning the volume down on my computer when the techno beat starts, waiting for all those gee-whiz animations to stop positioning text and graphical elements, reading those tiny anti-aliased fonts inside those pastel or electric-neon colored boxes, not having search on the site or via the browser, not being able to assign my own stylesheet so I can bump up the font!

When I try to analyze a customer’s web site that has Flash navigation–guess what, our spider can’t figure out how to follow the links (nor can any spider, including Google’s). Ding ding ding! Yes, you have a very pretty site, but not all your readers are (sighted) people, they’re software agents. Other programs that are trying to make sense of your information structures. Just as choosing a paper stock or typography can make or break a print project, these kinds of considerations can make or break an interactive one.

When did interactive turn into dog and pony show? Who hijacked interactive from the land of tracking sales, gathering leads, managing workflow, removing layers of bureaucracy between you and the customer, allowing your customer to get information and make decisions and comparisons?

As ModemMedia puts it on their manifesto page:

Your customers have been busy using [the Web] to gather information, compare products, share experiences and, of course, to buy.

In 2002, the Internet was a factor in 73 percent of all auto purchases, a third of all personal insurance purchases and was the most-used channel for planning travel. And those numbers are rising.

In fact, in every industry, the percentage of people who use the Internet during the purchase and ownership cycle is climbing. The Internet is becoming the customer’s dominant channel.

So, if your Internet investment isn’t climbing, we can tell you what’s going to happen to your market share: It’s going to be falling.

The question, then, isn’t whether you should invest in interactive marketing. You should.

The question is how.

The holy grail of all good web sites? The Three C’s — Content, Commerce, Community. Sometimes you can get away with not having so much of one (like commerce), but missing two or three of these elements means you really don’t have a web site–you have an electronic brochure. Blah.

Here’s some more from ModemMedia’s manifesto:

Your customers depend on the Internet for communications, information and commerce – for services that get things done. They don’t watch it like TV or read it like a newspaper. They use it.

To win their business, you have to give them more than intrusive advertising messages.

You have to make yourself useful.

So the answer for us and a few other firms, at least, to the question posed at the top of the blog is NO, interactive doesn’t mean break out the circus tent, the dancing dogs, the lion tamer, and the sideshow freaks. We don’t want to dazzle you with our dizzying feats of folderol, and your customers don’t want that either. They want good solid stuff they can use to make decisions. Important decisions–ranging from which neighborhood to move to or what car to buy all the way down to which detergent or hand lotion is the least sensitive on their skin.

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