I really like user stories for higher-level stakeholders. Executives and business analysts approach the problem of product development from a different angle. The primary motive is “what can we build that will increase our revenue the most?” Now, thankfully, this dovetails with “what do our current users want?” and “what do potential customers want?” but it puts a particular lens on the problem. By focusing on a user story, which can be written quickly and understood at a high level, you can make a pretty good rough-cut at what you should build and what the business value should be.

Now in a pure Agile environment, this user story might have been sent straight to developers. Can you see the danger here? I’ve heard of Agile teams who want only one sentence of guidance before they start coding. If your developers are also UX experts, no problem. They can solve the user issue, design and develop a solution, and off you go.

So what did we do next? We prototyped. Using ProtoShare, our UX Guru prototyped an implementation hypothesis. It included facets of the issue that weren’t included in the original user story: If arbitrary groups are supported, how are they managed? Do users have their own groups or are they project-wide or account-wide? If someone is added to a group, what happens to all the artifacts that the group is subscribed to? Are groups just a way to select a bunch of users or do they have some independent existence?

Prototyping made these issues concrete. Instead of thinking up all the edge cases, the higher-level users could experience the prototype and would ask specific questions (e.g. “I want to do this, how do I do it?”). Now sometimes these questions fall outside of the original user story, but sometimes they don’t. In the end, we answered enough of these questions to take it to our end users.

So we ran some sessions with customers who had specifically asked for this feature. They had lots of users. During these sessions, the reaction was typically: “yeah, this is useful, but I really want it to do X, Y and Z.” Ultimately, once the users saw and experienced the feature, they were able to effectively judge the actual value of the feature to them.  What we realized is that the feature we were considering to be the top business priority was really a “nice to have” for a handful of larger customers.

You can see why the business stakeholders liked this feature at first: it met the needs of our largest customers. The thinking was that we want to keep them happy, and that by addressing this need we would be a better fit for other big customers. And there was nothing obvious that appeared to serve this end better.

So our UX team learned, through collaboration with the business stakeholders, what the value proposition was for this feature. The business stakeholders learned, through collaboration, that the feature was deeper, more complicated and had more profound implications than were obvious at first glance. And both business stakeholders and the UX team learned from customers that this really wasn’t going to help us sell any more product.

Missing from this story is our development team. They never got involved other than some initial feedback about the feasibility and technical difficulties of various proposals. They continued to work on the already prioritized and understood features.

If we had decided to go ahead and build this feature, there would have been additional collaboration all up and down the chain focusing on development implications. (There are frequently even more missed functionality discoveries once development starts. Having open lines of communication to clear these up quickly is important.) By the time implementation was complete, business, UX, developers and end users would all understand and confirm the value of the feature.

Ultimately, the decision was made not to add this functionality in the next sprint. The total elapsed time between the initial prioritization of the idea and its abandonment as top priority was 3 days. But what I really love about this process is that we actually significantly moved the ball forward on this feature. We didn’t drop the idea completely, we just adjusted its priority. And the knowledge and understanding of the problem didn’t disappear. The user story is still in our system and it is linked directly to prototypes that explore the problem, questions and comments by all stakeholders, decisions and resolutions that are recorded along with their reasoning.

Something else you’ll notice about this story is that for each step in the collaboration, there are defined roles: business analysts prioritize the user stories and communicate that to UX. UX investigates the stories and communicates those issues to business analysts. Part of UX’s investigation involves testing hypotheses with end users.

This process emphasizes my two touchstones for successful UX: user testing and validation, and creation of a shared understanding. One other feature of this method of collaboration is that you need to maintain structure and responsibility for the various stages of the collaboration. This is not free-form brainstorming. It’s adding collaboration to a defined process. Business analysts do their work, and then they are required to communicate it to UX. The communication is a two-way street, with the goal of creating shared understanding. UX pros do their work and communicate it to business analysts, end users and developers, again in a back-and-forth process that listens to feedback, gathers evidence and responds to it.

Today on Radio Johnny Jeff Parks talks with Derek Featherstone, who will be presenting at the upcoming edUi conference about the importance of accessible design in the creation of great experiences for every user. Derek argues that organizations need to look at accessibility as a design tool and not simply as list of requirements with which they must comply. As we build more dynamic interfaces our standard of care must also increase. As designers we should striving to make products and services that are both technically perfect and easy to use for every person, regardless of their physical limitations.

Quotes

“We really want to make sure that we’re doing this for all people and not just for people that have perfect vision or perfect hearing or have full use of their hands… We want to create experiences that are just as engaging and just as magical and just as easy to use for people with disabilities as well.”

“There’s a huge cross-over between the mobile space and the accessibility space…One of the things we’ve embraced for years in accessibility is the idea of flexibility and adaptability.”

“If we look at accessibility as a design tool, and a core business requirement, we start looking at it much earlier in the design process. We start looking at it when we’re first conceptualizing a product or project.”

Notes

* Follow Derek on Twitter
* W3C World Accessibility Initiative
* Re-Research: A New Picture of Existing Data – Making a difference for your organization, using mental models” by Indi Young

Jeff On Radio Johnny today I have the pleasure of speaking with Derek Featherstone, internationally known authority on accessibility and web development and a highly sought after speaker and published author. His experiences include hands-on web development with a specific focus on delivering web standards based solutions that encourage the response beliefs of javascript and AJAX in a way that allows these dynamic web interfaces and accessibility to coexist. Focusing on big picture strategy, up to the elbows in design and code on the tactical side, doesn’t get any better than that.

I couldn’t agree with you more, Derek. Thanks so much for joining me on Radio Johnny.

Derek Thanks for having me here, Jeff.

Jeff This is great. The overarching theme today that you’d like to talk to our listeners a little bit about is creating interface magic for everyone. Maybe you could talk to our listeners a little bit about what the focus of today’s topic is about and give us a little more on your experiences and background.

Derek The basic premise in terms of creating interface magic is that we spend a lot of time and a lot of effort making sure that we create experiences that are engaging, that are a pleasure to use, and that are more than just “let’s slap this together and get it live.”

All the different clients that we’ve worked with over the years all want to do more than just the bare minimum in terms of design and in terms of providing an experience. I think that’s a really important piece of doing what we do on the web. We’re people that want to do more than just what it takes to get by, at least I know certainly our clients are that way and I’m sure most of yours and most of our listeners are as well.

The idea of doing this for all people is that we really want to make sure that we’re doing this for all people and not just for people that have perfect vision or perfect hearing, or have full use of their hands or whatever it may be. We want to create experiences that are just as engaging and just as magical and just as easy to use for people with disabilities as well.

Jeff Absolutely. You described very succinctly there why this is important, but I think it’s also important because one of the first points you talk about is the fact that we all lose our capacity as we age. In North America with the Baby Boomers being the largest generation in North America’s history this is an area that I think is critical, as you just articulated, to get right and to build into what people constitute as being a great user experience.

Derek Absolutely. That’s really what this is about is making sure that accessibility and creating things that are easy to use for people with disabilities is just seen as part of overall user experience and sort of a core requirement to make things work really well for everyone.

Jeff Exactly. To give people some perspective on this as well; I have a background of working with people with disabilities for nearly a decade, so I can appreciate the importance of this. But, I would think it gets even more complicated when we’re designing for, let’s say 20% of the screen on an iPhone or something like that. There’s a lot of talk about mobile design today. Are there moves towards trying to make things more accessible on mobile devices as well for individuals?

Derek There absolutely is. There’s a huge crossover between the mobile space and the accessibility space. A lot of the things that we do in the accessibility world are not just benefits for accessibility sake but they’re also benefits in the mobile world. One of the things that we’ve embraced for years in accessibility is the idea of flexibility and adaptability.

That’s something that we’ve really pushed, and lots of accessibility advocates have pushed, is to say the things that we’re building need to be flexible and malleable so that somebody that has specific needs can adjust and use what you’ve provided, but adjust them so that they work well with their device, or work well with their particular needs or their particular mode of interaction.

We see a lot of crossover even just at a basic philosophical level. When we’re talking about mobile design now, we’re talking about creating things that work on lots of different devices in different settings and in different scenarios. Even simple things like looking at something natively within a browser on an iPad, an iPhone, or an Android device, but then looking at that same content inside of an app on that same device there’s actually sometimes subtle differences between how the built-in browser works and the embedded browser works.

Understanding some of those subtleties and having a flexible design that can fit in both scenarios and work really well is kind of an important piece of the mobile space as well, so there’s huge crossover.

Jeff The point I really liked here on the notes you provided me was that importantly we need to look at accessibility as a design tool, as part of user experience and not simply as compliance.

From my experience and people I’ve talked to, when they think about accessibility it’s almost like a human resources job description. There are certain things that need to be complied with to fill the job and if we’re going to comply with making things accessible it’s a short checklist of things and we’re done.

But to your point, we need to stop looking at it like that and we need to look at this bigger picture and these other elements that are now coming into play with different browsers, with the advent of tablets and mobile. It’s a critical piece that I don’t hear people talking a lot about.

Derek Absolutely. That’s something for us that has evolved as a philosophy over time. It’s very natural for people to think about accessibility as a compliance requirement because in most cases it is a compliance requirement. What ends up happening in those scenarios is that we have clients that come to us at all different stages of projects.

Sometimes they come to us right at the beginning when they’re first conceptualizing a product or a project, or they’ll come to us at the design stage or they’ll come to us when they’ve already got a design mostly finished but they want us to check on a few things. In lots of cases they’ll come right near the end when the product has mostly been built and is somewhat ready for launch or they’re a significant way down the pathway of developing whatever it is that they’re developing and then they ask us for our accessibility advice then.

The idea that accessibility is a thing to be complied with and a checklist – it’s not that the checklist is not important, it’s an important piece of this, but the idea that accessibility as compliance, when that’s the pervading thought behind what accessibility is it means that it doesn’t get applied until much later in the process when it’s too late to make fundamental design changes.

Whereas if we look at accessibility as a design tool and as a core business requirement we take it into account much earlier in the process, we start looking at it when we’re first conceptualizing a product or a project and say, “Are there specific needs for content,” for example, “for different devices, for different settings? How do people with disabilities engage with this?”

I know you’re familiar with Indi Young and her work in mental models.

Jeff Yes.

Derek There are things that we look at. When she’s going through and determining the mental model of somebody that’s trying to complete a particular task, even something simple like a movie, for example, the whole process of figuring out what movies to go to.

There are things that people with disabilities may take into account or consider that other people just don’t need to. The choice of what movie to go see may not depend exclusively on friends or other things like that, but their transportation decisions may be completely different, whether or not there’s accessible transportation available at the particular movie time.

We need to take those things into account as much as possible, as early as possible in the process. That includes right from the get-go when we’re first putting our ideas together about what a product or project should be.

Jeff Exactly. You shared with me, Derek, the idea that right now you and your team are working on a redesign of 17 individual sites that are being consolidated into one for a major U.S. health insurance provider. Can you talk to our listeners a little bit about it? I think you’ve described probably what you’re going through with them as well. But, are there specific things around accessibility and is that a focal point for this particular project?

Derek It’s probably the most exciting project that we’ve ever worked on, to be honest with you.

They looked at this as an opportunity to say, “We have these 17 sites with slightly different branding and slightly different look and feel, and we need to consolidate this into one. For info structure reasons we’ve got multiple servers all over the place, there’s just a whole lot of good business sense in bringing this all into one house and having it under one new consolidated brand.” They looked at that and said, “This is our opportunity to make sure that everything we do is accessible from the get-go.”

They engaged with us a few other partners right from the beginning so that accessibility was taken into account right up front, both the strategic side and the tactical side of it. We’re involved in a lot of different things there. We’re building components for the site, we’re building templates and layouts, we’re designing things for them, we’re reviewing other people’s designs, we’re working with third party vendors to help make sure that they’re choosing the right vendors that have the most accessible code or is going to be able to produce the ultimate end result, not just in accessibility but overall usability and ease of use.

To top it off, we’re not even aiming for Level A compliance with the web content accessibility guidelines, we’re not even aiming for Level AA. We’re actually aiming for as close to full AAA compliance as we can. It really has been a dream project in that they’re dealing with accessibility and dealing with it appropriately right from the start, but also really shooting for the moon, really aiming as high as they can. That wasn’t even the right thing to say, they’re not shooting for the moon. They really are shooting for the stars. They’re aiming as high as absolutely possible.

Jeff I can’t think of a more appropriate industry than the health insurance industry for accessibility to be top of mind all the time. That is ultimately that is your target audience. People have asked me in the past, “How do we tie accessibility into usability?” When it comes down to that specific sector in particular, which is a huge industry the world over, especially in North America and the United States with the health insurance, I can’t think of a more appropriate place to start modeling that importance in that area.

Derek It absolutely is. I think that’s part of the reason that they’re shooting and aiming so high, and they know that they want to take it into account from the get-go. They had significant experience in usability and overall user experience and they’ve done studies to work with users on actually walking through processes and things on their website, and they’ve been looking to improve those things. They know that a really highly significant portion of their audience is an aging population, so they are fully aware of the implications of what they’re doing. That’s part of the reason, to credit the people that work there, they really took it on board and said, “We need to do this. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it really is a huge part of serving our customers.”

Jeff Without question. Quite frankly, in the web world where so much is (pardon the bad pun) Flash, with everything that’s just so “look at me, look at me,” it’s refreshing to hear this kind of work being done in an area where the web is actually demonstrating a value add to help people in the real world and not just through the virtual worlds that are being created by you and your team. Absolutely critical. Accessibility, I think, should be a much more broadly talked about concept and topic.

Just to finish up here, what do you think the greatest barriers are to creating accessible websites and web services? I mean this with all due respect… Is it ignorance on behalf of the client and the community or is it literally a lack of knowledge, or is it just time? What are some of the biggest issues that you’ve run into in the past?

Derek I think awareness is a huge issue. What we’re seeing happen a lot now, we’re being engaged by a particular client to evaluate the work of their other third party vendors to say, “These guys are saying that their stuff is accessible. Can you assess this for us and let us know what needs to be changed?” We’re seeing that people are starting to build accessibility requirements fully into their procurement process. That’s a huge step, because what that means is that it’s there in paperwork, which means it’s being seen much more widely across the business. So awareness is a huge issue and always is.

There’s even groups that we work with that have said in the past, “Yes, we know how to do accessible code,” or, “we know how to create an accessible website.” What we’ve actually found in many cases is that they have maybe a basic understanding but a lot of the nuances and the things that we’re talking about where we’re talking about truly creating a great experience for somebody that has a disability that’s using assistive technology or is using different settings in their browser. They understand the basics but they don’t have necessarily a lot of experience to base it on in terms of working with actual people with disabilities.

That awareness is sort of two-fold. One, it’s the general awareness of accessibility. Some people just genuinely don’t know that it’s even an issue. Then the other side of it is the awareness of how this actually works with real people and not just this theoretical concept that I’ve got this checklist and if I’ve done that I’m accessible. So awareness is huge.

The other side of things is really time. You said these two right at the beginning. Time is a huge one simply because accessibility needs to be prioritized the way that everything else does. One of the things that we see happening in this project that we’re working on with this one client, they’re fantastic, it’s an agile development process that they’re using right now, so in every sprint planning session the accessibility team is represented to the point where they’re asking us how many points should be assigned to a sprint for accessibility work that needs to be done so that it’s all done right up front and is planned for and it’s not this thing at the end, “Don’t forget to run it through this little checker.” It’s more this is planned for right up front.

That doesn’t happen absolutely everywhere. Time is a huge factor. The time isn’t necessarily an issue in that it takes so much more time to build things and design things in an accessible way. The only reason that it takes more time is because there’s a learning process that goes with it.

Once you know how to design in a more accessible way and how to build things in a more accessible way, there are some things that just take more time because there’s more hands touching the project, but ultimately once you’re aware of the design and the development implications it really doesn’t change your overall time that much for your specific work. It now becomes just how you do it in the first place, not this extra thing that you have to do.

That’s really the way that it should be, right? It should be integrated into all your processes and all your workflows, your software development lifecycle or whatever it is that you’re working on. Once it’s integrated into that and people know what they need to do then the time issue doesn’t go away completely, but it really become much less significant because it just becomes the way that we do things.

Jeff It becomes like what these experience communities are talking about all the time, which is trying to make everything ubiquitous or seamless or almost invisible – it’s just automatic. Almost electricity when you flip the light on in the morning, it’s just there.

Derek Yes, it just happens.

Jeff Exactly. Derek Featherstone, thank you so much for joining me today on Radio Johnny. I understand you’ll be talking about this at the upcoming edUi Conference as well. Correct?

Derek Yes, that’s coming up in September.

Jeff Wonderful. Derek, thank you so much for joining me today. Also, on behalf of all the people whose work and lives I know that your work is going to touch, thank you very much for all your efforts.

Derek Thank you, Jeff.

Today on Radio Johnny Jeff Parks talks with Eric Phetteplace, Emerging Technologies Librarian at Chesapeake College in rural Maryland, who will be presenting at the upcoming edUi conference about the importance of performance when designing for mobile. Eric argues that performance cannot be an afterthought but should be a distinct development concern in every project. He describes the most important improvements to make, shares tools that can automate performance improvements, as well as the specific problems libraries and educational institutions typically encounter.

Quotes

“…we think about the design, we think about the content – what the message is – but really you have to consider how is this going to perform…Writing a performant website is the baseline that needs to be a consideration on everything you work with… reducing the amount of data being sent and the number of HTTP requests…”

“…users expect sites to load faster on their smartphones than they do on their desktop computers which are a lot more high powered, and most are on better Internet connections. Not only that; the trend is getting worse! The first study [by Gomez] was done in 2009 and then again in 2011. The first time around, the number was about 60% of people thought things should be faster on their smartphones… the next time around it was something like 80%”

“As the web becomes a mature development platform, new things are constantly coming out that make our lives easier – that make us not have to deal with the nitty-gritty details. [See Notes below for examples]“

Notes

* Follow Eric on Twitter
* The .htaccess
* Filament Group’s South Street
* Browser Stack
* MobiTest
* Web Page Test
* Yeoman
* jQuery Mobile Download Builder
* Steve Souders
* Stoyan Stefanov
* Jason Grigsby

Today on Radio Johnny Jeff Parks talks with Fam Mirza, Founder & Executive Creative Director of Mirza Minds. Fam Mirza has had his work in the Superbowl halftime show, and national TV, in addition to working with several artists in the music industry formulating event concepts & marketing strategies; most recently with Sean P. Diddy Combs. Fam Mirza shares his insights about the importance of simplicity in the creation of successful events and experiences through engaging stories – including the 1 Face Watch – an initiative designed to promote awareness and raise funds to help solve health and environmental issues the world over.

Quotes

“It’s interesting to see in such an advanced age simplicity is still key. Not only in product designs, event concepts but also in user interfaces because no matter how advanced our society gets, the user will always want a fully functional and easy to use product – that’s just human nature.”

“Marshall Ganz is a professor at Harvard and he was also responsible for putting together the organizational model for President Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign…his storytelling method uses the story of ‘us’, the story of ‘self’ and the story of ‘now’ to tell a story and create change. It provokes the listener to take action!”

“A product is a product but once you put a story behind it now it’s more than a product. The story is the bridge that you can use to connect with the consumer and that should be the goal of any organization right now – to socialize a product.”

“The 1 Face Project is a mirror face watch – so you can see your face in it – the mission statement behind it is: ‘Changing the world – one face at a time!’ Each colour of the watch represents a different cause. The black is for Cancer. The white is for Poverty. The clear is for Water. The blue is for Climate Change. The red is for Heart Disease. The pink is for Breast Cancer. The proceeds go to their respective charities to create change in the world.”

Notes

* 1 Face Watch
* Mirza Minds design agency
* Follow Fam Mirza on Twitter

Today on Radio Johnny, Jeff Parks talks with Shmuli Goldberg from ClickTale analytics about designing for mobile – where there is no keyboard, mouse, or 20 inch monitor – we are now designing for people in the real world in almost any environment. Tracking the interactions of taps, tilts, and pinches will be key in creating that great experience companies are looking to for their customers. This now involves a brand new approach that “swipes” the slate clean and demands that we learn from scratch!

Quotes

“…no one took a second to step back and realize the three pinnacles on which they built everything to date – spent 20 to 25 years perfecting the experience for a specific interface – was gone! There is no keyboard. There is no mouse and there’s no more 19 or 22 inch screen sitting on a desktop. Instead we have a device in its’ essence that while we are touching or pushing we cannot see part of the screen. We have a device which is meant to be held in the palm our hand using gestures and native interactions directly through touch… it should not be a shrunken version of your website.”

“I had a great quote from a friend of mine who said ‘Browsing the web on a mobile devise is like using Internet Explorer in 1997!’ You can see how great the Internet could be but it’s still not fun to use yet, it’s still a struggle.”

“The mobile web is not the next evolution of the web it is a brand new animal! It has different rules, different inputs…this is because the mobile user is not the same as the desktop user.”

“We’ve built from the ground up the ability to track brand new gestures. The ability to track things such as swipes and zooms-in, flicks and even tilting the devise itself so you get a perfect understanding for how people are using the mobile device.”

Notes

* ClickTale’s Beta Mobile Analytics application
* Follow ClickTale on Twitter
* Rosenfeld Meida’s The Mobile Frontier – A Guide For Designing Mobile Experiences

Sure, you can search Pinterest, but what makes the site so much fun is the exploration and element of surprise, in large part enabled by categorization of content by both the Pinterest team and the site’s users. As user trends continue to shift from search to discovery, creating the structure and process to support that discovery requires a sophisticated content strategy.

Taxonomy is about so much more than categorizing content. When crafting a content strategy, we consider the people, processes and technologies that support the content throughout its lifecycle. The same goes for creating taxonomy. As content strategists, we have to think about taxonomy from the perspective of what terms and structure will help the content perform best and support the organization’s business goals. We also have to consider the longevity and flexibility of the taxonomy.

The Taxonomy of a Pin

On Pinterest, users can explore boards in one of 32 categories—31 specific categories plus the catchall “Other”—and uncategorized boards. But when users create a board, they’re not required to assign one of the 32 taxonomy terms to their board. For someone exploring Pinterest by topic, this leaves a gap between content that exists related to that topic and content that has been categorized as that topic. This means that pins on a food-related board named “Recipes” or “Vegetarian Dishes” may not appear under “Food & Drink,” preventing people from discovering them.

Pinterest could help close this gap by requiring users to categorize their boards at the time they create and name them. Instead of requiring users to categorize each board they create, however, Pinterest’s strategy is to involve other users. When someone comes across an uncategorized board, they’re asked to help by selecting one of the 32 categories from a dropdown.

 So while Pinterest gives its user community a lot of free reign when it comes to naming and organizing content, this strategy is supported by well-placed guidance to help the community improve the quality and reliability of the content. Pinterest strikes a balance between flexibility and structure by involving users in enhancing site categorization while lowering the barrier to entry for users who would rather not spend their time categorizing.

Wondering how to bring together taxonomy and content to form a strategic user experience—and how doing so benefits your organization? Read on.

Taxonomy & Content Strategy: a Match Made in Metadata Heaven

Taxonomy can help support an organization’s content strategy, and vice versa, by:

• Helping users discover and interact with content that’s interesting and relevant to them. Taxonomy enables us to use related content to tell a story and keep users engaged. Want to increase the time people are spending on your site or the number of pages they’re viewing? Make your first impression, “This is great, now give me more of it.” Then use taxonomy to serve up related articles, photo galleries, videos, product descriptions and other content. Paired with an interaction designer, a content strategist can make recommendations for calls to action, prompts, cues and other microcopy that guides users through related content.
• Promoting older but still relevant content. Creating and promoting new content is important, but leading users to older content may also be part of your content strategy. As content strategists, we can work with information architects and developers to find ways to give prominence to content that may otherwise be buried in an archive. For example, for a series of reports usually listed in chronological order and filtered by date, a content strategist may use supporting research to recommend that users also be able to interact with this content by subject.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project does a nice job balancing the latest content with relevant information from its archives. Within each topic page, the emphasis is on the latest research, but users can also filter reports by content type (e.g., report, data set, infographic) and by year. Then, on each report page, the Pew Research Center serves up “Related Research” on the same topic, even though some of the related items might be from a few years ago. In the sidebar, a data point from the report serves as another method of encouraging visitors to explore additional content.

Each of Pew’s reports is served up with related—but not always the most recent—research

• Elevating content from deeper sections of the site. Even if you’re not a strict adherent to the three-click rule, reducing the amount of time it takes your users to discover relevant content can’t be a bad thing. Taxonomy allows us to showcase content that, on a sitemap, appears to be many levels deep on the homepage or secondary pages.
• Relating and reusing content across multiple platforms and site installations. For example, part of your content strategy is to build a stronger connection between your website and your blog, which just happen to be driven by different content management systems. Taxonomy can help. Assuming you’re using the same taxonomy terms in both systems, you can still dynamically relate content using a tool like RSS, pulling relevant blog posts into web pages that are categorized with the same terms.
• Helping our clients manage content now and over time. Content strategists, information architects and developers should work together to determine how taxonomy plays into the content management system, from creating content types to establishing workflows. Using dynamic relationships to populate content in multiple places means less work for the content administrators, who no longer have to update multiple pages or sites with the same information. And presenting content administrators with term lists instead of relying on them to enter metadata reduces human errors and inconsistency.

Keep in mind that implementing or revising a taxonomy can require change management. Choosing well-researched and tested vocabularies can support an intuitive user experience, but may also require some guidance—instructional content on the administrative interface, for example—for content authors and managers. They may be used to using the organization’s internal terms, not the terms site visitors are using when looking for information, to define content.

• Providing context for tagging. You may decide that users, not your organization, are going to define how your content is classified and labeled. Take a look at Goodreads, a social network for readers. You start with the simplest of taxonomies: three default bookshelves called “read,” “currently-reading” and “to-read.” From there, you can create and name other bookshelves, or categories, from the basic “science fiction” to the clever “it-was-earth-all-along,” and place books on more than one shelf.

This approach empowers Goodreads to support discovery in many ways. For example, on each book’s page, you can see a “Genres” callout showing how readers most often classified the book. You can also follow the “See top shelves” link for the full list of shelf names. Whether you prefer to find popular books by broad category or dig into unique, quirky lists made by other users, Goodreads provides ample opportunity to do both.

Genres and bookshelves for The Hunger Games.

Whether you call it “folksonomy” or “social tagging,” your role as a content strategist is to provide the context to empower your users to make the best decisions about tagging your content. What information do they need to tag their content in a way that supports your business strategy, but with minimal effort on their part? And what information does your organization need to maintain, promote and otherwise take advantage of the content users have indexed? Going back to our Goodreads example, the site offers a set of “Bookshelf Tips” to help users get the most out of their categories.

• Empowering designers to create more engaging interactions. Taxonomy, together with other components of information architecture and data modeling, helps designers create the interactions that drive users find the content they need and want to share. Sorting, filtering and visualizing data wouldn’t be possible without the right content structure behind the scenes.

Because taxonomy can impact everything from interface design to content management system development, the best conversations about taxonomy and content strategy usually involve diverse members of your team. The information architect and content strategist should invite designers, writers, search engine optimization specialists, CMS developers, marketers and site administrators to contribute ideas and voice concerns. With input from your stakeholders, it’s time to get started.

Getting Started: If the Taxonomy Fits…

Tags or categories? Open taxonomy or closed vocabulary? How deep should your hierarchies go? Your content strategy should help drive which type of taxonomy to use when.

If your organization’s strategy is to build a collaborative community in which engaged users are creating content, then a closed taxonomy with a limited vocabulary may send the wrong message.

If you plan on creating content about the same subjects for the foreseeable future, then relating content through taxonomy can work well. But if the subjects will change often, then relating specific pieces or types of content to each other rather than linking them via taxonomy may work better.

You may also decide to limit your use of taxonomy, for example, if your organization is highly risk-averse and leaves nothing to chance. Relying on taxonomy-driven dynamic relationships, rather than manually creating the relationships between pieces of content, may not be the right content strategy for you, since you lose control over exactly what displays where. When a database, rather than a human being, is creating content relationships, the results may be humorous or even inappropriate.

When it comes to developing the list of terms you will use, a card sort can be a good starting point. Through this usability method, you can learn how users would organize your content and what labels they would assign to each category—information commonly used to inform sitemap development but just as useful when building out a taxonomy.

What Are You Waiting For?

Gather a multidisciplinary team and look for opportunities to integrate your taxonomy and content strategy. Get up close and personal with your content management system to see how you might be able to create more dynamic relationships between content. Review your archives and dig deeper into your sitemap to see what content deserves a promotion. Figure out where you’re still making updates manually, and see if introducing a taxonomy can help reduce the time you spend administering your content across channels.

Your rewards? Engaging interactions, consistent content and happy content managers, to name just a few.

Getting outside our routine surroundings takes a little effort. You have to ask for names of people to talk to and find out if they’re willing to talk to you. Much of this can be done by recruiters or social media these days, but I swear you have to get out and talk to people. Don’t let a glass pane materialize between you and the participant (read: camera lens, laptop screen, touch screen). Technology puts us at a remove from the people we want to empathize with. Conversation puts us in their head. When someone suggests, “Set up two video cameras, one at regular speed and one on time lapse to try to find patterns in behavior, and then do some casual shadowing observations without the cameras,” it smacks of being too caught up in the researcher/analyst role. You can only guess at what is going on inside people’s minds and hearts. You must ask them and listen to their stories to find out for sure.

How do we do this comfortably? Harness your natural curiosity about the way other people think. You like making things better—but for whom? Question yourself. Usually you can make things better based on your own perspective, but to understand someone else’s perspective you need to do more than observe and interpret.

Some time ago I met with a potential client to do some work on crafting promotional tweets and Facebook status updates with the purpose of sharing commercial offers across social networks. This might not seem to fall within the purview of social interaction design — the job being more of a marketing copy writing contract. But as I dove into the challenge, it soon became clear that even writing tweets and Facebook messages involves a type of social design.

• The design language or form is language itself;
• The medium is communication;
• The system is social networking and distributed messaging;
• The content is branding, sales, and marketing;
• And the interaction is the social and conversational call to action.

Advertising: from image to talk

The old (mass) medium form of advertising is the image. It is versioned for multiple broadcast media and addressed generically to appeal to the greatest number of market segment customers as possible. Messaging will often make lifestyle references, appeals to value and utility, price and quality, aspirational imagery, celebrity endorsement, and so on. Decades of fine-tuning supported by market research and results tracking have provided marketing with a virtually scientific sense of purpose. As simplistic as many advertisements and campaigns may seem, marketing writers operate with a great deal of confidence and awareness about what they are doing.

What then of the conversational style of messaging and promotion now so important in the age of social media? Branding, marketing, and sales function differently in this medium. They eschew the image for talk. Their appeal is more personal and is often targeted. Message distribution occurs not through media buys and placement but through the distribution facilitated by customers themselves. Success is attributed to virality — but in fact communication is far more nuanced and subtle than viral transmission. The call to action is not just an appeal individual action, but is an appeal to social action (sharing, liking, forwarding, recommending, tweeting).

The matter of crafting promotional word-of-mouth messaging for effectiveness across social media is completely unlike that of broadcast messaging. For it relies on the engagement of end users, and depends on their willingness to repeat the message or share the action in their own words (even if it’s just a matter of quoting, or retweeting), to their own peers.

Here, then, is a brief overview of the social interaction design considerations of writing promotional copy.

Social media messaging is relational

The crux of broadcast advertising and marketing is the impression. Messaging seeks, through its claims, its use of image and references, and its aesthetic or style, to make an impression. Audiences are expected to tell a commercial from fact, and so the entire form of communication is bracketed: it’s understood by all that a commercial is fiction. The aim, then, is to make an impression upon audiences such that consumers identify with the message, enough so to form their own mental associations and ultimately recall or even act upon the message broadcast.

This may just involve brand awareness, but more often seeks action: a purchase. The challenge in broadcast messaging is thus the production of messages that make their appeal most effectively to the greatest number of consumers in such a manner that their response to the messaging extends company sales and awareness. The “relationship” is between the brand and the consumer.

Social media messaging is different. The medium is personal, and so messaging arrives within the context of a social tools (twitter, Google, Facebook, etc) used regularly for personal purposes. The messaging is direct, insofar as it appears as a statement received by the user in a medium used for direct communication (again, twitter, Facebook, etc). Image and brand personality references are crafted with words, and so brands may avail themselves of imagery and motion story-telling (tv ads) far less than they are used to. Creative is invested completely in the two axes of social tools: language and speech. And distribution is not controlled, but is rather given over to the audience to execute according to the the message’s appeal.

Social media messaging is appealing

This matter of the appeal is a critical distinction between mass and social media. The appeal of mass media messaging is anchored on the impression made. The appeal of social media is anchored on the user’s acceptance of the message. More specifically, the distinction is between a broadcast message invested with meaning, and a social message whose meaning is invested by the user. Power shifts from the brand to the consumer. Expression (branding) is replaced by Interpretation or Reception. The broadcast message may seek to make an impression; the social message seeks the user’s engagement. From a communication perspective, the operation of commercial promotions is reversed: brands do not supply the meaning, users do. Only then may they be expected to pass it along. Only when they accept, like, and see themselves in the messaging do they make it their own and share it.

The construction of social messaging requires a shift from objectively-framed communication to subjectively addressed communication. Broadcast messaging creates a fictionally objective claim (seeking to make an impression, an image). Social media messaging seeks to address the end user and relate directly by means of a pseudo form of speech: speech by proxy, if you will.

Addressing the (message) envelope

This means that the writer may employ objective claims, as in writing headlines and news-like statements. Or may “speak” more personally, making use of I, You, We, They, and Us. Those are linguistic elements rarely deployed in broadcast media. Most community managers and social media managers do this without thinking about it. We talk without reflecting on the constructed-ness of our speech. But that’s not to say that there’s no order or design involved in speech. All speech employs the order and construction of language, in both its form and content.

Speech is addressed, to somebody, to everybody, to a group, or even to oneself. The use of “I” is unnecessary on twitter and in Facebook updates, because the medium implies it. But “I” can still be of use, to change both tone and appeal. The linguistic effect of using “I” or “I” references (me, my) changes effect. For example: “Support relief efforts in Haiti” vs “I would really like help in supporting Haiti relief efforts.”

Similarly, use of “you” directly appeals to the reader/user. As in, “I would really like your help in supporting relief efforts.” Use of group references, such as to include by suggestion, makes use of the addressing of speech also. As in, “We should really get together to support Haiti relief efforts.”

These kinds of addressing functions of speech are used with risk in broadcast media, but are less risky in social media. The use of addressing (I, we, you, they, us, etc) in broadcast makes an implication that many in the audience may reject. There’s no personal relation in broadcast, and thus the appeal is risky. But in social, it extends an offer of relation and when appropriate (to the brand or claim it makes), can succeed precisely because it is relational — it’s personal, where broadcast can’t be.

Message content and linguistic expressions

If addressing involves the envelope of communication through social tools, then content is where references and claims are made. The message comprises of a statement or expression within which a claim is made. Here, the medium offers a greater range of differentiation than broadcast. First of all, a brand or company may craft many more messages, providing many more claims, than in broadcast. Claims can thus be made to appeal to the interests of a greater number of consumers/users. Claims based on price, utility, value, timeliness, and much more. Claims directed at personal interests, social values (causes), cultural affinities, news, and so on.

These content claims can be presented or expressed in social media messaging by means of objective statements or personally and socially addressed expressions. Here we encounter some basic linguistic types of expression. We have:

• statements of fact;
• requests;
• questions;
• answers;
• invitations;
• offers;
• announcements;
• recommendations;
• and more…

Message content and the claims of content

Any of the claims you wish to make, as the informational content of your message, may be expressed differently by use of the above types of linguistic expression. Consider:

• “We (the organization) would like your support of our Haiti relief efforts,” (appeal for help and appeal to include self in organizational efforts)
• “Our relief efforts are getting underway. Help us now!” (announcement plus direct appeal)
• “Relief efforts make a difference with the help of twitter” (factual statement, no direct appeal)
• “Join in our relief efforts today” (invitation)

In addition to the addressing and informational, or content claims, of social messaging, there is the call to action. All internet advertising and marketing works by call to action. But in social, the call to action is social — it hopes for personal response, yes, but seeks social engagement. The social call to action is unique in that it asks the user to personally repeat or distribute the message to his or her peers. The commitment hoped for is greater; net effectiveness is supposed to be higher. Because the message is distributed by means of the highest authority there is: one’s own relationships with friends and peers. Personal relationships, not media, are the backbone of this kind of marketing.

Completing the message: call to (social) action

The call to action is often a link. It may be accompanied by information that provides reference and context, or not. But the call to action may be the expectation of retweeting. Or, in the case of Facebook, of liking. Brands often want users to complete the call to action based on the content of their message. But the user completes the call to action only if his or her interpretation of the message resonates and agrees with his or her interests in it. Again, the power is reversed, from expression and image-based messaging to interpreted communication. Actions are taken by users when they feel like it. When they feel like acknowledging a message; when they feel like being seen to acknowledge it; and when they wish to include others in it.

Here, then, commercial messaging wants to be as least commercial as possible. Many call this “authenticity” and “transparency,” but lets not fool ourselves. It’s commercial, and everybody knows it. So use either great creative, compelling narration, use news, or values, or discounts and package them communicatively.

Take, for example, the discount or offer. Social media are rife with discounts and offers, and companies such as Groupon, Yelp, and Foursquare (to name but a few) are heavily invested in the value proposition of social shopping and social commerce. The challenge here is to make the act of shopping a communicative act. It normally isn’t. In some cases, the challenge is in fact to make the act of window shopping a communicative act — as when companies hope that users looking for products socialize their efforts and solicit participation from friends or peers.

Transformation of this act into a social and communicative exercise demands use of the medium’s communicative possibilities, in short, the messaging variants we have described above. If I purchase flowers online, and am given a message after the purchase to share it with friends, the more effective use of messaging would focus on giving, reaching out, sending greetings, bringing a smile to somebody’s day — not the more conventional but commonplace “Save 30% on flowers today.” That doesn’t communicate beyond the value proposition, which is unlikely to be of interest to most of my friends at any given time. More likely to communicate personally would be a personal expression to which the purchase of flowers is simply a reference: “I just made somebody smile. Guess who? (link)” And so on.

Summary

In summary, the creative work of commercial social media messaging extends beyond the craft of broadcast advertising and marketing. The medium used is a form of mediated speech, and its success depends not on its image appeal but on its personal reception by users. Action is solicited on the basis of claims that engage a user’s interests and which are communicable. A number of forms of linguistic expression are available as means of “designing” the message envelope and contents. And the informational, or value propositions contained in the message may be highly differentiated for the purpose of targeting and reaching different types of audiences and their peers.

There is order, structure, and design in all things. In the facilitation of social interaction, and communication, too. Especially when it’s commercial.

Mashable’s post on the social media Sharepocalypse has caught everyone’s attention. Author Nova Spivak breaks down the issues social media users face in the sheer volume and diversity of sharing activity across our favorite social networks.  And comments on some of the resources and solutions that may be on offer if “social assistance” services can deliver effetively.

I was on a different topic recently, that of scaling and population, when I got to thinking about noise. Much of the sharepocalypse problem, I think, comes down to noise. Noise, because there are often motives behind social sharing. Motives that suggest that the act of sharing often means more than meets the eye.

This is interesting, because if sharing produces content, and if the sharepocalypse concerns an excess of content and content sharing activity, then it’s not just the volume of content that needs addressing, but the intentions of those who share. Sharing, after all, is a social act.

It’s all about sharing…

There would be no sharing if there were no friends, peers, colleagues, and fans to “consume.” And likely much less sharing if there were no measurement of sharing activities: no new followers, friend requests, comments, likes, +1s and so on.

Not to mention the meta message of sharing metrics, of which Klout is the best example. Our activity and the responsiveness of our “networks” are transformed into a meaningful number — an “influence” metric, or klout.

Point being that the act of sharing is not just an act of sharing content. It’s a social act, and social acts solicit some amount of acknowledgment and recognition. Receiving that, they can become communication (as happens when any two or more people engage in an exchange).

Content, then, is often the vehicle for a communication not yet established. It’s the opening move, if you will: the statement or expression.

The content is the vehicle

It belongs to human communication that we are able to distinguish an utterance from the thing uttered (the claim). We can tell the meaning expressed in talking from the actual sentences and expressions used. In the case of sarcasm, for example, we know that the meaning intended actually contradicts the the expression.

And this applies, to some degree, in online sharing. Knowing our friends, and less so our peers and online social connections, we’re often able to tell what a person intends when they share. The content is the vehicle, not the conversation. And in fact, content often opens up comments and exchanges permitting all involved to relate something of their own.

Content shared then is often just the ice-breaking move in social exchange. It’s the starting point, the springboard, and the context. And it’s fine, generally, if talk moves past the content itself to other things.

Noise is the problem

Which brings us to noise. Noise is the problem. Some hope it can be filtered out, say algorithmically. Algorithms may be written to anticipate the individual and personal preferences of a user. Or to collect information from aggregated activity. So individual vs a social approaches.

Noise might also be reduced by means of services that sit on top of sharing networks. This is the social assistance idea noted by Spivak.

But there’s still the matter of noise and why it is an unavoidable byproduct of social sharing. This has implications for the feasibility of noise reduction.

Social networking platforms can be viewed as social systems — a combination of mediating technologies and the practices that emerge around them. They’re self-reproducing systems: that is, it’s the constant social activity of users that keeps them going.  My thought is that if a social system reproduces itself by means of mediated interactions and communication, different types of noise are produced.

The noise of redundancy that results from distribution of activity across tightly connected social networks — a kind of noise that would not trouble situated and co-located “real world” interactions. Call this the noise of amplification. It exists because content and communication rapidly escape the site of their original production and “appear” elsewhere. (Face to face talk is governed by the physical distance in which your voice can be heard.)

The noise produced by an attention economy. This being noise resulting from the online social condition that only activity can get attention. One has to post and share in order to have presence. Here the act of sharing is what matters, less so what is shared, for the act maintains presence and creates the contexts around which others can engage.

The noise of system self reporting. This being notifications, which are system messages reporting on user activities but not authored by those users (Bill is now following you). Facebook was built on this (“Jill uploaded a photo” creates social activity by proxy, leading to more activity by those who respond to it).

The noise of bots and non-human accounts. Twitter is the most guilty of this, but wasn’t the first to allow it. (Remember Fakesters on Friendster?) This noise helps to circulate news, but results in a kind of tolerably false communication.

The noise of obligatory social etiquette. This is the noise created by adhering to online social norms and conventions, such as following back, or adding to Circles, reblogging, liking, and so on. (Social gestures — likes — have communicative purpose.) Many of these acts are simply baseline social etiquette and whether they pay off or not, are the online social equivalent of buying a lottery ticket: your chances of winning increase dramatically when you buy a ticket. A social act that has potential.

So given these different types of noise, what are the prospects for smart noise reduction? Content shared is hardly just content shared, but is almost always a form of social action. Can the social acts be separated from their contents? Should filters be designed to sift out bots? Why not then sift out users whose social media use is primarily promotional?

Or the reverse…

Or the reverse: sift out content that’s intended just to network and connect, but which has little news or information value? There could be so many further ways to tweak filtration, based on person, content, genre, timing, status, relevance, personal preferences, social preferences, recent activity, etc. It’s mind boggling.

Sharepocalypse is just the tip of the sharing iceberg. The flotsam and jetsam that drifts downstream in a medium that never stops flowing. But the currents beneath are deeply social and mean far more than meets the eye. It’s going to be hard to sort through all that noise. Because collect the empties as you will, more often than not, there’s a message in that bottle.

Indeed it is. Every interaction people have with your website is an opportunity for your organization to improve, hurt or confirm your credibility with them. When your content doesn’t support your business/organizational goals and provides zero value to your customers, you will end up with more unpleasant conversations and missed opportunities. You need a content strategy. So where to start? At the beginning, of course. But what is the beginning? You are in the day-to-day grind of maintaining your current site, fixing the most “urgent” issues rather than addressing the underlying problems that led to today’s real and perceived crises. The process of creating a content strategy was very rewarding, both for the Web team and the people we worked with internally. We discovered insights about how the website could support the goals of individual business units and the corporation. Stakeholders realized that there was value in creating content that people wanted to read, view or respond to. But you can’t to results without starting.

1. Realistically Assess Your Situation

Can you finish what you start?

At Cerner, we knew that there were problems with our content in the spring of 2010. We “knew” it in the sense that we got complaints about it, we noticed inconsistencies and inaccuracies in how we talked about our solutions and services, and our analytics told us visitors didn’t care to read, consume or react to what was on the site. But we really didn’t know what it would take to fix everything, or even what “everything” was. Before anything could be done to fix our site, there had to be a commitment to do so. This sounds simple, but it’s not. Is your company/organization willing to let someone (or several someones) spend the time necessary to dig into the underlying problems with the current content? Will your company let that person or persons create a plan for fixing it and then go do it? If not, is the company/organization willing to be influenced on the importance of content? If the answer is still no, then your default content strategy will be to have no strategy at all. For us, fortunately, the answer was yes. In 2010, we started a redesign of our entire site. The redesign was not limited to just the visual design and a new technical platform, although those were important considerations. We wanted to create an entirely new user experience, which would not be possible without completely re-thinking how users found our content, and what we actually chose to say (and not say) with our content. The content portion of the project was not just added on as an afterthought, but was included from the very beginning of the discussion of what we wanted the website to be.

2. Build Internal Support

Who cares about content—and can do something about it?

So great, you have permission to create a content strategy, whatever you decide that means. It’s one thing to have approval from your manager to do so, but what about the other areas of your company or organization? If people outside your team are involved in the content process (most likely creation or review/approval), you need them to support your efforts. To get their support, this group needs to care, or why they should care. We had about 30 people across the company responsible for providing or overseeing the content for their group of solutions and services. These people were not/are not writers or Web content experts, but implementing a content strategy would be impossible without their support. We targeted a small sub-set (three) of these people (we’ll call them content contributors) who we deemed as influential among their peer group. In individual meetings, we discussed the idea of putting a strategy behind our content. We didn’t use the phrase “content strategy” in the meetings; instead, we talked about their business goals, and shared ideas for how content could help them meet those goals. These people were not executives within their given organization, but rather those who would most care about content in that organization and who would be in a position to take action on it. What we discovered:

• Content contributors were desperate for guidance on how content could support their business goals;
• Governance had to be included in our content strategy. Governance by itself is not a strategy, but our content contributors needed a clearer process for governance of our content;
• This group would start to really care about their content when we gave them a reason to.

This sub-set of content owners served as advocates down the road when we shared our plan for content creation, maintenance and updating during the redesign process. By introducing the idea that content was important to an influential sub-set of this group, we faced no opposition to changing “how things had always been done” when meeting with the full group. With the internal support in place, then it’s possible to get the subsequent work done.

3. Define and Prioritize

How will you get the work done?

I listed this after building internal support, but in reality this step can and should occur in conjunction with creating internal support. While we were meeting with the sub-set of content contributors, we identified the key problems areas (both quantitative and qualitative) with our existing content. We took the time to catalog and inventory ALL of our content, which at the time numbered about 7,500 pages, including our nine global sites. Taking inventory of your content is time-consuming and hard work. But you have to do it in order to define the problems with your content and prioritize how to fix them. There are numerous examples on the Web of what your audit should include, from a spreadsheet to more sophisticated software tools. Devote some time looking at them (hint, a spreadsheet will probably work for you). Ask yourself how that approach would work for your website. Ask people who work on content strategy how they handled a content audit. We decided to capture the following information in our audit:

• Page Title;
• URL;
• Metadata keywords;
• Last date page was updated;
• Who updated it?
• Did the page include an image? Video? Downloadable PDF?
• Was it any good?
• Is it written in appropriate tone and voice?
• Does it contradict content in other locations on our site?
• Is it just a regurgitation of a flyer or product spec sheet?
• Is it written to inform a visitor, or to please a product manager?

The last item (was it any good?) took the most time to complete on our audit. But you aren’t doing an audit without answering that question. Otherwise, you are just filling out a spreadsheet. Yes, quantitative data was essential to understanding our overall content issues, but ultimately you need to make judgments about your content. Our content issues immediately surfaced once we completed the audit. And we now knew exactly how bad the problem was (or wasn’t). For us, these issues were are biggest challenges:

• Lack of tone and voice – For example, we might talk about our radiology solutions in an informal, conversational way, with the content focused on how it might benefit the end-user or health care organization. But on our page for our pharmacy solutions, we would list 15 bullets of feature functionality, with no consideration of how this solution benefits the end-user or organization. So are we a company that wants to talk only about how great we are, or are we a company that is focused on helping our clients improve how they care for patients? Can visitors to our site believe what we say about our solutions? Are we credible? It was hard to tell;
• Bad metadata and information architecture – Incorrect metadata of course has the consequence of making your content harder to find by search engines. Beyond that, if you are sloppy with your metadata, page titles and naming of sections on your site, it can give the user (even subconsciously) the idea that you don’t take content seriously. If you won’t take the time to make sure that pages are named consistently, then should visitors to your site take seriously what you have to say? For many of you, this might be stating the obvious, but don’t farm out the metadata and naming conventions to your technical team (unless they are content champions). Take the time to understand how your content management system works and how to fix metadata issues;
• No standards – A user would have no reasonable expectation of what they would encounter on types of pages within our site. It became obvious that we needed a standard for what type of information a user should expect to see on a solution page vs. an event page vs. an executive biography. This includes the words, images and video, as well as the font types, sizes and color used on each of these sections. These things matter. Take the time to consider them and stick to them;
• Governance confusion – Some groups were allowed (more or less) to publish content on the site with little oversight, while others went through a semi-review process before publication. This issue was an underlying reason for all of the previous three issues.

There were other issues, of course, but these – if corrected – would most improve our content, support the website and business goals. Now it was time to find out if our plan would work.

4. Demonstrate Success

What results did you get?

To make content strategy an integral part of your company/organization, you’ll need to show it’s worth the time and effort. Here are a few examples of success we attribute to the content strategy work.

• Users more easily find our content – Prior to the redesign of our website (including a strategy for content), less than 20 percent of our visitors came to the site via search engines. Within a few months of redesigning the site, that number increased to 30 percent of our visitors, and today we are approaching 40 percent of visitors to the site from search engines. This represents new groups of people finding our content and interacting with us;
• We increased Cerner’s credibility online – Our content strategy included the creation of a corporate blog. We wanted to use the blog for our own industry experts, as well as selected clients, to talk about key issues in health care. The blog does not overtly tout our solutions, but focuses on sharing our perspective on key health care issues. Recently, Investors.com (part of Investor’s Business Daily) referenced a Cerner blog post in a story on ICD-10, a change to how diseases are classified by health care organizations. Providing credible, relevant content resulted in a third-party recognizing us as a source for information;

Figure 1: Investor’s Business Daily cites a Cerner blog post

Figure 2: The quality content of this Cerner blog post by Lisa Franz led to its citation by Investor’s Business Daily

• Our content resonates with users – Six months after we redesigned our website and implemented our content strategy, we provided feedback to our content contributors on what types of content resonated with people. Product pages with video (and especially those with client testimonial videos) received more visitors than those that didn’t. And visitors – on average – spent significantly more time on the product pages with videos than those without videos. (See Figure 3) For us, more traffic + more time spent consuming content = win. For those of you who rely on other groups in your organization to supply content, you must give them guidance on what works. At the time I shared the video results with our content contributors, we had just 13 product pages with video. Today, that number is more than 30.

Figure 3: Adding quality video to our product pages led to more visits and to users spending more time on those pages (image credits: John O’Nelio)

Get to Work

I came across a quote from Thomas Edison during this project.

The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand – without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it.

Applying a content strategy to your website requires work. As you begin the process by building internal support and evaluating your content, the path toward a content strategy that will work for your organization will become clear. It’s likely you’ll realize additional benefits, too. In our case, the relationship between the Web team and content contributors – and the business units they represent – is much stronger due to the successes achieved. Discussions about content occur (more often, not always) during the planning stages of projects rather than the middle or end. This approach is one that worked for us. But none of it would have been possible without getting started.

A Few Resources That Helped…

• Kristina Halvorson, The Discipline of Content Strategy – A List Apart, Dec. 16, 2008;
• Colleen Jones, Content Analysis: A Practical Approach – UX Matters, Aug. 3, 2009;
• Erin Kissane, Content Templates to the Rescue  – A List Apart, July 7, 2009;
• Kevin Nichols, Examples of Content Audit and Inventory Tools;
• Content Strategy Knol (Google)