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

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.

There are still parameters to input and many options to choose before we can finally hit the ‘go’ button on many devices. Take a digital camera for instance. Advanced technology must be able to help a camera tell which scene mode the camera should choose. A toaster must know how long it will take to have nicely toasted bread. Recent gadgets are now able to tell where they are, who is there, what they are facing and many other things, so they should be able to do more. It’s like a very intelligent person who is blindfolded wearing earplugs.

I feel that way especially when I put some food to cook in a microwave oven. I know what the food should be like for me to eat. I know it shouldn’t be burned. I know it should be defrosted. But I’m not a cook and don’t know exactly how long it should be cooked. And that’s why I thought of this concept design.

WYSIWYG Microwave Oven Concept

Let us adjust the ‘how-we-want-it’ setting and skip all the details. Or rather, the ‘what-it-should-be-like’ setting because visual aid helps us picture the results much more easily than verbal expressions do.

Put a dish in it and this oven tells what kinds of foods are in it.

All you need to do is to adjust the 'look' of the food displayed on the glass by dragging the button. You can control the cooking time while looking at what it will be like after cooking the adjusted length of time. You'll know exactly when it boils or burns.

By the way, I wish a microwave oven could be movable so that it could get close to the table when necessary.

Recently, a number of the persuasion principles (the ways in which people influence other people) that where used in face-to-face influence attempts are starting to make their way into the design of online services. Event though most of these persuasion principles are effective on average there are clear indications that we should personalize our use of these persuasion principles. Based on my PhD workI will describe why these strategies should be adapted to individuals using persuasion profiles, and I will try to address some of the issues that are relevant to UX designers.

So, what are those social influence strategies?

Influence strategies are basically messages that are used to increase compliance, which are peripheral to the actual request. Thus, if you try getting someone to stop smoking, you can add to that request that “nobody really smokes anymore”. This latter message does not directly relate to the actual request, but does make it more likely for people to comply with the request. Cialdini identifies six principles of persuasion:

1. Reciprocity: People feel obligated to return a favor, thus when a persuasive request is made by a person the receiver is in debt to, the receiver is more inclined to adhere to the request R. Cialdini (2004);
2. Scarcity: When something is scarce, people will value it more. Announcing that a product or service is scarce will favor the evaluation and increase the chance of purchase;
3. Authority: When a request or statement is made by a legitimate authority, people are more inclined to comply or find the information credible;
4. Commitment and consistency: People do as they said they would. People try to be consistent with previous or reported behavior, resolving cognitive dissonance by changing their attitudes or behaviors to achieve consistency. If a persuasive request aligns with previous behavior people are more inclined to comply;
5. Consensus: People do as other people do. When a persuasive request is made people are more inclined to comply when they are aware that others have complied as well;
6. Liking: We say “yes” to people we like. When a request is made by someone we like, we are more inclined to act accordingly.

Why should we adapt to individual users?

If you think about it, each of the principles of persuasion that is mentioned above is used in one way or another on a lot of e-commerce websites. However, these principles are also used to help people stop smoking, or help people lose weight. In my PhD I have worked on these latter types of applications, and there the motivation differs from the one in marketing: We do not just want to increase compliance – and thus for example decrease smoking – on average, but rather we want to motivate individual people. We (researchers at the TU Eindhoven and at Stanford University) setup a number of studies to examine whether or not people respond consistently and similarly to the principles presented above. Overall, we found that while these principles work well on average, they often fail for individuals. Some people never listen to authorities, or try to do exactly the opposite of what others are doing. However, we also found that people are generally consistent: If you do not respond to authority arguments now, you are likely to also not respond to them tomorrow. Next, we tested whether if it is possible to use all the principles at the same time (so: “Please stop smoking! Nobody smokes anymore and your general practitioner recommends you to stop. Etc. etc.”).

Comparison of heterogeneity in the effects of influence strategies with the average effects of those strategies. The solid black vertical lines are the estimated average effects of each strategy, as compared with the control message. The black curves are the estimated normal distribution of strategy effects for the population, while the gray curves are the density of the estimates of the strategy effects for this sample.

We found is that that choosing a specific principle is actually more effective than showing all of the principles at once.

What are “Persuasion Profiles”?

These two results combined (people are different but consistent, and combining all the principles does not work) lead us to start playing with the idea of persuasion profiles: Collections of the estimates of the success of different strategies for individuals. Thus, your persuasion profile could say that the Authority principle works fairly well for you, while using the Scarcity principle pretty much always fails. We can build your persuasion profile by observing your responses to the principles mentioned above.

Estimated influence strategy effects for each participant in Model C, as compared to the control messages. Note that for some individuals, the estimated effect of one strategy is negative, while the estimated effect of another is positive.

These persuasion profiles can then off-course be used to select which principle to present next: So for you, given your profile, we would say that your general practitioner recommends you to stop smoking (which probably is true) while for some of your friends we use a different principle.

Does it actually work?

The idea of persuasion profiling is appealing, although also scary when used with the wrong intends. But, we still needed to show that it actually worked. To do so we setup a series of evaluations in which we use persuasion principles to influence people, measured their response, and then created a profile. The next time we tried to influence the same person, we selected a principle based on the profile, measured the response, and then updated the profile. We tried this in several settings: We put a big screen in the hallway of an office building and put up messages to encourage people to take the stairs. The messages used different persuasion principles. Due to the Bluetooth-key of their mobile phones we were able to track individuals, measure whether or not they took the stairs, and present them with a personalized message. What we found that more people took the stairs when we personalized the messages using the persuasion profile, than when we just randomly picked one of the messages. We showed in a similar way that persuasion profiles can increase the responses to emails, and also can drive sales on an e-commerce website.

Wrap up

I hope to have introduced the idea of Persuasion Profiles, and motivated why they can be effective in influencing people. However, just like other personalization efforts persuasion profiles raise both ethical and practical issues. For UX designers of applications that intend to influence the behavior of their users it means creating different types of content for each of the persuasion strategies. It also means that each user will have a different experience, and perhaps a totally different motivation to use your service. I believe the long-term consequences of these types of personalization are not well understood both by designers as well as by researchers. However, I do believe persuasion profiling is coming up, and it can be for better or for worse. It can teach us about our own decision-making by showing us our profile – so then you know you always listen to authority arguments. But, it can also potentially sway us into doing things we do not necessarily want to do…

In 2012 we will be continuing with the ‘Discussion’ series as started in 2010. It’s an opportunity to ask a question to you, get an expert opinion from an invited expert and open it up for community discussion. We hope this will provide the opportunity for you to share thoughts, project experiences, references, introduce experts on a topic, how a topic plays out locally and globally, what differences/similarities you see in your markets and what it means to our practice to push us all to think more deeply about the world we live in.

So the question is: What topics would you like to see discussed in 2012?

Past discussions

• Discussion: What are the ingredients to become a great leader?
• Discussion: How do you communicate a UX vision?

The studio is, above all things, a learning environment. It allows designers of all levels to work together, promoting constant knowledge sharing, critique, and collaboration. This increased teaching has allowed me some time to reflect on my own education, and what I want my students to learn. Art and Design school was an interesting experience, one that strongly shaped my view of life and work. It forces you to think deeply about your work, the way you work, the environment in which you work, and what it means to succeed. I’ve come to realize that there are three main components to design education that are incredibly important to my daily work as a designer.

1. The Journey

Design school is really a journey. You start as an inexperienced novice, and leave with four years of intensive practice in the foundations of design. Over that time you learn to use certain tools naturally, you unconsciously competent with your tools. The first courses in design school help you learn expression and exploration. Through focused study in art and design history, open ended creative exercises, and self-directed projects you learn how to answer questions by making things. During this period students make an absurd number of objects, be they photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, videos, or anything else. Many design schools have adopted the practice based methods of Rowena Reed-Kostellow, who had her students make hundreds of models to explore the different aspects of 3D space. The second, complimentary, part of this early education is the idea of deconstruction. Deconstruction is where students take a formed object, or design solution, and take it apart to learn how it all works together. It also involves learning how to thoughtfully edit you work. Understanding what to leave out, how to remove it, and how that impacts the final product is an integral piece of the design practice. What students are really learning when they practice exploration, expressing, and deconstruction is how to tune their intuition. Intuition is a designers best friend, it’s what allows you to understand when you have a correct solution, when something is aesthetically pleasing, and how to put the pieces together to get there. Jon Kolko has done some great work to popularize the idea of abductive reasoning, and that is where all these early design school exercises should get you. Reed-Kostellow’s repetitive exploration methods help students internalize the forms they are building, thus giving them a strong intuition about when that type of form is “right.” Synthesizing various inputs and coming out with a new idea or object is the core of design practice, and all of design school is setup to help students internalize this process. One of the most important skills students learn from constantly making things is creative stamina. An art or design student is expected to be able to be creative on demand, and consistently. Students must be able to show up for a 3 – 6 hour studio session and create interesting and useful things that help them explore their topic. You quickly learn how to force creativity and inspiration, even when you’re tired, hung over, and have been doing this every day for weeks. As a practicing designer these are the core skills that I use every day. Exploration through making things, learning and synthesis, creating new knowledge form a variety of information, and using my intuition and history to understand when I’m on the right track. All of this comes together in the second big thing I learned from design school: The Studio.

2. The Studio

The environment in which design takes place has a huge effect on the output of the designers within it. Design schools consists of a number of environments – lectures, social activities, and more. However, the most important environment learned in school is the studio. The studio is a place to create, learn, share, critique, and collaborate. In a design school most practical work, either in groups or alone, takes place in the studio. A studio is a lot like a professional kitchen. There are a number of requirements to create a functional studio:

1. Tools and materials for making things must be readily available and setup in an organized way. A studio will quickly fail if people have to search for their tools and waste time that could be used making things. Students (or working designers) should be able to jump right in and get going with the minimum of setup.
2. A studio environment must be open enough to allow of serendipitous critique and collaboration, but also give people space to focus on their own work. This is a hard balance, both in schools and in professional design studios.
3. A successful studio will have designers of different levels working in the same space and encourage a natural form of mentoring. More senior practitioners, in schools this would be either professors or higher level students, can use the openness of the space to give feedback and help to more junior designers, as well as lead by example. The ongoing critique and the ability for junior designers to watch the more senior people work makes this an incredibly strong learning environment.

The studio is where students go to do their exercises, explore ideas, learn from and talk to other students, receive instruction from professors, and make their projects come to life. The creative stamina learned from hours of exercises is what allows them to enter the studio and create things until they get it right. The studio, and the rest of the design school experience, teaches designers to constantly create in order to understand the design problem at hand, and eventually come up with a solution.

3. Foundations

The final element of design school that I’m going to talk about is foundation. A great studio, and learning how to explore, deconstruct, and intuit solutions, is all fairly useless without the foundational elements that let students actually create things and understand why some solutions work and others don’t. Foundation gives us the basis for critique as well as creation. The shared language used to describe elements of a design solution makes it possible to discuss designs based on a common understanding and intent, while still leaving room for different perspectives and styles. These elements include things like time, colour, 2D and 3D space, line, feedback, and more. Design schools teach students how to use these elements and talk about them in a critical way. The other aspect of foundation are the hard skills designers need in order to explore and create designs. The most important of these is visual thinking and communication. Design is created and communicated in primarily visual media – sketches, drawings, models, videos, etc. Students learn how to sketch in a constructive and deconstructive way, refine those sketches into models, drawings, and diagrams, then create prototypes using sculptural or interactive materials. Learning how to think by sketching, for example, is an integral part of design education. It allows students to create outputs that clearly communicate their intent and can be discussed and critiqued using the share language of the foundations. Learning these skills is a combination of practice, instruction (i.e. life drawing class), and reflection. Once learned though, they form the basis of design communication and creativity, setting up the student for success in the studio and beyond.

In Practice

Design school teaches people to be comfortable with the unknown. Tight deadlines that require large amounts of creativity and output teach focus and discipline. The studio environment gives students a safe place for exploration, learning, and critique. Visual thinking and communication lays the foundation for taking ideas and making them real. These are what I’ve taken away form my time in design school, and hope to pass on to those that I teach and work with. A successful design business is a lot like a school. It should help the designers within it learn, grow, and create good work; it should support collaboration and serendipity; and most of all it should encourage designers to explore ideas, solve design problems, and teach others around them.

Interaction 12

If you didn’t attend design school, and are interested in getting a taste of what it’s like in a way that you can immediately bring back to your daily work, Matt will be giving the workshop ‘What You Missed When You Skipped Design School’ with Dave Malouf  at Interaction 12 in Dublin.

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Studio picture NC-CC by sandcastlematt
Moleskine picture NC-BY-CC by dmpop

10. “Checklist Thinking” for UX Professionals: Retaining Your Sanity in a Complex Project

Author: Greg Laugero
It’s common knowledge (or it should be) that discovering requirements during page design is a recipe for madness. But no matter how much we believe this and strive to avoid this, it still happens. In this article Greg let’s us take control again.

9. Experience Design Models: Minding the Gap Between Ideas & Interfaces

Author: Marc Sasinski
What can we do to better communicate experience design vision during that window of opportunity between raw ideas and design deliverables? How can we use our abilities to visualize for the greater good? Enter experience modeling.

8. Designing a Reason to Come Back

Author: Stephen Anderson
In this article Stephen shares some of his ideas on how to get people back to your website. He explains the significance of rituals and even gives us a design challenge.

7. The Theory Behind Social Interaction Design

Author: Adrian Chan
Via this article I would like to give you the big picture introduction to the theory behind social interaction design. Many of my articles on this topic are anchored in social theory but don’t make explicit reference to it, so I thought an overview might be in order.

6. Aristotle’s Storytelling Framework for Interactive Products

Author: Jeroen van Geel
Throughout the centuries people have told stories to share knowledge between generations. Storytelling is an important skill each interaction designer should have. It helps create engaging products and services. But how should we start doing this? I came up with a framework.

5. Where Innovation Belongs in User Centered Design

Author: Jake Truemper
User Experience designers have a unique opportunity to become the facilitators of holistic design and the advocates of innovation. By combining traditional user-centered activities with a greater emphasis on creating engaging designs we can bring usability into alignment with innovation in the design process.

4. Design Research and Innovation: an Interview with Don Norman

Author: Jeroen van Geel
I got the chance to interview one of my heroes: Don Norman. This May he was one of the keynote speakers at UX Lisbon in Portugal. I spoke to him about innovation, design research, and emotional design.

3. User Experience and the design of news at BBC World Service

Author: Tammy Gur
Designing a setting for the torrent of content that passes daily through a news website is a challenge unlike any other. the BBC World Service has got a user experience and design team which designs and develops news sites for the web and mobile devices in 27 languages, catering for audiences across world. In this article Tammy shares some of their experiences with you.

2. The ‘IxD Bauhaus’: What Happens Next?

Author: Rahul Sen
Occasionally, amidst the rapid rise and fall of trends, fashion and fancy, we are faced with true revolution: paradigm shifts that throw out excess baggage of some kind and usher in new ways of thinking and seeing altogether. The catch is that you need to have the benefit of hindsight to truly measure their effectiveness. With this in mind, Rahuk believes that the interaction design community is witnessing an important revolution — an ‘IxD Bauhaus’ of sorts.

1. How Your Coffee Mug Controls Your Feelings

Author: Seth Snyder
What would you say if Seth told you that objects you use every day are now believed to be practicing a form of mind control on you? Sounds crazy, right? Well, although cognitive scientists probably wouldn’t use the term “mind control”, they wouldn’t disagree that while we interact with physical elements of our environment, our brains are performing what’s known as embodied cognition, a sneaky sort of intuition that drives how we feel and behave and is breaking down century-old mind/body link claims with a vengeance.

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)

Today on Radio Johnny Daniel Szuc speaks with Whitney Quesenbery about her topics at UX Hong Kong 17 & 18 February 2012. Whitney talks about the importance of storytelling, choosing the right UX method towards finding answers, and as we look forward, practitioner knowledge about both design and technology is critical. Whitney also talks about the trend of creating for the “social good” and how appreciating this movement can strengthen our approach to design.

Quotes

“Storytelling is a direct line from my work in theatre … understanding how we are all telling each other stories, when we try to understand someone who uses the products we make, we are trying to envision the story that they are telling themselves, what is the scenario that they are in, why are they interacting with us at all, and how can we create products that make that story a wonderful, easy, good story … as opposed to a bad, awful, difficulty, barrier filled story.

… all of a sudden we are really thinking about people situated in their lives and how the things we make fit into that life rather than how the person gets jammed into the software.

Over the years we have a pretty rich set of tools, how we move through the process … each of those techniques is really an answer … the answer needs to be modified to fit that new question … so it’s about understanding what question you are answering and then being able to think really hard about the right way to get that answer.

Summary

Whitney Quesenbery discusses the importance of storytelling in making products, how to choose the right UX method in projects, how practitioner knowledge about design and technology (a hybrid) is becoming important and how we should all continue to focus on people when designing products & services.

Notes

* Follow Whitney Quesenberry @whitneyq on Twitter
* Learn more about Whitney Quesenberry
* Learn about

Making in design probably serves many purposes and the honest truth is that every individual designer has their own personal reasons why they make things as a designer. In my mind, however, there are two reasons to make: experiencing and communicating.

There are some who would argue that designer’s main reason to make is to execute or to produce. For this article, what I mean here by execute is to contribute towards the artifacts that will be part of the final consumed version by end users.

The interactive designers

The interactive designer I understand completely. Their tradition is rooted in technology as an art form, like painting or sculpture, where the artist was the producer of their vision. Their penetration into software design in my mind has had many positive attributes. I see the tinkering movement in interaction design directly connected to this group of artists who have always been explorers of the medium.

But there are others from many hybrid sources of skills and education. People have been mostly working in the areas of web design and mobile native app development. It’s those people who I feel have have been seduced by a false rhetoric of technology.

Interaction designers love technology. I would even suggest that we may have lost our way, by becoming too enamored by technology. We have ostensibly drank the Kool-aid of a promise of technology and have given up our precious ability to be critical towards it.

Technology promises us efficiency and speed, not just in our final solutions, but also in how we execute all the pieces of our process. If we couple this with the lack of design foundation in the practice of interaction design it is easy to see why so many designers have given in to this engineering-centric rhetoric. This would have us criticize the worst historical moments of software design, which completely ignores the more real and complex design-centric history of interactive software and media. We have made the engineering call for efficiency and speed a higher calling over what is so special about design: beauty as manifested through holistic systems thinking.

Short-term focus

A recent warning to this kind of thinking has come in the guise of criticizing the capital of the technology startup world, Silicon Valley, and by one of its poster children, no less. Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview at Y Combinator’s Startup School, challenges the notion that Silicon Valley is the best place to start and run a technology company:

If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.

Further, he alludes in the same interview to a conversation with Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos who says,

“There’s a culture [in Silicon Valley] where people don’t commit to doing things. I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term,” he explains. “You don’t have to move out here to do this.”

How has this manifest itself in the interaction design community?

Simply put, by the corruption of making in design to focus on execution and production as the core attribute of ‘making.’ This has been manifested through the interaction design community’s response to two separate but related movements (for lack of a better term) Agile development process and Start up culture.

Both have had positive outcomes in some respects. In a recent Twitter debate about the value of LeanUX (LUX) I ended my part of the conversation with the following tweet:

The 2 messages I do really appreciate from agile, lean, etc are “balance” & “collaboration”. The 1 I dislike is “design =making”.

— Dave Malouf (@daveixd) October 29, 2011

But both movements have great issues when it comes to their most basic premise, which is that artifacts outside of direct production of code provide little value to the process of making software.

Why do I make things?

With that, I’d like us to talk more about “why do we make as designers?” – experiencing and communicating. Further, I have to ask “Why do we experience?” – to deconstruct.

Design is a deconstructive process. At our core we make things, these we can tear apart, so we can build something completely different out of the previously disparate components. Without the ability to deconstruct in this way, we are no longer doing design and we are losing all that makes designing special.

So I make to deconstruct and this plays out to bring value to me in various ways: It means I make things to compare them. This requires that I make a plentitude (to take from Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experience) of artifacts.

It means I make things to associate. Again, this will lead to a plentitude of artifacts because each artifact regardless of how ridiculous the idea that is being communicated serves the purpose of being part of the collection of ideas that inspire all the ideas that follow – not just the next iteration’s worth.

It means I make things to critique. Criticism is not just something one does. It is something that is created through making. We make many artifacts in order to help us develop the language of design that evolves towards our principles of design. Principles are not just conceived, but they are grown through a collection of artifacts.

It means I make things to understand and clarify. The things we initially create often are more than what we know we need. It is not our intention to maintain scale or complexity, but rather we create in order to understand scale and complexity. This helps us to better clarify and to reduce complications of the systems we are designing (for and within as well).

Of course, part of what I need to understand is the material(s) out of which my designs will finally be carved.

It means I make things to generate new things. Great designers are open to the ‘generative.’ That means creating artifacts whose purpose is to generate new things – artifacts, experiences, conversations, etc. – that lead towards designs and designing.

All of this isn’t to say that I can’t make to execute if I am so inclined and skilled, but this is not design. Execution is production work and in the world of software, making is usually done by and using processes geared towards engineers. This isn’t bad. But it not being bad doesn’t mean it is good, nor make it design.

Design is influenced by art

There is another angle to all this that adds even more confusion. Much of design is influenced by art. Art also makes. But art executes. In my sister program here at SCAD, Interactive Design and Game Development, they execute what it is they conceive. They also make for many of the same reasons I mentioned above beyond execution, but they differ in other core aspects of applied knowledge and process that are beyond the scope of this article. Their program’s history is from art where the painter paints, and the sculpture sculpts, etc. Few painters ever had someone else paint for them their idea except as exercises for their apprentices who in essence were the metaphorical equivalent of their master’s brush.

But since many who come from the world of ‘new media’ also have this connection to interactive art, there are many designing interactive systems who also execute their ideas. This multivariate influential space of interaction design leaves a sense of conflict between the industrial design side of interaction design and the ironically formed engineering and art side of interaction design.

To conclude

For me, I do not mind that there are interaction designers who can and want to execute design. What I mind and take offense to are statements that conflate traditional design with the idea of ‘making’ through statements like, “LeanUX makes sense, because design is all about making and this puts designers in the role of making instead of creating artifacts that are not about production.”

It assumes that making is only equal to execution and while I can see and have seen a great work where designers do execute their ideas, I will not abide a world of design that defines making only as execution without acknowledging its more important purposes – communication and experience.
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Book image NC-CC by olivepress