The Content Wrangler published a “state of the profession” rant about writers who have jumped on the bandwagon of content strategy without going the work the understand the nuances of content production on large projects. Read Know Your Stuff’ or Stop Pretending To Be Professionals.

I was part of a panel discussion at the Gilbane Boston conference, and instead of doing yet-another-panel, my co-presenters and I decided to stage our presentation in the form of a three-act play. Watch One Project, Three Strategies: : What Teams Need to Know About Design, Development and Content Strategies for Content-driven Initiatives. (54 minutes, and the sound quality is iffy but if that doesn’t bother you, you’ll enjoy it)

The Content Marketing Institute published an article about how the goals and production of public sector content is similar to that of the private sector. Read How to Climb the Engagement Pyramid with Public Sector Content.

Data Conversion Labs published an article explore some of the ups and downs of making online books that are both usable and attractive. Read e-publishing.

Why I say that is because of a concept borrowed from the financial industry called asset amplification. In the context of financial markets, asset amplification describes how changes of wealth in financial markets causes amplification because of follow-on consequences. (Thanks to the Journal of Financial Economics article by Wei Xiong explaining how this works.) Similarly, the power of copy can be amplified if it is placed into a robust technology framework. Once copy is placed inside of a framework, it becomes the content of that framework. Like coffee is the “content” of a cup, copy is the content within a technology framework. And like a super-hero with the appropriate gear, copy, with the appropriate framework, gets super-powers, too.

The super-power of content is the potential for follow-on consequences of copy because of the underlying technopower is what turns copy into content. Thinking back a few years, communications coordinators who organized events would type out the event details: event name, start and time, place, cost, and so on, and then spend hours copying and pasting the event into sites that would allow them to paste it into a provided text box or, even more time-consuming, complete a set of form fields that the coordinators had to fill out individually. Today, we use content feeds which allow events to be amplified with no manual intervention. This is done through the technopower of the underlying technology framework.

As we get away from brochureware to robust interactivity, the need for rich semantic content grows. Again, copy, multiplied by technopower, makes content which can be processed by other systems. The event example was a simple one, but there are increasing levels of complexity, from “simple” publishing to the kind of interactivity and outputs that allow for successive complex transformations of content. We are all familiar with how content gets syndicated, but what may be a surprise is how much content is manipulated and transformed within a system. Each transformation provides the potential for additional amplification, and eventually provides a much richer user experience for the content consumer.

In the end, content may be nothing without copy; however, in a post-paper world, copy is nothing without content.

Previous post: Turning Copy into Content

Vancouver has a shiny new Canada Lin—a subway train—that runs from the Airport to downtown Vancouver. It’s wonderful. As I live out near the airport, I often take it to work, and it shaves a lot of time off my commute. It’s clean and comfortable, and runs every few minutes. However, there are inherent problems with wayfinding; some of them are usability problems, others are content problems. They are not separable, and work together to create either a good experience or a frustrating one.

Inside the airport, the signage says “Canada Line”. As I walk through the airport, I sometimes wonder how these people around me, many of whom have little or no English, find the transit system. Canada Line could mean “information about Canada by telephone” or some sort of train line. But where does it indicate what the Canada Line actually is: a subway train to Vancouver and to the whole regional transit system?

From inside the train, each transit station looks identical, and station signage is sparse. At rush hour, it’s next to impossible to see station signs through the crowds of people on the platform. Riders must learn to look for the signs inside the train that identify the current stop. It takes a while to realize this, and to counter-intuitive look within the train to learn where you are.

The signage on the platforms tells you which trains are coming. A recording announces that the next train on the “outbound platform is for YVR.” The platforms are not labelled, and in underground stations with several twists and turns down the stairs, who really knows which direction is inbound or outbound? Going north, there is one terminal called Waterfront (in other words, downtown). Going south, there are two possible terminals: YVR (the airport code for Vancouver, though the airport is actually in the suburb of Richmond) or Brighouse (also in Richmond). Going north is no problem. You get on the next train. Going south, you need to choose your train if you are going as far as Richmond. The helpful signage displays an electronic schedule such as:

YVR – Airport – 4 minutes

Richmond-Brighouse -  8 minutes

Richmond-Brighouse – 12 minutes

(This setup could be problematic; some riders see past the first line as its size and boldness are subconsciously interpreted as a title, and they automatically skip to the second line to look for “real information”. But that’s a whole other story, and we wonder whether TransLink did any testing of that.)

However, you are more likely to see a series of messages that say something like:

• If you drop something on the tracks, don’t retrieve it yourself. See an attendant.
• Only one bicycle per bicycle area on the train at a time.
• GO CANUCKS GO

The schedule comes around eventually, but your train may have entered and left the station by then.

If you have gotten onto the wrong train, figuring out how to double back and get onto the right train is problematic because of the mapping system inside the train (if you can find one). I know – been there, done that, cursed the entire time.

These may seem like small items, but they’re the crazy-making stuff that ruins your experience. It’s the stuff that makes people post about “the sign says this but what you really need to do is …” and “it’s cute but not too bright…” or “be careful, because if you miss your connecting stop, it takes you an extra 15 minutes to turn yourself around, and believe me, it will happen.”

It doesn’t take much to fix these problems, but it means that someone needs to walk through with a “user experience eye” and make sure that the experience works for all the audiences. For example, the content on the signs could shorten the duration of secondary messages and spend more time on the schedule and train destination. And it means training staff (including whoever is in charge of the electronic platform signage) to follow the guidelines that make the difference between a good user experience and a frustrating one.

Many thanks to Jerome Ryckborst, the UX Manager who collaborated with me on this post, and my project Director, who was the inspiration for this post. Pay attention. Be outraged.

I’m sure you have user experience people helping you, but I’ll bet you don’t implement half of what they tell you. If you did, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post explaining how to lose supporters and antagonize customers.

I have received my snail-mail letter explaining that I need to update my credit card to use my Esso Speedpass key tag. You give me some instructions, but they don’t  cover my situation.

Your website isn’t helping me because:

1. I exceeded my number of logins – after all, it’s probably been years since I last went to your website – and now am told to call your Customer Service Center.
2. Self-service is faster, supposedly, but your “help” center doesn’t answer my question and your FAQs are, well, not particularly helpful.
3. I fall back on the old telephone, but phoning your customer service center won’t lead me to a customer service agent. AND, pressing “0″ just sends me back to the opening menu. (Your support content is definitely not aligned – where is the consistency?)

So, now I’m kind of stuck. On one hand, you’ve made it so painful for me to rectify my problem that my next step is likely to toss my key tag into the trash, shred the letter, and put this experience behind me. I know the score; I’m a single lone customer in a huge pond, and you couldn’t care less whether I renew my account or not.

On the other hand, I like the convenience of a key tag.If I really, really wanted a new Speedpass tag, I could report mine lost, and you’ll send me a new one and all the problems will get rectified, in the course of setting up a new account. But thinking into the future, I’ve already had to replace my credit cards a couple of times this year alone.  Do I want to go through a dead-end voice mail tree each time I need to update my account?

So, Imperial Oil, listen to your user experience folks. I suspect I’m not alone in considering the barriers you’ve built into your customer experience, and deciding it’s easier to bail.

Boykin’s approach, in a YouTube video called Satisfy the Cat, works well to illustrate the relationship between web designer, client, developers, and end users, and why a user-centered design process, instead of a client-centered design process, is important to grease the wheels of business.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dln9xDsmCoY

Be sure that visitors subject your website to the same first-impression scrutiny that they exercise in real life, only faster. It takes 0.1 second to decide whether your site is attractive, 10 seconds to decide that your site is “taking too long” to respond, and 1 minute to be fed up with a task or a video.

Explaining the importance of getting this right is critical to a development team has its problems, as people “yes but” when it comes to their territory. The marketing department may “yes but” over the whiz-bang elements that slow down the site. Interaction designers may “yes but” when asked to redo problematic area. Developers may “yes but” when asked to do over some code. The writers may “yes but” when you insist that a content strategy must precede the content development stage.

Actually, it’s not even the “yes but” that is the problem; that may just development stakeholders working through how to fix the situation. The problem is when the “yes but” is accompanied by a workaround, a justification, or a reason that serves to solve an internal problem rather than a client-facing problem. It can throw the development timeline off, affect the quality of the final product, and compromise the maintainability of the site. Because all of these factors have an effect on the Total Cost of Ownership, sometimes in serious ways, the “yes but” can be the “gotcha” that takes a project down; definitely not something I’d want to underestimate.

If you’ve never been to CANUX, you’re missing out on a fabulous opportunity. Being up in a resort-like mountain setting at the Banff Centre imbues the workshop with some cosmic-force creative atmosphere. There are a few days left to sign up with the advance discount, so don’t delay if you’re sitting on the fence.

I’ve just moved into a new place, which comes complete with a gas fireplace. I was told by my landlords that using the gas fireplace to warm the lounge area would be cozy and economical, so I pushed the button on the remote control to start up the fireplace, which was set to 74F, took some painkillers, and promptly fell asleep on the sofa. When I awoke, the temperature hovered in the low 80s, and I couldn’t figure out the right button combination to turn the fireplace off, and within a half-hour, the temperature was climbing into the mid 80s. As I couldn’t get in touch with my landlords, the next best thing seemed to be to find the information on the manufacturer’s site.

The site was completely geared toward sales. There was no telephone number to contact anyone, and the customer support side was rather anorexic. I sent off an email using their contact form, with little expectation that anyone would get back to me, as the form was also geared to sales – or at least knowing details such as the model number (and I wasn’t about to start poking around a very hot hunk of cast iron). There were some downloadable manuals, that in my fevered state made little sense, and even in my current non-fevered state, I realize now, didn’t have the information I needed.

The poor user experience continued, even after some creative searching turned up company with a phone number in the same area code as me. So do I have incredibly bad luck, or is this problem more widespread than should be, considering that the Web has been around for more than a decade? Where is their knowledge base, their forum, or at least a FAQ page? I am, after all, used to using new Web services, where  self-serve is the norm. I had every incentive to look for the information, if it were there. And in this case, where I was literally dealing with fire, I expect some sort of emergency line to get a much-needed answer.

According to Jeffrey Tarter, Executive Director of the Association of Support Professionals, “Tech notes should be the heart and soul of a great Web support site.Yet painfully often, users encounter a tangle of hard-to-understand, poorly maintained knowledge base documents that fail to solve their problems–and may even discourage users from ever coming back to the site. In fact, many knowledgebases were originally written for internal use by support reps, not customers, and hardly anyone ever seems to ask: Is this approach really working for us?”

I can answer that. No, it’s not working. It’s not working for either party. As a customer, the experience left me cold. I certainly wouldn’t buy from them, and could never recommend them in good faith. As an industry professional, I can’t imagine it’s pleasant or productive to have irate customers calling for information that support staff are ill-equipped to answer.

The people who come to your site, who are generally called “users,” come there to consume content. It doesn’t matter whether the content is text, audio, graphics, or video, and it doesn’t matter whether the content is of the persuasive, instructional, or entertainment variety. The people who come to your site are content consumers, and they have searched out, or navigated to, your site to find some content to consume.

When a content consumer comes to your site and finds what they’re looking for, they consider the endeavour a success. In other words, they went on a treasure hunt found the content “treasure” they were looking for.  When the hunt leads to no treasure, the time and mental energy spent is considered a waste, no matter how good the rest of the user experience.

Here’s a real-life illustration. Last year, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. When my sister called me from the other side of the country to tell me the news, I had all sorts of questions. As the eldest child, I’m the “fixer” and went into high gear, doing research to find answers to the questions no one had thought to ask at the time. I chose to look through the Mayo Clinic site, as they are a reputable source of information. Thankfully, I found the answers, and could provide links to my sister so she could read up on the topic, as well.

What would have been my response had I not not found the content I needed? Would I have been impressed with the navigation, the colours, the affordance on the buttons? I think not. I would have uttered a frustrated “this is terrible,” or something more colourful, and left the site in frustration.

In my case, the process of the hunt became invisible. This is because of the care that the Mayo Clinic team put into creating usable navigation and wayfinding aids.  (Had the design been flawed, the hunt would have been impeded, and that would have warranted a frustrated outcry of a different tone.) More important to me, however, was that the content that I had set out to find was actually there. It would never occur to me to wander around the Mayo Clinic site to marvel over the user experience of their site – well, actually, I would, but only because I’m an industry geek with infinite curiosity – but it would occur to me to read everything I could get my hands on about the topic at the forefront of my mind.

I relied on the clues that got me to the treasure in the most efficient way. This form of wayfinding is a critical aspect of user experience, but it is not the entire user experience. It may be convenient to abdicate responsibility for wayfinding to the information architects, interaction designers, and other user experience professionals whose work scope includes these aspects of site design, but it is certainly not effective. In other words, the user experience is not complete without good content.

Dorian Taylor, who comes from the technical side, hit the nail on the head when he wrote: “Rather than designating content as something that is plugged into a decorated shell, why not endeavour to put it at the centre?” This fits nicely with a content strategy perspective, where we recognize that content is not a shell game.

But really, wouldn’t it be an eye-opener for companies and bureaucracies who don’t seem to get it, and don’t seem to have an impetus to get it? And the consumers who could finally realize that the problem doesn’t like with them, but with the services, products, websites, and agencies with which they they’re trying to interact.

The idea would be something like this: follow around a couple of average people, watch their interactions with the world around them, and show the interactions, both positive and negative. Here’s what a half-hour episode could look like:

Woman comes out of the shower, holding two bottles. She shows the camera that she can’t tell which one is shampoo and which one is conditioner because she’s at that age where everyone needs glasses – who wears glasses in the shower, though? – and the labels on the bottles have the brand name in large type and the product type in small type. She figures out the fix: change brands for one of the products so she’ll know that yellow is shampoo and green is conditioner. (Are you watching, marketing managers? Designers?)

Woman is shown up some transit information. Between the compact fly-out menus and double-tab navigation, it takes her several tries to click on the tab she wants. With each try, her language gets more colourful. Finally, she gets to the schedule and discovers that the route she needs to take doesn’t work for her, and she expresses her frustration articulately but firmly.

Man is shown driving in his neighbourhood. He points to a bicycle lane being used as a right-turn lane, another being used as a right-hand passing lane. The camera shows how close cars come to the bicycles as they whiz by. Camera shows him on his bicycle, and as he rides down the street, wobbling from time to time, he articulates his fear of being hit by a car that doesn’t allow enough clearance. He reminisces about the bicycle paths in Holland, a tiny country that found the room to create bicycle paths separates from the road by greenways.

Man is calling a telephone provider to ask about deleting a service he doesn’t use. He is put on hold while told that they are “experiencing a higher than usual call volume”. He snorts with derision and says that he’s never once called without getting that message. In an Emporer Has No Clothes move, he theorizes that this is simple understaffing in the hopes that, aside from saving money at their end, more people will be motivated to figure out their problems by themselves. The camera pans to his computer screen, where he shows how he’s sent around and around in circles when he tries to get to that service. When he finally reaches customer support, the comical discussion with the staffer at the other end reaches Kafkaesque proportions. (Are you watching, marketing managers? Loyalty advocates?)

Woman is trying to book a ticket online, and shows that despite clicking “Remember Me”, the site design doesn’t want to remember the first six numbers of her account. Somewhere along the line, she is asked to put the number in again, and ends up looking up the number and, out of frustration, writing it on her hand. She muses that it’s times like this she considers taking up smoking again. (Are you watching, interaction designers?)

I could go on, but you get the picture. This is the reality of daily life, where design sloppiness gets ugly as it frustrates us ten ways to Sunday and wastes our time, from the time we get up until the time we go to bed (oh, and don’t get me started about alarm clocks). Oh, and if you need a willing victim, er subject, for your show, call me.