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.

I would argue that, depsite the perception that websites consist of marketing content, for many sites, the marketing content is only the top layer – the icing on the cake, and what supports that top layer is a substantial amount of technical content – the cake itself. 

Layers of content on a website

That technical content is often far more valuable to the corporate or product brand than the persuasive content. In doing user research for one client in particular, a manufacturer of power generators and inverters, I saw how guys used their site. Consistently, they would bypass all of the marketing material and go right for the specs. (Of course, before the site revamp, a lot of the specs were missing or buried in a PDF in some obscure area of the site, but that’s a whole other story.) They knew what inverters did, and what to look for, and went directly to find what was, to them, the important piece of information.

In effect, the technical specifications were the marketing material; if the inverter had the right oomph to it, that’s what the users wanted to know. And had the content been wrong, had the inverter been used with some disastrous results, then the ensuing fall-out would have become a marketing problem. The artificial siloing of content between organizational departments – marketing, techdocs, training, support, engineering – is reminiscent of the discussions we had about information arhcitecture, some 8-10 years ago. The difference is that for many organizations, these larger silos have become de facto standards in which they bucket their information for consumers. They assume that when a content consumer arrives on their site, they want to see a certain type of content. They try to funnel the user through their site navigation or constrain the path to the cash register. But if you look at the way consumers actually use a site, you can see that they will not be constrained. In this case study, Jakob Neilsen reveals that consumers will breeze past the feel-good content and head right for the techincal information, product reviews, and other information pertinent to their decision-making process.

The content that was sought out by the consumer, in this example, is probably produced by a department that publishes to multiple channels, not just the Web. Their content strategy likely has to take into account single-sourcing for print as well as Web, and other channels such as training materials (possibly print, e-learning, and a Web output), manuals, product data sheets, and other end products. The Web is but a slice of a greater strategy. When we talk about content strategy, then, my contention is that the type of content we include in the definition needs to broaden beyond Web content, as does the recognition that the content, even if just for the Web, includes not only persuasive content, but instructive/informative, user-generated, and even entertainment content.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RAHEL!
It may not be the coolest thing to send gift certificates as birthday presents, but:
1) There aren’t many same-day delivery gift options.
2) All online gift-selection guides are too narrow minded and in a dire need of some faceted taxonomy: a woman our age can only be a domestic diva, country clubber, or super grandma, and a geek can only be a young dude; there’s no way to find something for a geek grandma.
3) I hope you’ll enjoy browsing the product catalogue.

Most consumers wouldn’t articulate the problem as clearly as my taxonomy guru colleague. I’ve had this frustration for years, starting with becoming a grandmother at age 40, and finding myself represented in the media by 80-year-old white-haired, hunch-backed women in rocking chairs, their knees covered with shawls. Well, it’s more than a decade later, and I’m in the gym three times a week, working out with my personal trainer, and watching my media alter ego get a little younger and a little more active, but mostly, I’m supposed to be verging on arthritic or incontinent and see lots of medical professionals to fix me up when I’m not in discomfort on the golf course. On the other hand, at least I’m now being shown on a golf course instead of in a rocking chair!

In all fairness, there are a few posts for geek grannies – there’s even a link to a spoof video of a gangsta granny (again, hunch-backed and white hair). I was thinking more along the lines of Goldie Hawn or Kathy Bates.

Given that I’m working on a couple of design projects for fitness-related, health-related sites, these observations hit closer to home than usual. I suspect there needs to be more middle-aged women in advertising, design, and related fields, as our perspectives can show how different the landscape looks from this side of 50.

What a great concept. I’m going to make 2009 my own year of creating unexpected value. What better way to create a great user experience for those who deal with me in a professional capacity?

Joe Pulizzi, Chief Content Officer for Junta 42, understands the value of content, that it is an asset that serves as the “good stuff” of marketing campaigns. Without content, the technology has nothing of interest to deliver. Customers and prospects will be drawn in by the quality and usefulness of the content, not the potential of the technology behind the scenes. He recently blogged about this phenomenon and trends in content marketing. As marketers move money to areas where it can be more effective, the role of content is facing a significant increase.

Hear more about this trend, particularly about the dos and don’ts of content marketing, in Joe’s presentation, Please Stop Talking about Yourself: Is Your Web Content Killing Your Brand and What to Do about It, at Web Content 2009.