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.

So when it came time to changing the answering machine greeting message, I followed the instructions only to discover that there is no option to select. I tried all the little tricks to see if the option got hidden elsewhere in the menu tree, but it was definitely missing. Well, that’s fine; I will tough out the pain of contacting customer support, through the phone number in the back of the book. The phone number works in Canada – always an iffy question – so that’s encouraging, and after listening to all the preambles, I press 1 for English, enter my product number, and go through the various menus but there is no option for “menu items are missing”. It seems that all the options end up the same way, leading to an end point of “visit our website at …”.

Now, gigantic corporations all have us trained to despise having to call in; in other words: Don’t you think I’d have checked the website first if I thought I could find the answer on your website? It would have been so much easier: go to the site, choose the model number, and  But of course, the user experience was quite painful. Here is an encapsulation of the frustration points:

1. After doing a Google search for AT&T 84209 (the model number) phone, I kept getting routed to the att.com site, which was obviously US-based, and geared to telephone service subscribers.
2. I redialed the number from the instruction book and was given www.telephones.att.com as the URL. Typing in 84209 got me to a shopping area. Do I want to buy a replacement cordless battery? I must say that if I happened to know the model number of a phone I wanted to buy, I’d be in luck because the second shopping option is to buy the very phone that I’m getting annoyed over.
3. There are links to the manual and Quick Start guide, which I consulted and had the same incorrect information.
4. Filling in the Contact Us form field promises to net a response within – depending on which of the messages you believe – 72 hours (on website), 2 days (on-screen auto-reply message), or 3 days (auto-reply email) but I doubt that I’ll get a meaningful answer. It may be too late anyhow, as I’ve run about the house, disconnecting telephone bits and bobs and tossing them into a bag to return to the store.

Now, I admit that my question is not one of the top ten questions, and it might be embarrassing to put it on the automated reply options (Press 8 if the interface  doesn’t work as per instructions.) but surely someone has asked this question before, and somewhere, a content developer has tackled this discrepancy. The point is that there needs to be a strategy around content that goes beyond the basics. Now that I’ve calmed down and revisited the situation with an industry insider’s eye, the support site is lovely – beautiful colours and the navigation to the FAQs is quite simple. But when a customer is searching content, and can’t find it, then all the other niceties fall away. The laser beam focus on finding the content, which is needed to complete their task, overrides all other aspects of the user experience. Task-based analysis at its best.

So to AT&T, I would ask: if one of your questions is “Who is Charlie Johnson and why is his name displayed on my phone?” surely the question of missing menu items could be addressed, as well? This site is a classic example of focusing resources on the usability side of the support site, but not having a content strategy befitting such a site.  In this case, I did receive an email a few days later, referring me to a “real person” in another department, but by that time, my answer was, “Thanks, but too little too late. I’ve exchanged the phone for another brand.”

Seeing as how returns of electronic consumer products is a multi-billion dollar problem in North America, companies could definitely benefit from having strong content strategies, not just on their website, but across the product line, from instructions to training to their support site.

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.

• October, New Orleans, LA: Lavacon
  A conference for techcomm managers and project managers, this year’s theme is professional and career development. If you sense a career change in your near future, or are out of a job and want to move to a field with a future, I’m presenting two sessions. One is on content strategy; the other is on managing your personal brand online.
• October, webinar: Leveraging Content Assets on a Tight Budget
  Part of Aptara Corporation’s Thought Leader webinar series, you can learn how to align technology and processes with business goals, leverage existing content assets for better user experience, and creating an optimized content supply chain
• November, Banff, AB, Canada: CANUX
  I’ll be presenting a case study at this 2-day Canadian User Experience workshop. If you attend, you’ll also get the infamous Kristina Halvorson, whose keynote my presentation follows
• December, Boston, MA: Content Management Professionals Association Summit
  The theme of the trade association summit this year is open source standards. My presentation on “open source content” is a little different aspect of content strategy.
• December, Boston, MA:  Gilbane Boston
  I’ll be moderating a panel discussion on Content Modeling and Information Architectures for Content Management, which is a critical aspect of content strategy.

If you can’t complete your professional development in the content strategy area during 2009, there will be multiple opportunities during 2010. Stay tuned!

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.

Whether the content you’re looking for is product content to help you make a purchasing decision, or post-sales content that helps you with product use or maintenance, there are too many sites that seem to be great sites. They might even be winners of industry awards, which they use as ammunition for not changing the status quo. But unless you happen to want what they think you want, you’re left feeling like you’ve been on a treasure hunt, only to find there is no treasure.

This is the “sizzle without the steak” effect, so aptly described byJakob Nielsen in his study of a business consumer researching an LCD projector. The vision of the content a user would need to make an informed decision missed many critical assumptions, resulting in a hunt for content across fifteen different sites.

While Nielsen categorizes this as a usability problem, the usability issues lie with the content more than with the structural or interactivity aspects of the site. Had the content simply been “misplaced” on the site, the user would have shown more bouncing between pages within the site. The fact that the user went to fifteen different sites indicates a serious lack of content on the site. Skimping on content encourages users to practice site fickleness, bouncing from site to site to compare information.

Anticipating what users want to know, and providing the right type of content, in the right place for the right time for the right user, in the right tone keeps users on your site. A good content strategist will look at content through the filter of user experience, and ensure that the content created contributes to a rich user experience, and that there is enough of the right type of content to allow users to complete whatever task they arrived at your site to accomplish.

If you’re being asked to use your content in more than one way, you might be at the stage where the more part includes methods or technologies you’re not really familiar with. Maybe content re-use means syndication or collaborative creation with other departments or divisions, or incorporating content from other sites or user generated content. It could mean figuring how to build community or provide better support or get better feedback.

Maybe more means creating or incorporating help from the technical side, sharing the content in a knowledge base, putting it on the Web, maybe with automatic updates, and adopting XML, perhaps figuring out how the new DITA standard works for you in all of this.

No matter what your situation, you’re in the position where you’re supposed to figure out the XML stuff and the Web stuff and the quality stuff and the stuff around RSS feeds and copyright, how it all fits together, and why you need any of it, anyhow.

After all, if you’ve even tried to coordinate content creation between departments, or track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, or just share content between a CMS and LMS, you’ll recognize how hard it is to find two systems that play nice together, let alone get an entire corporate strategy in place. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. The promise of content management was to solve the silo problem, but in many cases has simply created larger silos.

I’ve posted slides from my workshop, where we look at:

• The concepts of content convergence and integration, the principles behind it, and the market forces that are driving the trend
• Opportunities created by content convergence in various contexts, from technical documentation converging to support documentation to marketing material to user-generated content
• The changing nature of content to allow for successful convergence, and the changes in processes to support it
• Ways to prepare your organization to adapt, and explore ways to allow content convergence to drive improvements in business efficiency and customer relationships

When the DUO Consulting newsletter hit my inbox today, and I read Sonny Cohen’s post entitled “Site Loading? Skip Intro? You’re Kidding? I’m Outta Here,” I found myself nodding my head in sad agreement. However, a couple of the comments on the blog got me riled up enough to elaborate on the topic here.

To Flash or not to Flash

I have seen Flash intros well executed, but in very rarely and in very specific contexts. Most of the time, it’s an annoyance or worse, a complete block.I used to be able to successfully aruge with developers by reminding them that Flash undoes their SEO (search engine optimization) efforts. Recently, a developer proudly countered that because Google can now index Flash files, he sees no reason not to revert to Flash. This raised the stakes for me, as the need to “prove” that Flash is counter-productive just became a more laborious task. Here are a couple of user experiences you can try for yourself:

To Flash or Not to Flash

Your task: Find the address of the Moxie’s in Vancouver’s West End.

The test: Does the Flash interfere with getting information?(For a uniquely frustrating experience, repeat the test on your mobile device.)

The site: Moxie’s Classic Grill

Results: I did this exactly once, and only under duress. Each page takes ages to load. The logical “Contact Us” and “About Us” don’t yield any useful information, and the restaurant locator is less than useless. With each page load, I became so resentful of wasting my time (and having my lunch date waiting on the other end of the phone while I went through this exercise), that I now have a slight hate-on for Moxie’s. In other words, the site damaged the brand. It’s not like their menu is so unique that I have to go there to experience a particular type of food.

Conclusion: Nobody likes a flasher, especially when they think that forcing their jiggly bits onto you is cool.

Sound Indulgence

Your task: Go through a testimonial, and find the corresponding site in their showcase.

The test: Can you turn off the sound of the “hostess” to listen to the testimonial? (For a uniquely frustrating experience, try this on a wide-screen laptop, where the lack of screen height  affects the ability to navigate.) How long does it take you to match up the testimonial to the showcase piece? Most importantly, was it worth the work?

The site: Darvak

Results: Observe user behaviour as they wildly start moving the mouse across the page, trying to find the “mute” button. To determine if anyone actually listened to the message, answer these questions:

• What does the organization believe is the key in [sic] graphic design, marketing, and advertising?
• What is the name of the hostess?
• Did they accidentally open the pool game in their desperation to turn off the sound?

Conclusion: Maybe it’s because I spend too much time on airplanes with crying babies that don’t come with mute buttons, but this brings to mind the phrase “Children should be seen and not heard.” Kewl, maybe. Useful? Not so much.

Who Gets It?

The site: Vision Critical

They have a Flash option, which allows users to engage or bypass this. On their products page, the embedded video has controls to allow users to pause and continue, mute, or end the video. Also, users can scan the page while the video loads. And finally, the content in the video is useful. It is an extension of the page content.

The site: Jaguar

The site has a Flash presentation which doesn’t interfere with getting to the information. When I bypass the Flash, I don’t feel like I’m actually bypassing it; I’m simply getting to the information I want. If I want their Flash experience, I can return to it at any time.

The video didn’t really do anything for me, but let’s assume that their market research has shown that the video creates emotional impact. They let you move anywhere in the Flash presentation by moving along the preview bar (Want to see that leather interior again? Click along the bar and return to it.) There is, again, control. I didn’t like the music, so I turned it off.

The site: Adobe AIR

The Flash on the Adobe AIR site is actually useful – it demonstrates what the product does. Their execution is such that I don’t need to take any steps to browse the content on the site or to go about whatever task I set out to do. The lack of interference with other navigation and content elements means that the first time I come to the site (when I’m more likely to view the Flash), I can investigate it when I’m ready to, and on subsequent visits, I can ignore it (because I don’t need to be educated in that way again).

These samples have been chosen at random, from the frustration and appreciation of my personal experience. I used to think I was less tolerant than many users because of my industry experience, but having spent time with some younger users lately, I realize that my tolerance level is quite high, compared to theirs. They expect sites to “just work” and there is about a 2-second window before they go elsewhere in search of content (note: in search of content, not more barriers).

The conclusion isn’t anything startling. It’s nothing that hasn’t been said over the past ten years. Let users stay in control of their experience. Let them complete their tasks without friction. Don’t assume what users want to do on your site; do your due diligence in user-centered design to be sure you’re getting it right. When in doubt, do some user testing. And as a content strategist, I’m obligated to add: start with a strategy, then build to fulfill that strategy.