It was interesting to me to see how Lean has made it into this area because at first glance, Lean is all about production line efficiencies, and here it’s being applied to a discipline that is far from production line, and couldn’t be effective without a certain amount of creativity. And creativity is hard to streamline in terms of “reducing waste.”

The idea of applying Lean principles to a service environment isn’t new, however. In 2004, Lean was just starting to be adapted to areas beyond manufacturing. I worked on a project where we applied Lean principles to the production of content, where the savings were great and the ROI was stunning (though as Scott Abel always warns: your mileage may vary).

My client and I turned our success story into a presentation. As the question of ROI comes up continuously, I thought I’d post the presentation to show how a rigorous examination of even a small area of content production can yield significant results.

How Far to Lean (goes to Slideshare.net) or view below:

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

This list is organized arbitrarily by broad category. Hey, my blog, my rules. And what you can do, gentle reader, is add your favourite books to the comments section. More reading, more knowledge!

Planning and Design

Harnessing Complexity (Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen)

Managing Enterprise Content (Ann Rockley)

Content Management Bible (Bob Boiko)

Document Engineering (Robert J Glushko, Tim McGrath)

Content and Complexity (Michael J Alberts, Beth Maxur, eds)

Designing e-Learning (Saul Carliner)

Information Design (Robert Jacobson, ed)

User Experience

Understanding Your Users (Catherine Courage, Kathy Baxter)

The User is Always Right (Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar)

Paper Prototyping (Carolyn Snyder)

Why Software Sucks (David Platt)

Handbook of Usability Testing (Jerry Rubin, Dana Chisnell, Jared Spool)

Storytelling for User Experience (Whitney Quesenbery, Kevin Brooks)

Observing the User Experience (Mike Kuniavsky)

Subject to Change (Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer)

Rocket Science Made Easy (Steve Krug)

Simple and Usable (Giles Colborne)

Do Good Design (David B Berman)

Built for Use (Karen Donoghue)

Mental Models (Indi Young)

The Inmates are Running the Asylum (Alan Cooper)

Practitioner Guides

The Web Content Strategist’s Bible (Richard Sheffield)

Elements of Content Strategy (Erin Kissane)

Letting Go of the Words (Ginny Redish)

Content Strategy for the Web (Kristina Halvorson)

Creating the Perfect Design Brief (Peter L Phillips)

Business Process Mapping (Jacka Keller)

Request for Proposal (Bud Porter-Roth)

Managing Knowledge (Wayne Applehans, Alden Globe, Greg Laugero)

Managing Your Documentation Products (JoAnn Hackos)

Techniques for Technical Communicators (Carol Barnum, Saul Carliner)

Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog (Kitty Burns Florey)

The Accidental Taxonomist (Heather Hedden)

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Edward Tufte)

Envisioning Information (Edward Tufte)

Wordsmithing for Effect

Clout (Colleen Jones)

Neuro Web Design (Susan M Weinschenk, PhD)

Content Rules (CC Chapman and Ann Handley)

Get Content, Get Customers (Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett)

Content Nation (John Blossom)

Curation Nation (Steven Rosenbaum)

Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely)

Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh)

Branded Nation (James B Twitchell)

Call to Action (Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg)

Intercultural Communication (James W Neuliep)

A Practical Guide to Localization (Bert Esselink)

International Technical Communication (Nancy L Hoft)

Metadata and Delivery

Audience, Relevance, and Search (James Mathewson, Frank Donatone, and Synthia Fishel)

Search Engine Visibility (Shari Thurow)

Metadata Solutions (Adrienne Tennenbaum)

Killer Web Content (Gerry McGovern)

Wiki (Alan Porter)

Introduction to DITA (Jennifer Linton, Kylene Bruski)

User Engagement

Conversation and Community (Anne Gentle)

Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky)

SocialCorp (Joel Postman)

Sway (Ori and Rom Brafman)

The Thank You Economy (Gary Vaynerchuk)

Radically Transparent (Andy Beal, Dr. Judy Strauss)

Crowdsourcing (Jeff Howe)

Participating in Explanatory Dialogues (Johanna D Moore)

IDI’s Rahel Bailie will be there, making one of the keynote presentations, The Content Strategy Paradox, and running a workshop, Not All Content Strategies are Created Equal, about strategies for cross-genre content.

Read her take on content agility
Revisit her 2010 webinar on content strategy and ROI

Content strategist Kathy Hanbury shares her way of going about a content review, and producing a content usability scorecard.

The Content Review (Heuristic Review, Expert Review) and the Content Review sample report

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.

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.