Audiences, Outcomes, and Determining User Needs

One of the most important parts of web design and development at Blend Interactive is what we call our Audiences and Outcomes process. The process – which borrows heavily from C. David Gammel’s Online and On Mission – helps determine site audiences and the expected outcomes of those audiences. It’s what drives decision making for the rest of the site. It’s kind of a big deal.

If you want to learn more about the process, we suggest two things.

1. Buy Gammel’s book. You can get it here.

2. Read my article, “Audiences, Outcomes, and Determining User Needs”, published today in Issue 345 of A List Apart

If you’re confused about how this differs from your standard discovery meeting, with people meeting in a room and answering questions and all of that, the answer is: it doesn’t. Not really. You may already do something like this without being so deliberate, or you may define audiences and outcomes elsewhere in your process.

That’s cool. We’ve found that tackling audiences and outcomes at the very beginning makes our content inventory more relevant (by allowing us to pair pages with audiences) and saves a step in our qualitative audit (by giving us context for content needs).

What’s more, it clarifies our goals from day one. This clarification is important. For example, if we’re building a site to sell mail-order diapers, we can’t just say, “We’re building a diaper delivery site, and mothers will come to the site to buy diapers, and so let’s start writing copy.” I’m not a mother. And if I was, I’m certainly not EVERY mother. I know damn well that fathers and other caregivers will come to the site, too. So if I move forward with the diaper-buying mother stereotype in mind, I’m doing a disservice to a giant percentage of the site’s users.

And, while you’re at it, this issue of A List Apart also has a wonderful look at future-friendly content from constant smarty Sara Wachter-Boettcher: “Future-Ready Content.”

My First Principles

Earlier this month, Contents Magazine asked seven very smart people about their first principles – the things that ground every part of their work, whether in content or beyond. You should probably go read that.

Then, Contents asked us to fill in the spaces by submitting our own answers to the question, “What are your first principles?”

There’s difficulty in nailing down those first principles – especially for me – because our first principles are constantly changing. They adapt. They are found wanting. They slip out of our hands and are rarely in our control.

That’s kind of the point, I think. There’s a reason Contents asked not just WHAT, but HOW – specifically, “How have your first principles changed over time?”

Read the full article…

Building Confidence: The Hidden Content Deliverable

When we sign a contract for content work – whether it’s working with a client as a consultant or accepting a position within a large company – we do so with the expectation of deliverables. They are the things we make. They are often a symbol of milestone completion, or quarterly goal. They are CONCRETE. They are LAW.

But that’s not really what we’re doing, is it? We’re not handing over documents – we’re handing over the keys to a very large vehicle, and our biggest hope is that the people we hand it over to can drive it safely.

Content Strategy Begins at Launch

Content strategy is not about the content as much as it’s about the content-makers, teaching those who will carry the flag long after our leg of the march has passed. As we learned over and over again at last year’s Confab, this is a field of organizational change. The templates and aggregators will stand without us, but the passion will not.

Passion isn’t often passed around in the content strategy circles, but it should be. When we as editors and consultants and architects take on a project, we do so not to construct the project ourselves, but to share our knowledge. We may take the first steps; we write the first about page, or we reword a paragraph, or we suggest a new location for the news feed. But when we’re gone, we’re gone.

It’s this handoff that we plan for. The goal of any content strategy project is to create a better experience for the user. But it is also to instill our clients and companies with the passion and confidence to create their own content.
Read the full article…

“A Content Methodology Primer” at Contents Magazine

Contents Logo

A little more than three months ago, Erin Kissane approached me about writing for the first issue of a new content publication, Contents Magazine. I said yes. Of course I said yes.

That article went live today.

From “A Content Methodology Primer”:

It’s romantic to think that content work is an art, all brandy, pipes, and wood grain. But it’s not. It’s a process. A messy, sticky, multi-disciplinary process that begs for structure, consistency, and guidance.

That’s a daunting task. Content wants to be messy. It wants to roll around in the mud. It wants to be gross. Our job is to pull it together—to take the guesswork out of creating and curating it—and to treat content work as something closer to a science.

I’ll be honest – the process was completely new to me. Being a self-edited writer for most of my life, I’ve never gone through a true editorial process. It was wonderful – having that guidance and those extra sets of eyes kept me honest and challenged me to write better.

A huge thanks to the team over at Contents for giving me this opportunity, especially Erin and Krista Stevens, who were BEYOND patient in editing an article that threatened to explode into a 7,000-word maze of non sequiturs.

Contents Magazine

You’ll have to forgive me for a moment. I’m about to get mushy.

Because, over in a more enlightened part of the internet, something beautiful just launched.

Contents MagazineContents Magazine is a little project from the team of Krista Stevens, Erin Kissane, Erik Westra and Ethan Marcotte. A little project, I say. HA! More like a VERY MAJOR undertaking. It’s the act of taking a scattered industry of content people and giving them a little something special. Something UNIFIED. Publishers rub elbows with information architects and copywriters. The lines that threaten to separate the disciplines are blurred. Erased, even. Discussion begins and – wait for it – continues.

It’s that continuation that makes Contents Magazine so unique. This isn’t a one-and-done blast of an issue – it’s a slow trickle of content, each article telling more of the story, each voice shaping the concept with a different tool. There’s a promise of synthesis: examples, follow-up, comments; the elements that make up the full conversation, curated in a way that will add one last element of texture.

Contents Magazine furthers the promise of community that began at last May’s Confab, and carried over into this summer’s CS Forum in London.

This is a community of insight. We all like to talk. A lot. And we all like to share. A lot. That’s what happens when you combine word and data nerds and ask them to organize. As the world of content shifts and splits, we wander to the edge and create a bridge to the other side. Then, we celebrate with a glass of bourbon. Spreadsheets, too. Lots of bourbon and spreadsheets.

All of us content strategists and editors and publishers and information architects, we’ve got the passion. We’ve got the voices. We’ve got the drive to push things forward.

Now we’ve got the forum. And what a beautiful little forum it’s turned out to be.

Congrats, Contents Magazine team. We all look forward to being a part of this.

Next Page »