Confab Fringe Meetup – March 2013

On Tuesday, 19th March, The London Content Strategy Meetup held a special Confab Fringe event at Google Campus that featured three great talks about content strategy from the Government Digital Service and Confab speakers ahead of the first ever Confab London Content Strategy conference taking place this week. Here are some of the notes that I made during the evening:

Neil Williams: On Her Majesty’s Digital Service Neil is a Product Manager at Inside Government where they are merging the websites of all government departments and many other public bodies into one section of www.gov.uk.

• Currently content is spread across many sites and as such is incomplete.
• 14 of 24 Ministerial departments have been moved over to www.gov.uk/government in four months which has included the migration of 45,000 documents.
• GOV.UK is a product that people want and research shows they would use it again.
• Start with needs – Who are the users? What do they need? Document user needs on a spread sheet (user stories). These needs inform every decision.
• Bring people with you – Everyone is involved.
• Constrain formats – No such thing as a 'general page' all content must meet user needs. There is no space for waffle on GOV.UK!
• Editors, dev and designers together - Sit together, learn together, build together.
• Quality – Validation, performance metrics and spot checks are used to ensure quality content at this scale.
• Change management – Need to consider all of the stakeholders involved and make sure they are listened too and included in the journey.

Gigi Griffis: Content Strategy with a World-Changing Twist Gigi is a Content Strategist and web writer.

• Think macro – Improve working relationships and identify people within organisations who are not working together but should be.
• Think micro – How can Content Strategy help your portfolio or an Airbnb listing? A/B titles and descriptions.
• Be creative (and sneaky) – Incorporate Content Strategy wherever you can to demonstrate value and help you sell it in. Project briefing forms are a way to identify user needs.
• Content strategy not only teaches people how to create and manage content but also how to think about content, marketing strategies and customers in the long term.

Leisa Reichelt: Prototyping User Experience Leisa spoke about Strategic User Experience and explained that with a better understanding of business strategy we can align our work to business goals and consequently deliver better customer experiences.

• A two way approach – Top down (designing better environments for doing better UX) and Bottom up (delivering strategy through execution to drive change).
• Work in a multidisciplinary team. Sketch to HTML, stay out of Photoshop.
• Document only what's necessary.
• Don't work alone – Common sense emerges quicker when you pair with somebody else.
• Test multiple prototypes – Don't commit to being right at the start.
• Use real content and test the content.
• "Show, don't tell" – Showing stakeholders prototypes gives them a better sense of what you are making and allows you to make decisions based on evidence.

Three great talks and some very practical takeaways. I'll finish with one of my favourites quotes of the night from Leisa Reichelt:

"Prototyping beats abstraction"

UXPA UK February Event – Brand and Experience

The February 2013 UXPA UK event was about the intersection of brand and experience design. Here is a short overview of the talks and a few thoughts on the subject.

User experience is at the heart of your brand Kevin Keohane (@brandviolet) and Don Fogarty (@DonFog) from Brand Pie gave a talk titled 'User experience is at the heart of your brand'. They began with some brand basics: be relevant (to the audience you want to engage with), be authentic (don't say one thing and do another) and be differentiated (why should people chose your product over a competitor's?). When working with clients they ask what's your purpose, ambition, strategy and positioning? These questions apply to both internal and external facets of the company and they believe that strong, enduring brands align what they do with what they say and position themselves based on what they're great at and not just on what's happening in the market.

They then explained why they think that brand experience and user experience need to be one and the same thing and referenced a study published in the Journal od Applied Psychology that gave poor treatment as the number one reason why people leave brands (a whopping 73%). Customers who have memorable experiences with your brand are more likely to remain loyal, spend more money with you and recommend your brand to their friends. Conversely customers who have bad experiences will also share these with people in their network on a variety of channels.

"Create an experience that provides a memory that relates directly to your brands purpose, ambition, strategy and positioning" – Kevin Keohane and Don Fogarty

As Kevin and Don explained the prize is to become market leader but even leader brands can be knocked off the top if a nimble challenger brand comes along with a simple, usable, focused product that is backed up with a superior end-to-end customer experience connected across all touch points.

Brand is Interface David Eveleigh-Evans (@eveleighevans) from Method spoke about the ways in which the nature of brand definition is evolving and adapting and how interaction design is shaping the experiences between people, technology and brands. He explained that interaction design is becoming ever more important in differentiating a brand and maintaining customer loyalty as product experience surpasses traditional marketing communications and advertising.

David explained that your brand is more than a logo, a typeface and a series of colours, your brand is your interface and the gap between brand promise and brand reality is determined by the truth of use. Being consistent and transparent creates trust and brand loyalty.

"A brand is not a product or a promise or a feeling. It's the sum of all the experiences you have with a company" – David Eveleigh-Evans

Social networks provide brands with opportunities to join in the discussion on a much more personal level and they are also opening up new touch points for customer engagement and support (conversely they are also creating new outlets for your customers to talk about you). David explained that the challenge now for brands is to bridge the gap across all of these online and offline touch points.

Summary Digital technology is bringing us closer to brands than ever before via mobile, desktop and offline channels. How can brands differentiate themselves in this ever-changing world?

Customer experience should be at the heart of everything you do. A user-centred design approach aligns business goals with the needs of customers across channels, devices and touch points. After all, customers who have a positive memorable experience are more likely to return. However, if you have a fantastic product but your online presence leaves your customers frustrated and unsatisfied then they may well start looking for alternatives.