Content Strategy Myopia: Toward a Toolkit for Better Content #CASEMMW Ron Bronson 

About Ron Strategist at large. (Service design, digital, UX & product) Curator, Aggregate Conference (#GGRGT) 

“The explosion of digital technologies over the past decade has created empowered consumers so expert in their use of tools & information they can call the shots. Hunting down what they want when they want it and getting it delivered to their doorsteps at rock bottom price.” -Harvard Business Review (Nov. 2015) 

What is service design? 

What is service design? A collaborative approach to creating service experiences from the customer perspective. Focused on quality, service design helps organizations gain end-to- end understanding of their services. 

What is service design? ● People focused ● Research based ● Iterative ● Participatory 

What is service design? ● Tangible ● Empathetic ● Experiential ● Cross-disciplinary 

In service design, the end is just the beginning. 

“A business suffers from marketing myopia when a company views marketing strictly from the standpoint of selling a specific product rather than from the standpoint of fulfilling customer needs.” - Ted Levitt (1960) 

Some examples 

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So what’s content myopia? A refusal to see beyond your own narrow view of your product & audience. 

The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference. 

“Stress cases aren’t only about crisis — they apply when something mundane goes wrong, too.” Eric Meyer + Sara Wachter-Boettcher “Design for Real Life” 

Designing for worst case scenarios 

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Decision Journey 

Journey Mapping 

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Vocabulary ● Frontstage ● Backstage ● Touchpoints ● Service User ● Service Provider 

● Pain points: places where you know from research or analytics that users are currently getting hung up and have to ask questions, or are likely to abandon the site or app. ● Broken flows: places where the transition between touchpoints, or through a specific interaction on a site (like a form), isn’t working correctly. ● Content gaps: places where a user needs a specific piece of content, but you don’t have it—or it’s not in the right place at the right time. 

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“Quality, relevant content can't be spotted by an algorithm. You can't subscribe to it. You need people - actual human beings - to create or curate it.” -Kristina Halvorson 

Our content is reactive. We rely on third parties to tell us what our users are doing or too heavily rely on data to translate clicks into experiences. 

“Why do users or retention or revenue or click- through or likes or pages views matter? ...What are you trying to do for the world? What is the value that a person will get by using your product or feature at the end of the day?” - Julie Zhuo 

We create biases toward our imagined outcomes. This makes us more likely to forget about, or at least minimize, the possibility of other outcomes. 

Takeaway 

● Better content means understanding your audiences & stakeholders better. ● Collaboration is critical. Content isn’t a spectator sport. ● Exercises like journey mapping make content strategy interactive & involve others. ● Demonstrate more skepticism with regard to assumptions about your audiences. ● Design content for stress cases. ● Examine your own blinders in content. 

Tusen Takk. @ronbronson ronbronson.com [email protected]