Bust the seven BIG digital content problems

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 ELLE GERAGHTY: What a lovely introduction. Thank you, Steve. This is my 11th UX Australia and I will definitely be back for the 12th. I loved the talk that we just heard from Andy Polaine. If you are not in the room I feel very sorry for you. You know why loved it? It was all about content and about how to create more sophisticated content. That is what my talk will be about today. I have been really lucky to work with a of fantastic organisations over the last 15 years. Over time I have noticed the same type of content problems happen over and over again. I thought it makes sense to try to drill down and look at what are these problems and see how we could look at tactical, short-term responses to try to mitigate some of them. We are all experts in this room and know that complex problems need complex and nuanced solutions. But in saying that, there are a couple of things that you can do that are a bit of a quick fix. To start this conversation off so, I want to ground us a little bit. What is content? We saw some of the examples of content just now, but let's get into the actual nitty-gritty detail of it. So often when we it about content we think, "We are talking about words." This story from the ABC his words and image on a generalist website. And this story is about the taxonomy of product distribution on a commercial website. Content. And the Australian Taxation Office has instructions on how to do a tax return, that is content. Words, the content. And as Andy mentioned, cat videos are the base of the internet content. Recipes, content. Reviews, content. Applications, maps, content. Tools and calculators on the web, content. Health instructions, content. Newsletters, content. Data from the Bureau of Meteorology on my phone, content. User generated content. When you looked at the BBC news reader, and he was talking about something and his family bursting? He came to Sydney I got a photo. Why does Google say 'compose' on the red box? Chat box, content. Will this list ever end, do you think? Gaming, the narrative behind the games and the actual, they are not called cartoons, are they? What is a better word, avatar, thanks, James. What else have we got? Oh, sorry, I had a little delay on the progressor there. Talking about virtual reality, we keep talking about it coming but I haven't seen a fantastic application yet, maybe I'll be something later. If I'm talking about Siri or Alexa or Google home, have a miss anything out, another great example of content that I should put on this slide, other than artificial intelligence that we just talked about. No? Maybe? Usually someone has a great example for me. What have you got? Oh, yes, great. It wasn't, I will add it. The suggestion was signage and I guess wayfinding in the context of a digital content. The people who craft that content, these are people. It is not just writers, journalists,
2. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 2 of 6 copywriters and technical writers, it is also sound designers, illustrators, videographers, and we know people who are creating big fakes using artificial intelligence, these are all content creators. So let's think about why content is so important. Let's have a look, I know this is quite small, but this is the Apple website. I've taken a nice long screen grab of it. You might think these guys are doing alright. Apple sent to be pretty successful, perhaps their homepage is a pretty good one. But let's deconstructed. What is going on on this homepage? The first thing I can see is content. I can see words and images. Let's get rid of that, I want to get rid of that so I can see what is left in the content. There are some more words, I know that is content, I said that before. More words, and other image. They are content. Hyperlinks are content. Thanks, good point, but that on the slide as well. More content, more words, a link, images. Beautiful photography, I wonder how much they paid for that. They probably thought about that for they did it as well. Notice I left the global navigation and the footer there as well. I would argue that navigation is content as well. I will leave the global navigation for you. So that is apple, they are a commercial site. It is all about the shiny imagery. Let's go back to the Australia Taxation Office and did the same thing but more quickly. You can see the same thing will happen there. Can I see the top? I can see some words. Maybe there is the micro copy on the search function, content. Then I can see a whole bunch of 'read more' trying to solicit me into reading more about the site. I can see chat box, some help text explaining how to use it. I can see infographics, more infographics, more infographics. I will get rid of that again. So what is left on this website? How many people submit a tax return? It is about 11.5 million people in Australia every year. You can say proportion of them have had a look at this website, it is a pretty important site, made up substantially of content. It is pretty important. You can say they are information websites but what about a functional website. Where is the interaction? Google maps. Words, content, icons, content. More words, content. It goes on and on. You might say, "Hang on, that is not content." But the map is content. The GIS is content. That is why content is so, so important. If we are not thinking about it from a more tactical point of view, if you think about the storytelling that Andy Polaine talked about, content is really the basis of why it will come to a digital space. And really interestingly, I just heard from Tad McGillin who was instrumental in heading up the UK government Digital strategy, and he came to Sydney conference, and he headed up the UK government estimate, any said it cost 10 times as much to service the user from the call centre, or if you potentially have a walk-in branch, then it does via digital.
3. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 3 of 6 So not only is content ubiquitous but it is also important because it is such a cost-effective way of servicing users. And Acosta risk there is that if you don't get it right, for example if we are not compliant or providing inconsistent information, that is also another reason for us to prioritise the production and management of content. OK, that is a bit of a preamble. Let's look at these seven problems I have noticed. The first one is all about audience. You guys will know this problem intimately. This problem is all around user insights and understanding more about who our customers are, who our constituents are, who are the people who engage in a digital space. I often see a range of problems here. The first kind of most naive level is there is no understanding of who uses are. The second one is we kind of know who our users are. We have done a bit of user research, there is a discussion document somewhere, we might have a persona, but we are not quite sure how to actually apply that insight in a meaningful way. And then you probably have something quite sophisticated but there is no organisational consensus around who our users are and what they are trying to do. So what I'm trying to do in this session is to view one or two quite tactical pieces of advice from a content is effective to address that deficit. And I will suggest two techniques. One is to look at Gerry McGovern's top tasks. What he had done is take user journeys, in a way you are quite familiar with them, and created connective tissue towards actual specific tasks that users are trying to complete and discuss the content you can create to address it. And you have probably heard of the core model, created out of Norway from a company called Net Life. What they do is talk about a great model that helps you map user's journeys into the content. It is all page base, you look at one specific screen, one-page, and look at how the user gets there and what they do when they leave. And it creates a conduit from the users to actual meaningful artefacts. And I will share these tools with you on the last flight for you to take a photo. I really like this quote from Gerry McGovern. And again, this is an emphasis around the strategy, and it is really a tactic that he developed around top tasks. Again, you will notice commonality in his next challenge, but one that you have on a day-to-day basis. And you'd probably be thinking, "Oh, well, I share a lot of these challenges with content strategy." and you will think yes, that is correct, because if you are creating a digital artefact, the main thing you are working with whether you know it not, is content. The business strategy I see over and over again is a lack of cohesion between the stated organisational strategic pillars and what content is actually being created.
4. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 4 of 6 So, sometimes this is about a lack of understanding, sometimes it is a lack of articulation. There is a whole bunch of complex reasons why this is going on. Some of you might be working in organisations where you think, "I actually don't know in a real, meaningful way what my organisational strategic goals are, or my corporate strategic pillars are." And you are not alone. A lot of people have that same feeling. So this is what I would recommend. I could not actually find a tool, other than the one I have worked on which is a bit awkward, for solving this problem. What I have here is a really simple solution. You go and look for the corporate plan. It will be somewhere, on intranet, a lot of organisations but on the intranet. You create yourself a really simple table. You have two columns. On the left you have your strategic pillars or drivers, what you call them in the organisation. And on the right you put what actions you are actually complete in terms of creating content, or more importantly reducing content to support that strategic pillar. If you think about the Australia Council, one of their strategic pillars is they want to amplify Australian art and excellence in Australian art. You put that on the top left column. And then you think what are going to do on the website are digital channel to support that? And they have another one around diversity. Rather than publishing on the Australia Council website a traditional oil painting, we might look at more diverse pieces to illustrate who we are as the Australia Council. The third challenge that I see over and over again is not having the right people and the right team with the right skills on board for content strategy. The biggest problem is not enough people. People are trying to run a huge organisation with four people in the online content team. It's just not going to work, that's not enough people. They don't have enough resources allocated to them, they are not trained well enough. They are not released to do additional professional development, and what happens then is that there is a lot of stress and poor outcome. The solution that I have here is that Pat McGillan who I mentioned before, he's written this really fantastic book called lead with content, and there is a whole chapter in there about governance. Governance is a mitigation for a poor content resourcing situation. Governance tells you that these the people in your team, these are the skills that they need, and this is how you promote them. I highly recommend that book, which is free to download. They ask you for your name and email, but as we know from our keynote, everyone knows everything anyway, so what's one more invasion of privacy? I really would advocate this concept of governance as a way to mitigate the problem of team. My next challenge is about budget, which is not just about money but about time. Again and again, I will see inadequate money and time allocated to content projects. I will hear things like,
5. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 5 of 6 "Oh, the content will only take a week, it'll be fine, we can get that done in a week." In fact, I know it will take eight weeks. I sit constantly over and over again, and the only way you can mitigate this is with something as basic as a spreadsheet we you list down what it is you are going to try and create and how much you estimate each of those items will cost. If you're talking about just updating some copy, you'll need your in-house copywriter, you need the time cost of getting it approved, going through legal, compliance, getting the big boss decided off, then realising it so fundamentally change you have to go back to the beginning. If you are thinking about commissioning a Deep Fake artist, these have big costs and time associated with them. A really great tool that I found by Liam King has created this fantastic content cost calculator. What you do is put in how many pages you have, and pages are really related to artefacts. Sometimes we know we are creating an interstitial or a piece of micro copy or some kind of AI bonanza. Think about how many do I have, how long they take to create. The different people that create content, they all cost amounts. You put in the daily rate at that person and then you get a time and budget estimate for your project. It's a really powerful thing for you to do when you are starting or even in the middle of a messy project to actually talk about the real cost of the work that we're doing. Of course, Christina Halverson who wrote the book on content strategy, she has a lot of information in her book around costing and budgeting if that is something that you wanted to dig into a little bit further. So content, believe it or not, content, in a very meta-way, is a problem within content. People don't know what they have got. The number of times that I've gone to work with a new client and they say, we had three sites and they have 50 pages." You do an audit and discover they actually have 30 pages, you don't realise they actually have a number of PDFs published on those sites. At a very fundamental level, you have to understand what you have before you can start imagining the amazing stuff in the future. One of the tools that will help with that is Screaming Frog. It Is an HTML Crawler. It goes into your website and notes down all the links on the Website. When I was working at Atlassian, I asked the devs to give a scrape of the code so that I could then rip out all the words that were public-facing. All the warning messages, the interstitial is, the intro messages, I was able to pull all of those messagings out. You can do an audit on an application similar to the way you can the website. I love this quote from Meagan Casey because I've had exactly the same experience where the client says the content in the ecosystem is one thing, and then when you give it a little scratch, you realise how different it is. So measurements. Measurement, for me, is like a big rock, and it looks nice on the outside, then you tip it over and underneath it is this fitted mess with spiders. It is a confusing and
6. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 6 of 6 complex space. The big problem is that I see our vanity metrics, people collecting data and not knowing how to actually act upon that. If I was to direct you to a tactical short-term way to get better at measuring the effectiveness of your content, I would point you at these two places. At the very least, have a look at the Google analytics Academy. If you feel like your Google analytics skills are not up to speed, have a look there. They also do some stuff with search console. They have some really good guidance on how it is you create meaningful regiment of your digital entity. Really, it's all about starting small, being pragmatic, and keeping yourself honest about finding connections between what you are actually producing and whether or not it is any good or not. Finally, technology. The technology problem manifests itself in two ways. In one situation, there is this overly… And of session with the importance of technology. The CSS is going to make or break is, we need a new social media channel. In fact, we know that technology is an enabler not a driver of any additional project. On the other hand, you see this lack of understanding about how technology can improve content strategy. People won't understand why author content experience this is important, they won't understand why a content system needs to include a meaningful model is so important. If there is a great guide on basic requirements for a new content management system. I highly recommend that you have a look at that. It has an emphasis on your author experience, which is really important. Content strategy for mobiles, Karen Mcgrain has written that book, the whole book is fantastic. One of the things that is beautiful is about creating content for abs is that it really gets you to think away from the channel or as she puts it, the container. The last one here, designing connected content is a brand-new book that has come out. Mike Atherton and Kerry Haim, it's all about how you can use technology to amplify the content work you are doing. In summary, really quickly, what do we have? We have audience, we have strategy, we have team, we have budget, we have content. If you are experiencing these problems, you are not alone. I hope that some of those really quick tactical solutions will be able to help you. Listening, taking ownership, and being fabulous leader. I did promise you these references, so you can look them up. I have the slides for this talk. I have the references. All the slides are on this site, I would love to talk to you during UX Australia. The two challenges I have at the moment are around scaling content and around content in an agile environment. If you have great solutions or are thinking about those two things, please come and talk to me. Thank you so much. (Applause)