Content as a service

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) MATT FENWICK: Hello, hello, hello. g'day, what is love? So if you ask Pat Benatar, you believe that love is a battlefield. And if you're more into the DJ, you believe love is a gift. If we just took these songs seriously, it has radically different implications for our love lives, how we see what we do, how others see what we do, the options that are open to us, what we're like on a date. Research suggests that language doesn't just describe our reality, it structures our reality. It creates a whole model through which we experience the world and applies to our love lives but also applies to the work that we do and content people as designers. The language that we use creates a model and that model structures how we see what we do, how others see what we do, and the options that are open to us. I'm going to dive into content and even that one word, a whole model that we can unpack. So what is content? Well, the scientific definition is content is the stuff we put in sinks. And I like this because it captures words on a web page, whiskey in a bottle, and grain in grain size. So you've got the content and the container and this model structures the whole way we think about content. A couple of things flow from there. We tend to think of con tent as a commodity. Has everyone ever wondered why marketing departments feel compelled to push more and more content out there all the time? It's because they're operating from a commodity model. It's always better to have more money because money is a commodity. It's always better to have more content because content is a commodity. We tend to treat content in a transactional way. This much grain costs this many dollars, this many pages cost this many dollars. So what we're doing there is attaching cost to the unit of the commodity. We're not looking at the underlying value is that we're creating. Secondly, it means that we tend to see content as separate from design. You've got the content and you've got the container. This means that our skill sets are quite separate. You can be a UX designer and not have to worry too much about content and vice versa. It means the way we scope out projects intersected. I see a lot of container projects out there. Build us a website, build us a UI and the content is someone else's problem. Finally, it kind of goes right down to the way we structure information. So we have quite good tools and processes for thinking about structure but they tend to stop at the container level. So the way the information architecture is often practised it's mainly page, page, page, we stop at the page level but we don't dive deeper into what is the internal structure of the of the contents, what is the relationship that live there is. Why do people think this way? Well, because it gives us strong feedback loops and easy boundaries. So a feedback loop is how do I know I'm doing a good job? And this container, commodity model, it means that I can build a container, I can write some web pages and it's done. That fills the need we have for closure for accomplishment. We don't need to live in the messiness that comes with the blurring of the boundaries. So why is this a problem? Well, I think it's because it ultimately leads to design grade. It's like we buy a top of the line fridge, we chuck some random content in there, turn off the power and walk away. So what that plays out like is firstly, we have content that goes mouldy. So you have content that goes out of date, or it's it's kind of make shit up. You see ad hoc decisions made
2. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) Page 2 of 3 about content that aren't consistent with the design intent or use of research. It applies to the system as a whole. When the process goes off, day one, it might look OK. Day 30, day 40, you're not going to want to open the fridge. That's because we haven't thought widely enough about the system we're designing for. If we want to change anything, we need to identify the basic models that people are working out of. We want to identify the human needs that that model meets. We need to point out what's wrong with that paradigm and we have to find something different. That gets to an idea I've been playing with as content as a service. This is content that supports an information experience, designed with a purpose and delivered over a series of interactions. I'm going to tease that out. So content supporting the information experience. That means we're not obsessed with outputs of this page and that page . We're looking at how are people experiencing the information that we're presenting. It means that we're designing with a purpose and the content strategy consultant, I go into organisations all the time and you will do a content audit and you will see content completely untethered from strategic intent or user need. So we need to tie our content back to what is the good we're trying to do for the user and for the organisation. Finally, I'm interested in how we deliver this over a series of interactions. A couple of thing there is. So we're mapping the content much more tightly to the customer journey. We're thinking about the systems that we're going to use to deliver it, but also we're looking at all of the interactions that they have. And this may shock you, but people aren't just going to look at our website. They're going to be looking at other sources of information and we need to design for that experience. We need to recognise that it's OK for people to see other content. So this is very much a hit and run, so I'm just going to throw out some questions. So how might we design better feedback for content work? People think, not because they're unintil intelligent or they don't want to do good work, of course they do. The feedback is so strong and the container model is so real to them. We need to give them something else that feels as real. That will be partly testing content with questions and metrics how we look at the health of our content at scale. We need to design with content. So how can we be more curious about content and vice versa, how can content people break out of their format specific job titles like social media person. How can we be more curious about the whole interaction we're designing for? We can also expand our tool kit. Content design is a difficult one. It goes part of the way there. Content modelling is the next frontier where things start to get really cool. How can we design systems that deliver better content? I say systems and a lot of people jump straight to IT infrastructure. That's part of the piece. But I'm talking about systems in the broadest sense possible. So the cultures we need, what's the capability, what's the work flow, what's the governance model to actually do this better? Finally, people aren't going to change overnight. Stakeholders are still going to go out and ask
3. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) Page 3 of 3 for container project. They're still going to ask for commodity content projects. So what I'm really interested in is what can we leave behind? So what can we leave with them by way of templates, awareness, capability, so it can still be with the client and doing good long after we're done? That would leave us feeling content. Thank you. (Applause)