The design of the corporate culture and our interactions with others should be at the center of all that we build.

We must move the discussion beyond the tools, policies, and processes that “define” us and provide solutions that address our global community.

It’s no longer enough to be given a leadership title – we must lead by example.

Think about our changing world. Think about the challenges. Think about new kinds of leadership.

As Richard Seymour has noted, we now live in an era where we can do anything. As such we must shift the conversation from what we can do to what we ‘should’ be doing.

Connectivity is a given. And we all have an interest in working together. Because for all the wonders that technology can do, here’s what it can’t do. It cannot make our choices for us.

So, here is what I did and how I did it.

Note: Due to the brand I used the ‘client’, as I’m unable to share all of the details, deliverables and insights in this post.

Day 1 – 4: Strategy

User needs and business objectives should lead you to the correct digital channels but, in this case, the requirement was for an iPad application. This made it even more important that I understand the audience and device.

The Business
Documentation is crucial but nothing beats face-to-face conversation with the relevant stakeholders.

Tools
- In this case, my access to the business was limited and I had to rely on only a few telephone interviews.

The User
I broke this up into two distinct tasks – (1) Identifying and getting to know the ‘target audience’, and (2) figuring out their needs.

Tools
– I created a simple 10 question survey at Surveymonkey.com and used social media to source respondents.
– 3 face-to-face interviews with real people representing the target audience.

The Device
I ran the risk of proposing a website disguised as an iPad application, so I had to get a thorough understanding of the operating system and how people use tablets.

Tools
– Studied the Apple iOS Human Interface Guidelines manual.
– Picked up a copy of iOS Wow Factor: Apps and UX Design Techniques for iPhone and iPad (Apress, Timothy Wood) at the office. This is by no means the definitive guide to iOS but it gave my enough to work with.
– Lived on iTunes, staring at multiple applications from the relevant business category. Google Images and YouTube came in handy when I couldn’t access a specific application.

Day 5 – 6: Designing the Application

With my foundation set, I had to create tangible deliverables – (1) Map out the application (2) segment the functionality (3) and propose a working model for the user interface.

Mapping the Application
I reviewed the existing digital channels of the business and noted the most critical functionality and content. I mapped my new proposed functionality into a new framework based on the research in the previous step, and segmented and categorising everything as I went.

Tools
– I needed a quick way to articulate my proposed solution. I turned to iThoughts, a mind-map application on my iPad.

Segmenting the Functionality
I posted the giant mind-map on my wall and identified 2 distinct functional segments. I then categorised the functionality and content accordingly.

Tools
– Normally, I would turn to my friends at Optimal Sort, but this time I went old school. I covered my wall with several sticky notes for a Closed Card Sorting exercise.
– I fired up Omingraffle to map the taxonomy and high-level navigation.

Working Model for the Application UI
I feared this step the most, but with the structure and functional layers in place, the creative juices just flowed. I knew what the application had to do; I just had to figure out how it was going to do it.

Tools
– I found an array of design blogs with iPad related UI designs and also spent a lot of time on several pattern libraries.
– Sketching …lots of it!
– I used Omnigraffle to convert my sketches into a structured wireframe layout with relevant annotations (thanks to Konigi’s awesome stencils).

Day 7: Prototype and User Testing

I spent most of Day 7 documenting what I’d done into a presentable Keynote document. By that afternoon I had little time left, so I had to make some quick decisions. The objective was to test and demonstrate the UI framework in action.

Low Fidelity Prototype
Prototyping is ingrained in my day-to-day approach and my friends actually poke fun at me because of this. I’m a cautious strategist believing in starting small, interrogating the data and then iterating. I decided to show 1 or 2 minor interactions, just to get a feel for how the interface would react.

Tools
- I drew up a set of annotated wireframes in Omnigraffle to demonstrate how the interface would react to tactile input, and how the layout would adapt to the tablet’s vertical and horizontal orientation.
– Keynotopia’s set of UI components combined with native Keynote functionality allowed me to build an interactive application within hours.

User Testing
The final and probably the most exciting step and I ran out of time! I had the prototype ready on my iPad for testing with real users (thanks to the tools in the previous step).

Tools
– I planned to use Keynote on iPad for live testing.
– Click testing – I wanted to try intuition HQ or Usability Hub.

The Document

The following Slideshare document is an edited version of the final presentation, I’ve also included a screen-capture video of the prototype in action.

When it comes to the content side of things, this tendency can be both helpful and harmful. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that people who work with content love to debate definitions, but we’re just as guilty of losing ourselves in the weeds as anyone else.

I have worked on several projects in my career that involved moving into a new content management system, and each time, the team has to tackle similar questions: What should we put into the CMS? What is content?

On the surface, these sound like simple questions. Of course, you put the content in the CMS. You know, the stuff on the website. Like, articles. And the templates for the articles, those too. Because that’s what people come to the website for. That must be the content. OK, super. Got it.

But what about the instructional copy? You know, the words that may just appear on one page of the site — the instructions on the registration page, for example, or on the shopping cart page. Those items are words….surely they must also be content.

Hmm. But the shopping cart actually lives on a different server — it’s a third-party app that we “integrated” into the site by making the templates match. In fact, we don’t even share a single CSS — we took the one for the main site and copied it over to the server where the shopping cart is, because we couldn’t sort out some security issues easily, and that was faster, even if it’s a pain to remember that and keep everything in sync. Well, all right. That instructional copy on the cart might be content, but we’ll have to keep it outside the CMS.

We also have a big image library that we’ve been managing on Sharepoint, instead of in our CMS. We use these images in our print campaigns as well as on our website, so we really need to manage them carefully to ensure we don’t confuse things. Are those images content? If we pull them into the CMS, how will we know if we’re using the right ones in print?

Then there are our business rules. Our site is personalized for each customer, based on past purchases. We have specially designed rules that govern this personalization, and while the customers do not “see” the rules, they see the results of them. Are those rules content? Our CMS can handle dynamic page generation based on sophisticated metadata — and that’s all to do with content. So, into the CMS it goes — right??

Despite doing this kind of project many times, I’ve never yet seen a situation where these questions can be easily answered. Often, the “answers” depend on the person who’s charged with answering the questions — your IT team will give different answers than your marketing or product development teams. None are necessarily right or wrong, of course.

How can you sort through the confusion?

My best recommendation always goes back to the business goal. What do you need to achieve? Are you working to increase sales? Improve productivity in the customer service department? Improve customer reviews? Many times, when I’ve seen disagreement about what content is, it’s because teams also disagree about the business goal, or they lose sight of the goal in the weeds of their own discipline.

It’s usually not worth spending all your political capital on winning this kind of fight. Instead, make sure that the content — whatever you judge that to be — is easily manageable by the business owners. That’s the real fight worth winning.

Do whatever you have to do to keep regularly changing information accessible to the business owner of that information, or to ensure that things that have a make-or-break effect on your business can be easily fixed when old, broken or otherwise ineffective.

Don’t worry about what they call it. Content…images…rules…ads…text…video…just get the process right so you can meet your customers’ expectations.

The Jamaica Design Association (JDA) is a volunteer led organization set up to foster a spirit of camaraderie, sharing of knowledge, and the advancement of Jamaica through the advancement of its design industry as well as its design practitioners. From design hobbyists, design newbies, design students, to seasoned design professionals, all are welcomed to band together and learn from each other, thus helping each individual member to become better at his or her craft. Whether you’re a Designer living or working in Jamaica, or a Jamaican Designer living or working overseas, you are welcomed to join the Jamaica Design Association.

Please email Roger Davis, President of the JDA for more information. You can also follow Roger on Twitter @layerphase.

Kristina and I look forward to returning to Jamaica to share our own professional experiences and those of thought leaders in design and writing the world over for workshops that are hands on, interactive, and fun!

Online Journals / Peer-Written Web Magazines

Books

Blogs

Articles & Podcasts

Apps

Videos

Conferences

I admit we were geeking out a little, and throwing around lots of words like responsive content, taxonomy, governance, and mobile.

This went on for a while, when we realised the other person in our little group wasn’t saying much, and in fact was looking moderately terrified.

Keen for him to join in, I turned around and said “so what’s happening in terms of content strategy in your organisation?”

He paused for a moment before replying, “to be honest, our biggest achievement this year was moving our site from Dreamweaver to a basic CMS.”

And with that simple statement he brought us back to the reality that many businesses are still in the early phases of their online journey, and a lot of the content strategy talk happening at the moment often is too advanced for their situation.

So what do you do? If you’re in an organisation where the web is still quite new, how do you bring in content strategy without freaking everyone out?

Here are three simple ideas:

First, start by knowing what you’re working with

There’s no point being a content strategy advocate without having a good grasp of what you’re working with.

Do a quantitative audit of all your content. How many websites are there? Is there other content hidden in intranets, knowledge bases or call centre systems?

If you’re brave, then move to a qualitative audit. Does the content you’ve got support the goals of your business? Is it up to date? Are there gaps in key messages?

Second, start to foster a close relationship between the business areas who create the content

For most organisations the usual content creation suspects are the marketing team, the information technology team, and the human resources team.

What sort of content are they generating? How often? Are all of these areas working with the same messaging and content goals? What’s the best way to get these areas talking to each other?

Third, offer a solution to the problem

Management like solutions, not problems. So before you go and point out all the things which aren’t working, make sure you’ve got a plan to fix the problem.

At a basic level, this could be a style guide or document that outlines who is responsible and can approve which types of content, and how content must fit in with the overall goals of the business.

Over time this can grow into a governance model, training material for authors, and an ongoing plan of attack for your content.

What was the first thing you did when introducing content strategy to your business?

Online Journals / Peer-Written Web Magazines

Books

Blogs

Articles & Podcasts

Writing Apps

Videos

Content Marketing & Analytics Tools

Communities of Practice / Peer-Written Web Magazines

Books

Tools

Other Resources

Online Journals / Peer-Written Web Magazines

Books

Tools

Other Resources

A new product, a new opportunity

There it sat, on the shelf in the liquor store. An unfamiliar whisky housed in one of those fancy, boutique-style bottles. It wore an already-iconic label. I was intrigued.

This distilling company put some careful thought into this whisky. They even created some delightful point-of-purchase pricing signs echoing that label design. The text at the top of those tiny pricing signs reads “Just Released”–an announcement to the world, proud and urgent.

They want people to know about the whisky. They want people to buy it. But, as of this writing, THAT’S THE END OF IT.

The portable web changes everything

Like any other whisky nerd, I searched the web from my smartphone for any mentions or reviews of this whisky. To my surprise, there was only one relevant listing. And it wasn’t a helpful listing, either: an online retailer that offered only a price and size of the bottle.

The label on this bottle includes the company’s website. Unfortunately, it, too, was unhelpful. The whisky was not listed anywhere on the site. Searching for the whisky’s brand name on the company site brought up a page full of PHP errors. (That’s another matter altogether.)

Lots of whisky enthusiasts would have stopped right there. Despite the lack of information, I purchased a bottle.

(I shan’t mention the company name, lest this post become the only thing about this whisky on the all of the Internet.)

The gap between online and offline strategy appears

Time and money were spent on the product design and retail accoutrements, but the online presence? NOT A DROP. A chasm between the distillery’s new product strategy and the online strategy quickly became apparent.

This distillery has a product, a niche whisky. They want to sell it. Lucky for them, people want to buy distinctive whiskies. But they don’t buy them blindly. They want to know all kinds of things before making that purchase: age, blend, whose grandpa distilled it in the hills 100 years ago, etc.

If that information is not presented at the point of purchase or on the item itself, they’ll seek it out online. Possibly right there on the spot.

When companies present anything less than a complete and unified presence online and offline, people notice. Really, they do. Those people may shrug their shoulders and carry on with their tasks on your site (albeit with less satisfaction and ease.) Or, in the absence of any info online, they may give up and go to a competitor.

Each item and brand, especially in a retail environment, should have a corresponding presence online. That presence needs a solid strategy to inform its messaging, target audience, distribution, workflow, and maintenance.

Instill your projects with content strategy

I’ve heard online content strategy described, at its most basic, as the alignment of business goals and user expectations:

• Company provides a product or service
• People complete tasks related to that product or service (e.g. learning, purchasing)

The closer we align the meeting point(s) of those business goals and the user expectations, the better. Both sides need to be addressed. The one-way, broadcast model the distillery put in place, either actively or by omission, will no longer cut it. They missed the mark entirely in this case. No pun intended.

A toast to your future content projects

Part of the burden (or joy, I mean) of content strategists is keeping up with an organization’s new initiatives and changes to ongoing efforts. The launch of this whisky is a fine example.

To avoid a similar situation, get a seat at the table early in the process to engage with all staff involved on a project:

• Ask lots of questions
• Consider the implications of new company endeavors in the short and long term
• Filter each and every situation through your core online content strategy
• Be ready for changes that will inevitably come up along the way
• Make sure that new efforts are sustainable

Content strategists can have a great impact, but they are not a cure-all. Some projects may suffer from scalability issues, unwise decisions, or legacy organizational baggage.

What content strategists can do, however, is follow the standards for making great online experiences. They can ensure that the right audiences are addressed in the most effective way. And, they can guide the process with an overall strategic vision in place.

When your project is (hopefully) successful and all things are operating in sync, I have but one more bit of advice: pour yourself a glass of whisky.