Content Experience Archives - Page 6 of 6

Content behavior design promotes the discovery of content. It is different from information architecture, which is focused on global information organization and navigation, and on offering users tools to specify what they are seeking. Content behavior design anticipates what content might be interesting for users, and decides what to display based on that. Rather than assume the user is necessarily looking to find a piece of information, content design assumes that the user may not be consciously looking for a piece of information, but would be happy to have it available if it were relevant to core content she is viewing.

In some cases, content behavior design can help people discover things they were not seeking. In other cases, additional content provides more clarity. Effective designs give audiences more context, making the content richer. Here are six examples to illustrate how content behavior can work for audiences.

Real time content aggregation (Kayak)

Many bits of information are associated with a single label (a flight number) representing a single object (a plane). This example brings together real time information about the flight, showing information about three locations (departure, current, and arrival) and timing information about events associated with these locations. The aggregation of many pieces of real time information makes this powerful. Real time information is compelling because it changes and gives audiences a reason to check for updates. One could imagine this example being even more useful if it included weather related information affecting the flight, especially any weather conditions at the arrival destination that could impact the projected arrival time.

Content about related actions (ESPN)

In interaction design, it is helpful to highlight a next action, instead of making the user look elsewhere for it. In this example from ESPN, the column on the far right allows the user to order tickets for a basketball game. But instead of simply saying “order tickets,” it provides information about how many seats are available and the costs. Incorporating this content is successful for two reasons: 1. It gives people interested in ordering tickets an idea of their availability; and 2. It gives people not interested in attending the game in person a sense of how anticipated the game is in terms of attendance. Based on the number of tickets sold, and the prices of tickets, do fans expect an exciting game?

Tracking components of collections (Paprika)

Digital content curation is an important development. People collect content items that have associated metadata. As they assemble items into collections, the metadata can be combined as well. In this example from the recipe manager app Paprika, the ingredients from two recipes are combined into one shopping list, so that the user knows how many eggs in total he needs to make both dishes. The content is smart enough to anticipate a need of the user, and perform that task without prompting. Another example is the app Delicious Library, which can track the replacement costs of books one owns. Designers use content behavior for applications focused on the “quantified self”— the collection of information about yourself. For example, a design could tell the user what night of the week she typically sleeps best.

Audience activity insights (Economist)

What audiences are interested in is itself interesting. The Economist has adapted the concept of a tag cloud to listen to reader comments on their articles. The program listens for keywords, newsworthy proper nouns or significant phrases, and shows relative frequency and extent they coincide. It’s a variation of the “most commented” article list, but shifts the focus to the discussion itself. Audiences can see what topics specifically are being discussed, and can note any relationships between topics. For example, Apple is being discussed in the context of China, rather than in the context of Samsung. Users can hover over to see the actual comments. It provides a discovery mechanism for seeing the topicality of the week’s news, and provides enough ambiguity to tempt the reader to explore more to understand why something unfamiliar is being discussed.

Data on content facets (Bloomberg)

Content can have many facets. Faceted navigation, which takes the user to other content related to that facet, is a well established navigation technique. This example from Bloomberg, in contrast, brings the content to the user. As the interview is happening, users can get more information about things mentioned in the interview. Without leaving the interview, the user can get more context, viewing real time information about stock prices discussed, or browsing headlines about companies or industries mentioned. The viewer can even see how often the person speaking has appeared on the show previously to get a sense of their credibility or expertise. Even though some of this information is hidden by collapsible menus, the user does not need to request the system to pull this information – it is provided by default.

Data-driven leaderboards (IMDb)

Lists are a helpful navigation tool, but they are more valuable when they have interesting data behind them. Unlike tables of data, which require users to sort, leaderboards provide automatic ranking by key criteria. In this example from IMDb, animation series and titles are ranked by user rating and gross revenues. The ranking provides the casual viewer a chance to gauge relative popularity before clicking on one for more information, while the core fan might check the list to see if their favorite film has moved up in the rankings.

Content recommendations (Netflix)

There are growing numbers of content recommendation engines, covering articles, books, music, videos and even data. They rely on different inputs, such as user ratings, user consumption, peer ratings, peer consumption, and imputed content similarity. In many respects, content recommendation engines represent the holy grail of content behavior design. The chief problem for users is understanding and trusting the algorithm. Why am I being told I would like this? Netflix provides a rationale, based on prior activity by the user. It’s probably a simplification of the actual algorithm, but it provides some basis for the user to accept or reject the recommendation. I expect recommendation engines will evolve further to provide better signals that suggestions are a good fit (no risk), and that they aren’t too narrow (the filter bubble problem).

Ideas for thinking about behavior

In choosing what content to present, it helps to ask:

what else might someone find helpful that is related to what is being presented?
what aspects of content are notable, changing, and newsworthy, and how can you highlight these aspects?
how can you present content elements so they are interesting, rather than simply informative?
if you are trying to encourage audiences to act, how can real time content to used to support that?
how do different audiences relate to the content, and can you provide something that appeals to different segments?
what content could the system automatically provide that is laborious for someone to do themselves?

Designing content behavior is central to content engagement. Try out ideas, and test them to see what works for your audiences.

— Michael Andrews

In the digital world, experiences are largely derived from content. Audiences are not able size up the credibility of conversational partners in-the-flesh, or touch physical things to test their worthiness. Instead they react to stuff made of pixels. That reaction of people to pixels is the essence of what is often described as the content experience. What follows are some insights into how content experience arises, and a suggested framework for how to plan to make experiences as good as possible for your audiences using four building blocks.

Content creators often have a naive view of content. They believe there are two types of content, good content and bad content, and that good content results in good experiences. The creator then concludes: my content is good, so people will like it.

When considered from the user perspective, content appropriateness seems like a moving target. Content may be good for some people, but not others. Content may be good at certain points in time, but not others. When content isn’t quite right, it can seem mediocre, or even bad.

Understand your audience’s (sometimes complex) motivations

Experience is about emotions that arise from one’s thoughts and feelings. In our heads we think and talk to ourselves (thoughts) while in our bodies we process various emotional, visceral or unconscious reactions (feelings). We can have thoughts and feelings about ourselves (our self concept), and about other people or things, such as brands. Thoughts involve interpretation and evaluation – a process of judging that can be curious or critical. Feelings range in intensity and how they manifest. Feelings and thought play off each other – thoughts drive feelings at times, and other times feelings drive thoughts. Their interplay is most intense when feelings and thoughts are aligned or “fused”: the times when people are most convinced of what they encounter is real.

Psychotherapists warn of the danger when people can’t separate thoughts from feelings that are negative: when unconscious feelings spur critical thoughts about oneself or another, or when habitual negative “self talk” causes one to feel bad. Storytellers like to encourage the fusing of thoughts and feelings in a positive way by getting people so absorbed in an enjoyable story so that they stop evaluating the story (and the storyteller) critically. People tend to have positive experiences when they feel comfortable with the storyline: it is aligned with familiar, positive prior experiences of a person, so that receptivity goes up, and judgement and negative reactions are absent.

The interplay of thoughts and feelings influence perceptions your audience has of themselves, and of your brand. Content can prompt people to evaluate themselves negatively (“I must be dumb for not understanding this”) or positively (“I’m so in the know.”) Content also induces people to evaluate brands negatively or positively. Consider the public reactions, both positive and negative, to a recent Dove soap campaign focused on beauty. That campaign may not represent the kind of content you create, but it does illustrate the range of possible reactions that content can elicit, with people talking both about themselves, and the corporation that is behind the message.

Whether the content provokes thoughts and feelings about the person using the content, or the brand behind it, depends on the person’s self concept (expectations about oneself), and their view of the brand or product (expectations of the brand.)

The following table illustrates some different aspects of content experience. People may focus on how an experience makes them feel or think of themselves. Or they may attribute the experience, good or bad, to what the brand did for them.

	Relating to Self (personalization)	Relating to Brand (attribution)
Good Experience	Affirms who am I, or want to be	Has qualities or values I desire, is “on my side,” gets me where I want to be
Bad Experience	Makes me feel inadequate, or under-appreciated	Slows me down, wastes my time, insults me, bores me

Brands generally have limited influence over a person’s self concept, unless they have had – or will have – a sustained relationship that will influence a person’s expectations of themselves over time. A community college may be able to reframe how a person thinks about themselves. A candy company generally can’t. For the most part, brands can appeal to aspects of existing self concepts. A high end chocolate maker might use content to cultivate chocolate appreciation and connoisseurship, and affirm a chocolate aficionado’s belief in their erudition.

It is helpful to know the mindset of your audiences, especially whether they have a superior (arrogant) or inferior (intimidated) attitude toward aspects of your product, so you can adjust your content to work with their expectations. For example, does your audience see themselves as geeks? Does your content appeal to geeks, or does it seem too simple, or too me-too? Unless people are looking for aspirational content (involving a transformation of self identity) people generally want content that reaffirms who they think they are. When content is discordant with how people think of themselves, they often will blame the brand for being wrong.

It is also helpful to know any hot button issues different audience segments may have. When faced with an emotional situation, people often personalize the bad ones more than the good ones. Take the assertion that brands care about their customers. Some brands like Zappos in the United States have been successful in getting people to view their organization as caring about the customer as an individual. But generally customers have a healthy skepticism when it comes to believing brands “care” about them. The idea that brands might genuinely care – really value the customer’s time and psychic needs – must be earned through repeated concrete action. When something goes wrong, the same people who doubt that “care” (in the emotional sense) is a reasonable expectation to have of a brand will be quick to decry that the brand doesn’t “care” about them, as if they secretly believed the brand would prove them wrong. While content is only one aspect of the brand experience, it can play an important role in offering palpable evidence to customers that can create a feeling they are cared for.

Given these variables, content will often need to adapt to different segments of the audience, to account for different priorities, both informational and emotional. To understand the differences in audience segments, it is helpful to create content personas that address the informational needs of different audiences at different stages of time, their psychographic characteristics, media preferences, topical interests, their attitudes toward the brand, social media behavior, time scarcity, and attention habits. To offer full value, content personas should go beyond the functional scenarios and device-centric usage profiles found in user experience personas.

Get ready for the “moments of truth”

Good content experiences are achieved when audiences sense their thoughts and feelings are aligned while using the content. People hear messages when they aren’t distracted by how the message is being delivered to them. They identify with content that seems as if it is part of their life stories. The building blocks for good content experience need to come together during various “moments of truth” a customer will encounter: points in time when the customer will form a strong and lasting impression that will shape their expectations of the brand in the future.

During moments of truth, there is a big potential for content to make people feel bad about themselves, or bad about the brand.

If the brand doesn’t offer content that’s on-topic, then the customer will feel the brand is not a credible source of information.
If the brand doesn’t present content in an audience-appropriate way, it can destroy trust, or make some customer segments feel excluded.
If the brand doesn’t offer a compelling articulation of how its various content relate to your bigger needs, then the brand has forgone the opportunity to establish a basis for an ongoing relationship. Instead, the brand may even foster confusion about the brand, or even skepticism and cynicism if the audience is more focused on poor storytelling than the story itself. When viewing individual items of content, the customer thinks: “yeah right” – it doesn’t add up.
If the brand lets down a customer at a critical moment, because it failed to plan for how a customer might need content at a certain time, then the brand has lost the chance to build loyalty.

Implement the building blocks of superior content experience

It may seem self-evident that one should create content that makes people like themselves and the brand. But the reality is that only some content does this well. Even if we disregard all the badly produced content that people are often forced to use to get things done in their lives, we are still left with a massive amount of content that is unexciting for most people and offers poor competition for other outlets vying for their attention. Correcting the most clumsy elements that spark bad experiences is not enough to attract audiences to want to use your content.

Delivering superior content experiences depends on a mix of components and methods:

what you say or show
how you say or show things
how you do your communication

What you say, and how you say and do that, can be broken down into four building blocks that address how you develop relationships with audiences, and meet their needs during their moments of truth when the are likely to form a strong impression that will shape their expectations of your brand. These building blocks are illustrated below.

content experience building blocks address key audience needs

Content elements are the choices about what to talk about. This includes the topics your content addresses, the level of detail offered, the selection of information to based on audience needs and priorities, and making connections to other topics that are related. The content elements you offer are the DNA of your identity to audiences. It reveals whether your focus is the same as the audience’s. Content elements are the major factor determining how curious an audience segment will be in what you say.

Content presentation is about how content is styled, translated into media and distributed. Yes, style matters, a lot. Assuming the audience has interest in what you talk about, you need to determine how to present the content in a way the audience will find engaging and willing to offer their attention. Presentation choices help create the rapport you establish with your audience, influencing how receptive they will be to what you have to say. Content presentation includes editorial style, such as voice and tone. Editorial style influences the mood your content conveys, such as being helpful, happy, respectful or funny. The decisions relating to content presentation also include whether to show content about your topic, rather than simply talk about it, and selecting the appropriate media to convey your content, such as video, info graphics, or social media dialog. The more a brand can communicate on the audience’s terms, the more the audience can identify with the content and see it as part of their life stories.

Content articulation is about how content elements come together to create meaning for audiences. This can be the stories you tell about your brand, or the arguments you make to advocate a certain position or course of action. Your content elements and presentation should support how your content is articulated and reinforce your messaging. Audiences should be able to easily understand the big themes of what you offer, without feeling shouted at. It is easiest to see the articulation with brands that have cartoon mascots (Ronald McDonald or Smokey the Bear) because both brand and audience think in terms of what the mascot persona says as part of its larger story. Other brands use more subtle ways to tie together content into a larger message, such as when content consistently reflects brand values such as environmental stewardship.

Content awareness is about how your content responds to audience needs at different points in time. Content awareness embodies the relationship your brand has with the audience by showing how responsive your content is to changing audience needs, and how well you can anticipate these needs. Your content demonstrates awareness of audience needs by planning for customer journeys, and for detailed scenarios of use for your content. Aware content makes the right content available where it is needed, when it is needed. It does so by considering content needs across different device platforms, and anticipating how content may be needed in the context of secondary activities that are not immediately related to acquiring or consuming the content. To deliver aware content, content resources need to be embedded within the overall design of your organization’s services so it is available exactly when the audience will want to use your content.

Great content experiences require more than an entertaining copywriter, or a clever editorial calendar. It requires empathy for different kinds of people, who have an assortment of needs and motivations. Empathy is not an intention; it is a measurable quality. It is demonstrated by how successful your content is with different audience segments. Truly empathic content is possible only from a deep understanding of the many aspects of audience needs, which should be validated through user research with audiences and content performance assessments. The ability to deliver that content, the capacity to create and position content addressing those needs, requires holistic coordination and planning.

— Michael Andrews