The trouble with context

April 4, 2013

At the Information Architecture Summit in Baltimore, I’ve just had the pleasure of a full day with Karen McGrane, considering content strategies for mobile which of course isn’t content strategies for mobile at all but content strategies for content which might somehow be consumed by 76% of us using some kind of hand-held device or other as the primary device that we use to consume that stuff because that’s our preference notwithstanding the fact that indeed for some 40% or other of the 76% or other that preference is actually the only option because using a smartphone to access the internet is the only way to do it and don’t forget that an ever-growing percentage or other of the new natives in the 18-24 age range just actually don’t see why you’d want to access the internet on anything other than your smartphone because, like, using a proper computer is what your dad does in the corner of the home office and I should know because that dad is me.

Which is to say, don’t get led astray by implied contexts of physical devices when considering the user needs and behaviours in relation to the structure and organisation of the content they may consume. There is no specific mobile use case that defines a content strategy when considering your options for creating a compelling user experience. There is only content. And the structure of that content. And the user experience of interacting with that content is what defines the context of use. It is a misappropriation of the term to hypothesise scenarios based on context, since context can only ever be undefined up to the point at which the manifestation of the moment of interaction occurs.

We can, of course, be pragmatic and facilitate a conversation about context by making some assumptions about likely renditions of scenes where actors follow a script to bring to life some awkwardly cinematic versions of potentially reasonably representative portrayals of the personification of a user need. These are the ‘what if’ propositions that at least enable us to align our thought gazelles behind a weirdly myopic vision of a real life event. It enables us to say ‘that might happen. what might we consider based on the knowledge acquired from that?’ And actually, we can write pretty good scripts. And we can develop pretty good personas.

But we’re just making it up. And we bring to that imagination every subtle or not so subtle nuance of our own limited experiences and assumptions to the point where we can imagine a whole sundance festival of what ifs but if the only person in the audience for the special screening of ‘a series of what ifs in the style of a seemingly disconnected robert altman style parable that ultimately defines the human experiences but coincidentally demonstrates the likely context of use for you the user’ just sits there slowly shaking their head muttering something like ‘they don’t understand. they don’t understand’ then we’re wasting our time.

listening post: queen and david bowie – under pressure

Your content strategy is brilliant and hopeless

May 22, 2012

I don’t believe there’s anyone out there who has put two words together that have been published on a web site since 1993 that hasn’t at some point sat at their desk and typed into a strategy document ‘write once, publish everywhere’ or ‘centralised writing, distributed reading’ or ‘write once, publish many’ or ‘global content, local readers’ or ‘one repository, many devices’ or ‘my CMS brings all the boys to the yard and damn right it’s content framework means it’s deployed on multiple platforms and viewports with coherency and efficiency and is better than yours by which I mean maximises ROI and provides the ideal user experience about which I could teach you but I’d have to charge’ or something like that.

Defining a content strategy that maximises ROI on publishing for a business isn’t difficult. Once you’ve distilled the distribution components of a publishing system into the dark matter of a CMS then everything else kind of gets sucked into the inevitability vacuum. You just need to draw some concentric circles around it and randomly place some google image swipes of devices and screens and that stock photo of a globe with a URL wrapped around it that says THIS IS WHAT THE INTERNET IS and you’re away. If you like, you can project the cost benefit to the organisation of rolling out said strategy by Q4 and streamlining your processes, synchronizing your publishing and automating your workflows. In the long term the ROI is massive. Like, a huge number.

Trust me, I’ve written that strategy a few times. It’s brilliant.

But it’s also hopeless. Content strategy, however perfectly formed, nearly always necessitates business change in order that is delivers on its promises. And businesses don’t like to change. They like to save money. They like to be efficient. But they rarely actually honestly have the ability to change the way they operate around a strategy that makes their content delivery scaleable, manageable, responsive, adaptive, data-driven, intelligent, profitable, better. Not because they don’t think your strategy isn’t brilliant and that it will indeed bring all those boys to the yard, but because they’re simply unable to overcome the festering delineations within their own business that preclude agility. I mean, if you could just change your strategy to make it work for the product division, because, you know, I think they have data or something, then maybe we could do a pilot, you know, phase one, but we don’t have anything to do with the service division, I mean, they’re a separate part of the business and we don’t even know who they are, although Mike in corporate does know the manager over there and Mike owns all that corporate stuff, like, um, I dunno, press releases and things. Can we do press releases? They already have a CMS. Maybe we can use that, etc…

Defining a content strategy is rarely a problem. Facilitating business change nearly always is. If you’re not talking to the person who can truly bring about that change, you’re quacking into a void.

listening post: death in vegas – hands around my throat

Global, local, desktop, mobile

May 10, 2012

About a million years ago I wrote the web globalisation strategy for a large corporation that included, variously, authoring and production strategy, globalisation, localisation and internationalisation requirements, data architecture, content management platform definition, functional specifications, business requirements, lots of pictures of concentric circles, some arrows, some double-byte character sets, search integration, all sorts of stuff. I mean, I didn’t write all of it. No, actually, I did write all of it. And it was pretty good. But it never happened.

It never happened because the content strategy that supported a ‘write once, publish everywhere’ model was simply too inflexible for stakeholders to sign up to. The idea is perfectly simple. The execution is pretty doable. We could build the platform, we could integrate localisation workflows, we could support content authors with different levels of scope and authority, we could distribute that authoring, we could centralise that authoring, we could mash everything together into a globalised online presence, and Bob would indeed be your uncle.

However, different stakeholders want different things. Different customers want different things. Different users want different things. So, what’s good for the North American goose isn’t necessarily good for the Korean gander. What’s good for the North American buck isn’t necessarily good for the French doe. What’s good for the North American seahorse isn’t necessarily good for the Australian, well, seahorse. And the subtleties of those differences are what led the program to dribble to an apologetic unconclusion. We simply couldn’t define a content strategy that was flexible enough to assemble and distribute a globalised site, based on the centralised, corporate brand and product requirements and the business needs of the content experts and marketeers in the countries. It was easier for the countries to roll their own. So that’s what they did. Using the platform we built to support the central content model. They just created their own instances and copy and pasted the bits they needed from .com, creating silos and duplicates all over the place thankyouverymuch.

It’s that difficulty I witnessed in the global vs. local model that appears to be a central (pun intended) issue with desktop vs. mobile. Well, ok, it’s one of the central issues. I mean, it’s a bit of an issue. IT’S AN ISSUE.

There’s no reason why technically we can’t support the authoring, publishing and distribution of content and services that can provide a coherent experience across all kinds of screens and devices. Responsive design is a method. Having less stuff is a method. Having smaller stuff is probably a method. But for a properly scalable, flexible and efficient operation, it’s just not going to happen unless all stakeholders are in agreement about the content strategy. And when I say stakeholders, I mean anyone who owns, manages, authors or consumes that content. As a content owner, you might not care about comments disappearing from an article when you read it on a smaller viewport. As a commenter, you’ve just been slapped with the wet fish of ‘fuck you’ simply because you’re reading the article on something that fits in your palm. And that’s why content strategy is hard and why rendering isn’t the whole answer.

I’m not proposing a solution, I just see parallels with the globalisation efforts I went through years ago. I don’t think anyone has ever really got globalisation right. I’m not sure anyone will ever really get content strategy for the wider web right. But it is fascinating seeing the component parts evolve that might make it happen.

Jennifer might enjoy this Global Web Programs presentation (PDF 5mb) that talks about the common web platform. Fun times.

listening post: pg.lost – jonathan

We Sell Servers

May 1, 2008

You know that, of course, but how do you buy our servers? For as long as I can remember, and in line with how we structure our organization, we’ve presented our product lines on the web by the product categories by which we refer to them. This means that if you’re looking for our servers on sun.com, we think you might want to look for them by their parent category. Right now, we’d be in a great position to answer customer questions like “What CoolThreads servers have you got?”, or “Show me all your blades”, but, really, is that the kind of question you have in your head when you come to sun.com to look at servers?

Maybe you’d actually prefer to see our servers presented in terms of their attributes, so that you can begin your research by asking “What servers have you got that can run Linux?”, or maybe “I’ve got $5000 and I want a Sun server now. Show me what you’ve got”. In any case, you’d be hard pressed right now to complete a customer journey like that without going through a number of hoops. Backwards, probably.

So, at the moment, we’re looking at what’s important to our customers in terms of the way that they look for our products and how they might expect to see them grouped, or otherwise, so that a subset of products is a meaningful subset of products, that can support directed searching, categorization and a much more targeted presentation model. I mean, do you really need to know everything about why our products are so great when you’ve already come to sun.com to find the products? Is that product category landing page just telling you a bit more than you need to know, when all you really want to do is find the products? Perhaps, in actual fact, you don’t know what you’re looking for and you do need help in understanding just what Sun servers there are and how they are differentiated from the competition. Either way, we want to try and support those interactions as efficiently as possible and, from a user experience perspective, make it a pleasure to be engaging with us.

We have great people in the team conducting user evaluations and interviews and gathering as much data as we can in order to direct our designs, but, you know, you might have something to say about your experiences on sun.com and what you really want to be able to do when you’re researching our products. If you do, let me know, and we’ll feed it directly into the design process. If you don’t want to comment here, you can always email – my name is Tim Caynes and I work at sun.com, so the address isn’t difficult to fathom.

Listening Post: Future Radio Online

Content Channels

April 21, 2008

First of all, full marks for getting high page rankings and integrating all sorts of lovely flash advertising and web 2.0 features like the google user pop-in, user comments and article sharing, plus filters, subscriptions, related stories and gazillions of regular ads, without really compromising the page download, but, really, where’s the content gone? This is the regular, non-member, non-CEO, non-attaché, non-content view of a regular forbes.com page and if there was ever a web 2.0 version of the blink tag, this is pretty much it. There’s so much going on here that it takes a while to even fathom where the content is. I mean, obviously its in that slot under the header and next to the left navigation, but with so much distraction (ads doing what they do best), it takes a while to orient yourself. Its a bit like trying to focus on the horizon when a boat is pitching uncontrollably and you’re just about to take a second look at the lobster thermidor you had for lunch. And there’s no handrail. And no boat.

Its probably unfair to pick out Forbes, as there’s any number of article-based sites out there which adopt this style of page format. I say, ‘adopt this style’, but what that really means is ‘crams as many ads into the available space’, even if they are those circular ads which are published by, and point to, yourself. I guess I still hanker after solid design frameworks and excellence in user experience, but as the channels on the internet converge with the channels on TV and other media, it’s predictable that the demands for return on investment drive the content model. Perhaps I should be tipping my hat to the page designers who manage to actually squeeze some content into these pages, notwithstanding the requirements for ad placement, cross-marketing, subscription targets and everything else. That is a real user experience challenge, albeit not one I’d like to have to take on.

As we begin to talk about ‘content channels’ for sun.com and how we surface rolling content on our existing navigation and page class pages, we are in the (probably) enviable position, from a user experience perspective, of owning not only the whole page, but also the content channel itself, so we can build it pretty much anyway we see fit, within our established web design framework. Maybe it would actually be easier to know that for given page types, we are only allowed to utilize a space 200×200 in the 3rd column using specific technology and hosted on a 3rd-party server that only allows you to add clear text and a 60X60 graphic – but easier isn’t necessarily better.

Mind you, we haven’t designed for the sun.com content channels yet, so its difficult to pontificate about the relative merits of total ownership of design against paid-for content services, although, naturally, that won’t stop me.

Listening Post: Holy F**k: Lovely Allen

You Know, Like CNET

April 4, 2008

Before you even get to the point where you ask ‘what is your content?’, there’s an apparent understanding that you need to work out how it surfaces all over your site. Since the very early days of sun.com, one of the biggest goals, as far as maintaining a healthy visitor profile goes, is just how to make things sticky. I’m not talking sticky as in the stuff that makes you go eeuw, but sticky like the invisible elastic brain rubber that compels you, against the gravity of your free will, to revisit those places online that have already visited. It’s the same reason you go back to Fry’s every so often, just to see if there’s any new technology stuff to dribble over, or why you ping last.fm or iTunes to keep up with released, related, and recommended. It might also be the reason you visit Gap every Friday lunchtime – you’re just checking it out to see what’s new.

But how do you know what’s new and where do you expect to find that out? When you’re looking at something the scale of sun.com and trying to determine customer behaviours for a given page type, it’s not alway a simple task to predict. You might be the kind of visitor who would casually visit the sun.com home page and, not unreasonably, expect to see anything newsworthy enough, that you might be compelled to actually invest time in, to be present right there. You might be more specific than that. You might be the CTO for an SMB or some other suitable market research defined acronym pairing, in which case, you’d probably know that we’ve got a place just for you, where you’d expect announcements, deep-dives and news to appear, relevant to your needs. You might even have a large propeller sticking out of your head and be interested only in what’s going on with Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and how that relates to your development requirements for your linear accellerator or something. Either way, when we’ve got news for you, we want you to find it. And we want you to come back again. And again. And again.

So that’s why we’re currently investigating new approaches to surfacing the bestest, most currentest, content around, that’s relevant to you, in a way that’s going to make you want to come back often, but not take all day to consume when you’re engaging with us. One of the ideas we’re floating around (or select another flagpole/envelope/conceptualization buzzword bingo term of your own there) is content channels. You know, like CNET. We could funnel these content streams into various containers on product pages, gateways, category pages, etc., so that what’s most relevant to you is right there, where you want it, on-demand, so to speak. In terms of web design, this a quite a nice proposal, as we can have the content live elsewhere and suck it through a virtual ‘news pipe’, which spits it into, for instance, the servers container. Which would probably be quite sticky. Of course, someone, somewhere, needs to be owning, managing, publishing and maintaining the channels, but on the assumption that that would be possible, then a modular approach to deploying those channels where it makes most sense would be, um, neat.

Listening Post: The Who: I Can See For Miles

Web 2, Content 1

January 15, 2008

Obviously there should be some clever dot nomenclature in that title to make it more obvious, but that would have made it it just, well, too obvious, and besides, I didn’t fancy the idea of what the permalink would look like and since when have I written a meaningful title anyway.

Maybe you’ve read this far. Maybe you only got the first line in your reader and so you haven’t seen this line and I wasn’t interesting enough to make you get this far. I’ll probably end up putting some screen grab or other in here later to make it look nice and as for the Sun template, that makes everything I write look nicer than it really is, which makes me seem more authoritative, when obviously I’m not. But you might not see that either.

If you grew up with the ‘content is king’ mantra stuck on your huge CRT monitor with a post-it note in the late 90s, and you were devising a strategy for your web content that was focused clearly on what you had to say, rather than how it looked, then welcome back to relevancy. As we’ve (the royal we’ve) integrated web 2.0 capabilities further into our core publishing architectures, and in many cases, foregone ownership of publishing technologies altogether, we’ve willfully opted back into html 1.0. Sure, we have open, distributed platforms that mean we can write once, publish multiple and aggregate endlessly (how fun was it to make recursive feeds of yourself on natuba, before it turned into some weird iphone freakshow?), but how can I squeeze my multimedia in there, or my flash-based corporate profile? Answer is, you can’t. Not really. Not without accepting that things will end up a bit, well, not exactly how you want them. Of course, you can publish a bookmark to your 1.0 web site, which looks as fantastic as it ever did, and even has all the pixels in the right place, if you’re using the right browser/OS combination, natch, but an RSS feed? What kind of losers want to read that stuff?

If you’ve spent 17 hours updating your blog template, like I often do, to get the icons left aligned and the text justified and just the right size, then you’ve just fallen into the pit marked ‘waste of time’, where you’ll find me. Of the 17 people that read anything I ever write, about 16 of them have probably subscribed via google reader or bloglines or something, which means that all formatting has disappeared and my carefully crafted font is now 19 inches tall and my in-line images are not in-line at all, but a huge page break in the middle. Mind you, of those 16 people, only 6 of them are actually reading, the others are just marking it as ‘read’. In fact, I’m the only one who cares, but even I don’t care anymore. I’m writing everything with html 1.0 as the lowest common denominator, which means at least I get to right-align my images, but not much else. It’s quite nostalgic. I might dig out my copy of Mosaic and see how things look. And then take a ride on my space hopper or something.

Listening Post: John Martyn: Certain Surprise

which way round for globalization development?

June 9, 2005

I’m not sure where this bit goes. I mean, I understand the idea of your über plan and all that, ’cause you’ve been banging on about that and doing those staroffice presentations with all those circles and arrows and things for years, but what exactly do you want me to do when somebody managing global content deletes a node in the global tree and expects the whole operation to be supported seamlessly across multiple venues and countries and languages?

er, I dunno. I only did the strategy, right? or did I do the business requirements as well? I can’t remember. oh, that’s what you mean. so what do you want me to tell you? everything we asked you to tell us 6 months ago about how you actually want this content platform to support a centralized content model at a level where we can actually write something approaching a functional spec which we can turn into something we can actually begin to engineer. have you got time to do that? oh, sure! um, but what is it you actually want me do do? I mean, have I missed something out from the globalization requirements that I did last year? well, yeah. you need to let us know how somebody might actually utilize the platform to perform some kind of task which supports the operational model that you put in those requirements so we can work out whether we need to re-architect the system to enable slurping by delta and node deletion and actually what the criteria are for us having actually delivered a globalized platform that meets your needs, which, by the way, are probably not the same as they were a year ago, because everything’s changed.

oh, right. hang on, are you telling me that my own business requirements might be wrong? you can’t do that, I am the business. there mine. it’ll take them home and not let you play with them if you start saying nasty things about them. no, we’re not saying they’re wrong, they’re just not quite, well, right. here’s a whole bunch of stuff we noted that you might want to consider, because what you’ve asked for and what we’re doing aren’t necessarily exactly converging on a neat path. oh, ok, thanks. jesus! that’s loads of stuff! yeah, but we want to make sure we do it right, right?

so we reach an agreement that I pull my dumbass finger out and actually do those process flows n’ stuff that I never get round to doing and the engineering team will do what’s right, like they always do, and if they need anything urgently to progress the globalization development, they’ll let me know, so I can make something up and filter it back into the strategy later. only joking. I’m calling it the pragmatic globalization development chain (because of course, aggressive pragmatism leads us into systemized sticky matrix approaches), which is how it’s always been really, except the engineering team know globalization as well as the rest of us these days, so I’m much more deferential when I tell them absolutely positively that global content is US-English and the tiered fallback model only goes 2 levels, because they’ll probably be able to point out to me just how that won’t really work, even from a business point of view, but in a really nice way.

globalization. head. wall.

June 7, 2005

there’s no myths associated with globalization just a simple truth. you’ve got to change all your business processes mate, cos this globalized solution ain’t gonna work if you keep producing stuff like you’re in an exam room with your arm over the answers and then expect it to spread the sharing message to where the revenue is, which is not where you are, probably. the burgeoning underclass of globalization managers have been squirrelling around for years, trying to get you in a small room with no natural light just so you can understand how it might actually be possible to transform our beautifully crafted concept album of monetization through pragmatic centralization into a workable, sustainable and accountable framework for managing our messaging and enabling our commerce venues with cascading content inheritance and local value-added content support, like what I just drew on those concentric circles in staroffice, in case you were trying to work out what that was. this projector’s a bit rubbish. and I’m in another country, of course.

I mean, it’s not like its gonna even cost you a fistful of dollars. you’re already building that central web application architecture, right? I just know you’re gonna be fully internationalized an’ that, and lookit, you got hooks into localization workflows and all that stuff going on, so its gonna be like sticking a lemon on the eiffel tower. easy innit? so why not let us talk to the authors and business owners so we can’t just have some sort of arrangement where we give them this lovely globalized platform where localized milk and internationalized honey flow across the plains of centralization and over the cliffs of subscription and into the valleys of unified content taxonomies and they just have to change the way they’ve been creating stuff for the last 10 years. I think they’ll be open to that. I expect they’re falling over themselves to break their agreements with their press agencies and design vendors and actually, I bet if we pointed out to them that copy and pasting entire sections of our corporate site into Re: Re: [Fwd: Re: [Fwd: URGENT: Re: [Fwd: emails and then expecting the intern to create the online equivalent of the cistine chapel on 15 disparate sites in 10 languages in flash isn’t the most viable authoring solution, then they’d probably have some kind of religious experience and convert wholeheartedly to the church of g11n and succumb to the divine and all-knowing truth of ‘the content model’.

so, I’m off down the newsagents to pick up my copy of Marketing Matters – But Not If I Can’t Employ My Friends To Do It magazine and I’ll leave it to you to arrange the con call that has to work for Santa Clara, Camberley, Singapore and Moscow that will kick this stuff off. but don’t do it on Wednesday afternoon, cos I have an appointment with a medico about a collapsed idea.

Things what I writ