When we talk about creating Web sites and online experiences, we talk about users — as in, user experience, usability, user-focused design. The emergence of an entire discipline focused on end users has essentially revolutionized the Web industry (even though better serving your audience with intuitive content and design, if you really think about it, seems like a “no-duh”).

But there’s a debate simmering in the online and software communities about whom we as user experience professionals are really serving. It’s not really about who they are, but about what we call them. A number of influential people in the profession have spoken out (some vehemently) about dropping the word “user” when we think about and speak about … well, about the consumers of our work.

What’s in a word?

It seems nit-picky, but people are passionate about the word choice. Some argue that “user” bears too much resemblance to the term describing drug addicts. Others argue that it doesn’t do justice to who the person on the other side of the computer screen really is, and what he or she is out to accomplish when interacting with a site.

“The idea to design for a ‘user’ is so reductive and limiting that I think we should rid it … from our vocabulary and design practices forever!” says Pietro Turi, author of the site iamnotauser.com.

The problem is that “user” has become the anonymous and generic word for a faceless, nameless avatar of a person. A “user persona” is a made-up description of some fictional person we invent to try to get in the minds of people who use the sites we create. A “user account” is a bunch of numbers and gobbled code managed impersonally by an IT guy who doesn’t care about the frustrated flesh-and-blood having a breakdown in some cubicle somewhere because she can’t remember her password. (You might have guessed that the latter bears an uncanny resemblance to me.)

I’m fascinated by this debate as someone who is a linguist at heart and a writer by craft. I spend my days fighting for the honor of words endangered by misuse and disrespect. And I agree that we as Web experience designers and strategists must be deliberate about everything we do — including how we refer to the people we serve, if we really care about serving them with excellence.

Designing for earthlings

It’s difficult to find an alternative word that can serve as the all-encompassing description of our audience the way that “user” does. “User” reminds us that the person is more than a reader, more than a viewer. He or she can be a customer, a reader, a game-player, a journalist looking for more information. Depending on which discipline they’re most interested in, different experts have suggested substitutes — content people prefer “readers,” customer experience specialists advocate for “customer.” But therein lies one of the biggest challenges we face in Web: that specialists think and operate in silos, concerned with their own piece of the pie. UX specialists were meant to be the point of connection for everyone — the nucleus that holds everyone together to think about the cohesive experience of the — who are those people again?

There is a movement to switch to that very term: people. We design (and write) for people! Which we do … except, is the term descriptive enough? Do we design and write for just people, or for people who are information seekers and performers-of-tasks, people who are actively engaged in making our content and tools work for them?

I have been more mindful of avoiding the generic and careless term “user” as I map out strategies for successful content and design with my clients. Where possible I talk about “customers” (even when the audience may not yet be customers — I like to be aspirational). When I know the people we’re specifically creating sites for (as I often do in the B2B world), I call them that: the jewelers, the pharmacists, the employees.

Officially I am not taking a stand for or against “users.” But I do strive to keep in mind that these are real people, with real problems. They will each experience the site or application in a different way, based on their individual histories and perspectives. We can generalize but should never be dismissive of this fact: that our “users” are doing more than using. They’re learning, absorbing, solving problems, improving their lives. If we can strive for those goals with genuine humans in mind, we’ll transcend the semantics of the word and do our jobs well.

As soon as I saw the notice about Content Strategy Forum last fall I knew I wanted to find a way to attend. I’d recently made the decision to focus the direction of my business on content strategy, making it the basis for all the Web projects I do with my clients, and had planned for 2010 to be the year of immersing myself in the principles and the practice of the discipline. The chance to get in on the ground floor of this conference, network with the growing community, learn best practices, and get inspiration and insights I could take back and apply to my client projects was too good to pass up. Plus, you know, I could write the whole thing off.

I’d also never been to Paris before, and once I decided to attend the conference my husband and I saw it as a chance for our first trip away together since our daughter was born – April in Paris and a little us time. But the day after we arrived, the Iceland volcano blew its top, resulting in an ash cloud that grounded flights for many days and threatened to keep us embedded in Paris and eating crepes (and away from our 3-year-old daughter) for many weeks to come. What ensued was a madcap “Escape from Alcatraz” scenario that involved long lines, poorly spoken French and Spanish, European road food, unspeakably gorgeous countryside, and our eventual departure from Madrid back to the States.

So because of our tardiness and the insanity involved with getting back, I’ve barely had a chance to think much about my experience with the conference until a couple of weeks ago, when I finally revisited my notes in order to prepare for a short recap of the event for the May San Francisco Content Strategy Meetup. I wanted to share a few of the highlights of my two days there.

A conference just for us

I typically attend conferences either to gather news and trends about the industries I’m working in or reporting on (which means I have ended up at plenty of events surrounded by jewelers, hospital administrators and pharmacists). Or, I go to conferences to glean some insight into skills I want to learn or the overall trends of my business, which means I’ve found myself surrounded by interaction designers or Web programmers. I’ve always feel like an impostor at conferences.

I was nearly done with the first day of the conference when the lightning bolt hit me. This was the first conference I’ve ever been to where everybody in the room was just like me. We were doing an exercise that involved wireframing, but in addition to thinking about the user interface design we had to collaborate on where the messaging went on the page. What did we want to communicate to the customer? What did she want to know first, based on her persona and her goals? I looked up to see my small group thinking hard about copy and the order of messaging, and it dawned on me: “This has never happened to me before!”

Spending two days with people all over the world (170 attendees from 18 different countries) who focus every day on Web content was exhilarating to say the least, and worth the trip in itself. I felt much like I suspect the people who attended the very first An Event Apart must have felt — that I was witnessing the seeding of something that would be very important for the future of our industry.

My takeaways

Led by some of the biggest names in the content strategy world, the workshops and sessions covered a lot of territory. Here are a few of the biggest takeaways for me from my two days in Paris.

There’s a strategy to doing the content analysis.
I attended a hands-on workshop about performing the content analysis Thursday morning, led by Rachel Lovinger of Razorfish and Karen McGrane of Bond Art + Science. It was my first session of the conference, and we worked together in small groups to organize and begin a site inventory in about 10 or 15 minutes.

This exercise brought to light two things: first, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and second, cross-cultural differences can influence that. (As an example, my own little team was comprised of two folks from eBay Europe and a French content strategist; as the lone American, I found that my approach of jumping in with both feet and figuring out organization and categories as I went along was counter to my German teammate’s more careful and structured approach.)

Rachel and Karen provided a list of variables to consider as you plan your content analysis:

1. How deep do you need to go?
2. How do you ensure you see examples of all the different content types?
3. What are the common pathways that users are likely to take?
4. Can you find content that has been lost or hidden?

Be in the room from the get-go.
The second workshop, “Evolution of Content,” studied how the folks at IQ Content in Ireland are using the agile software development approach to perform user experience projects for clients — which essentially means that rather than working in silos all their team members, including the content strategist, IA, interaction designer and visual designer, work collaboratively.

Presenters Elizabeth McGuane and Randall Snare talked about the vital importance of having the content strategist or analyst in the room from day one — present at the kickoff meeting with the client and participating actively in the discussion about the site strategy. “How well I’m able to tell the story is dependent on my client engagement and ability to explain reasons for decisions to clients,” Randall said. If she isn’t presented from the first moment as a core member of the team, clients are less inclined to engage with her and listen to her recommendations.

Content evaluation is essential and ongoing
The “Evaluating Content” session by Clare O’Brien at CDA was one of the sessions I was most looking forward to. I’d been reading about CDA’s process for testing and evaluating the effectiveness of content (they call it CUT, or content usefulness toolkit) in the online communities and am fascinated by the process of using metrics to determine content’s direction.

Clare started out by declaring: “Our data burden is stalling our learning process.” In new media, we’ve invented metrics that are supposed to tell us how we’re doing, but that they don’t really tell us what the problem is or how to solve it. People believe that it’s still OK to put any old content into a Web site, and aren’t making the connection between poor content and poor results, she said.

Thirty-nine percent of today’s marketers who are spending a lot of money online are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the conversion rates they are achieving — in the world of conventional media, heads would be rolling from better results than that. A Forrester study recently concluded: “Marketers inevitably discover that the marketing metrics in place today fail to tell the full story about their customers.”

Clare recommended treating content evaluation as a continual process:

• Start by setting benchmarks at the very beginning of a project and asking clients what they expect from their online property.
• Establish an analytics program that tests how people’s behavior with the site actually.
• Use a variety of techniques to perform ongoing content evaluation – click tracking, heat tracking, surveys and multivariate testing included.
• Advocate for testing real copy instead of lorem ipsum in usability testing. This is huge — especially since clients and UX people often worry users will “get hung up on the words.” But as Clare said: “Maybe they should be!”

Editorial strategy: solving the Day 2 problem
Jeff McIntyre, one of my favorite content strategy voices online, addressed what happens after a content strategy is in place and the site launches. “The Web design industry in North America is largely designed around selling patches of blue sky,” he said — meaning that agencies often promise a utopia without acknowledging the work it will take to maintain the squeaky clean, shiny streets.

We have to treat “post-launch” as a phase, Jeff said — and that’s where editorial strategy comes in. While many companies balk at thinking of their Web site as a magazine or at thinking about themselves as being in the publishing business, Jeff argued that they very much  are — and that they need to start thinking that way, putting an editorial calendar and process into place to keep the site fresh and accurate.

Thinking from the outside in
Joyce Hostyn of Open Text talked in “Holistic Customer Experiences” about how so many of our user and customer experience problems start — because a company thinks about process and systems first before they figure out the experience they want a customer to have. She compared customer experience to the layers of an onion — experience is the outer ring, then interactions, then touchpoints and processes, then systems at the inner core.

“Misery moments happen when you take the perspective from the inside out. Magic moments happen when you start with the overall experience you want to deliver and drive inward,” Joyce said.

She compared this to the way Disney creates a magical experience in everything they do, because they started with an emotional theme that they then base all decisions on to create magic in every last detail. Closer to home, she talks about mapping out the experience of a software upgrade for a user — planning from the experience level helps to bridge any silos and create a seamless upgrade process for the end user.

A few of Joyce’s other observations:

• Companies have a hard time seeing content as part of a customer experience. They see usability and design as important, but don’t consider content.
• Starting with an experience and a theme helps us write user experiences with real heart — something largely missing from Web content today.
• A product or service is a means to an end. The value lies in the story, and that’s what we’re here to create.
• You have to consider the backstory as well. A lot of that is happening outside the company-owned interaction points — such as in conversations happening in other places that drive perceptions about a company.
• We have to think about memories as well as experiences. Not only do we care about what messages we are delivering, but also how people remember the messages, because that is arguably just as or more important.

There’s work to be done!
The afternoon keynote was my first time hearing Kristina Halvorson, content strategy’s superstar, speak, and it was a moving and entertaining experience — very easy to see why she has had success winning hearts and minds with her message about the importance of content strategy. Kristina admitted that, as much as she speaks to large crowds each month, she was nervous speaking to a room of content strategists. It was a momumental occasion, and time for a major call to action.

In her speech “Banging the Big Drums,” Kristina gave everyone in the room their marching orders. The next year is our opportunity to not only talk about content strategy, spread the word, educate our clients, make our case … it’s our chance to build case studies. Let’s do things the right way and then document the results. Show the world the value of content strategy. We’re struggling to insert ourselves into our rightful place in the process, and to get clients to understand the value of investing in content. We have to prove that it’s worth it.

What’s next?

We are on the map. Now we take over the world.

Once we all escaped from Europe (and the Europeans were finally able to find seats on a train back home), conference attendees already started talking about 2011 — the location and the theme and substance. Most likely 2010 was the beginning of a whole docket of content strategy conferences that will spring up on the calendar, and so it remains to be seen where we’ll be off to next year. The 2010 conference seemed to be about establishing the legitimacy of the practice — we’re here, what we’re saying makes sense, we’re shaping the future of this together. Hopefully next year we’ll make enough progress that the programs will start delving into the particulars, the best practices, the professional nuances of content strategy.

Download the 2010 Content Strategy Forum presentations on SlideShare.

We sent the CEO (let’s call him Stu) copy to review ahead of time, but he seems not to have seen it before. He’s skimming the opening paragraphs. I hear whispering on the other end of the phone and realize he’s moving his lips as he reads.

“OK, I’m not a writer, so I’m certainly not an expert,” he begins, and we brace ourselves.

“What I really want these readers to know, above anything else, is that we’re innovative. I want you to get that word into the headline. Innovative.”

I prickle a little at this but keep my cool. Of course, his marketing team and I have done a lot of analysis to learn what this customer base is really interested in, and innovation is only part of it.

But what I really want Stu to understand is that just because he uses the word “innovation” in his web content doesn’t mean that prospective customers are going to believe he can solve their problems better than the next guy.

Even superheroes need the Justice League

We as B2B marketers fall into a trap with our customer communications. We feel like we have to come across as formal and distinguished in the way we talk about our company and products. We want to sound like experts, and we want people to think we’re the best.

But there are only so many words and phrases in the English language that help us get those points across, and when we set out to write the language to convey our distinction, we inevitably turn to the same toolbox of terms.

I’m as guilty of it as the next copywriter. It’s worse when it’s what the client thinks he wants. (In this case, if Stu is happy, everyone is happy, so the marketing team thinks “innovation” is a small price to pay.)

It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with this word, or its B2B jargon counterparts. As someone who has spent a great deal of time with every thesaurus I can find searching for alternatives, I can vouch for the fact that we use the words so frequently because they’re the most powerful, accurate and appropriate ones out there.

The problem lies more in the fact that as writers and marketers, we expect these words and phrases to carry the weight of our meaning and messaging, to work tirelessly as Men of Steel to save the world and solidly communicate the differentiating value of a company or product. A tall order for little words, as important-sounding as they may be.

The ideal would be if these words never appeared again in B2B marketing copy. But that’s highly unlikely. I would bet you money that sometime in the next two days I myself will use one of them in a client assignment. I’ll try hard not to, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.

But what we as marketers can do is to avoid letting the words rest on their own laurels — because they are so overused, customers breeze right past them. They have ceased to have meaning.

So even if we use them, we have to make them work harder. Why is your company innovative? Let’s illustrate it, right upfront — we have technology that no one else has, that gives you the highest productivity or accuracy in the industry and solves your problems incomparably. We solve problems differently than any other company, and here’s exactly how and precisely what it means for you as the customer. Amazing! When you approach it this way, you don’t really even need to use the word “innovative.” You’re already saying it, and in a way that means so much more to customers.

And now: the B2B copywriting Razzie Awards

Here they are — the five oft-used B2B words and phrases that I challenge you and myself to avoid using from this moment forward:

1. Innovative. This word is not only overused, most of the time it’s not used properly. There’s a philosophical debate going on in the patent world over whether an invention should be considered innovative if it doesn’t truly change the world or chart a new course for technology. If you have a couple of extra features that make your product a cut above the other products doing basically the same thing on the market, you’re not really innovating.
2. State-of-the-art. Also “world-class” and “best-of-breed.” They’re pretty words that attempt to elevate a product into the upper echelon of its category. But by themselves they’re empty words. When everyone in your category claims to have “state-of-the-art” or “best-of-breed,” they stop meaning anything.
3. The leading provider of … The problem with this phrase is twofold. First, it isn’t always true. If you’re like most B2B companies, you may lead the category with one or two products, but your competitors have No. 1 slots for other products. But the real problem is that it’s an inward-facing term. A lot of “About Us” pages start with this: we’re the leading provider of XYZ. Good for you! But what does it mean for customers? Lose the term and lead with a customer-focused proposition.
4. Combined experience of 200,000 years. I always smirk when I see a company talk about how their executive team has combined experience of 50, 100, or 200 years. What does that even mean? If you put the number of years in the workforce of everyone in your company together, sure, you’ll have a really big number taking you back to prehistoric days. Talk about the fact that your team knows the industry deeply and applies that knowledge to solving customer problems. Readers aren’t impressed by simple arithmetic.
5. Solutions that give customers what they really need. OK, this is a tough one. First, as someone who writes for the software industry, I understand that “solutions” isn’t just a jargony word for “product.” Well, it is actually, but there’s a reason behind it. Companies are trying to communicate that they bundle a product (the software) with consultative services, installation, support, etc. They don’t want you to think you’re just buying a box with some discs in it and will be flying solo from now on. I honestly don’t have a problem with “solutions,” expect that somewhere in the copy I’ve starting making a stand for at least one time calling it what it really is. Software. It’s better for SEO (that’s how customers think of it and search for it), and it’s better for clarity. Let’s not hide it. We’re in the software business.

   As for the second part of the phrase, “what they really need” — well, that’s one of my lazy fall-backs. What it’s trying to say is, “We really listen to you and customize your solution for your needs.” But it’s lazy. Take it a step further. What do customers really need? Thirty percent of their time back? More money? A happier work life? Take the time to find out. Your customers will notice.

So what about Stu? Well, we gave him “innovative.” But the rest of the copy on the page worked hard to make it meaningful. My guess is that customers will notice the substance — the quantifiable proof points, the copy focused on their specific challenges — and glance right over the word “innovative.” And I’m OK with that.

So why, as ubiquitous as they are, do so many Web forms leave us feeling frustrated? Why do so many users abandon  a form before they’re finished filling it out? Why does Luke Wroblewski, the man who literally wrote the book on Web form design and usability, feel like he has the right to stand up in front of several hundred Web designers (as he did at An Event Apart in San Francisco last December) and tell us that our forms “look like a poo storm?”

Forms are everywhere, and most of them are ineffective at best, downright unusable at worst. Even veteran Web users struggle to fill them out sometimes. Wroblewski explains the convoluted process that often turns the horse into a hobbled camel: regardless of who initially designs the form, marketing, sales, and IT all have a stake in what it inevitably becomes, each adding their own touches and requirements to it. And often nobody is minding the store to make sure the final form achieves its primary goal: getting users to complete it.

Here are some tips – from Wroblewski’s AEA presentation as well as a couple of my own — for the next time you have to manage the design of a Web form:

1. Resist the urge to ask for every last detail. It’s understandable why it happens. The rare opportunity to get prospects to turn over information about themselves gets your salespeople and marketing teams salivating. But do you really need to ask for a person’s fax number? How about street address? What’s the least amount of information you can collect at this moment? People are more likely to fill out the form if they don’t have to labor over it. Consider each field and requested piece of information carefully before including it. And don’t forget to tell users how you’re planning to use the data, Wroblewski says — people won’t give you an email address or phone number if you’re planning to sell it to someone else or spam them repeatedly.
2. Think linearly. How does the user’s eyes move through the form? Chances are, they do not naturally jump back and forth between side-by-side fields. Users tend to scan down the left side of the page, so your form should be designed accordingly, Wroblewski says. If you do need to jump around, use strong visual cues to draw users’ eyes to where you want them to go next. And by all means, avoid placing the “Clear All” button where users expect the “Submit” button to be — the biggest faux pas of Web form design is to stick a button in a user’s natural flow that will wipe out all of their hard work instead of rewarding them. It’s quite possible they’ll be so disgusted that they won’t bother filling the form out again after that.
3. Don’t break with convention. Because we fill out so many of these things, we’ve all become very accustomed to the design standards of Web forms. Occasionally a talented interaction designer finds a way to tighten up space and give a form a truly unique look that also functions well. But often those who set out to build a better mousetrap fail in their attempts. Certain conventions work, so stick with them. For example, a trend is to place the field labels inside the fields. Designers also try placing them to the right or left, or underneath the field. But Wroblewski says studies show that users complete a form 10 times faster when the labels are placed above the field. Smart, thoughtful design is always welcome, but it’s not always necessary to innovate when a convention works perfectly.
4. Treat the form as a holistic experience. Users get to the form from someplace, and when they finish the form they expect to be taken someplace else. People who create forms sometimes forget this, and focus more on the form itself than on the entire user flow. When sending the user to the form, be careful to only make promises based on reality — let users know what to expect and exactly what they will get from filling out the form. If using a multiple-part form, consider using a progress indicator, and make sure it’s accurate. (Wroblewski uses Fidelity.com as an example of a four-step progress indicator bar that misleads users by failing to mention the requirement to create an account in the middle of filling out the form, a major disruption in the flow.) And by all means spend as much time considering the confirmation page and process as you do the actual form. Users want to know they were successful, and want to be able to do something next as an immediate reward for their efforts.
5. Use a writer. I’ve known some IT people who were great with words. Designers too. But much of the time, forms need content help. Instructions, labels and buttons often don’t communicate clearly what exactly users should do. Calls to action are unclear or nonexistent. And the opportunity to provide context-based help (such as pop-ups explaining what the information is for or why the company is requesting it) is often overlooked. An experienced Web writer can help you see the form from the user’s point of view and craft language that will make your form successful.

But during this four-hour workshop, we as participants did witness how lots and lots of sketching, pitching and critiquing, and collaborative problem-solving can turn out several different approaches that all solved the same problem in different and creative ways.

Churning out ideas — lots of ideas
I took the workshop because I increasingly am playing the role of an IA and UX designer, and see it as an important part of the content strategy work I’m doing. But I’m first and foremost a word person, and naturally freeze up when called upon to visually organize and prioritize ideas — terrified I’m going to do it wrong and not quite confident in the process I use.

I learn by doing and seeing others do, so hands-on workshops are ideal for me, and this one was no different. The first thing we did was break into four different groups (some of which were large enough that they broke into subgroups) based on wireframing tool of preference. I use Omnigraffle for site maps and (I was embarrassed to admit, until I learned later in the session that many others were in the same boat) often turn to Adobe InDesign for wireframing simply because it’s comfortable. But I’ve been very interested in Axure for some time, and now that the software has a Mac beta version I wanted to learn more about how to use it — so I aligned myself with the Axure group. (Other participants grouped into groups using Omnigraffle, FireWorks, and Balsmiq. The point of all that was that there are many different ways to skin a cat, and they all work fine.)

We received basic requirements — personas for two different types of users, as well as basic background about the organization we were designing for, and some rough and somewhat vague must-haves, leaving things mostly open to interpretation. Then it was time to sketch.

Six to eight thumbnail sketches. Five minutes. No rules. GO. Of course I froze. I’m a verbal thinker, and would much rather have listed requirements and ideas first, before starting to draw. But the sketching was a fantastic exercise for two reasons:

• It got us thinking in terms of blocking out areas, shapes, relationships, rather than thinking detail — because there was no time for detail. In retrospect, I think about the Graphic Design Cookbook and its basic building blocks inspiring designers to explore thousands of possibilities.
• It got us used to the idea that sketching is the first thing UX designers do, and that they do it for a long time. They start with thumbnails and move on to more detailed sketches, but they may go through dozens, even hundreds, of pieces of paper before they are happy enough with a solution to put it into wireframing software. Thinking on paper helps designers stay loose and open to ideas, and makes evolution much more possible than it would be in the software.

When our workshop leaders showed their wireframing processes in videos at the end of the workshop, I was actually relived to see that one of them is a verbal thinker like me — he starts with writing out all his ideas and requirements in long, messy lists. But all four of them sketched and sketched for days before moving on. Sketching is essential.

Design becomes collective
Next, we engaged in a process similar to what burgeoning architects go through in architecture school: “design studio,” where everyone gets a chance to put his or her sketches up on the wall and pitch concepts. As a team we agreed on which pieces we like, and then we started sketching layouts based on the elements and concepts that worked for us.

At that point, we took our sketches to another group and presented to them, collecting their positive and critical feedback that we took back to our table to further iterate the design. Before our eyes we watched our wireframes become further refine. As somebody who tends to work alone, I always enjoy being reminded of how collaboration and feedback can continue to make a solution better and better.

We regrouped, drafted our final sketches, and then it was time to design the wireframes in Axure. While our group’s noble volunteer worked the software, the workshoppers passed out beers, which we all continued to sip as each group presented our electronic wireframes and talked through our solutions.

Having walked and talked through the process, I feel more comfortable wearing a wireframer’s shoes now. Especially inspiring were the videos documenting the unique process of each of the UXers running the workshop … confirming that there is, indeed, no single “right way” to wireframe, but that it all involves a lot of iteration, noodling, paper, sticky notes and time.

Russ Unger (@russu):

Will Evans (@semanticwill):

Todd Zaki Warfel (@zakiwarfel):

Like people, there probably aren’t many of those brands in your life. But the ones you’ve found you’re holding on to, and they continue to delight you with their ability to be there when you need them, to really get where you’re coming from.

Smart copywriting (combined with a great product presented in the right environment) is largely responsible for that fuzzy fondness you feel for a brand, especially when you interact with it online. That was the premise of Denise Wilton’s talk on “Writing for Relationships” at IxDA’s Interaction ‘10 in Savannah earlier this month. Wilton is the creative director of MOO.com, the wildly successful online printing company that has exploded among creatives and entrepreneurs for their fun design options and easy-to-use system.

But a large part of MOO.com’s success, Wilton asserts, is its ability to create a tangible brand online, where customers don’t have the luxury of interacting with a face-to-face salesperson but still crave the same kind of friendly service they’d get at bricks-and-mortar store. (And, in a world where live employees are MIA most of the time at physical retail stores anyway, there’s a real opportunity to deliver superior experiences even when your salespeople are chatty bots following well-crafted scripts.)

In fact, Wilton talks about Little MOO — the friendly bot who sends automated updates about the status of a customer’s business card order — and how people react to it: replying to it, sending email asking how Little MOO is feeling, treating Little MOO like a real relationship. The way Little MOO and all of the copy on MOO.com is crafted fosters relationships with consumers who feel like they know the brand intimately.

Wilton argues against all the people who say users don’t read online. “People read online all the time,” she says. But copy has to be targeted, useful and authentic, or users will indeed skip over it. “We know people only read what’s necessary online,” she says. “We have to make every single word count.”

Relationship-building through smart writing

• Lead customers from the monologue to the conversation. Web pages start out as monologues — you’re telling customers what they need to know. But once you make a sale, or two or three or ten sales, you can begin engaging customers in real conversations, through blogs, Twitter feeds and email newsletters. The tone of voice can be a little different in these communications — more casual, more intimate, maybe even more brand-focused or inward-looking — because you’ve formed a relationship and people start to care, to want to join the tribe. Until then, keep the information useful and strictly audience-focused.
• Figure out what your business is all about. “Are you selling online banking, or are you selling more time to spend with your kids?” Wilton says. “Before you work out your tone of voice, you have to work out what you’re really doing with your business.” A writer who is able to create a tangible, lovable brand voice through copy knows what the brand’s all about, inside and out — and it’s a hard thing to teach that to others, Wilton says.
• Write for context. In the spirit of making every word count, provide copy that truly supports the sales process — avoiding gratuitous prose. “Context is everything! Otherwise you’re just the annoying shop assistant,” Wilton says.

See Wilton’s entire presentation here.

That’s why I was particularly thrilled with Cindy Chastain’s presentation “Thinking Like a Storyteller” during Interaction ‘10, the annual conference of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), which I attended in Savannah the first week in February. Chastain is a user experience designer but also a screenwriter and filmmaker, and she often relates these disciplines as she talks about how to create captivating experiences for users.

A few of her observations that hit home for me:

There are two narratives going on at once.
There’s the narrative that you as the writer or designer create, and then there is the user’s narrative — the “stream of self-talk” that goes on as a person interacts with a product. Each step of an interaction raises new questions, prompts a user to want more information, and draws the user further into the experience — it’s important to understand how to build the right emotional and cognitive cues into these interactions, Chastain says.

People intuitively understand narrative structure.
For thousands of years, people have been telling stories. Children as young as 4 years old understand the shape of a story — the arc that takes the reader from least to most complex and then back down, bringing readers ultimately to a “soft landing.”

Writers and designers should pay careful attention to that time-tested arc, being careful not to disrupt the narrative flow (by inserting annoying ads or offers just when the story is starting to flow, for example) and to be sure to guide readers to a satisfying ending rather than leaving them hanging. Techniques commonly used in screenwriting such as “slow disclosure” create suspense and draw the reader into the story.

True character is revealed in action.
When we write or design experiences, we’re enforcing a brand character, with a voice and a personality of its own. When thinking like a storyteller, there’s tremendous potential to create a character or series of characters not only through the words we use, but in how and when the user receives a response or a follow-up, where the user is taken next or other “actions” that help readers/users feel like they are starting to understand what the “character” is all about.

See Cindy Chastain’s entire presentation here.

“I hate our Web site.”

That’s how many of my projects begin. A client calls, in a tizzy and in a rush. The company’s or the program’s Web site (in the client’s words) sucks, and the client is finally sick of it.

At first glance, the site may be (but is not always) nice-looking, with cool graphics, an attractive color palette. But try using it. Try reading it. Try navigating it and wading through content once you get a few levels down, where the interface design devolves from lovely and engaging to mucky and clumsy. Frustrated yet? So are the client’s customers.

The client wants a redesign, pronto. A “facelift,” they may call it. A “makeover.” At this point, it’s my job to back everyone up and analyze why the Web site does indeed “suck.” And almost always, the answer is crystal-clear: the site has no content strategy.

It doesn’t just need a facelift. It needs a heart and a soul.

Bandwagons, start your engines
At this point let me say that by even writing this post I feel like I’m jumping into the content strategy parade that is taking the Web world by storm this year. Fueled by the publication of the book Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson, content strategy is the discipline du jour. It’s the subject of blog posts and Tweets (search for the hashtag #contentstrategy), online groups, and programming at popular Web events such as SxSW. Content strategy is even getting its very own annual conference, debuting this April in Paris, France (and I am proud to say I have forked over the euros to attend).

The world doesn’t need another blog post about content strategy. But over the past several months I’ve made the decision to shift the focus of my business to this important discipline, as the foundation for all of the Web project work I do. I haven’t quite perfected my elevator pitch to friends and family about this change — it isn’t easy to explain Web content strategy to people who don’t live in the Web world — but I do want to explain to my clients and peers why this focus is important to me — and to them.

Content strategy essentially combines everything I’ve already been doing in my work: using business strategy to drive Web content, site architecture, user experience, design and functionality. The difference is that the content strategy comes first, and that the entire process of a site design begins with a well-developed plan for what content should be featured on a site, based on a company’s strategy, goals, audience needs and position in the competitive landscape. The content strategy then drives all other decision-making: information architecture, UX and UI design, functionality, even the choice of a company’s content management system.

What content strategy is, and what it isn’t
There’s more to it than this of course. A true content strategy has to do with not only what the content should be, but where it’s coming from, who’s authoring it, and how it will be managed post-launch. It may include an editorial strategy, an editoral calendar, a style guide. It’s an end-to-end plan for content — rare in a world where content has long been the most-often-neglected element as well as the one that’s hardest to wrestle to the ground in any Web project.

There are hot debates across the Internet about what exactly content strategy entails (some people believe it’s more about classifying and organizing content than about managing it going forward, for example — everyone seems to have a variation on the definition).

And as with any “awakening” in a community, the clamor for content strategy has led to a great number of misunderstandings and misinterpretations among people whose hearts are in the right place but who are repurposing “content strategy” to their own end. I recently read an article that detailed “10 content strategies for 2010,” which included “launch an email newsletter” and “write some white papers” in its list. No. Those are things that may come out of a strong content strategy, but they are not in themselves content strategy.

Kristina Halverson herself course-corrected hungry content strategy disciples on her company’s blog a couple of weeks ago, reinforcing the true definition of content strategy:

Content strategy is a plan to get you from where you are now with your current content (assets, operations, distribution, maintenance, and so on), to where you want to be. But for some reason, we want to skip that part and rush ahead to the execution piece. Which is why we tend to mix up content strategy … with tactics.

Content strategy is the reason for having a Web
The Web is content. People forget that. It’s the entire reason for the Web in the first place. The nature of that content has changed; now content can be text and video and audio and animation and interaction. But it’s still content. People don’t come to the Web for design. They come to solve a problem, to complete a transaction, to learn something, to find entertainment. That involves content in one form or another.

When companies decide to launch a Web site, they know they need a Web presence. They have a sense of what they want to communicate. They know they want something attractive and engaging that wins prospective customers over to their side. Maybe they want a shopping cart, or an online forum, or a cool interactive Flash. They think about content enough to determine what pages they might want, in order to complete an information architecture and build the site framework and navigation. But they don’t think about the guts of the site ahead of time. And therein lies the problem.

As Kristina Halvorson eloquently describes in her book, content development almost always comes in the final one-third of a Web project — after the IA, after the wireframes, after the user testing, after the visual design, after the CMS has been selected and almost completely implemented. What happens next is classic: a Web writer (and how many times I have been that writer!) or a cross-functional team of contributors comes along with a bunch of Word docs. An SEO specialist slaps on some keywords (and the writer rewrites to make the copy search engine-friendly, often rendering it human-unfriendly, but that’s a topic for another post). A content producer copies and pastes Word copy into the CMS and proofreads it for funny characters and formatting.

Launch day. The site looks great! But over time the cracks begin to show. Content is confusing, repetitive, incomplete, inconsistent or dull. It’s also really hard to find. And did I mention out of date? The online forum has a bunch of spam comments. The blog hasn’t been updated in three months. The Web site, quite simply, sucks.

What you get with content strategy
Starting with the guts means you’re starting with the heart and soul of a site, the why and how. What are our goals, and what content helps us achieve them? How do we execute content in a way to meet our specific goals?

Just as example: a company wishes to distinguish itself as a thought leader in its niche. How do we do that? Do we have a truly distinctive voice to bring to the table, a unique point of view and proprietary knowledge that we can share? How can we offer it up in a way that’s engaging, and to what end are we doing so? How do we put the resources in place to sustain our approach over time?

What you get with content strategy is the foundation for a rewarding customer experience that communicates your company’s or organization’s value while meeting your strategic goals. If it’s done right, here’s what that looks like:

• Your site tells a multifaceted, but cohesive, story about who you are, what you’re all about, how you’re different and what users can or should do next — from home page to deepest-darkest detail page.
• Your site design leads users to the most important content and functions, while empowering them to find the content they want the most.
• Your site provides valuable information to users who will come to see it as a go-to source for decision-making, professional enrichment, problem-solving tools, or whatever other purpose your content serves.
• Your site delivers what it promises to deliver. Enough said.

By the way, content strategy isn’t just for Web sites. It’s for your entire online presence, including social media platforms you’re managing. If you’re trying to answer the question “Should we be on Twitter?”, you’re asking the wrong question. Content strategy governs everything you publish online, and content across platforms should be inextricably linked.

I have so much more to learn, and 2010 is my year of immersing myself in content strategy and user experience by attending conferences, reading everything I can my hands on, listening to podcasts and meeting others who are as passionate about this discipline as I am.

But suffice it to say that my focus on content strategy will be a good thing for my clients. At An Event Apart in San Francisco recently, programming guru Jeff Veen declared, “We can make more Web!” Which is great. But in partnership with my clients and with content strategy at our backs, I’m hoping to make better Web.

Email marketing has officially hit its stride, and is taking its rightful place alongside traditional marketing efforts. In its recently published US Interactive Marketing Forecast, Forrester found that many marketers plan to skip direct mail altogether (to the woe of the U.S. Postal Service) and go straight for email. The forecast predicts an 11% growth in email marketing over the next 5 years, and reports that 97% of all marketers say they’ll use email marketing in 2009.

Which makes sense, really — email is cheap, customizable, easy to manage, and more people than ever are accepting of it. Email has become mainstream.

What’s interesting about Forrester’s report, however, is that the research credits the growth of the “social inbox” as one of the reasons for email’s reign. And that’s where things get a little trickier.

For those not familiar with the term (it was new to me), the social inbox bundles a few different concepts. First, there are the true inboxes associated with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter — and yes, there are companies out there now specializing in email marketing to those places. The social inbox also describes users’ adoption of email software that aggregates updates from all the different feeds to which they subscribe. (Yahoo! launched this kind of new experience with its Mail application in 2009.) But in general the idea is that social media platforms are becoming fair game for email marketing.

The idea of being able to reinforce your email marketing in multiple places may seem attractive to marketers, but we have to understand the implications. The first, of course, is that the social inbox is still taboo as a place to receive direct marketing — even if it’s from a trusted source. The folks at ExactTarget found that while most users found it almost “completely acceptable” to receive promotional messages from companies by email if the user has given permission to do so, they were much less accepting of those tactics through RSS, IM and especially SMS. (See ExactTarget’s presentation for more detail.) Think about what happens when marketing messages start showing up in users’ inboxes all over the Internet — by some counts, we may manage 10 or 20 different inboxes if you count work email, home email, all our voice mail boxes, social media sites, RSS aggregators — unannounced. How fast will users grow frustrated, then become annoyed, then get really livid?

For this future trend to work, we as marketers need to be sensitive to users’ tolerance for e-marketing, understanding more about our customers and how they want to hear from us. This is key, and the discussion about how to do this has most likely only just begun.

But much of the success of the email-social inbox dynamic duo will depend on content. In all the bytes of communications blipping into users’ points of contact with the Internet, are we giving them anything they really want or that truly helps them in their business and their lives? Are we saying the same thing over and over as we reach out to them through different platforms, or worse, are we saying drastically different things that confuse them or turn them off? Or are we telling a cohesive story, using each outreach as a valuable opportunity to share one more enticing piece of the puzzle and tempt them with information they crave?

The collaboration of email and social inbox has the potential to be a powerful tool — but like with most superpowers, there comes great responsibility.

Admittedly, I was nervous. As the consultant, you always worry that there are unspoken dissatisfactions waiting to storm out of the closet if given the invitation. What if I had misread the success of the project, and the client was just waiting to pounce on me? But there was no pouncing. Our fortune was that we had a small, collaborative team, a few smart cooks in a very large kitchen, and we’d all worked together unusually well  — it was one of the great successes of the project. We knew each other well enough to be candid without needing to finger-point. Because of that, we could focus on an open discussion that led to many good discoveries.

Our post-mortem methodology
Before the two-hour session, I distributed a somewhat in-depth questionnaire to the team and asked them to review it. Part 1 used a 1-5 ranking system and focused on the different phases of the project. Team members were asked to rate to what extent they agreed with statements about each phase: “The discovery phase effectively informed the remainder of the project” or “Enough resources were allotted for the visual design phase.” Part II focused on success factors — teamwork, communications, etc. — and asked open-ended questions about what we did right and wrong in each area to facilitate discussion.

Rather than complete the questionnaires, team members used them as a guide to prepare for the discussion. Then we walked through each area and used the questions as a way to talk about what worked and didn’t work. At the end of the discussion, I put together a short summary of our discussion with recommendations for the future.

What we learned
It’s easy to believe that the “learnings” from a project should have already emerged after nearly a year of meetings, emails and impromptu discussions. But a focused, two-hour reflection as a team can really help to crystallize some of these discoveries into a few beautiful lightbulb moments.

Of course, we focused heavily on time and resources. I wish we’d had more time or I wish we’d had more people to help were the most-often repeated phrases during our two-hour session. These were legitimate wishes: certain phases of the project were rushed, and in some areas the burden fell on a couple of already overworked individuals. But in Web site redesigns, these complaints are par for the course. I’ve worked on redesigns that involved one person and hundreds of people, projects with $0 budgets and $2 million budgets. There’s never enough time. There’s never enough money.

But there were a few fundamental things that emerged that could have made the project more successful in spite of the time and money constraints. Here were a few of our major a-ha’s.

Requirements should become before budget. The budget-first, requirements-gathering later method rarely works. Unfortunately, it’s usually the way things are done in corporate environments, because budgeting is usually completed the year before a project can kick off. It is the way of things. But what happens is that rash decisions are made in the spirit of thriftiness — and declarations such as, “our design will be really simplistic, we won’t need that many templates” or “we can do all the content and production in-house, that’s why we have a full-time editor” can mean major danger down the road. If planning for a Web site redesign, try scheduling your discovery phase in one fiscal year, then use it to inform a realistic budgeting process for the actual design and development of the site in the next fiscal year.

Content should come first. This has been the biggest lightning bolt for me this year, and the reason that I am refocusing my entire business toward Web content strategy. What happened during this particular Web project was what almost always happens: we scheduled the content development phase for the latter third of the project, and because of lack of resources, it actually got pushed to the last fifth of the project or so. One person, in-house, was responsible for writing or cleaning up all the content, because budget for a resource to help had been one of the first things to be slashed in the project planning. But inevitably, we started to have problems as soon as we began wireframing and visual design. As the site development progressed, it became apparent that we hadn’t planned for “real” content in our page designs, resulting in having to go back to the drawing board a few times to get it just right, and still having to tweak as we were building pages near project launch. Nightmare, right? But it’s all too common — and the reason why content should be planned carefully and at least partially developed before beginning page design. I’ll be writing more about this in future posts.

Testing is good. More testing is better. I was awfully proud of our team for embracing the idea that user testing, done early, was essential and could save the entire project. And though we were crunched for time and money, we built a prototype and testing our site design, IA and navigation with a handful of users right as we were still working out visual design and before we coded anything, a move that would make Steve Krug proud. But during the post-mortem, the IT lead on the project suggested he would have benefited from testing again, later on, once the site was really working. A complex new registration process, combined with a brand new prompt for members to log in to read certain content, meant a whole new experience for site users — and made our IT folks quake in their boots before launch. Everything ended up working smoothly, but later testing would have assured us a flawless transition and helped us address any potential bumps in the road.

Recognize when schedule slippage may compromise quality. This is a tough one, because in Web redesigns there’s always a “drop-dead” launch date toward which we’re working. The dirty secret is that a site very rarely actually launches on that target date. That’s because in a project this complex, dozens of variables come in to play, and each participant must complete each task on time, or the entire project slips. When one piece is delayed, other pieces are compromised. Along the way, we all work toward the supposedly non-negotiable end, so often when the schedule slips we make the decision to make it work, to speed up the next task in line in order to make the launch — compromising the quality of the pieces that follow. In our case, when IA took four weeks instead of two because of the amount of feedback we received, we found ourselves rushing through wireframes so we could hand off design more quickly to our production vendor — but in the end that rush delayed us anyway, because we had to go back and do it right. It’s better to recognize when we need more time and realistically evaluate whether we might need to push back launch accordingly — rather than waiting until the last minute to decide to delay the go-live.

Even though each one of us was already out of the frying pan and into the fire after launch, it was so refreshing to take some time revisit the project as a whole and reflect on how we did. It was an unusual opportunity to celebrate our overall success, but also to dissect the areas where we stumbled and understand why. After all, isn’t every project just another learning experience and chance to keep growing professionally?