At Teehan+Lax, we feel that the content components of any user experience are tied closely to the visual design and functionality. Content strategy gives us a set of methodologies for planning content with as much attention as we pay to visual design and functionality. This means determining not only what content should be part of each user experience, but how that content will be created, delivered and managed, and what people, processes and technology need to be in place to make that happen.

But my elevator pitch might not get across what content strategy brings to a project. I’ve been finding that what’s more useful is to talk about what can happen if you don’t have it — in other words, the actual problems content strategy solves. Here are three common ones:

1. A design that you can’t make the most of

Have you ever undertaken a large scale design effort, but after hand-off it was difficult to implement? Maybe the design relied upon images of a certain quality and quantity being produced and published on a regular basis, and you didn’t have the staffing or technology in place to make that happen. Or a 3rd party API that was supposed to incorporate a data feed into your site didn’t seem to work with your existing content management system. In most cases, these problems show up as you’re trying to implement and launch your project, leaving you wondering why you weren’t aware of a problem sooner.

Content strategy makes sure that all the moving parts are in place for content to be created or acquired, published, and managed. If the technology or resources aren’t there, we figure out how to get them. And if a proposed design demands content that’s way beyond what you can produce, we work with the UX designers to make adjustments and deliver a system that you can support and maintain.

2. Content that is tied to its containers

Sometimes content get developed in great detail as part of a UX design without a plan for how it will live outside that design. One example that’s becoming more and more common happens with efforts to create experiences for multiple screens (most commonly adding a mobile experience to an existing desktop one). Content often gets produced and published with just one experience in mind, and it isn’t structured for cross-platform use, so you have to re-create and re-plan the content for mobile or tablet experiences.

The problem? Your content is tied to the ‘container’ you’ve initially published it in — in many cases the pages and sections of your website. And while content strategy isn’t going to save you from doing some content planning for those hypothetical future projects, it can help you to publish content that is structured and organized effectively for re-use. As a bonus, adding this data to your content will mean it works much better with intelligent RSS feeds and search algorithms, making your content more accessible, flexible and findable. These qualities are becoming increasingly important as users access content not only on different devices, but through feeds and readers that take that content outside of its original context.

3. Great design. Not so great content.

This happens all the time: content isn’t planned and developed alongside the UX strategy and design process. Your project launches and it looks fantastic — until users start reading, viewing or navigating, and discover that content is irrelevant, of poor quality, or simply just not meeting their needs. This can happen in the case of a site re-design when no analysis of the existing content is carried out. It also happens with new platforms, where no one really ‘owns’ the content and assumptions are made that it will fall into place once the design is complete.

UX designers have enough to manage without making content planning part of their work. And clients — if they haven’t got a designated person or team actively planning your content — won’t be focusing their energy on content, when main responsibility might be technical implementation, marketing or project management.

Without someone advocating for your content, it can fall through the cracks with huge gaps and poor quality going unnoticed until it’s too late, resulting in a mad scramble to fix it with little time or resources.

Content strategy alleviates this problem by paying attention to your content from the very start, beginning with an inventory and audit of your existing content, analyzing it against competitors and best practices, and mapping it to your users’ needs. This process starts during the strategy phase of your project, and continues alongside design and development.

In doing this, we figure out the best way for your digital content to help you achieve your business goals and meet your users’ needs; we also make its production, publication and management more efficient, strategic and productive.

The primary thing to keep in mind here is that designing for a device like an iPhone, especially one with a retina display, using only a computer monitor leads to a good deal of guess work due to the differences in pixel density. We hate unnecessary guess work. Sure, you can export flats and look at them on the end device but you’re probably not going to do that as often as you’d need to – and it’s a waste of time given that tools like LiveView Screencaster are available. It’s a free app (Nicholas, we’d gladly pay) that let’s you view your Photoshop canvas in real time on your iOS device. It’s the best addition to our toolkit since Photoshop added layers and multiple undos.

Set up Photoshop with a new blank document (640×960 in this case) and make a second instance of it (this is key). It’s done by selecting Window>Arrange>New Window for… in Photoshop. See the screenshot above for reference. Assuming you have 2 monitors, drag one of the instances over to the secondary monitor making sure the entire canvas is viewable at 100%. Leave the other instance on the main monitor. Get LiveView Screencaster running on both devices and line up the LiveView frame to fit perfectly over the canvas on the secondary monitor (use the arrow keys for fine-grain adjustments). You’ll now want to work solely off of the main monitor instance leaving the secondary one alone. This allows you to freely zoom or move the canvas as much as you want for pixel perfection, while simultaneously watching how your actions are affecting the design on the actual device at 100%. Without the second instance, any canvas movement or zooming is mirrored in the iPod, and that’s not a good thing.

Here’s a quick snap of the sample set up:

One of the recurring questions has been around how it works. As one of our LinkedIn forum members said, “If no one is currently doing this, how can an agency possibly integrate the process and make it work?” Great question and one that’s been on our minds a lot lately, too.

As luck would have it, a campaign recently exploded online that I believe illustrates the adaptive approach to marketing. I’m talking about the Old Spice Guy work done by Wieden+Kennedy. It began as a great Super Bowl TV spot but what happened afterward – and they way they worked with their client – is what I find most compelling.

Iain Tait, in a readwriteweb.com post explains it best, “In a way there’s nothing magical that we’ve done here… we just brought a character to life using the social channels we all [social media geeks] use every day. But we’ve also taken a loved character and created new episodic content in real time.” As for the mechanics, he explains, “we’re looking at who’s written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web…in real time.”

My first thought was that to pull off such a responsive program they must have had a tremendously trusting client and collaborative working relationship. Tait said that Proctor & Gamble let his team create on the fly with little supervision, “There is such great trust … They have given us a set of guidelines and if we get close to the edges we contact them.”

In my opinion, Tait’s team has arguably created the most significant program since Subservient Chicken. They put all the right pieces together. But more so, they’ve illustrated exactly how an agency can practically develop and deploy a campaign that actively involves consumers in real time and delivers meaningful experience. Not only that, they completely repositioned the brand and now have an asset they can use in myriad ways.

I’ll probably take some heat for this, but personally, I always felt that Subservient Chicken was one-dimensional. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it and felt it arrived at exactly the right time in our industry. It showed how technology could be used to involve consumers without being ham-handed. But it was really just a playful destination. Somewhere to waste a few minutes online.

The Old Spice Guy concept goes way farther and operates on a much deeper level. It watches consumer activity, pulls it in without asking and feeds it back out as unexpectedly fresh content. On top of that it demonstrates a fundamental change in agency structure and approach. In fact, it’s so extensible that consumers themselves can run with the idea, create their own content and still be in line with the original idea… at no incremental cost to the client! See for yourself, have the Old Spice Guy create your voicemail message.

So What’s It Take To Do Work Like This?

There’s no debate that social media has completely transformed how marketers engage with their customers. And the impact of this change has rippled through agencies as they struggle to catch up to the changing needs of their clients – and consumers. But what hasn’t happened up till this point is agencies figuring out how to bring all the pieces together in one agile approach.

For a time I thought that BURT were onto something with their Agile Advertising approach, but the more I noodle it, the more I feel like what they proposed with their four feedback loops is really more of an optimization phase in a linear model (and something we’ve done at Teehan+Lax for some time). It’s great for tuning individual pieces of creative and improving their effectiveness but it isn’t necessarily about creating a platform for iterative ideas to be rapidly developed, tested and deployed. And an iterative development approach is really what we need.

“Everyone applauds innovation. At least, they love it in retrospect, after it has worked.”*

I believe we need to build teams and create operating environments that allow for responsive marketing that’s always on. Programs that respond to changing market conditions. Programs that naturally integrate the ability to test ideas and embrace failure. Programs that will use data to help inform what is made, how it’s designed, and who will be involved.

Tim Leberecht in his article, “Time for Marketing Innovation 2.0” delivers a stern challenge to all of us searching for new solutions. “As we are entering the new decade, it appears as if the marketing discipline, after undergoing a mesmerizing major transformation in the past two to three years, is facing stagnation. This often occurs when pioneering concepts are fully absorbed by the mainstream: Social marketing is on the way to becoming THE marketing, as social media is becoming THE media (it is always a sign of broad adoption if adjectives are dropped). Authenticity, engagement, meaning, communities, social, conversations, transparency, etc. – they’re all accepted across the industry and widely implemented now. What then is the next frontier for marketers? What will be the next big marketing innovation?”

To me the next big innovation won’t be the products we envision as much as it will be agencies we create that are structured to deliver Adaptive Marketing. And as the team at Wieden & Kennedy have shown us, it’s entirely possible and should now be expected. Silver fish hand catch!

Reading List:

After listening to what people had to say I thought it made sense to clarify a few things, namely:

• Language and terminology
• Agency structure and vision
• Creative output

The term “adaptive marketing” isn’t ours, it comes from the people at Forrester. If you aren’t familiar with their report (registration required), Adapting Agency Relationships In A New Marketing Era, I highly recommend you give it a read. It does an excellent job of setting the table.

Several people have pointed out that adapting to changes in the marketplace, integrating cultural nuances and responding to emerging opportunities are all hallmarks of successful advertising. And I agree. Being able to identify what’s hot and leveraging the next big thing is essential in keeping a brand top-of-mind. Being responsive and adapting to changing market conditions is what all marketers need to do. But it’s not what we mean when we talk about adaptive marketing as a practice.

Traditional Marketing Is Linear

Let’s look at traditional marketing for a moment. It’s fundamentally linear. It starts with the brief. The creative team then develops material that gets trafficked. Performance is measured to determine whether or not it worked. The individual project or campaign ends and measurement data is used to help inform the next campaign. Then the whole process repeats.

Agencies have done an amazing job of developing the linear model. When it comes to pushing one-way messages it’s impossible to argue with their success. In an era that was focused around informing consumers about the benefits of a product or service it was masterful. It resulted in legendary advertising that spread messages and built brand identities. But as consumers evolved they became more and more immune to advertising. And today, with a world of information at their fingertips, consumers share knowledge and find out about products in ever changing ways. Advertising still works, but not like it once did.

So, how can agencies also change and create marketing products that are once again relevant to consumers lives? How can they change and still serve the needs of marketers? How can they help consumers solve problems rather than push marketing messages? I believe the answer is tied to the way we work. And, the ways we are compensated for that work.

Adaptive Marketing Is Iterative

Adaptive marketing is considerably different from the linear model. It’s organized to be a dynamic, “always-on” process in which creative is continuously measured against a pre-defined objective. Creative is modified, refined or abandoned as required. And since the creative team is aware of the end goal in advance, they have the responsibility and authority to do whatever is required to achieve the goal. The creative product becomes a means to an end, rather than the end itself. And compensation is tied to key performance indicators rather than the hours it takes to accomplish the goal.

It works like this:

• The agency and client define the objectives of the engagement and establish several key performance indicators
• The creative team is dedicated to the project for a set period of time allowing them to focus on the task
• Ideas are rapidly developed, tested and deployed
• Ideas evolve and adapt over time
• Performance is closely monitored allowing the team to make adjustments
• Project success is determined by achieving the KPIs

Agency Structure

On our LinkedIn forum it was pointed out that Adaptive Marketing isn’t a new thing. And that’s entirely true. The strategic underpinnings go a long way back. But it’s the application of this approach in a modern agency that has us excited. In my opinion, large agencies will always have a difficult time embracing this way of doing business. The future is in the smaller, more nimble groups.

Most Agencies don’t have processes, experienced resources, or frameworks that can even begin to attack this problem

When it comes to actually integrating the Adaptive Marketing practice, “it’s not the way 90% of companies are structured. Most Agencies don’t have processes, experienced resources, or frameworks that can even begin to attack this problem even if a client came to them and asked for help.”

For an Adaptive Marketing practice to work an agency needs a special structure. We believe that for a group to be successful it needs a degree of autonomy and the freedom to be self-directed. It’s likely best done with a group that works well as a team and can share responsibility (regardless of seniority). At Teehan+Lax, we use an Agile framework (Scrum In 5-Mins pdf) and find that it works remarkably well.

I think it makes sense that teams are organized around the basic three pillar structure of design, copy and developer, plus a project manager. However, the team has to be able to evolve as the project evolves. As each project is unique, the creative that is developed will determine what is required in terms of talent and expertise. A company that can accommodate flexibility will be far better equipped to embrace an Adaptive Marketing approach.

Creative Output

A highly structured, yet free-form approach to creative development. The responsibility for steering the work sits on the shoulders of the entire team and they are directly responsible for meeting the KPIs. And when compensation is tied to these goals the group is incentivized to find innovative approaches and not simply rely on traditional solutions. When the team puts skin in the game, their success is tied to the clients’ success, and not just industry awards.

In terms of what creative can or should be developed… that’s something that’s almost impossible to answer. But there I find a frustrating over-reliance on the typical microsite/banners/youtube/facebook solution. That said, when the problem is framed as, “what do we have to create in order to help the consumer” then the right solution will appear. Too often, the traditional approach is to simply put messages “out there” in places where the audience will be, with the hope that they will a) see them b) care about them c) click or visit them. As I’ve said before, I believe this approach is out of step with the desires of today’s consumer.

I like to think of the creative output that comes from the Adaptive Marketing model as a meme. Continuously evolving and unfolding artifacts that build on each other make for a great platform for creative development. And the speed of online is a natural fit. Much has been written about memetics so I won’t go into it here, but the spontaneous and responsive nature of cultural memes in the online space serve as an excellent springboard for where creative approaches must go.

Data Monitoring

One of the first responses I hear from creative people when I mention that we embrace Adaptive Marketing is, “analytics will kill the creativity. Personally, I feel the exact opposite. I don’t think we need complex measurement and analyitics software to get in the game, but instead simple measurements that can be used to determine success. I want to go more into the use of analytics because it’s a thorny issue, but to me simplicity is the right way to go,

• It’s absolutely critical to know your objective (KPIs)
• Measure three things (tweets? site visits? sales numbers?)
• Use existing tools to start
• The problem will help define the measurement

We believe Adaptive Marketing is going to become an extremely important part of our industry and are excited to figure out how it will evolve. To that end, we’ve opened up a LinkedIn group to discuss the various issues around Adaptive Marketing. We welcome your participation and encourage input and feedback for what has already become a lively debate. In addition, you can use @adaptivemktg and #adaptivemarketing to participate in the discussion that way.

A common theme we keep hearing is: who and where are people who want to communicate with us, and whom we should be listening to and focusing our content development on?

As part of the process we’ve developed for formulating a solid and sustainable social strategy for brands, we typically start with developing a Digital/Social Persona to help guide the engagement and communications strategy. While Personas are common in advertising and UX circles, they are relatively unique within social media as most practitioners will just tell you to “start listening”. While this is absolutely key to understanding and getting involved, it doesn’t provide a roadmap for long-term planning and engagement.

A persona doesn’t replace interacting directly with your customers, however it does give brands an understanding of how their customers are using digital media in all its forms, how they are interacting and engaging with complementary brands, the types of content that resonate with them, and a sense of where the brand “fits” (or could fit) within their online life. It also clearly demonstrates where it falls down, or neglects an important aspect.

In our experience, having this information, backed by thorough data and research, immediately illustrates where traditional communications fall short and why they should invest in 1-to-1 interaction and content development to remain relevant. It also begins to start the process of thinking about what true integration and touchpoints mean on a larger level.

We have a system we use to develop these personas with both qualitative and quantitative research, and with each iteration or new project find new ways to get to know the “persona” of the composite individual we’re modeling. I have a firm belief that with the amount of data we are collectively collecting in the digital realm helping companies make sense of it all and truly understand who their customers and prospects are will become both easier and more difficult. :)

For my social media friends out there – what types of practices do you use to help your clients get to know their customer?

photo credit: Cesar R. via Flickr

Content Strategy has recently emerged as “the next big thing” for digital designers and marketers. More than ever, businesses and brands are seeking to provide utility to customers, prospects and partners in the digital channel. At the same time, the proliferation of the mobile web and social media are redefining how we access, consume and engage with content online. As a result, there’s been a collective awakening to the importance of defining, designing, delivering and maintaining compelling content on the web.

Content strategy often requires a systems approach, emphasizing the structural whole as well as the sum of the parts. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy or standard way to express this organizational structure. We can outline the high-level goals of the content strategy, and we can enumerate the necessary constituent parts (the content itself, people, processes, resources, etc.) But we don’t have a good way to document and describe how these parts relate to each other and the overall goals of the system.

The Content Flow Diagram (CFD) is a modelling technique designed to fill this gap.

Download CFD Omnigraffle Stencil Here

Basic Elements

CFDs can help us visualize and think about a strategic content system’s macrostructure. There are 5 basic elements:

• Entities (box) — the content itself, e.g. articles, media, collections
• Actors (stick figure) – e.g. users, content producers, editors
• Processes (circle) – e.g. publish, approve, rate and review
• Resources (document) – e.g. ontologies, attribute sets, guidelines
• Connectors (solid and dotted line) – directed paths and references

The primary structure of the CFD is the flow, consisting of a subject (usually an actor), a process, and an object (usually an entity), connected by a path. Here is an example of a typical flow:

Notice that in this case the process Create references Guidelines as a resource. This convention is helpful because it shows who will be using a given resource and for what purposes.

When a flow maps one entity onto another (i.e. there isn’t an actor involved), the process encapsulates a functional requirement for the underlying system:

It is often useful to show how resources are generated and maintained. This is achieved by designating a resource as the object of a flow:

Additional Elements

Although the five basic elements outlined above are sufficient to describe a wide range of strategic content systems, there are a few additional elements that can give us even more descriptive power.

• Goals (cloud) help us capture the underlying motivation and intent of the various actors involved. By including goals, we state our assumptions about strategic rationales behind the flows captured in the CFD.
• Portals (trapezoid) indicate what channels, platforms and points of entry actors use to access and manipulate content.
• Systems (cube) are essentially non-human actors. Content strategies often incorporate various proprietary and vendor-based solutions to facilitate community, search, data-flow and processing functions, etc. Incorporating these into the CFD helps us capture functional requirements for these systems and understand how they fit into to a larger operational strategy.
• External links (bracket) indicate where organizational boundaries lie and allow us to embed external resources and entities.
• Areas (rounded rectangle) show contextual groupings of flows. These groupings help readers parse more complex CFDs and understand the contextual domains that exist within the overall strategic content system.

It is also possible to layer on other dimensions of information through visual cues like colour, shading, line weight, etc. For example, one might use colour to indicate update frequency—e.g. evergreen content vs. responses to social media events that occur regularly.

Here is a more comprehensive example showing one possible (and fairly basic) content strategy for enabling online customer support (click to view larger version):

Click to view larger version

Conclusions

Content flow diagrams help us apply systems thinking to our content strategies by standardizing notation and making things visual and concrete. This modelling technique can be used casually—as in sketching ideas out on a whiteboard—or as a formal mode of documentation.

Content strategists should try to make their CFDs as intuitive and simple as possible, in order to promote collaboration. However, the CFD is a network diagram that can very easily grow in complexity. Therefore, it is often wise to break the overall system into logical pieces and model these separately, noting external connections where appropriate. Additionally, we can keep CFDs simple and purposeful by focusing on three primary questions:

• where does the content come from, and how does it lives and flow through the system?
• what are strategic resources necessary for and how will they be used?
• what are the major operational dependencies and responsibilities?

The CFD is one tool among many within the broader practice of content strategy. For example, one might conduct research, define high-level goals, generate resources such as templates, guidelines, policies etc. before or along-side the CFD. That said, the fact that content strategy is so multifaceted and multidisciplinary makes a systems-focused tool like CFDs even more necessary and helpful.

I hope that others find our contribution to this topic helpful and look forward to further improving and refining this technique.

Last year, I gave a presentation at MeshU that took a behind the scenes look at how we arrive at design decisions. We’ve since taken clients through variations of this presentation, which is always evolving because it corresponds to such a perennial and fundamental question in our field.

I’ve always appreciated it when fellow UXD practitioners talk candidly about what works and doesn’t work for them. Insights and methods pioneered by others have helped us improve our process here at T+L a lot. Maybe our spin on things will be helpful to you and your team.

Here’s the presentation

During a recent pitch, one of our clients asked us to come back and explain how we “bridge art and science” when making design decisions. I think this is an intriguing way to pose the question (and it speaks to how clients are becoming more engaged and sophisticated in what they’re looking for from a design shop).

Let’s start by defining our terms (Slides 1 through 20). Here are a few conventional ways to differentiate between art and science when it comes to user experience design (please note that I’m speaking in stereotypical terms here): In terms of focus, an artistic process is concerned with issues of look-and-feel, whereas a scientific approach focuses on deeper, more systematic issues like underlying architecture. In terms of methodology, art relies on intuition and experience, whereas science depends on rigorous investigation and analysis. In terms of validation, an art-led process often rests on subjective or personal evaluation, whereas a process that’s grounded in science relies on rigorous testing using quantitative metrics.

Although perhaps a helpful starting point, this model doesn’t tell the whole story. In fact, we can flip things around (Slide 8) and take a look at the other side of the coin: over the last 6 years, some of the most influential academic research in HCI has demonstrated the importance of emotional, relational and aesthetic affordances in design; when you factor-in experience, intuition is often an important check on incomplete or distorted data that might otherwise mislead; and there is certainly an “art” to testing in appropriate and productive ways.

In other words, rather than this binary opposition of art vs. science, a better model is perhaps something more like a continuum. There are two extremes we want to avoid. At one end, we have deterministic design—the idea that we can be entirely predictive, almost in a Newtonian physics kind of sense, mapping out causality for everything, no matter how complex or layered. At the other end we have open-ended design—where decisions are more or less arbitrary. The first alternative has turned out to be pretty unrealistic; the second is just a cop-out. We’ve tried to strike a balance between these two extremes and have gravitated towards evidence-based design as our happy medium.

Evidence-based design (EBD) is a term that comes from the medical world. Evidence-based medicine is the “conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients.” Transposed into our context, we like the idea of EBD because it acknowledges the fundamental reality that design is about making choices, and that the goal is to do this on an informed basis. We don’t have to maintain the pretence of a magical process that guarantees optimal results, but neither are we given free license to design whatever we want: our decisions become accountable to the best available evidence whenever possible.

EBD is not just about gathering up data at the beginning of a project: it’s about infusing design decisions with data-driven insights throughout the entire process. Slides 16-20 visualize this goal in terms of a typical agency process (actually, our process). In practice, there’s typically a gap between the define (or research or discovery or whatever you want to call it) and design stages. This is a fundamental challenge—you can have the best researchers on the planet, but if their observations and insights don’t carry over to impact and influence design decisions they’ll do you little good.

So how do we bridge the gap? For us, the secret has been to build our process around a rhythm of open exploration and refinement. Slides 22-28 visualize this approach (thanks to Brendan Schauer et al. from Adaptive Path for the inspiration). We oscillate between a ‘go wide’ mode where we investigate, explore and experiment, and a ‘refine down’ mode where we focus and prioritize. When this happens over and over again, we get these critical points of inflection that keep us grounded (evidence-based) and moving forward (design).

OK, let’s take a look at a real life example. Slides 29-48 provide a glimpse behind the scenes of our work on thestar.com redesign. We start by going wide and essentially scavenge for as many design inputs as possible. These vary project by project, but at a minimum we’ll need to get a handle on demographics, psychographics, behavioural profiles for target users; a concrete understanding of what is and isn’t working on the current site; business goals, needs & requirements; and a comprehensive competitive analysis.

All we have at this point is raw data—we need to turn this stuff into evidence and insights we can actually use. Borrowing from Subject to Change, we believe that inputs become evidence when they are durable (you can kick them around and mash them up), actionable (there are clear implications for design), and impactful (they actually start to change the way designers think about the problem itself). So how do you get there? This is where the art part comes in…

In the beginning, we aggregate stuff in one place, organize loosely and share it among the team. Tools like wikis are good for this exercise. Next we start to look for patterns and find corroborating data—multiple pieces that tell a coherent story. We then construct and test narratives for things we heard from stakeholders. These narratives help us get at the context behind the requirements. We then create focusers—models (visual, conceptual, personal etc.) that help us focus and filter. Two focusers that we often use are personas (architypal users) and design principles (mini mission statements). Focusers are important because they allow us to find the signal in the noise, develop a common language and conceptual framework, and make our assumptions explicit. Because they’re so elemental, they can inform design decisions on a case-by-case basis throughout the entire process.

Sketching has always been central to our process, but we’re starting to formalize this step and make it more collaborative and inclusive. In the case of The Star, we generated about 150 initial sketches (going wide) for 10 key templates (which we refined down in detailed IA). Prototyping is another technique that allows us to explore and test ideas and assumptions. Critical and complex elements in the UI make great candidates here.

Finally, we need to develop a plan of attack for knowledge gaps or areas of uncertainty. For example, with The Star we noticed some anomalies in the analytics data. When we took a look at the competitive set (with a little help from Image Spark), we didn’t see very much alignment in how other media outlets were using certain areas on the page. So, we developed a fairly wide-range of alternative modules for split/multivariate testing.

So there you have it: a relatively geeky look at the case for, and our approach to, evidence-based design. I hope that some of these ideas and examples ring true with you. What do you think? I’d love to hear what others are doing in their design practices and processes.

Last year, when Brandon essayed about Sketchboards on the Adaptive Path blog, Derek and I became instant fans.  Since then we’ve played around with variations of the method at T+L—sort of hedging it with our existing process—so I was really looking forward to this session.

First we talked about the sketch part in 2 stages:

1. Exploratory sketches: quickly saturate the design space by generating a number of rough options. Use word-play, inspiration libraries (hurry-up, imgspark!), conceptual models to drive this process.
2. Refinement sketches: take the most promising ideas and add a more detail and weighting through different types of marks, labeling, etc.

 
Then we talked about the board part:

1. Get a large sheet of paper or whatever you’re going to use to lay things out on and give it some structure: for example, use stages in a user flow.
2. Add referential inputs like personas, scenarios, requirements, design criteria, inspiration, etc.
3. Lay-out sketches, review, annotate, iterate and decide what you’re going to prioritize in wireframes.

A few personal reactions:

• Although things can go at a fairly fast pace, you’re definitely trading scope for time.  Brandon proposed a 5 day sprint that would maybe output 3 or 4 wireframe-able templates.
• I was impressed with how natural and intuitive the whole process felt. Sketching happens on an informal basis anyway—this just put’s some structure around it and invites dialog.
• The main thing I love about Sketchboards is that they encourage and facilitate conceptual externalization. They force you to get your ideas out and onto the page, making them tangible, accessible to all and amenable to critique (before you fall in love with them!).

Swimlanes is an early-process documentation method created by Yvone Shek and the folks at nForm.  As the image above demonstrates (here’s a closer look), multiple perspectives on a given use-case or design scenario are laid out in separate tracks, or “swim-lanes.” The idea is to capture and visualize implications of high-level requirements over time and in a parallel fashion. 

This is good because multiple stakeholders (business people, designers, project mangers, technologists) can see and give feedback on what they need to make happen/accomodate to, leading to a potentially more balanced and inclusive discussion.

To my mind, the key challenge here is making such a sophistic and integrated document like this flexible and agile. (We talked about the speed factor a lot, but I’m more concerned about the rigidity factor.) For more details on Swimlanes, check out Yvone’s original post here.

Next up: Five Sketches, Or Else! design process

Photo credit: mastermaq

Had the opportunity to attend this month’s Torchi event, featuring two guests from Microsoft. Lisa Anderson, MS Surface User Experience Director, talked about the fundamental shift from command line interfaces to GUIs, to what she called Natural User Interfaces (NUIs, I guess). Some really cool theoretical thinking in her presentation but it would have also been nice to get into a more concrete discussion about where they’re headed with Surface. I guess we’ll just have to wait for the SDK and interface guidelines spec. Lisa talked about how they’re trying to make the interface “disappear” by leveraging intuition and allowing interaction through direct manipulation. But there must be at least some standardized interface elements built into the Surface and I’m really keen to learn what these are and how they work.

Jansen Harris’ discussion about his work heading up the Office User Experience Team was also really interesting and much more concrete. No matter how you feel about Microsoft’s past performance when it comes to innovating the user experience, it’s hard to deny that they did a great job with the latest Office suite (and this has been borne out both critically and in terms of revenues generated). 3 things Jansen mentioned that stuck with me:

1. Early-on they established a set of design tenets to guide decisions at a high level over the course of the project. One that really stood out to me was “Straight-forward is better than clever.” I know I’ve often been guilty of breaking that rule :)
2. Developers took the first couple of months basically rebuilding the programatic foundations for Office specifically so that the UX team could afford to make mistakes and revise as they progressed along.
3. The Office 2007 team was comprised entirely of people who passionately believed in the project. If your heart wasn’t in it (and there were apparently those who fundamentally disagreed with the idea that MS could or should re-engineer the UX for Office), they found something else in the company for you to work on.

In general, I was impressed by how much grunt-work the team put into validation and evaluation throughout the design process. Rather than testing for testing’s sake or gathering data just to justify pre-ordained decisions, they used evidence to answer very focused, well-defined questions.

Quick plug: ToRCHI events happen monthly and are usually worth coming out to. Great guests and good discussion.