Thursday, February 26, 2015

The Best Brands Are Disruptively Consistent

I’ll never write a book on branding. I don’t have the time to sit down and commit the months, probably years, it would take to create something of value on the topic of brand management. And the people I have spoken to who have committed that kind of time to writing a management book invariably […]



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Brand Behaviors And Trust

Your word is your brand. Or rather, if the words aren’t right and your consumers depend on them for vital information, your brand will quickly find itself in the crosshairs of regulators, activist groups and annoyed consumers. The recent case concerning the contents of herbal supplements is more than an argument over percentages; at its […]



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Is Brand Differentiation Still Possible?

Short answer – yes it is, but not in the way it was. I haven’t met a brand manager yet who didn’t tell me that they had a differentiated product. I’m not surprised. It’s part of the job description of any brand owner to be marketing something that is disruptive, market-changing, blue-ocean, category-killing…15 years on […]



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Brands And Discounts: A Dangerous Liaison

Failing retail brands often have a second theme that unites them: discounting. While the popular press might trumpet sales promotions as being good for the consumer, it’s also worth remembering that price discounting is very bad for brands that over-use it. Let’s start with the most obvious drawback: it’s literally money off the bottom line. […]



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Stay True To Your Brand Positioning

A few years ago, I was working as a consultant for a luxury brand. After a long and fruitful week of branding meetings across Europe, we ended the week in Paris and I visited the brand’s biggest boutique with one of its senior executives. Enamored after five days of working for this lovely brand, I […]



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The Alternative Futures of Work

Predicting how surprising future scenarios might impact a worker’s needs.



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Conversion Rate Optimization – Know When to Say When! : Written by Brad Sockloff

Not every test needs to be run until a statistical significance of 95% is reached. There, I said it. I am fully aware that this post may be unpopular with many Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) experts out there. But that is ok. From a true statistical standpoint, I recognize that killing a test too early is not the ideal. However, I am approaching this from an operational perspective. There is a cost to every test – in most cases this includes the cost of media. You are spending your marketing dollars to drive traffic to your landing page. Every dollar [...]


The post Conversion Rate Optimization – Know When to Say When! appeared first on Ecommerce Consulting.






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The Art of Evangelism

A long time ago I was a revolutionary at Apple. My job title was “software evangelist.” My responsibility was to evangelize Macintosh to software developers. Later my title was “chief evangelist,” and my responsibility was to evangelize Macintosh to anyone who wanted to increase productivity and creativity. Post Apple, I’ve been many things: author, speaker, […]


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trendwatching.com | CURRENCIES OF CHANGE | Consumer Trend Briefing | March 2015

Why customers will expect good behavior to be more than just its own reward.



Read the CURRENCIES OF CHANGE Consumer Trend Briefing from trendwatching.com »






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Handheld Generator Makes Your Hand the Only Charger You’ll Need

handenergy.png VAGA HandEnergy keeps your device charged using a simple physics principle: kinetic energy



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What an Apple Game Accessory Could Look Like

apple-gaming-accessory-patent A possible design solution for hardcore gamers who avoid the touchscreen interface



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Building the Right Frictionless Tools for Mobile Merchants

1 Aunkur Arya, General Manager of Mobile at Braintree, on the security benefits catalyzing mobile commerce growth



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Removable Nugget Lets You Mix-And-Match Connected Jewelry

trellie-rings.jpeg Trellie is a notification device that can be configured to flash or vibrate when receiving calls or texts



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Learn How to Map Your Big Data Identity

felton lead skillshare Information designer responsible for Facebook timeline teaches Skillshare data visualization course



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IKEA Develops Brand-Specific Emoji Vocabulary

ikea-emoticons.jpg Everyone's favorite value furniture store taps everyone's favorite modern-day hieroglyphics as marketing novelty



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Cross-Channel App Cuts Through the Messaging White Noise

swingmail hand Swingmail makes life more orderly by centering email, social media notifications and more within single dashboard



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Context has Awakened Mobile as an Active Shopping Agent

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Contextually-driven actions, empowered by mobile sensor tech, are reconditioning the phone into a contributive shopping companion



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Contextual Commerce Can Make Our Lives Easier

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Rob Katcher of Hiku discusses the importance of contextual commerce platforms in a mobile-rich landscape



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How Innovators are Reinventing the Retail Experience

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We look ahead to the big retail trends of 2015 and this year’s SXSW lineup



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Minimalism Might Be Driver to Smartwatch Success

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Névo Watch encourages smartwatch adoption with a lossless focus on style



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PSFK 2015 Update: About the Theme of Live, Work, Play Better

PSFK 2015 conference


Our flagship event aims to provide inspiration for our audience to achieve balance and become effective in their lives



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Could Apple Be Moving into the Automobile Industry?

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Rumor has it the tech giant has plans to release a car after recently hiring vehicle design experts



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Coffee Shops that Look and Act Like Apple Stores

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Space Lounges is looking to renew the retail industry by bringing coffee shops into the 21st century



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Social Movement Encourages Real-World Interaction with Tech-World Metrics

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Branch Out Movement is taking modern approach to traditional communication—using tech to get people to connect "the good, ole fashioned way"



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Fitness Smart Wristband Breaks $10 Price Barrier

Fastfox


Fastfox Smart Band brings wearable health technology to newly affordable levels



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Dole Creates World’s First Edible Wearable Device

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Nutritious bananas can now be your data-infused running companions as well



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Future Of Research – Research Tools for the Age of Digital Scholarship

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Scott Lachut from PSFK Labs describes the importance of recognizing the proper set of tools for digital scholars



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Why Mobile is the Key to Cross-Channel Commerce

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Mobile is helping brands and merchants tap into the omni-channel behaviors of their consumers



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5 App Categories for the Apple Watch

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The one watch meant to rule them all will do so with wrist-friendly apps in five principal areas



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Building a Better Relationship with Customers Through Mobile

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We sat down with Lara Crystal from Minibar Delivery to discuss how mobile devices and single-purpose apps are redefining the way we shop



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What Harvard Knows About Consultants That You Don’t





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Stephen Hay – Structured Content and Responsive Workflows

Responsive web design's combination of fluid grids and media queries has really changed the design and development process. It’s an elegant way to ensure that one set of code can display appropriately across devices. It is, however, a bit of a problem with large legacy products and waterfall strategies.



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Can Vessel Dominate Digital Video With Its Unusual New Revenue Model?

Is Vessel crazy enough to take on YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, and Hulu all at once?


The post Can Vessel Dominate Digital Video With Its Unusual New Revenue Model? appeared first on The Content Strategist.






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SEO Isn’t Dead. It’s Just Different

Over the last few years, search engine optimization has become one of the most misunderstood terms in the world of publishing. Ask marketers about SEO and some will probably tell you it’s a chore, a nuisance meant to promote spam. Others might nod vigorously like the term is important, even if they don’t really know […]


The post SEO Isn’t Dead. It’s Just Different appeared first on The Content Strategist.






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Inside the AARP’s Brilliant Baby Boomer Content Marketing Strategy, Featuring Dr. Dre

For his birthday this year, hip hop mogul Dr. Dre got something unexpected: the cover of AARP magazine. Last week AARP, the 38-million-member nonprofit interest group known for serving a community of 50-and-over consumers, created a mock cover of the music industry heavyweight and tweeted it to its 86,000 followers. The move was part of […]


The post Inside the AARP’s Brilliant Baby Boomer Content Marketing Strategy, Featuring Dr. Dre appeared first on The Content Strategist.






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How To Improve Attention and Ability to Focus

Thursday, February 19, 2015

You’re not a great designer unless you’re also a great storyteller

All great designers should also be great storytellers. Find out how to become a better storyteller, and by virtue a better UX designer.


The post You’re not a great designer unless you’re also a great storyteller appeared first on UX for the masses.






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Review: Online UX Courses

By Arun Joseph Martin Published: February 16, 2015 “Learning from online video lectures [on] … All You can Learn, Udemy, Lynda, and SkillShare.” As a UX professional, I continually learn about new UX topics through online courses, in the form of video lectures. In this review, I want to share my experiences learning from online video lectures that are available from the following learning resources: All You can Learn, Udemy, Lynda, and SkillShare. While all of these sites offer online video lectures, they tailor their lectures for different learning outcomes. Table 1 provides an overview of all of these services. All of these sites synchronize their courses across different devices. So, if I watch a part of a virtual-seminar video on my notebook computer, then switch to my Android device, I’m able to continue watching it where I left off.



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Review of SessionCam: User Observation 2.0

By Peter Hornsby Published: February 16, 2015 “Observing users interacting with software is a powerful and often under-used technique in user experience. Its power derives primarily from the frequent disjoint between what users say and what they do.” Observing users interacting with software is a powerful and often under-used technique in user experience. Its power derives primarily from the frequent disjoint between what users say and what they do. UX research techniques such as surveys and interviews produce a lot of useful data, but self-reporting about behavior typically lacks accuracy. Plus, such research usually requires turnaround times of weeks, which does not fit into the fast cycle times of an agile development process. Observing users in context provides two key benefits.



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Responsive Web Design for eCommerce Web Sites

By Janet M. Six Published: February 16, 2015 Send your questions to Ask UXmatters and get answers from some of the top professionals in UX. In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts discusses whether responsive Web design is really necessary for ecommerce sites and some of the key elements of responsive designs. Imagine that your company has chosen you to be part of a team that is going to design and build or update an ecommerce Web site. The budget and deadline are tight, and the boss wants to know what is the minimum that you can do to create a strong, profit-building machine. What would you tell him? Would you stay focused only on your existing desktop Web site—or if you’re creating a new site, build for the desktop first—and let your mobile customers deal with it as best they can? Would you build a Web site that is somewhat different on and adapts to each type and size of device? Would you insist on developing a mobile app? And how would you plan to maintain the solution?



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Calculated Misery: The Dark Side of UX Strategy

By Ronnie BattistaPublished: February 16, 2015 “Small things can have significant impacts on customer acquisition and loyalty—and companies often overlook or under-prioritize them.” When I talk to companies, customers, and colleagues about UX strategy and the importance of understanding the end-to-end customer experience, I often tell stories about seemingly trivial parts of an experience with a brand that can have huge impacts. Small things can have significant impacts on customer acquisition and loyalty—and companies often overlook or under-prioritize them. For example: The process of exchanging a pair of shoes to get the right size may be so cumbersome that you don’t even want to bother with it. A meal that you have at a restaurant leaves a bad taste in your mouth—not because it wasn’t delicious, but because the server was inattentive and rude. Navigating a company’s interactive voice response (IVR) system to speak to a real person on the phone becomes a test of rage restraint, because it’s so abundantly clear that they want to make it as hard as possible.



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‘We Believe in Stories': GE Reports’ Tomas Kellner Reveals How He Built the World’s Best Brand Mag

GE Reports is one of the best brand magazines on the planet. We talked with Managing Editor Tomas Kellner to get an inside look at the digital publication's unique blueprint.



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Millennials and Media: Why Brands That Don’t Publish Are in Big Trouble

Millennials don't trust traditional media and advertising—but they trust sources closer to home.



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Neil Patel Reveals How to Tie Your Content Marketing to Revenue

We caught up with serial entrepreneur Neil Patel to discuss how brands should measure content marketing success, the ways SEO has changed, and how to create passionate content that resonates with readers.



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‘There’s a Space Race Here': Steve Rubel on How Agencies Can Survive in a Content-Driven World

We talked to Steve Rubel, Edelman's Chief Content Strategist, about how agencies fit into the content 'space race,' the importance of distribution, and why content marketing may not be right for all brands.



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Designing For Smartwatches And Wearables To Enhance Real-Life Experience

Designing Case Studies: Showcasing A Human-Centered Design Process

On China’s Bleeding Edge: Web Design Trends 2015

It’s Not Just the Story, It’s the Delivery

Have you ever been caught up in a really good story, but then realize it’s got a lot of plot holes? Or on the flip side, have you ever read, Read More


The post It’s Not Just the Story, It’s the Delivery appeared first on Pybop: Exceptional Content Strategy & Brand Storytelling.






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Achieving Content Strategy Balance

Think about who reads, watches and interacts with all your content. Lots of kinds of people, right? You likely have more than one audience type that you’d like to reach. Read More


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Transparency Reveals Great Content Opportunity

Groove’s CEO opted to out the company and created a blog that is singularly focused on the transparency of the business itself. Learn how to get started with transparent content for your own brand (and some cussing may be involved). Continue reading


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Content Strategists Can Follow Their Own Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang theory describes the universe’s origin from a single point billions of years ago. The Big Bang Theory of Content creates from a single point of content an explosion of infinite ways to reuse and repurpose that big idea. Continue reading


The post Content Strategists Can Follow Their Own Big Bang Theory appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.






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50 Shades of Mediocrity: Does Content Have to Be Good, or Just Good Enough?

When a franchise like 50 Shades of Grey enjoys crazy success, is it a signal that content doesn’t have to be good to be crazy-successful? Popularity is only one measure of success, of course. And for most of us in … Read More »


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A New Way to Listen

To develop empathy, you need to understand a person’s mind at a deeper level than is usual in your work. Since there are no telepathy servers yet, the only way to explore a person’s mind is to hear about it. Words are required. A person’s inner thoughts must be communicated, either spoken aloud or written down. You can achieve this in a number of formats and scenarios.


Whether it is written or spoken, you are after the inner monologue. A recounting of a few example scenarios or experiences will work fine. You can get right down to the details, not of the events, but of what ran through this person’s mind during the events. In both written and spoken formats, you can ask questions about parts of the story that aren’t clear yet. Certainly, the person might forget some parts of her thinking process from these events, but she will remember the parts that are important to her.


A person’s inner thought process consists of the whys and wherefores, decision-making and indecision, reactions and causation. These are the deeper currents that guide a person’s behavior. The surface level explanations of how things work, and the surface opinions and preferences, are created by the environment in which the person operates—like the waves on the surface of a lake. You’re not after these explanations, nor preferences or opinions. You’re interested in plumbing the depths to understand the currents flowing in her mind.


To develop empathy, you’re also not after how a person would change the tools and services she uses if she had the chance. You’re not looking for feedback about your organization or your work. You’re not letting yourself ponder how something the person said can improve the way you achieve goals—yet. That comes later. For developing empathy, you are only interested in the driving forces of this other human. These driving forces are the evergreen things that have been driving humans for millennia. These underlying forces are what enable you to develop empathy with this person—to be able to think like her and see from her perspective.


This chapter is about learning how to listen intently. While the word “listen” does not strictly apply to the written word, all the advice in this chapter applies to both spoken and written formats.


This is a different kind of listening


In everyday interactions with people, typical conversation does not go deep enough for empathy. You generally stay at the level where meanings are inferred and preferences and opinions are taken at face value. In some cultures, opinions aren’t even considered polite. So, in everyday conversation, there’s not a lot to go on to understand another person deeply. To develop empathy, you need additional listening skills. Primarily, you need to be able to keep your attention on what the person is saying and not get distracted by your own thoughts or responses. Additionally, you want to help the speaker feel safe enough to trust you with her inner thoughts and reasoning.


There’s virtually no preparation you can do to understand this person in advance. There are no prewritten questions. You have no idea where a person will lead you in conversation—and this is good. You want to be shown new and interesting perspectives.


You start off the listening session with a statement about an intention or purpose the person has been involved with. In formal listening sessions, you define a scope for the session—something broader than your organization’s offerings, defined by the purpose a person has. For example, if you’re an insurance company, you don’t define the scope to be about life insurance. Instead, you make it about life events, such as a death in the family.1 Your initial statement would be something like, “I’m interested in everything that went through your mind during this recent event.” For listening sessions that are not premeditated, you can ask about something you notice about the person. If it’s a colleague, you can ask about what’s on her mind about a current project.


Fall into the Mindset


How often do you give the person you’re listening to your complete attention? According to Kevin Brooks, normally you listen for an opening in the conversation, so you can tell the other person what came up for you, or you listen for points in the other person’s story that you can match, add to, joke about, or trump.2


It feels different to be a true listener. You fall into a different brain state—calmer, because you have no stray thoughts blooming in your head—but intensely alert to what the other person is saying. You lose track of time because you are actively following the point the other person has brought up, trying to comprehend what she means and if it relates to other points she’s brought up. Your brain may jump to conclusions, but you’re continually recognizing when that happens, letting it go, and getting a better grip on what the speaker really intends to communicate. You’re in “flow,” the state of mind described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.3 You are completely engaged in a demanding and satisfying pursuit.


It’s a different frame of mind. You don’t want to be this focused on someone else all the time—you have to do your own thinking and problem-solving most of the time. But when needed, when helpful, you can drop into this focused mindset.


Explore the Intent


Developing empathy is about understanding another human, not understanding how well something or someone at work supports that person. Set aside this second goal for a bit later. For the time being, shift your approach to include a farther horizon—one that examines the larger purposes a person is attempting to fulfill.


The key is to find out the point of what the person is doing—why, the reason, not the steps of how she does it. Not the tools or service she uses. You’re after the direction she is heading and all her inner reasoning about that direction. You’re after overarching intentions, internal debates, indecision, emotion, trade-offs, etc. You want the deeper level processes going through her mind and heart—the things that all humans think and feel, no matter if they are old or young, or you are conducting the session 500 years ago or 500 years in the future. These are the details that will allow you to develop empathy. Collecting a shallow layer of explanation or preferences does not reveal much about how this person reasons.


To remind the speaker that you’re interested in answers explaining what is going on in her mind and heart, ask questions like:



  • “What were you thinking when you made that decision?”

  • “Tell me your thinking there.”

  • “What was going through your head?”

  • “What was on your mind?”


If you suspect there might be an emotional reaction involved in her story that she hasn’t mentioned yet, ask: “How did you react?” Some people ask, “How did that make you feel,” but this question can introduce some awkwardness because it can sound too much like a therapist. Additionally, some people or industries eschew talking about “feelings.” Choose the word that seems appropriate for your context.


Avoid asking about any solutions. A listening session is not the place for contemplating how to change something. Don’t ask, “Can you think of any suggestions…?” If the speaker brings up your organization’s offering, that’s fine—because it’s her session. It’s her time to speak, not yours. But don’t expand upon this vein. When she is finished, guide her back to describing her thinking during a past occurrence.


Make Sure You Understand


It is all too easy to make assumptions about what the speaker means. You have your own life experience and point of view that constantly influence the way you make sense of things. You have to consciously check yourself and be ready to automatically ask the speaker:



  • “What do you mean?”

  • “I don’t understand. Can you explain your thinking to me?”


Keep in mind that you don’t have the speaker’s context or life experience. You can’t know what something means to her, so ask. It takes practice to recognize when your understanding is based on something personal or on a convention.


Sometimes, you will probe for more detail about the scene, but there’s nothing more to say, really. These kinds of dead-ends will come up, but they’re not a problem. Go ahead and ask this kind of “please explain what you mean” question a lot, because more often than not, this kind of question results in some rich detail.


You don’t need to hurry through a listening session. There’s no time limit. It ends when you think you’ve gotten the deeper reasoning behind each of the things the speaker said. All the things the speaker thinks are important will surface. You don’t need to “move the conversation along.” Instead, your purpose is to dwell on the details. Find out as much as you can about what’s being said. Ignore the impulse to change topics. That’s not your job.


Alternatively, you might suspect the speaker is heading in a certain direction in the conversation, and that direction is something you’re excited about and have been hoping she’d bring up. If you keep your mind open, if you ask her to explain herself, you might be surprised that she says something different than what you expected.


It’s often hard to concede you don’t understand something basic. You’ve spent your life proving yourself to your teachers, parents, coworkers, friends, and bosses. You might also be used to an interviewer portraying the role of an expert with brilliant questions. An empathy listening session is completely different. You don’t want to overshadow the speaker at all. You want to do the opposite: demonstrate to her that you don’t know anything about her thinking. It’s her mind, and you’re the tourist.


Sometimes it’s not a matter of assumptions, but that the speaker has said something truly mystifying. Don’t skip over it. Reflect the mystifying phrase back to the speaker. Ask until it becomes clearer. Don’t stop at your assumption. Teach yourself to recognize when you’ve imagined what the speaker meant. Train a reflexive response in yourself to dig deeper. You can’t really stop yourself from having assumptions, but you can identify them and then remember to explore further.


Another way to explain this is that you don’t want to read between the lines. Your keen sense of intuition about what the speaker is saying will tempt you to leave certain things unexplored. Resist doing that. Instead, practice recognizing when the speaker has alluded to something with a common, casual phrase, such as “I knew he meant business” or “I looked them up.” You have a notion what these common phrases mean, but that’s just where you will run into trouble.


If you don’t ask about the phrases, you will miss the actual thinking that was going through that person’s mind when it occurred. Your preconceived notions are good road signs indicating that you should dwell on the phrase a little longer, to let the speaker explain her thought process behind it.


Footnotes



  • 1. If you’re a researcher, it helps to know that listening sessions are a form of generative research that is person-focused rather than solution-focused. Thus, it’s easy to remember to keep them from dwelling on how solutions might work for people.

  • 2. This was my epiphany from the UX Week 2008 workshop (PDF) by Kevin Brooks, PhD. Sadly, Kevin passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2014.

  • 3. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, widely referenced psychologist and author, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York: Harper Collins, 1991, and Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, New York: Harper Collins, 1997, plus four other book titles on Flow. Also see his TED Talk and YouTube presentations.






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The Specialist-Generalist Balance

Prioritizing Structure in Web Content Projects

Most web content projects have both structural and editorial aspects: for example, the information needs to be structured to support the new responsive design, and the current copy needs an update so it adheres to messaging and brand guidelines.


I’m often asked which is the best order to approach the work: structure first and then rewrites, or the reverse? I didn’t used to have a strong opinion, because it seemed to me like a chicken-and-egg problem. If the project starts with structure, I’m building content models off of bad information. If, instead, we start with rewrites, the writers don’t know what pieces we need to fill the models, because the models don’t exist yet. It felt like both directions were equally fraught, and I didn’t have any strong reasons to recommend one over the other.


(Note that I’m not talking about starting without the editorial foundations of a project: understanding the business goals, establishing a message architecture, and knowing what the work is supposed to accomplish are core pieces of any project. I’m talking instead about rewriting poor content—editing and creating new copy based on those foundations.)


Structure the content first, then do rewrites


I recently finished up the second phase of a project that we organized to focus on structure first, and reasons to stick with this approach piled up in my lap like turkeys going to roost. I think that a structure-first approach does make sense for the majority of my projects, and here’s why.


Content models are based on what content is for, not what it says


On this particular project, the existing copy was horrible. Jargony, clichéd, and almost stubbornly unhelpful. How could I build a useful content model off of bad content?


As I was working, I realized that the quality of the copy–even if it’s terrible–doesn’t really affect the models. I don’t build models off of the exact words in the content, but instead I build off of what purpose that copy serves. I don’t actually care if the restaurant description reads like teen poetry (sorry teens, sorry poets): it’s the restaurant description, and we need a short, teaser version and a long, full version. The banquet facilities should include well-lit photos taken within the last decade, and the captions should use the appropriate brand voice to describe how the rooms can be used. I don’t actually need to see decent photos or strong captions to build space for them into the models.


Structure decisions influence development and design direction


A complex content model will help inform all kinds of site decisions, from CMS choice to data formatting. Developers can make better architecture decisions when they have a sense of what kinds of relationships exist between content types, and designers can organize a pattern library that matches the granularity of the content model. The earlier the structure work is done, the easier it is to build integrated design and development plans.


Cramming bad content into strong models is an incredibly compelling argument for editorial intervention


When projects are focused on the structural aspects of the work—we want to recombine content for different channels, or make a clever responsive experience using structured fields—people often start out convinced that the current content is decent enough to do the job. “Sure, it could probably use some spiffing up, but that’s just not in the cards right now.”


I have never seen a more effective argument for the importance of editorial work than taking existing copy and seeing how inadequately it fills a model that we’ve already agreed meets our business goals.


A model I built recently had a content type for holding gushy snippets about the business’s amazing customer service. When we went to move the existing content into the new models, the only copy we could find to migrate amounted to “free ice water” and “polite employees.” We had already agreed that telling the story of the brand experience was a key job of the new website, and seeing how thoroughly their current content failed to do that was the kick in the pants they needed to find budget for an editorial assist.


Content models are easy to iterate


Waterfall isn’t a great match for content development any more than it is for design and code, so editorial rewrites often trigger adjustments to the content models. I may split one large field into two smaller ones, or the writers will find a place where I left out an important piece of content altogether. Refining the models is an expected part of the process.


On projects where editorial rewriting has been done first, though, I often end up with copy that, although now written beautifully, has no place in the model. In the course of structuring the information, we combined two pages into one, or are reusing the same description in three places, and so the editorial effort that went into fixing that copy is thrown out before it ever sees the light of day. That’s discouraging, and can lead to content creators feeling like I don’t value their time or their work.


What works for you?


It’s nice to have some strong reasoning behind my structure-first leaning, but of course my experiences may not translate to your project needs at all.


If you’ve worked on a project that organized structure work first, what advantages or drawbacks did that process uncover? From a design and development perspective, are there pros or cons to either direction that aren’t covered here?


If you’re a writer, does creating copy within a content model free or stifle your best work? If you prefer to start with editorial rewrites, what are the hidden benefits for the structural side of the project?


I believe there are real benefits to taking a structure-first approach to organizing content activities, and I’d love to hear how and if that works for your projects as well.






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Monday, February 9, 2015

How to Hire an Ecommerce Consultant in 2015

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Brand Pricing: Less Versus Off

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Brands Face A New Era In Social Responsibility

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Telling The Short Brand Story

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8 Keys To Transforming Brand Culture

If you need to shift your culture from where it is to a different viewpoint and value set, is there any incentive for change without a crisis? Will a culture make changes on its own or do people need a fright in order to seriously disrupt business as usual? Dan Ward argues in this piece […]



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Seven Habits Of Organized People

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Strongest Internet Rules Ever Proposed: FCC Chairman Tells ISPs They Are Public Utilities

The rules proposed by FCC Chair Tom Wheeler could put internet service providers in a tough legal bind.


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A Beautiful, All-In-One Project Management App For Creative Studios

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