Jeffrey Zeldman is not only one of the founders of An Event Apart, he’s also an accomplished Designer and entrepreneur. Today he describes a tool he calls the Content Performance Quotient, which will help us all determine what’s working and what isn’t on our websites based on how people expect to be able to use them.
First up @zeldman with Engagement: The #1 stakeholder request. “We need more engagement” is the biggest request that we receive. “I put 10 hours a day into this website, and people aren’t using it enough.”
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Maybe engagement isn’t the best metric for how websites are doing. #aeadc
Places where it’s the right metric
If you’re publishing long-form articles, like travel articles or A List Apart
If you’re teaching reading— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Places where engagement isn’t the right metric:
Service design – if you’re returning something or getting something fixed, you want the experience to be short.
That’s what most of us do.
It might be a good thing if they get out in 3 seconds!#AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Blue Cross Blue Shield’s website: My kid needs an operation and i want it to be covered: I want that to be short. Is my allergy medicine covered? I need a new doctor. 3 screens and 2 clicks. Nobody wakes up in the morning and looks for thought leadership whitepapers #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
If a customer spends 30 minutes on our website, was she engaged or was she frustrated? #AEADC
Measure if someone can do tasks and how long it takes
Speed of usefulness!
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Can the site anticipate customer needs, help them find their way, and let them leave? @zeldman uses the Design Content Performance Quotient #AEADC
Business people really like acronyms and business words so this term works really well.
Check @designcpq for a stream of info
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
A measurement:
how quickly can you get the right content to your customer? It’s Content usability. #AEADC
How quickly can you solve the customer’s problem?
The shortest distance between problem and solution.
This is your value to the customer— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
A new goal to iterate against
A new way to deliver valueFrom the customer’s perspective, this is the time it takes to get the information they came from.
Org’s POV – the time it takes for a specific customer to find, receive, and absorb, your most important content. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
There’s always some kind of selling proposition involved from the org’s point of view. Unique Selling Proposition: what’s unique about us? May be conveyed through more than words. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Basically 2 things being done:
Customer is trying to solve a problem
Organization is trying to put forward a unique selling propositionAnything else is pretty garbage – content that nobody needs. If nobody reads it, uses it, wants it, it’s garbage#AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Most of us make pretty garbage most of the time. Garbage in a delightfully responsive grid is still garbage. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Word @zeldman #aeadc #nehaaeanotes pic.twitter.com/dOM5LgjeH5
— Neha Gupta Goyal (Nay-hah) (@nehagupt) July 30, 2018
How do we cut content and get permission to cut content? Let’s look at cigarettes. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
They had 60 second advertisements, preferably in black and white, narrated by a man. They were wall to wall copy. Then Leo Bernette came along and showed cowboys with guitar music and no narration to advertise cigarettes. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
This was before you could just put imagery on a screen, it was neither rational nor normal. At the end “Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.” Appealed to the manliness of men. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Eventually they cut the copy all the way down to one word and an image #AEADC pic.twitter.com/j74S1TYmZh
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Slash your architecture. Shrink your content. Ask “Why do we need this?” Compare to your goals. It’s either advancing the content the org needs to tell, or it’s solving the user’s problem. If it’s not doing either of those, we don’t need it. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Every design is intentional or it’s not design. Re @jmspool – “design is the rendering of intent”. If it’s not doing something to solve a user’s problem or a business problem, it’s pretty garbage. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Even dropshadows and things can be intentional (tell a button from a non-button, provide aesthetic appeal) #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Mobile First with @lukew was where @zeldman first started thinking about intentionality of design because “everything’s special” doesn’t work on mobile. Cut out the nonessential stuff and deliver what the customer needs – on mobile and desktop #AEADC https://t.co/03GSVPWZ3O
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Mobile first = Content first = Users First.
Pare down to the things the user needs #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
How did we get here?
– Prioritized meetings over meanings. Sometimes to advocate for the user you need to argue, and if you’re afraid to do that, or not empowered, good meetings don’t mean good products. #AEADC— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
How did we get here?
– Prioritized the content management system (CMS) over the content. Here’s a platform that lets the business decide what to put on the web. Even lets them change the navigation — regardless of the research you’ve already done. “I need 5 buttons.”#AEADC— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
It’s easy to give everyone what they want. It’s harder to do the right thing and say “no, you don’t need 5 buttons”.
If the user suffers, ultimately the business suffers. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Quote from @gerrymcgovern – we’re whistleblowers and often get punished for bringing up usability issues pic.twitter.com/LTJfbkC6aq
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Stop designing 2001 sites for a 2018 web. Example: if you have video content, put it on YouTube. That’s where people look for it. Then embed it on your website. Also put it on Vimeo. Because when people look for stuff, those are the places they look #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Get the content where the user is. If you have people who only use Facebook or Instagram, put the stuff there. that helps you streamline the site because you’re putting it where the niche audience will look for it #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Relevant articles:https://t.co/EF3ijeHH9h
When you strip the game down to its core, everything you learn is a universal principal. At the moment the user needs something to happen, that’s when we’re focused on the interaction #AEADC— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Atomic Design – focus relentlessly on the individual interactionhttps://t.co/8sVjnVW9jY
What should the customer do that will encourage them to do the thing they want to do? That might mean encouraging them to come into a store, or might be to buy online. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
With our shopping carts we’re always looking to remove friction. If we can do it from our shopping carts we can do it with our content #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
FAQ problems:
Duplicate and contradictory information
Lack of discernible content order
repetitive grammatical structure
Increased cognitive load
Too much contentSimplifying the experience and removing FAQs is good for the business. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
“Users come to any type of content with a particular purposes in mind, ranging from highly specific (task completion) to general learning (increased knowledge)”
Nobody wakes up and says “I really want to see what your site’s doing these days” #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
How to redo content:
– Waterfall – content inventory, massive work. Not necessarily recommended, ditching it is best– Agile/Scrum – constantly iterate on content. Best bet if you’re in-house. If you’re already taking a scalpel to everything else, incorporate the content #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Option 3: redesign
– throw away everything and redesign from scratch if you have the opportunity, especially if you’re an outside organization #AEADC— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
How can we take all the stuff that exists on this gigantic information architecture and put it on one or two or three pages? Consolidate the whole website down to a few pages. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
What do you do if you have a big deep content site? https://t.co/F8oqUy0L2q
We need design that is faster for people who are trying to get something done.
We need design that is slower for people who are trying to comprehend what’s available. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Scanability is great for transactions and lousy for understanding. Use bigger type, better typographic hierarchy, and more white space to slow readers down. Make it look more like an e-book. If you’re on a tablet, you sit back and relax. You can take in the content #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
Bigger type causes people to sit back from their monitor and slow down. @washingtonpost is good at big readable type on articles. @nytimes uses different type rules for opinion pieces than journalism #aeadc@ProPublica and @Slate and @smashingmag
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
The Readability app was one major driver behind this. Apple’s Reader in Safari makes things easier to read. Medium, and A List Apart #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018
If the content is delivered for the good of the general public, that should be slow. If the content is designed for the business or the user to complete a task, it should be fast. #AEADC
— Anne Gibson (@perpendicularme) July 30, 2018