Content without context can mislead even the savviest sandwich eater. (image via bitchcakes)

A friend recently told me that he sometimes eats a breakfast sandwich made by a popular national coffee purveyor. After describing the amazing meltiness of the savory ham and egg package, he joyfully added, “And it’s only 370 calories!”

He knew this because the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has made it mandatory for the afore mentioned coffee purveyor– and other large food chains– to display the caloric content of its foodstuffs in a location readily available to customers.  My friend, a smart, educated, food-loving sort, made the calorie pronouncement in a boastful tone, as if to say, “It may sound unhealthy, but it’s actually not too bad.” Because I’m not a complete killjoy, I didn’t immediately point out that while the one number – 370 –  is important and provides some value, especially in distinguishing the sandwich from its display-case neighbors, like oatmeal without toppings (140 calories) and double iced cinnamon role (490 calories), the calorie count isn’t the only or even the most important number at issue, at least for many people.  And in isolation, it only tells a piece of the nutrition story. However, its singular presence imbues 370 with a meaning and degree of importance that exceeds its actual value. Remember fat, salt and sugar? What are they, chopped liver? Okay, you get the point.

What we’re talking about here is content without context. Information that seems meaningful by virtue of its presence. In fact, using a sandwich’s calorie count as a sole representation for nutritional value is the equivalent of, say, examining a single paint layer in a Jackson Pollack painting. Yes, it’s crucial and contributes to the meaning of the overall piece. But without the other layers, it’s so many drips of color.

It’s terrific that Mayor Bloomberg and the Board of Health are tackling the issues of health and obesity. Posting calorie counts is a great start in what I can only hope is a long-term concerted effort to support people to eat more healthfully. However, unless customers visit the coffee purveyor’s website, they lack key information that rounds out the health picture, namely–in the case of the ham and cheese sammie–total fat: 16g, calories from fat: 150g, and sodium: 730g. Further, they would have to visit a different site to find the recommended daily allowances of these nutritional components.

In the case of calorie posting, food establishments have little incentive to provide information or context beyond the mandates of municipal agencies, but the case of the melty breakfast sandwich raises some important questions that all businesses should be asking as they create, publish, curate and disseminate mountains of information each year:

• Are customers/visitors/readers truly better off with the information they’re being served up?
• Does available content tell a whole, partial or misleading story?

It’s hard to be perfect in this arena, but asking the above questions in both broad and narrow contexts will get you some of the way there.

Press play for instant video help gratification. (image via ffffound!)

The breakdown: for your next help content assignment, consider creating screencasts—video snapshots with narration—to demonstrate core features of a website or application.

Let’s face it: most help files suck. They bore, they complicate, they fail to illuminate their subject and cause needless frustration for the user. On the other hand, few things are as rewarding in life (online or off) as clear, simple, genuinely helpful assistance. Could be a well-written manual, a lucid diagram, or friendly tutorial. So why don’t we see more of the good stuff?

On a recent project for a major digital radio client, I had the opportunity to take a different approach to developing help content. The project involved creating a stand-alone, iTunes-esque desktop application to manage and record audio. Like most projects, somewhere along the way our feature set became… complicated. The team’s first reaction was to post a sizeable HTML help file to help users grok the interactions. But we thought we could do better by adding video screencasts to appeal to visually-oriented users.

With Jing, an awesome, free screencast tool from TechSmith (known for Snagit and Morae), we recorded several 30-second walkthroughs of the music application’s core features such as creating playlists, recording shows and uploading files. We slapped a 3-second title card at the beginning of each video, posted them to YouTube and effectively expanded the project’s help content beyond the stock HTML or RoboHelp format.

As Michael Pollan has repeatedly pointed out, diversity is critical for a healthy ecosystem. If you’re developing a help “system”, consider adding multiple formats of content to assist your users. Some people prefer video, others may prefer text, but by diversifying your support can only make your content more appetizing and consumable for a range of users.

There’s an old tenet of web design that says if you need to explain how a page works, then you need to redesign the interface. Fair enough: no amount of explanatory copy can make up for bad design. But what to do when a page is necessarily complex, as is sometimes the case with detailed transactional experiences? Or when the client requests a level of complexity you’ve recommended against?

Content strategists often face this problem. An extra bit of directional copy would—theoretically, at least—clear up confusion about what to click and where to go next. Problem is, if users are already engaged in a task (say, if they’re on step 3 of a 5-step process), it can be nearly impossible to reach them. Even if you flash a dancing gorilla on the screen. Seriously.

This lack of awareness is called “perceptual blindness.” In a classic test of experimental psychology, two Illinois professors showed a short video to their students. The video featured a several people passing around two basketballs. Before show time, the professors instructed their students to count the number of times the ball was passed between the players. Watch the video here and see if you get the right answer.

Notice anything strange about the video? No? Just a bunch of chest passes and bounce passes? Watch it again. The professors’ test revealed that at least half the people who saw the video did not see the person in the gorilla suit walk leisurely into the frame, wave at the camera, and walk away. I know I didn’t see it on my first view. Silly as it may sound, the test has strong implications for interface design. The professors engaged their audience in a task, albeit a simple one: count the number of passes. Once the audience was engaged and busy counting the bouncing balls, they failed to notice the proverbial gorilla in the mist. Their perceptual blindness was matched only by their eagerness to complete the task at hand.

I recently experienced this phenomenon first-hand during user testing of an unusual credit card application. When users are thoroughly engaged in a task, it doesn’t matter if you flash directional copy in bright orange letters at the top of the page (we tried this), or show a colorful, interstitial alert layer of copy (also tried this). Most users won’t see it, or they’ll click the nearest available “next” button without reading the body copy (happens every time).

Eventually, we solved it. Our solution was to cut our losses and figure that some users just wouldn’t get the interaction design in the first place. It was a complicated page, but for the right audience it was a puzzle: they enjoyed poking and clicking the page to see what would happen next. Sometimes your design isn’t for everyone. And the sooner you can retire your invisible gorillas, the sooner you can focus the experience on the elements that matter most to the right audience.

Manufacturers and their marketers expend a lot of time and effort on brand sites designed to entice consumers to make purchases. But what happens after a site visitor converts from prospect to customer? Is your company, or your client, expending as much effort to strengthen ties with existing owners? Have you developed a content strategy that addresses owner’s needs?

Not only are loyal, satisfied owners your best source of future customers, many of them serve as unpaid brand ambassadors who help attract additional buyers through favorable word of mouth. Why then are so many post-purchase, or owner, sites treated as afterthoughts and populated with repurposed print owner manuals and pitches to buy the next new model? Content strategy principles should not be limited to brand sites alone; they must be developed to support the entire consumer purchase lifecycle.

After more than a dozen years of working on a number of consumer product research, shopping, buying and owning sites, I have found the following three content strategy principles to be most effective for post-purchase sites:

1. Adopt a publishing mindset
Business owners should act as publishers and content managers as editors

From the selection of the content management system through the creation of the Content Strategy Brief, the owner property should not be treated as a static entity that is refreshed only during periodic rebranding intiatives. Owner sites that do not receive regular care and feeding risk becoming time capsules and, even worse, irrelevant to visitors.

2. Deliver the right information at the right time
Customers need advice and support at many different points during the product-ownership lifecycle

Serving owners a welcome page after they register for the post-purchase site is a good start, but give considerable thought to the types of information that are most useful immediately after a purchase is made, a year afterward or even after warranty coverage has ended. Even owners of the same product purchased at different times, or those purchased at the same time by first-time versus repeat buyers, will have dramatically different needs when it comes to user assistance and customer support content.

3. Content can be both user-centric and support business goals
Align content goals, page purpose and business objectives; establish metrics that directly measure the impact of the content strategy

Manufacturers build owner sites for one reason – to sell more products in the future. Not only do these sites need to benefit owners, they should help manufacturers develop a stronger relationship with these customers. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should be established to ensure that the content strategy is meeting both user and business goals

A content strategy that acknowledges the specific needs of each owner segment should result in good KPIs and in reaching the ultimate site goal – creating a more loyal and engaged owner.

A transatlantic plea for assistance. (via)

What does it take to achieve Best-in-Class status for online user assistance and support content? This post gathers together some key insights gleaned from a survey of recent research studies—with a focus on a (proprietary and pricey) Aberdeen Research Report—as well as professional experience.

But first, what does it mean to be Best-in-Class? Let’s define it here as scoring high, 90% or better, on key performance indicators like meeting project completion dates, staying within cost targets and keeping translation costs under control. Then add in factors like evaluative data from customer satisfaction surveys and results from content user testing for ease of use, relevance and comprehension to complete the scoring matrix.

So here’s what these Best-in-Class organizations have in common.

The two most significant trends linking B-in-C’s are publishing to multiple formats and supporting content customization. Studies show that today’s consumers are more likely to seek out and use support content that is not only provided in multiple electronic formats, but that is delivered over the web. Both enable content customization, which is becoming increasingly important when it come to meeting more and more precisely segmented customer needs. The winners are customizing support content to specific markets, specific customers, or even to specific product or service configurations.

Some other biggies related to multiple formats and customization—the leaders deliver support content for all configurations and variations of a product or service and they customize it with a fast, simple and easy user experience. Plus, they customize the support content “at the point of interaction.” Meaning, the user enters information identifying their specific configuration, their market segment and other relevant differentiators. Then the content management system generates the right content and publishes it online.

In addition, keep this B-in-C short list of other success factors in mind as you plan your support content:

* Provide an interactive support content experience. Success, and brand loyalty, often means enabling users to virtually interact with a representation of the product or service.

* Develop support content using enabling technologies that incorporate structured authoring and leverage embedded configuration logic so you can capture content for future re-use and re-purposing.

* Practice single source authoring to save time and money

* Strive to reduce text, embedding customized photography, graphics, rich media demonstrations, simulations and emulations, and multi-stage visualizations of processes and instructions.

* Research to understand users and identify key user needs, then use this understanding to work at reducing overall content volume by authoring precisely relevant and concise support content.

* Automate content management and publishing using captured logic and content management systems.

Michael Knight never met a product manual he didn’t like. (via)

“Put the user manual online,” she said.

Easy enough; PDF the manual, drop it on the site, and users can download the new, in-car technology manual—all 114 pages.

In-car technology has come a long way since I bought my first car. My ’76 Plymouth Volare wasn’t technological at all—unless you count the indestructible Slant Six engine—which seemed more a response to the oil crisis and market crashes, than technological advancement.

Today, there are on-board computers, nav systems, video monitoring, voice activated media and mobile systems, “green” gas monitoring gadgets and even systems that—to the likely dismay of insurers—will park your car for you.

How are we supposed to learn how to use all this stuff? And since we’ll be using them while we’re doing 80, it would be nice if we could learn to use them in the still comfort of our driveways.

We could slice and dice the product manual into tinier, friendlier chunks so users could print two handy pages to take to their car. We could let users email pieces of the manual to their mobile device. We could chunk the manual into podcasts and users could listen to the manual in their cars.

While these approaches may seem sound, they’re sometimes misguided. Perhaps the focus shouldn’t be the manual at all—but the user.

There are compelling ways to let users at the helpful content of a product manual without flushing 114 pages on them; namely (and this costs extra) rewriting the manual (or at least the good parts) for customized consumption.

If the automaker is in 3 countries, has 3 brands, 25 vehicles, 59 trim levels, and 11 radio or navigation units (all manufactured at different factories throughout the world), it’s unlikely that one generic user manual is going to be much help, no matter how we slice it.

Custom help content ,however, is specific and relevant. Users identify something they need help with and tell us something about themselves; their country, brand, model and trim level. Now we know what they really want—not the generic user manual, but a short, relevant, sharable, How-To guide; custom-tailored specifically to meet their needs.

While this content may never make it to the bestseller list, it’s sure to make it to the car.