User Experience + Digital Content
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
—Steve Jobs
With a high level strategy in place, it is often seductive to jump right to discussions of platforms and technology, run out and buy some shiny new computers and, you know, start making things.
This approach would be akin to developing a billboard campaign for a product by designing the visuals first, and then replacing the “lorem Ipsum” once you have figured out what the message of the campaign would be… which would be long after the billboards have gone up. And, for that matter, how would you know if the visuals were a good match for the message? How would you even know if a billboard campaign was an appropriate vehicle for your message at all?
While it seems obvious that we would never approach a marketing campaign this way, you might be surprised at how often digital extensions follow this path. Unless your goal is to simply stick a lot of flagpoles sporting your property’s logo into the digital landscape, you need to work out your user experience and content strategy before talking tech.
To start carving out the precise digital applications that will fulfill your strategy, the strategist will now begin to engage a variety of subject-matter experts: usability analysts, content specialists, interaction architects or digital brand specialists. The exact composition will vary based on your property and strategy, but these people will be charged with creating the architecture for your digital extension.
Remember: the pop culture adage “If you build it, they will come” really doesn’t hold true when it comes to digital… and without proper planning, it’s doubtful you can even build it. There is a real danger today in rushing to build a digital extension without first taking the time to get to the heart of your property. Understanding how this fits into the context of an overall digital strategy provides a sense of which levers can be used to trigger the best audience response.
What user experience and digital content mean
The combination of the two are often referred to as the design (or the interactive design) of the digital extension to your property… not just what you see, but how it works. Understanding your audience’s expectations, aptitudes, and motivations is the key to crafting a comprehensive design that will engage the audience and guide them to support the goals already established for your entertainment property.
User experience is a somewhat new term to describe the way in which digital content is presented to online audiences. This includes not just the vehicles for premium branded content, but also the mechanisms that audiences are given to interact with or create their own content. This is an extremely complex practice that considers everything from download wait times to screen size to navigation options to connections to other platforms… and your team’s decision to adhere to or innovate on existing conventions for all of the above.
Digital content is all of the material available for a user to absorb through your digital extension: this ranges from the branded material you will provide (such as video, text, or music) but also to contests, games, or quizzes to engage and retain the online audience.
But who the heck is your online audience and what the heck do they want to do?
Understanding your audience
Not all properties have a cut and dried “males 18 to 35” or “urban teenaged girls” demographic. What do you do when you have a property that appeals to several different demographics at once? How do you craft a user experience that can meet these varying tastes and still fit with the digital strategy?
This is not an insignificant challenge, but — happily — it is one that digital teams encounter constantly when working in other industries. In brief, there are a few options to choose from:
1. You can choose to focus on the one user group that either has the most appeal to your investors, or will have the biggest uptake when it comes to digital extensions. This builds on Alan Cooper’s model of persona-driven design.
2. You can create multiple experiences within your overall strategy, with each one designed to appeal to one particular group of fans. Such orchestration will probably require the development of smaller, more focused applications.
3. You can attempt to craft an experience that will appeal broadly across all demographics. It can be done, but there may need to be audience segmentation within the digital property itself.
Your strategist will work with your digital design team to provide the pros and cons for each scenario. While the ultimate decision is up to you, listen carefully to their recommendations: if you’ve been following this process and making careful hiring decisions, their advice should be sound. You can begin to relinquish just a little control… but make sure that they are doing their homework.
User research
Your team can compile phonebooks worth of information on your property’s demographic, but if that information doesn’t give you any clues as to how to craft an audience experience that is in line with your goals, it’s useless. Here are a few ways to move forward:
Direct and Indirect Research
Expensive whitepapers covering general trends and in person focus groups are slowly giving way to up-to-the-moment online research and surveys. For very little expense, your design team can set up a “survey microsite” to directly reach a much wider swath of your demographic than a focus group ever could. These surveys can also do double duty as a platform-uptake test administered across different channels such as social networks, mobile apps and your own site.
Qualifying Questions vs. Targeted Questions
It is “User Research 101”, but you must first establish that you are talking to the right people before you can put to use any of the other information you garner from them. Qualifying questions tend to be short and include lines such as: Do you watch show X? Do you use social networks? Are you a female between 18 to 24? etc. The targeted questions are the ones your strategist will craft to get to the heart of the information you really want to know about your fans, after the qualifying questions have been satisfactorily answered.
What You Need to Know
There are a few categories of information you need to glean from your audience, regardless of the techniques you choose to employee to get them. These will shift slightly depending on your specific strategy, however as a general rule you may want to find out:
1. How your target audience is using technology — after all, there is no point considering iPhone apps if your demographic uses Blackberries.
2. How your fans converse with their friends — if your objective is to encourage referrals, you’ll need to know which social tools they use to share information… or if they use such tools to share at all!
3. How they consume media — does your audience read a lot of print magazines, watch little video clips, have a large iPhotobooth collection? All valuable clues for the types of content that will strike a chord later on.
4. What does your audience really like about your property — the single most important line of questioning and often the most surprising. “I like the characters” or “I like the stories” is a lot less valuable than “I want to see what shoes Carrie is going to wear this week” or “I love when you show the gory close-ups in the medical mystery portion” or “Every week I want to see if I can guess the ending before my wife” or “Me and my girlfriends tune in each week hoping to see a shot of Dylan’s cute butt!”
You cannot rely on your audience to spontaneously give you brilliant insight into their state of mind. There is most definitely an art to crafting these questions — asking “How do you consume media” is not going to get you a very useful response.
After all, it wasn’t until the strategists at Goodby Silverstein & Partners thought to ask the question “how do you feel when you don’t have any milk” that they were able to twig onto the brilliant “Got Milk?” campaign that was to transform an industry. Talk to your strategist and their design team about plans to craft questions that will get you beyond the obvious responses.
A Warning
Be wary that your research isn’t used to simply validate a decision that has already been made. It is surprisingly easy to craft leading questions (sometime unconsciously) in order to garner a response in favour of one tactic or another. Be honest with yourself — your team should be doing research to discover what will have the best chance of success, not to make you feel better about a path you are already locked into. Because you are doing this analysis so early in the game, you have the time to shift your strategy to fit the realities of your findings.
Sifting the Information
Once your design team has completed their research into the behavior of your online audience and contrasted it with your property’s core demographic, they are still one step away from being able to successfully translate this data into a content plan. This information still needs to be distilled into both general conclusions about the audience, and crafted into a persona (or personae) that will guide their design decisions. Every designer, content specialist and user experience expert will have his own way of tackling personae development, so there is no need to get into a lengthy treatise here. Suffice it to say these documents will help down the road in evaluating whether your digital property is developing along the right path or not.
Restating your goals
Now that this much research has been done, it is a good time to revisit why you are crafting this experience in the first place. Once your team dives into the complexities of the perfect experience for these recently discovered online fans, it is surprisingly easy to lose site of the project’s goals and strategy.
A simple way to prevent this loss of focus is to have your strategist rephrase your plan in terms of desired user actions or outcomes. If your plan is to use new media to cause existing fans of your show to evangelize it to new potential fans, this could be rephrased as “we’re going to create a digital experience that will result in users bringing their friends into the fold via social referrals and content sharing.”
This may sound a little bit Greek to you, but it will help your design team get traction.
Translating this knowledge into action
Now comes the tricky part — pulling together all of the surveys, personas and other material you have gathered and beginning to make decisions about how you will create digital content extensions based on this data. You would be surprised how often this fresh knowledge might spark a new idea on the part of one of the senior stakeholders. It takes some discipline to consider how to fit such brainstorms into your established gameplan, rather than tossing previous work to the wind.
The good news is, if you have been following this process, you can almost always find a way to incorporate such new feedback into your experience design. For example, if your research has told you that your audience:
- - Tunes in to see the hunky lead actor
- - Loves to collect things
- - Derives pleasure from having exclusive items that their friends don’t have
- - Likes big eye candy photos
Then the “exclusive and unlockable mobile trading cards of behind-the-scenes looks at the hunky actor’s real-life house” idea suddenly doesn’t look so bad… especially if it can be slipped in as part of your already planned iPhone strategy.
Quick Tip
If you want to be in a position to take advantage of such brainstorms, make sure you assign someone to collect relevant (and irreverent) production assets as you go. This will make life much easier for everyone involved in the digital extension process. This person needn’t be a producer — a motivated production coordinator is often much more effective in this role.
What you should expect from your design team
As your design team begins to wrap up their research and planning, they should be in a position to present a detailed pre-production plan to you and the other stakeholders. Your strategist (either internal or external) should probably be the person holding the pen on this to ensure that pre-production plan speaks to your established goals, fulfills the agreed upon strategy and can be delivered on time, on budget and at a high quality.
As with film or television, a good pre-production plan is intended to resolve any problems or logical issues before anyone starts cutting code. From this point on, changes start to get expensive, missteps doubly so. Check that there are:
- - Site maps
- - Wireframes
- - Established nomenclature
- - Style guides
- - Interaction flow-charts
- - High-level schedules
We’re definitely down at the 500 foot level now.
Again, this area will likely not be your forte, so don’t be shy about calling in a trusted third party expert to review the finer details of the plan. This could be your internal Director of Digital or someone referred by a colleague: the good news is that this audit won’t take long. And as long as they understand that their engagement is to simply vet the practicality of the proposed design (rather than second-guess your design team), you will get good value for your money.
Final goal check
Make sure that you do one last review before locking into the plan. Your digital content and experience design must not only satisfy’s your audience, but directly relate to the goals you are trying to pull off for your property. Now is the time to double-check all of the assumptions because from this point on, you’ll be spending real money.
The right stuff
This is a good time to touch on the topic of money. You’ve heard the expression that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?” Much like film or television, this holds true when it comes to crafting digital properties. If your project has reached this phase, you should have spent about a third of your total planned budget. If not, you’ve probably cut a corner.
The work to date is not inconsiderable and is starting to involve some technical complexities that you may not have wrestled with on previous projects. If you’re starting to feel a little out of your depth, this is probably the right “feeling” to have. This is why choosing your team members carefully at each stage is important: you will need them to be trusted, accountable and fully in-line with your goals so that they can manage their teams of technical experts.
If not, another old rule comes into play: hire slow, fire fast.