Contextual Delivery: How To Hit The Moving (And Evolving) Mobile Target

In the current landscape, strategies for mobile content are obsolete by the time you get blessing to start using them. It seems a lot of technology is discarded almost as quickly as it is adopted, making content delivery for the mobile set a bit of a moving target. So when we think about mobile strategies, I’d argue it’s smarter to think about content delivery in a contextual fashion versus relying too heavily on the new what’s next in emerging mobile technology.

So, what types of technology and what practices in mobile are stable enough to invest your time and money in when it comes to your content? Here’s three must do’s when you start thinking about contextual content strategy when it comes to the mobile user.

1. Start by strengthening what you’ve got.
If you already have a Web site, for crying out loud, optimize it for mobile already. If you’re saying, “My site isn’t flash so I’m good to go,” you’re fooling yourself. Start thinking about mobile users differently. They’re leaned forward and they’re on the go, meaning their attention is even more limited than the average laptop or desktop user.

The screen is smaller and these users rely on their fingers and thumbs to navigate your content. That means you want linkable buttons and calls to action that are appropriate to the pinching, pulling and tapping that comes with mobile keyboards and touch screens. (Note: tablet computers like the iPad are a completely different beast, so please just consider handsets as being the focal point of this discussion.)

The service your site provides will also dictate how you’ll want to present on mobile as well. If you’re selling cars, your site should look very different on a mobile device than it does on a laptop. If you’re a blogger, the content should be even more varied and different in presentation as the automaker.

The smartphone market is growing at an exponential rate. As you can see by the comScore data above, use is on the rise as price points become lower and the age begins skewing higher for smart phone use (see data below). That means more and more people will be accessing your content on their mobile phone. And remember, making the experience unique and rewarding based on the device your user chooses as their primary method to access your content will always be looked upon favorably by brand loyalists.

2. Start thinking about where and when consumers are accessing your content (read as: Think GEO!)
This proliferation in Geo Specific services and content is not a fad. It’s not going away. It’s high time to start accepting the fact that you need to start thinking about the where and the when in regards to your content delivery methods. If you can vary content by time of day, (eg: virtual tours or walkthrough videos of homes via QR code on real estate signs during off hours) or serve specific content by region, whether that’s by app or through site detection, you’ll be better able to serve your users’ most immediate needs based on their physical location.

Geotagged content is certainly not a new thing, but the rise of the smartphone and mobile computing have made it a necessary evil to consider and code for moving forward.
Companies with larger national and global footprints stand to benefit greatly from the geolocation phenomena, but even small companies and local establishments can benefit from a smart Geotagging strategy. Coding for it is easy (sometimes as simple as dropping in a meta tag) and there are a variety of services that offer ways to deliver custom content to those open to sharing their location data, whether it be through a tweet, a check in or through their smartphone’s GPS technology.

Location and time help create context for information, and makes data much more consumable. For instance, if I’m hiking through the El Yunque National Rainforest in Puerto Rico and I have my Trails App open on my iPhone, it would be great to come across someone who may have blogged about that elusive waterfall I keep missing out on. And I could do it had the blogger simply added geo.position meta tag to his data.

While you may not need to go so far as partnering with a major geolocation vendor like Foursquare, thinking of the ways that your user’s location influences your content is an absolute must when it comes to mobile delivery and how it’s perceived contextually. Even if you just start thinking of adding your own photos and information to Google Maps, you’re off to a better start than ignoring Geo Data altogether.

3. Make it easy and keep it simple.
If you’re a brand, don’t make it too difficult to complete a transaction through your mobile site or app. Ultimately, you want content that helps make the user or consumer’s goal easier, essentially bridging the gap between online and brand centric experiences. While they may not be in your store or interacting directly with you, your mobile content serves as the conduit to bring the online and offline experiences together.

Any content that you create for mobile should be optimized and quick to load. Mobile users have high, if not slightly unreasonable expectations, due to the fact that mobile apps and sites are supposed to have streamlined features, which should, in theory, offer speed in return.

The key takeaway is to get your head in the game. If you don’t, you’re going to miss the first part of a major revolution in digital and you’ll miss a key opportunity to have your content make good contextual sense to your potential users, customers or supporters.

Want to discuss it further? Drop me a comment and we can hash it out.

Photo used under Creative Commons License courtesy: Gare and Kitty

Evaluating Content: Reading Level

Does your average target user understand the writing found on your Web site? Did you, or your content author, think to evaluate the reading level of your copy prior to publishing? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

If you’re a large organization farming out your Web writing or if you’re a small business with a DIY approach, I’m willing to bet that the author of your content is fairly educated. And while said author(s) can certainly write beyond the average high school student’s reading level it doesn’t mean they should.

One of the biggest problems I discover when I’m tasked with evaluating Web content lies in the reading comprehension level of copy. More often than not, it can be simplified, edited for brevity and structured into smaller paragraphs. Multisyllabic words (how’s that for confusing/technical word choice!) are often presenting reading problems and most of the copy is not optimized for scanning.

Too many sites are just too damn hard to understand for someone trying to find information, make an informed decision or complete a transaction (you know, the things that ultimately lead to that elusive ROI?).

Pharmaceutical manufacturers Web sites are notorious for having readability problems in copy. We’ll use drug maker Glaxo Smith Kline (Advair, Boniva, Paxil, Valtrex, etc.) for our evaluation purposes in discussing the importance of readability.

As you can see by the quick report above, GSK.com has an average reading level of grade 20. So, in theory, to understand the majority of the material on the site, one would have to have significant postgraduate education.

I may be going out on a limb here in assuming that a good chunk of the consumers who use GSK drugs and any potential investors may not have achieved masters or doctoral degrees. So, it should follow that when the less educated are reading through potential side effects of drugs, or are scanning for quick information about the company; this copy isn’t going to make them feel more at ease in using a GSK manufactured medicine or convince them the company is worth their investment dollar.

The problem with GSK mostly lies with a high instance of confusing words and complex sentences. More than 27 percent of the words found on the GSK site are “Complex” (Complex words are polysyllabic – having 3 or more syllables). Even worse are the more than 175 instances of long sentences (10-20 words or more).

How do you improve it? Simplify, my friends. Simplify.

Start aiming for writing copy that younger audiences will understand. I don’t believe that there’s necessarily a magic number, but I generally shoot for 6th to 8th grade. Most journalism schools teach new copywriters to scribe for that comprehension level. It should be no different for most Web sites, unless you have a highly specialized audience (think advanced Web programming, Law Libraries, etc.).

Granted, most drug manufactures create microsites to be more consumer facing and in line with the marketing campaign (Valtrex.com), but even these sites are writing to a high school reading level and using high percentages of confusing words. (Valtrex.com is appropriate for 11th graders FYI)

I’m also of the belief that if corporate sites are in your linking strategy on consumer facing sites (as is the case for GSK.com), you need to have both readable by the same audience, which is clearly not the case here.

Is pharmaceutical stuff sometimes difficult to understand? Absolutely. Do drug names often contain multiple syllables? Absolutely. Does that mean the rest of the content (including descriptions of symptoms the drug treats and potential side effects) needs to be difficult to understand? Absolutely not.

Having trouble getting there, or don’t know how to even get started in evaluating copy readability? It’s not really an exact science (that’s what great editors and content strategists are for), but fortunately, there are lots of nifty tools out there to evaluate this stuff. If you’re looking for a quick evaluation of a page on a site, Read-Able.com is a strong, visually appealing site to generate reports on existing reading levels that will help get your pointed in the right direction.

And, if you’re going to get started in evaluating reading level in web copy, here’s the three things you absolutely need to pay attention to, whether you hire a content strategist or not.

1. Flesch Kincaid reading level. This test is sort of the standard. It’s built into many word processing programs and will give you a general idea of how difficult the content is to digest. If the reading level is too high, cut back on confusing words, simplify sentence structures and utilize elements that make the page easier to scan. Too low? Beef it up a little. Too many syllables in you words? Try breaking them apart or separating thoughts.

2. Make your content brief! More often than not, site owners are trying to reach mass capacity with web content to be better optimized for search. It’s a major disservice to your users and to your governance plan. If you’re using 10 words, do it in five. Don’t use a paragraph when bullets or a diagram can say it better. Utilize checklists, how tos and walkthroughs instead of detailed descriptions or confusing language.

3. Use the common sense test. I know, this is asking a lot, but just like you know pornography when you see it, you’ll know confusing copy when you see it. Don’t be smart for smart’s sake. If you know an eighth grader, ask them if they get the gist of your copy. If they don’t, chances are a good chunk of your visitors don’t get it either.

What tools is your organization using to evaluate reading level? Is it something your strategists are building into their Web toolkits? If not, maybe it’s time you ask them to start doing so, because you may be missing out on conversions or customers.

Image courtesy Brian Talbot

Avoiding Missteps: Accounting For Testing and Refinement in Content Strategy

Sometimes, first dates can leave us with mixed feelings. We take special care to make sure no hair is out of place, that we smell nice and do our best to make sure everything goes according to plan. First dates can be an expensive, exhausting and – depending on your skills – either be a very rewarding or entirely dissapointing experience.

Practicing content strategy for the first time is very much like a first date. It requires careful planning, a lot of get-to-know-you-type conversations and, ultimately, will probably cost you a little more money than you expected it to. If all goes well, that strategy will pay off and bring many years of happy returns, but like any new relationship, content strategy takes time, examination and refinement.

It’s here that many strategies, and relationships for that matter, fall down. If we don’t account for reflection and refinement, we can’t determine how successful we could really be.

Good content strategists start with an audit and inventory of all the content you currently have. This process can be done specific to your online properties, if you’re looking only at the Web/Mobile/Location mediums or acrosss your entire organization at the enterprise level. From that initial audit and inventory, gaps should have been identified and opportunities to refine existing content to fit existing or new audiences (personas) would have been properly communicated to the you, the client.

Executing the production of new content according to our strategy would be the next step. If they’ve done their job, your content strategist will have synched up with your analytics team and determined some success metrics for our content. And with metrics, content that’s on strategy and a usable site in place, everything should go swimmingly right? In theory, absolutely. Here’s how you go about testing to find out if that’s really the case.

So, here’s how you start setting up for the review of those success metrics to determine how to further test and refine your process and existing content.

1. Test to find out if your content is easily consumed

You spend time testing your Web site’s usability, shouldn’t your content get equal treatment? Some kind of test needs to be put into place to test the viability of your content. It’s not as simple as increasing clickthroughs or user time spent on your site, though that will provide an initial baseline as if it’s even being found.

Start with basic questions. Is the content readable? Is it too long (this applies to video or text) Do your users understand it? Could re-wording things be the key to creating influence? Is your message solving your user needs or potential problems? These are all questions we can start to answer with A/B Testing, or simple focus groups. You can be as scientific (think A/B testing, Eye Tracking or utilizing fMRI) or as basic as you want (Usability Testing, User Interviews) to be when it comes to testing for whether or not your content can be easily consumed. The name of the game here is not to launch and leave it, assuming that our strategy is the right one.

2. Take Personal and Situational Behaviors Into Consideration While Testing

Are your personas working hard enough for your content strategy? Did the content strategist account for personal behaviors when developing a content plan? What situations were generated as potential scenarios that require content? If context were acconted for in the up front planning, we’d have already accounted for factors beyond basic socio-economic and media consumption habits and looked at our content as a task or fuciton that helps address a need to a specific user situation. If we haven’t, that should be accounted for in testing for refinement as context will always make our content more useful, meaningful and relevant to users.

Test, refine and test again
This process is never over. You have to keep at it. As content strategists, we owe users increased levels of context and usability. Our job is to not only get them to our Web sites, but to make their lives easier, answer their questions before they have them and leave them feeling satisfied with the overall experiences on our sites. Content is the vehicle to that satisfaction, so we need to keep testing it. Just like that relationship… we’ve gotta keep on keepin’ at it.

Photo used under creative commons license. Photographer: Stuart Bell

Context As A Content Strategy: Let’s Hash It Out!

For the first time in my professional career, I took a pretty big leap. I told a room full of very, very smart user experience professionals at Internet User Experience 2010 that I believe content strategists are not doing enough to adequately prepare for the next big thing. I also mentioned that I believe that Context, not content, is the real king when it comes to the web.

I’m happy to report that my thoughts and early stab at setting up the foundation for Context Strategy were both well received (see slides below).

Still, I’d like to reiterate that this process still needs refining and that we need to start finding better ways to account for personal behaviors (personal behavioral context) and personal situations (personal situational context) in order to take content strategy to the next level. When we combine personal behavioral and personal situational contexts we have the basis for what we’d potentially need to create a contextual based content strategy.

My next steps are to start exploring fields for content audits and persona development to begin accounting for context, while researching tools (including Eye Tracking, Functional MRI and biometric data) that can be synthesized on a project by project basis. Like I say in my presentation, I really need help formulating this discussion to get to a place where we can all start creating more meaningful content for users on the Web.

Comments on my presentation or the idea of Contextual Content Strategy in general are more than welcome. Let’s hash this thing out people!

Talking Context and Content Strategy: Internet User Experience 2010

I’m very excited to be able to announce that I’ll be a presenter in the Content Strategy sessions during the sixth-annual Internet User Experience Conference this July. While I’m speaking as a member of the content strategy community, I’ll be providing a heavy dose of context as the focus of my talk will be “Context as a Content Strategy.”

Basically, my presentation will attempt to shine more light on content’s oft overlooked spouse, context.

As web designers and user experience professionals we are all aware of the importance of content and we consider how this material is used, but more often than not we don’t consider what actually makes it up. Is the material too difficult to understand? Have we provided adequate background information on the topic? Is there another piece of content (even if this content doesn’t belong to us) that helps to support it and give it relevance?

These are the questions all content strategists and content developers need to begin considering prior to the onset of production. In order to achieve this process, content strategists and site owners must begin to be more critical of content during heuristic reviews, content audits and gap analyses to account for contextual improvements that will make content more relevant for visitors.

My IUE presentation attempts to begin to define how content strategists can evaluate and plan for content through a more specific contextual lens through examining how the brain processes, accesses and stores information and what factors content strategists can begin to consider when planning for supporting content and creating deeper, more meaningful content plans across multiple devices (iPad, Smart Phone, Laptop, Desktop, Etc.).

If you’re not familiar with IUE, the multi-day event covers most aspects of web site design and strategy, including user experience design, graphics, branding, social networking, accessibility, effective web writing, the migration to mobile, and enhancements that drive customers to your site.

I’m absolutely honored to have my own little spot and will be joining a panel discussion on content strategy as well with a bunch of smart cookies that include Chris Moritz (digital content strategy manager at C-E, Shauna Nicholson and many more. If you’re interested in attending my talk, I’ll be speaking Monday, July 26 (time is still TBD). Following my presentation will be the content strategy/content management panel. I’ll announce those details as I get them.

There’s still time to register, and if you can make it, you’ll no doubt be treated to a lot of interesting talks and learn a whole lot more about some really innovative things going on in the digital space.

Hope to see some of you there!