1. Content Strategy Needs User Experience:
Let’s All Blow Bubbles Together
Presentation to Internet User Experience 2010
July 28, 2010
Alice Coleman, User Experience Manager, Campbell-Ewald
Christy Brewer, Content Strategist, MSL Group
Some days, being a user experience professional can be lonely. You research and
survey, and create a beautiful set of personas that get stuck up on a cube wall
somewhere, as they fade into blind spots for those who are supposed to use them.
Meanwhile, some content manager is sitting in a cube, mulling over an inventory,
wondering what’s useful and what’s not. Too bad that poor content manager is
poking around Google Trends and making assumptions on instinct alone. They
might as well both be blowing bubbles in the wind.
Alice Coleman and Christy Brewer were brought into a web site redesign project
at the same time. Coleman is an accomplished user experience pro. But Brewer is
a jack-of-all-trades, having only dabbled in user experience research as an
extension of her editorial and content creation background. Brewer knew better
than to pretend she could play in Coleman’s world, and began asking questions
that sprang from her journalism training. Soon, they were finishing each other’s
sentences, and found a clear and concise way to illustrate that what Brewer needs
is exactly what Coleman provides.
Brewer and Coleman moved past nomenclature and into the land of bubbles to
visually define the relationships between persona research and content
development. Using standard UX practices of identifying key tasks, search
behavior data and web analytics, Brewer and Coleman’s bubble illustrations map
the path from guessing at valuable content and strategically designing content
that meets actionable organizational goals.
This presentation focuses on the process Coleman and Brewer used to navigate a
tricky project with stakeholders with strong opinions and beliefs. Every
stakeholder thought they knew best who the target audience was and what they
needed. But, by sticking to the process, Coleman and Brewer not only revealed
additional audiences and needed content, but more importantly showed all
stakeholders a logical way to prioritize content needs. This user-experience-first
approach to content strategy got all stakeholders
seeing eye-to-eye, realizing that the needs of individual audience segments
weren¹t “wrong,” and that this step was crucial to creating mutually agreed-upon

2. goals for the site.
The fight starts every time with the usual suspects. In an agency setting, “Account
Teams” know their client. They know the goals for any effort, and know
everything the client knows about the target audience. Experience Planning
knows the channels and how to reach the target audience. Project management
can offer solutions used on previous projects. And writers study the angle and
style most likely to reach the target audience.
User Experience and Content Strategy are two disciplines that are still new to the
agency structure. And they’re shaking up what agencies know about creating
content for both digital and traditional publishing. Very often, the “research
people” are contacted to dig up dirt that supports a point. User experience tools
and content planning frameworks bring a level of objectivity to a project that,
when used for good, can build consensus on a development team based on an
objective structure.
However, when you introduce User Experience and Content Strategy by surprise,
sometimes both disciplines attack the same research, but from different angles.
At first, it seems like yet another fight between professionals with opposing
viewpoints. Let it run its course, and the results of each effort will create
deliverables that point to the same conclusions, even though the end results may
not look coordinated. At least, at first.
The User Experience discipline looks to audience research to create tangible
documents that serve to communicate a priority or structure to what the target
audience wants. Personas, primary and secondary task lists and user flow
diagrams illustrate that age-old question, “What should we create?”
Content strategy uses audience interviews and research to begin defining what’s
important. Keyword research and conversation monitoring offer an objective
confirmation. Content category and topic lists give the editorial team a definitive
direction to begin creating content.
Like a system of checks and balances, approaching both User Experience and
Content Strategy research simultaneously can speed p the planning phase of a
project. Natural reaction is to fear coming up with two very different results.
However, put your UX pro and content strategist in a room to talk about it, and
most of these points will be reconciled by working out a common nomenclature.
In most cases, the research sources will be the same, and the remaining
differences can be worked out as each discipline shares its perspective (using a
common language) and reviews the conclusions drawn. This requires checking
ego at the door, but will turn out a strategy that will resonate with the most
important stakeholder: the target audience.
During this particular project, we debated whether personas belonged to UX
alone, or if UX and content strategy should be co-owners. We decided that UX
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3. owns the personas, but doesn’t develop them in a vacuum. This is where the
check-and-balance approach was most important, since the personas became the
key “sanity check” for every decision about content. Our personas weren’t
established until UX and CS got in that room and worked through every detail.
From there, UX and CS are in lock-step, alternating deliverables until the
editorial team takes over specific content creation. Here’s how we get through the
entire process.
Most projects begin with a creative brainstorm that focuses on visual design,
functionality or content. However, this misses the crucial step of studying your
audience. Luckily, both public relations (from where many content strategists
develop) and user experience see audience analysis as the first step. The conflict,
however, can arise in the differences in nomenclature between content strategy
and user experience. Don’t let this choke your process – explain what you mean,
and understand that you’re really talking about the same thing.
Without this analysis, you’ll miss the perception gap that so often exists between
communicators and the intended audience.
The goal of audience analysis is to find the most direct path between
organizational goals and the needs of your intended audience.
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4. Reading suggestion: “Made to Stick,” by Chip and Dan Heath; specifically, “the
curse of knowledge.”
In the case of the Navy.com site redesign, Coleman and Brewer joined the project
after “content pillars” had been defined. Their goal was to ensure that they hold
true. Campbell-Ewald usually depicts content pillars this way, which is key to
understanding the process moving forward:
Since the user experience process was new to Campbell-Ewald, Coleman had to
explain the steps in the process, and illustrate how UX deliverables fit together.
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5. Brewer then began merging the user experience insights with content strategy
deliverables. This diagram layers the most important “task” identified in the
personas and user experience scenarios with the content pillars. Now, the pillars
become more meaningful to everyone working on the project, and everyone
understands the rigor that went into the research.
Too often, personas are created and forgotten. Many user experience
professionals have come up with clever ways to make personas more
understandable and visible. Brewer’s favorite is a baseball-card style poster.
However, the most valuable step in adopting personas is to be more clear (and
even clever) in illustrating how the personas impact content creation.
By using Campbell-Ewald’s existing “circular” design for illustrating content
pillars, Brewer and Coleman converted the radial items into a pie chart. During
persona development, each pillar of content was confirmed to be valuable to
every persona, but to different degrees. So, the content pillars evolved.
This is an aggregated estimate of the types of content that the new site should
include:
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6. The next step is to determine the degrees to which each pillar is valuable to each
persona. User experience flows identify relevant tasks. Tasks can only be
completed through content (widgets, articles, videos, forms). So, this
methodology uses the tasks to identify the most relevant content. The five content
pillars are then ranked, with a degree of importance assigned to each pillar. This
has also been effectively implemented with a bar graph. The strength of the pie is
that it communicates the finite amount of content to be created.
The personas then take on a customized pie chart to illustrate the content each
persona values.
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7. Take this synthesis of thought one step further to illustrate more depth of content
and task analysis by using your task list generated in persona development and
color code it based on the content pillar pie or bar graph. This creates a visual
depiction of not only the tasks that are important, but also the types of content
that will effectively assist the user in completing those tasks.
From here, project teams have greater buy-in on the mission of the project, and
defining the remaining tasks becomes more objective. By referring to the
task/content diagrams and making the persona document more meaningful,
debates around site maps and specific delivery of content will naturally begin to
refer to specific personas, and questions will sound more like, “Will this widget
give Drew the answers he needs to move forward?”
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8. Continue with wireframe development and be sure to include people who think
about conversion at this point as well. When you present your research to this
point, they will have an objective basis on which to build methods to encourage
more marketing-based needs, like increasing awareness, consideration and
engaging in specific calls-to-action.
For the content strategist, this methodology makes a content gap analysis more
meaningful as well. By color-coding existing content (or proposed content
sources) according to the content pillars, it’s easier to develop a more reliable
estimate of content development needs.
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9. Again, this can be communicated to project stakeholders in the same visual way
as the tasks:
If this level of content gap is scary to the project team, remind everyone of the
current state of content, and show the roadmap to fill the gap.
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10. Use the level of gap and the ranking of task priority, along with a priority level for
each persona, to determine the most important content needs. This requires
participation from content strategy, user experience and business/organization
leadership. In the case of this project, one particular persona represented a target
market that was most highly desired, so that persona’s needs were placed first.
This methodology creates a more solid framework for creating editorial style
guides, topic selection and asset inventories.
Suggested reading: IUE 2010 presentation by Daniel Eizans.
As projects proceed through development, having a collaborative set of guiding
documents support decisions with research eliminates subjective arguments and
creates a unified vision for the project. That foundation will ensure that you get
buy-in from non-UX people, cohesively tell the story and have useful
conversations within all involved disciplines.
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