Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Robert Williams

Robert Williams — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 15:06:45 GMT

When I’ve worn the “content strategy” hat, the best and most productive relationships with IAs I’ve had were the ones similar to editor/writer relationships. The “what” and “how” of web content and communications is still largely a creative endeavor (thankfully) and I’d look to IAs to optimize, provide structure to, or validate my ideas about content needs, relationships, and user value and its ability to support business/organization requirements. The least productive were when an IA would hand over a stack of wireframes and say something to the effect of “fill this out with content” (This approach always reminded me of those old Madlibs books).

Increasingly I see the need for content strategy to really be organizational communications strategy—“Enterprise Content Strategy” (ECS) we’ll call it to coin yet another acronym. I see it as old fashioned campaign style management and creative direction with a doses of business analysis, SEO/SEM, technical content management and IA in the mix.

Robert Williams — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 20:14:57 GMT

Good article. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard clients (external, internal or “the bosses”) repeat in strategy or review meetings “must be above the fold” as one of the dozen things they “know” as absolute gospel truth for all kinds of web projects and engagements.

This would be a great series… maybe not “blasting the myths” but at least challenging them.

Robert Williams — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 01:26:13 GMT

You’ve captured the nightmare of my workday and I’m sure many others. All day long I have to be in and out of two hosted CMS’s, a CRM, a hosted project management/tracking software, two different analytics packages, several vendor “client” sites, a conversion management app, the IT dept.’s helpdesk, etc. I’ve never thought of this usability issue, just the nightmare created by technology and bureaucracies consumed with the analysis of data, which generally seems to lead to little actual strategic decision making; just a lot of head scratching about what to do with all this “good” data we’re accumulating.

As so many of the activities within these systems have more to do with tracking, reporting and data entry than with helping me be productive or think creatively or critically, I’m often seeking easy ways to stay out of them by creating alerts and dashboards. When I’m in them, I find myself wanting to create my own tips and notes and instructions (few systems seem to accommodate this). Maybe therein lies another usability approach to resolving this problem—finding more streamlined ways to create and disseminate the customized information you want from the systems and the customized info you need when you do have to be in them.

Robert Williams — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:32:35 GMT

What about personas from analytics reports based on time periods and considering other business data? I find that filtering, say, a keyword report by time periods and doing some cross referencing of other business trends data can be quite revealing about the “who” and beneficial for doing some analysis to hypothosize about the “why”—whether this data gets used for creating personas or not.

If you’re lucky enough to be an a place that has the resources, the hardest part is breaking down that wall that exists between web analytics or UX design resources and market research resources.

Robert Williams — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:20:30 GMT

As a current ‘innie’ web manager, I agree that there is also a great internal need for those with ‘evangelism’ (is that word still being used in the UX/web strategy world?) and salesmanship skills: persisitance, organized communications, quickly being able to assess organizational cultures and narrativize business cases. My concern with outties who do have those skills is that they have been focused on using those them to acheive short-term goals—buy-in for a design, sign-off on documents, approving nods during brainstorms. For an innie, I’d be looking for someone who can prove that they won’t fizzle out over the long haul, be in tune with changing business needs and can constantly be ready with Plan B (C and D and E).