Continuous User Experiences

When designing a single user experience for a single platform, it is too easy to become myopic about the individual that will be using the experience, and not take into consideration, that same individual’s behavior on connected or related digital platforms. It is a stretch, for example, to think that a consumer would only visit a company’s web site, and never encounter another digital interface, or digital store front, from the same company. People use the web and mobile devices for different purposes.  One digital platform may even drive usage of another. Information Architects should seek to evolve their research methods to observe a single end-consumer's behavior across a connected, digital ecosystem of browser-based, mobile, and other digital experiences. The end goal, is to develop a holistic digital strategy for the client.

What happens, however, if a client isn’t thinking about, or willing to pay for an engagement with a larger scope, or broader implementation across digital platforms? After all, client engagements typically begin with a single project.  Client budgets may only cover research that yields insights that inform the design of the contracted project.  In this case, it is up to the Information Architect to convince the client that the precious time spent with the end-consumer should be maximized to uncover insights that may prove helpful, when connecting behaviors across all touch points of their planned, digital ecosystem. Missing key behaviors on digital platforms that aren’t immediately relevant, may result in non-scalable interfaces that won’t elegantly support naturally connected experiences across platforms (from an end-user perspective).

Ultimately, upfront end-user research with an intentionally narrow scope, may cost clients more money later, in future research and fixes to non-scalable interfaces. Behavioral personas should illustrate an end-user's total digital lifestyle, not an isolated set of behaviors, if they are to be used to inform the design of a connected set of digital platforms, rather than a single user interface.

Content Relevance and Promotion

There are numerous ways to elevate content within a digital experience. For example, a marketing department may opt to treat a web site as a companion, or destination, for a promotional campaign or offline advertisement. In this respect, a web site must accommodate a dynamic, marketing schedule, that can be updated as often as new campaigns are launched. This type of promotion is often found on ecommerce, or consumer product marketing web sites.

For content-driven experiences, however, content relevance to the consumer should power the logic employed to promote content. Designers may wish to define a content hierarchy, based on its relevance to consumer, in order to determine the prominence and sequence of promotional categories of content. The following, are relevancy models that can be used to define a promotional framework for content, on web sites:

1. Elevate content that is of known, high-value, to consumers. Consumer research can help designers identify what content is most relevant to end-users of a web site. Perform qualitative analysis to develop theories about the type of information that will be sought on a web site, and then, perform a quantitative analysis to validate the information-seeking trends with a statistically significant set of data.

2. If the web site author has a credible, editorial voice, consider editorially-driven content promotion. Many businesses mistakenly believe that their editorially-driven content promotions will drive engagement on their digital experiences. Understanding consumer perception of a brand is the key to understanding whether or not the brand has the credibility to warrant it curating the content that exists on the web site.

3. On experiences where social engagement is likely, enable social discovery, and promotion, of content. Content discovery via integrated, social media tactics may be relevant, if the target audience of a web site is likely to engage with social media. Of course, an analysis to understand the level of social interaction on a web site is required before pursuing a path of social media integration, for content discovery purposes.

4. Promote content based on prior end-user behavior. Amazon, Netflix, and other popular web sites are typical examples of web sites that elevate content to consumers based on their prior behavior. This tactic may be effective, however, a complex algorithm must be developed, which may be prone to defects. Additionally, a web site may not have the volume of content to make "behavior-based" recommendations a worthwhile experience. If the potential number of recommendations are
few, based on a small amount of content, there is great potential to offer repetitive recommendations based on prior end-user behavior.

5. Enable the web site community to decide which content is promoted, and which content is buried. Web sites with a large community, and ones which aggregate content from 3rd party sources, may opt to let their community dictate which content gets promoted or "buried" on the web site. Digg is a perfect example of a web site which empowers its community to promote or bury articles. Thus, content popularity, is what determines which content rises to the top. It is suggested that user-driven content promotion is only employed when end-users are likely to have a high degree of engagement with content, and when a web site's content is updated very frequently.