I can’t really answer the question from the more interesting angle – the psychology and expectations of your potential customers – but I can tell you what the data says; the evidence-based approach.

All the data I’ve collected points to multiple pages being better, for a number of reasons:

1. The SEO benefit. The more topic-focused pages you have with unique titles, the better chance you have of attracting organic search traffic. For our upcoming content audit app, Pageradius, I created six small landing pages for SEO-targeted terms.

Creating the small amount of copy for these pages took less than a day, and even if they only bring in one or two extra customers via search, they’ll probably pay for themselves. The greatest proportion of time for this kind of task should be dedicated to keyword research – finding the the keywords that you can effectively compete on and that provide enough volume to be worthwhile. It’s a shameless plug, but I talk about my keyword research process in detail in chapter 23 of my new book, A Practical Guide to Web App Success. You should be able to perform the keyword research and write/edit the copy for five or six pages in two to three days… and it’s “evergreen” content (as we say in the content strategy world) that doesn’t need to be updated very often, so it has low ongoing overhead.

2. If you want to grow your business, running targeted adverts (Google AdWords, Facebook Ads) is a good way to gauge relative interest, prioritize the roll-out (where you focus your attention first) and, of course, attract customers. If you have feature/service-specific landing pages for the keywords you’re targeting (“content audit tools”, “web cms migration”), your ad quality score will go up, and therefore your cost per click will go down. In other words, targeted ads pointing to targeted pages will cost you less than targeted ads pointing at a single generic page. Plus you have better expectation-matching for customers who click through, so a better chance of conversion.

Even if adverts and SEO aren’t your favored approach to attracting customers, they can be extremely valuable for informing your business strategy, e.g. “how much demand is there relatively for each service?”, “how much demand is there relatively in each city?”, “when are our potential customers most active on the web?”

3. Probably the biggest reason: all the data I’ve seen points to people being more likely to contact you if they’ve visited multiple pages on your site. Now obviously there’s a bit of a selection-bias here (by visiting the contact page they’ll of course increase their pages-per-visit by one anyway), but the numbers are convincing. On Contentini we have configured conversions in Google Analytics and can easily prove to ourselves that people who contact us have usually visited one of our specific service pages first.

On another website we run (where conversion tracking is tricky because of technical issues), we use advanced segments to compare ‘average’ visitors to those who visit the ‘contact us’ page. You can easily do this retrospectively, if you don’t already. The data clearly shows that potential customers (those who visit the contact page) spend more time on more pages than the average visitor.

1. Technical challenges, such as how to crawl a website quickly without affecting the site performance, and how to reverse-engineer the structure of a website from on-page links.
2. Interface challenges, such as how to navigate a long list of pages and how to best visually represent the structure.

The optimum solution to many of the issues depends on the size of the website: displaying the structure of a 20 page website requires a different approach to that for a 1,000,000 page website.

What we needed to know, then, was the typical size of an audited website. Our personal experience of audits didn’t provide a large enough sample to extrapolate, so we took to the (virtual) streets to find an answer.

The Facebook Ad. In retrospect the word "amazing" wasn't a great choice. Two tips (this Ad got a 400% better CTR than our other Ad): Put a question in the title, and have a face in the picture

We have a pretty good idea of the type of website that is audited, from our experience, your overwhelming feedback, and the growing list of registered emails that have signed up at the audit tool website. We’re also running a Google AdWord and Facebook Ad, to grow the list of registered emails and get a better idea of the organizations that need it.

We decided to analyze three types of website: local government websites, university websites and enterprise websites. The Google Web Search API was put into use to return the approximate number of indexed pages (i.e. website size) for 100 FTSE company websites, 442 local UK government websites (e.g. city and district councils) and 291 UK university websites.

The data shows that enterprise and university websites typically have thousands of pages (1,000 to 10,000), and over 50% of local government websites have tens of thousands of pages (10,000 to 100,000). Few websites in our sample – less than 1% – had over a million pages.

A second graph was created to in order to find the percentiles, i.e. what percentage of websites have less than 10,000 pages? How many have less than 100,000 pages? We also plotted a second set of data that excludes all websites with less than 1,000 pages, as we don’t consider these smaller sites a valid target market for the app.

The data shows that 90% of the target (1000+ page) websites in our sample have fewer than 90,000 pages. 50% have fewer than 12,500 pages.

This is all useful information for the challenges I mentioned at the start of the post. We now know that we don’t have to worry about crawling or visualizing websites with millions of pages – these are rare in our marketplace, and even though the tool will work with them, we shouldn’t optimize the interface for them. We do need the tool to expect tens of thousands of pages per site, although we can optimize for less than 90,000 pages (90% of our sample/market).

Data is crucial to our decision-making process, so that we can deliver the best possible experience to the greatest number of users. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

I’m currently in the “app zone”, with several streams of web app thoughts racing through my mind. I’m finishing up my web app book, we’ve just launched our iPhone/iPad app Mingle (above), and we’re at the planning stage of our next project, a content audit tool.

Amy has written previously about micro-copy on this blog (1, 2). I wanted to use this post to generalize some of Amy’s thoughts with a high-level look at how website content differs to app content.

Readability vs Legibility

Website content should be easy to read. Your eyes should easily scan through the text and end the article with little effort or eyestrain.

Our eye movement during reading is complicated, skipping through fixation points in sentences and occasionally jumping backwards. Our eyes recognize the shapes of words either side of each point, rather than linearly reading individual letters.

It is therefore often the role of the designer to use typography that maximizes word recognition, by using typefaces that have distinct letterforms (usually serif fonts) and by setting the letter and line spacing to best suit our physiological reading process. The content strategist doesn’t worry about the shapes of word they are using, only their accuracy and ease of comprehension, though they do shape the overall readability through choices in sentence length and paragraph structure.

For app interfaces, where individual words rather than sentences are common in labels and menus, legibility is key. It is again the role of the designer to choose a clear typeface, which is legible at small sizes (usually sans-serif fonts). But it is also the role of the content strategist to ensure that the words exhibit maximum legibility, by choosing words that have distinct shapes and are easy to distinguish from one another. Consider the poorer legibility of a shapeless word such as till, or the difficulty in distinguishing between two menu items of print and paint.

Paragraphs vs Words

Long-form website content has to take account of the reader and the business. It should reflect the brand and style of the organization, often through use of a consistent house style.

Interface text shouldn’t be cute or mangled into on-brand messaging. As action or help text, it has to clearly state purpose as simply as possible.

Flexible space vs Restricted space

With most websites, long-form content can continue down a page as far as it needs to. Content length judgments can be made on readability and purpose.

Interface content is nearly always restricted to small area of the screen. One or two words, limited by length, need to be carefully chosen to convey a specific action.

Read infrequently vs Read frequently

Most website content is designed to be read once or infrequently by each visitor. Articles can be fixed or updated without changes causing confusion to users.

App interface content, on the other hand, is there each time you access the software. With repeated use, research shows that the position of the interface labels (their context to the app) becomes more important than the labels themselves. Whenever Google, Facebook or Microsoft re-design their product layouts, they may be more usable for new people, but existing users need to re-read and re-learn the context of each interface element, hence the inevitable social whining.

Content strategists should work with interface and UX designers to minimize these changes, by considering what future features and updates are likely to appear in the app. With this knowledge, the interface and labels can be designed to minimize changes in position or text.

Not translated vs Translated

Although some websites are translated, the quantity of content prevents many larger sites from translating more than a few key pages.

Apps with limited content are easier to translate, and often have a clear commercial benefit to do so. Even if there are no plans to translate an app in the short term, every content strategist should consider it as a future course of action. Considerations include:

• How can you simplify the content so that it is easier to translate? Can you make it shorter, use less ambiguous terms/metaphors or remove unnecessary punctuation?
• Are you using metaphors or terms that only make sense in a particular country or culture?
• How can you re-use terms and phrases consistently to reduce translation effort?
• Where can you replace words with icons, that don’t need to be translated?

Primary vs Auxiliary

Website content is the main attraction. In apps, content is there to support features and actions, and should never distract the user from their task at hand. A content strategist should aim to remove content from an app wherever possible, though some would argue that the same should be said for website content. Prune aggressively.

—-

This is just a first draft, my first thoughts on how we can start to develop specific strategies for app content. We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

And if you live in San Francisco or New York and haven’t downloaded Mingle for your iPhone yet, get to it!

Content inventories and audits are essential weapons in the content strategist’s eternal fight against purposeless and neglected content. While the process of conducting a manual inventory has value in itself, it is also prone to errors and inconsistencies. We think there must be a better way. We plan to build a tool that significantly expedites and improves the quality and sophistication of content audits.

We’d like your help. If you’ve done a content audit or plan to in the future, please leave a comment below about what you’d like to see in such a tool. In particular:

• Disregarding all technology limitations, if there was a magic content audit tool, what would it do and how would it work?
• If you’re not convinced that an automated tool can add any value to the manual process, why not? What do you learn from a manual inventory and audit that can’t be replicated in an automated magical app?
• What types of website have you audited, and what were the problems that you faced?

Giant Tree in Front of Facebook HQ

On May 1st 2010, Dan and I took the life changing step of leaving our full time jobs in London to set out on a trip around the world. We founded Contentini as a way to formalize the content and user experience focused freelance work we had been doing breathlessly and passionately in our (limited) spare time. Over the past year, Contentini has grown enormously. We have hundreds of subscribers to our blog, have found an inspiring online community and we’ve been run off our feet with consultancy work. Our international roster of clients are spread across the world, including in Australia, Canada, the USA and the UK.

During the past few months, a whole new set of changes have been set in motion and we’re excited to finally be able to share them with you.

Content Strategy at Facebook

As of April 1st 2011, we officially dialed down the amount of travel we’ve been doing. As exhilarating as it has been to see the world, we are both ready to find a place to settle into – an inspiring place with both internet access and a stable power supply (a combination we often found difficult to find in South East Asia). We’ve moved to Vancouver, Canada where we will be until the end of September, when we’ll move to San Francisco indefinitely.

I have accepted a Content Strategy position with Facebook. I started my new job on Monday and for someone like me who is obsessed with the finer details of micro copy and the particulars of content strategy within an interface environment, this is pretty much an opportunity of a life time. I am part of a team of some of the most clever and creative people I’ve ever met, working on exciting content that will impact the experience of millions of users. It’s fantastic and I can already feel my thinking about content strategy, user experience and the web in general growing and expanding.

Upcoming Book and Product Launches

Dan is hard at work on putting the final touches on his forthcoming book, A Practical Guide to Web App Success, which will be published this Autumn by Five Simple Steps. The experience of watching his book take shape and getting an inside view of the Mark Boulton team at work has been wonderful and I’m so excited for the rest of you to read it. Dan is also finally making time to work on a variety of brilliant apps and tools that will be released over the coming months, many of them directed at the content strategy community.

If you haven’t already, check out the Content Strategy Design Patterns Library and the Content Strategy Twitter Trends Tool.

The Future is Big

The result of all this change is that we will no longer be taking on consulting work, at least not in the foreseeable future. We do know lots of talented people though, so if you need a recommendation or an introduction, please get in touch. We will continue to use Contentini as a place to blog about content strategy and user experience, and of course, we’ll  also use it to let you know about our upcoming launches and products. We are also on Twitter: @contentini, @amythibodeau and @zambonini.

We hope you’ll stick around.

Image Credit: Giant tree in front of Facebook HQ, taken by Amy Thibodeau

Content Strategy

• Cor blimey guv’nor, if there wasn’t a load of old bollocks this week. There seem to be more content strategy posts than ever, but most are fluff, mind-numbingly basic or introspective meta-discussions on content strategy.
• LukeW provides the best value this week, with notes from Kristina Halvorson’s presentation at An Event Apart. There’s also a post-presentation interview with Kristina elsewhere.
• Content Strategy on a Shoestring Budget is a set of slides that is really more of a simple introduction to content strategy, with a strange furniture metaphor. The quoted 4 hours for a 300 page website inventory sounds a little optimistic to us, but they get major kudos for putting forward some real numbers. If there’s one thing content strategy needs now, it’s more specifics and fewer What Is Content Strategy posts (and, perhaps, weekly digests).

User Experience

• Would you Adam and Eve it? LukeW delivers for a second time this week with notes from the Crafting the User Experience presentation at An Event Apart.
• UX jumps the shark and appears as the main focus of a BBC news story, told from inside Google.
• Personas: The Foundation of a Great User Experience speaks a lot of sense, but it’s a shame that the self-serving author doesn’t do more to discuss low-cost, lean persona development; his take on ‘low cost’ is “this can be done over the course of three to six months rather inexpensively using a consultant for about $35,000“. We’ve put agile persona development on the list for a future Contentini post.

Cheerio!

Poorly devised, unhelpful content is wasteful. It potentially wastes the time of users and can also have financial implications for the company responsible for it, in this case Apple. Because they were not more thoughtful about their micro copy, they’ve had to correspond with me multiple times, costing them and me money and time. They’ve also left me feeling frustrated and, if at all possible, I will probably look to spend my money elsewhere. Lucky for them, they are one of the only providers of digital MP3 and video content online in my region of the world. Unless you’re Apple, can you afford to alienate customers because of careless copy?

Pop Up Text Should Not Create More Questions Than it Answers

My story begins with a recently discovered passion for the television series Mad Men. We were in Bangkok recently where it was about 40 degrees Celsius every day and I was spending some time watching Season 2 on my laptop in a heavily air conditioned room. I could have downloaded the episodes illegally or easily purchased the entire season for less than a fiver from any number of dodgy DVD vendors down the road, but I genuinely believe that if possible, it’s good to compensate artists for their work.

I bought and watched Season 2 episodes seven, eight and nine. When I went to purchase episode ten it took me through the regular purchase process, asked for my password, confirmed that I wanted to make the purchase, scrolled as though it had begun downloading and then:

As a user this message was jarring because it didn’t give me any helpful information or options. The primary purpose of a pop up should be to assist users by telling them plainly what is wrong and also ideally by giving them a next step to correct the problem. This pop up told me nothing: was the problem with my connection? was the problem with my credit card? was the problem with the episode or the entire series? when would it be resolved? where could I go to find out more? when should I try again?

Expert tip: if your pop up message creates more questions than it answers, you have a problem.

I waited 24 hours and tried again. Same message. 24 hours later I tried again (yes, I realize that there is more to life than Mad Men, kind of). Same message. After 72 hours I decided to email iTunes support to find out why they’d broken up with me. Everything looked normal on the Mad Men Season 2 iTunes page, so what was the problem?

Email Support Should Not Be Scripted, Because it Makes Your Company Look Daft

Apart from some very basic emails such as notifications that you’ve signed up for an account or password reset links, I generally believe that it’s best to avoid pre-scripted written communications if at all possible. Scripts always read and sound like scripts. They don’t feel like interaction and at their worst they can actually further alienate a customer because they often miss the mark.

Apple’s support emails sounded a bit like they were drafted by a robot that had been imprinted with the customer service philosophy that if you repeat the customer’s name over and over again, everything will be alright. Ready for a laugh?

Dear Amylee,

I understand that when you try to purchase “Mad Men Season 2, Episode 10,” you receive a message indicating that it is being temporarily unavailable. I know it could be upsetting when things won’t work the way it should. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Amylee, from time to time, the iTunes Store updates the items in the catalog to ensure the highest possible quality for our customers. It’s possible that “Mad Men Season 2, Episode 10″ is being updated and is therefore temporarily unavailable. Please try again in 72 hours. If you still are unable to purchase it, please let me know.

I hope you continue to enjoy the iTunes Store, and thank you for being an iTunes Store customer. Please do write back for any additional concerns and we would be glad to assist a valued customer like you.

Have a great day!

The email managed to reiterate my problem without providing much information at all, except to tell me that the problem wasn’t with me, but with the item that was being updated. Stupid email, didn’t make me feel great, but fair enough.

I waited a few days and tried to download the episode again only to receive the same pop up. I should mention that at this point, most customers would give up and the company would forfeit the £2 sale, but not me. I’m tenacious.

I emailed Apple again to let them know that the item still wasn’t available. As a content strategist who focuses on micro copy, I thought I would be helpful by saying: “I understand that from time to time the catalogue needs to be updated and that items may be occasionally unavailable, but the thinking behind this message is just impossibly bad. First of all, the message does not give adequate information – is the item unavailable because of my account? Is the item broken? Is there something wrong with my connection? These are all concerns a user has that should be addressed in the message.” Here’s the response:

Hi Amylee,

Thank you for contacting iTunes Store customer support. I understand that you want to download “Mad Men Season 2, Episode 10,” but the item is still unavailable. I apologize for any frustration this issue has caused you.

The item is not available not just on your account but on the iTunes store. The item is not broken as well, it’s just that iTunes Store is currently working toward a resolution of the issue and hopes to have it resolved shortly.

Generally, the television networks provide Apple with the latest episode of each show. Occasionally, there can be a delay.

You can rest assured that Apple is working to make this episode available on the iTunes Store as soon as possible. I am deeply sorry for this Amylee.

Thank you for your patience. Apple appreciates your business and loyalty.

This emails tells me … nothing. It doesn’t let me know when the item will be available, it certainly doesn’t address the usability issue and it basically leaves the responsibility on me as a consumer to check back (with no real time line) over and over again over an infinite time frame to see when the episode will be available.

Then this:

Hi Amylee,

This is [redacted] again, getting back to you. Thank you for writing back and the opportunity to help you today.

As I further investigate. I apologize, but the TV show “Mad Men Season 2, Episode 10,” TV show is not available in the United Kingdom iTunes Store at this time.

Although I cannot comment on future expansion plans of the iTunes Store, you can rest assured that Apple is committed to bringing these types of items to people around the world. I am again sorry about this, Amylee.

Thank you for understanding. Apple is always making sure where giving the best service for our valued customers. Have a great day!

I could post more emails, all equally useless, but we’ve all got important things to do (like watch Mad Men). To sum it up, when I pointed out to her that I’d recently purchased three other episodes on my UK account, she tried to tell me that the three episodes were not episodes but “videos” (what does that even mean?). When I sent her the order number, she responded by telling me that my three Mad Men episodes were actually episodes of 90210. Whaaa? And now Mad Men doesn’t seem to exist on the iTunes store. That pretty much brings us up to speed.

How A Few Simple Content Changes Could Have Made Everything Better

Although a good whinge feels cathartic, I would like this post to offer up some simple solutions. If the iTunes store took their micro copy a little bit more seriously they could have avoided wasting my time, wasting their time and potentially alienating a customer who really likes to buy stuff online.

Suggestion #1: A Customer Should Not Have to Click ‘Buy’ To Find Out an Item is Unavailable to Them

If I am already logged on, presumably iTunes knows my location and should be able to tailor their shop to display information that is relevant to me. In fact, they already do this in a number of ways. Movies and music are often released at different times in North America and the UK and I am always given the option to pre-purchase items using UK release dates. Items that aren’t available to me should either not turn up in my search results or should have a clear label on them that says ‘Not available to UK customers.’

If an item is being virtually restocked or is temporarily unavailable, this should be evident and ideally, there should be a mechanism in place to allow consumers to add it to a watch list so that they can be informed when it becomes available again. Here’s a rough mock up:

Detail of unavailable item:

This solution accomplishes a number of practical goals:

• It frees up a consumer’s time so they can focus on buying things that are available as opposed to wasting time trying to buy what isn’t.
• It sets up a system so the customer will receive a notification once the item is available again for purchase, prompting them to make their purchase and bringing them back to the app.
• It potentially saves time and money because it provides enough information that the customer hopefully won’t need to contact customer support to try and understand the issue.

Suggestion #2: Ensure that the Micro Copy on Pop Up Boxes is Helpful

As mentioned in suggestions #1, consumers should not have to go through the buying process to discover an item is unavailable. In circumstances where it is impossible to give the user this information without making them click the ‘Buy’ button, it is crucial that the text on pop up buttons be helpful. This seems obvious, but the iTunes message would suggest otherwise.

Let’s take a minute to remember what it says:

This doesn’t really tell the consumer anything apart from the obvious: they cannot currently buy the product. It’s almost like saying, “We don’t care about your business.”

There are a million ways that iTunes could improve this. Here is one possibility:

The text in this pop up is still brief, but it accomplishes a number of things:

• It clearly tells me why I am not able to download my episode.
• It apologizes, making me feel like iTunes cares about me as a customer.
• It gives me the opportunity to sign up so that I will find out when the item is available again, prompting me to make a purchase while simultaneously not wasting my time by asking me to check back at some undisclosed time in the future.

Suggestion #3: Email Communication Should Not Involve a Form Letter

With all the money that Apple would save in customer support by simply providing better information to customers from within the app, they might be able to afford to pay real people who have knowledge in customer care to respond to support requests.

Although a real human was obviously behind the emails I received, it was painfully obvious that she was working off of a basic formula email response template, and only adding in small bits of information where it was applicable to my case. This really doesn’t work and only makes an alienated customer sink into an even deeper sense that the company in question doesn’t really care about them or hear their concern.

Generally speaking, email shouldn’t be treated as content but as active communication: fluid, dynamic and personal. If a company doesn’t have the resources to provide real human to human support to its customers, it should feel doubly or even triply compelled to ensure that the micro copy on its website is useful, thoughtful and strategic.

Most of Us Aren’t Apple

Apple exists in an echelon of success that is special. They are one of the most profitable companies in the world and they have a loyal following of fans who automatically adore almost everything that they do. Apple’s specialness ensures that most people are not going to stop using their products because of poor content or user experience. In other words, when it comes to the micro copy on their apps, they believe they can afford to not care, and they are probably right to a certain point. As someone who obsessively uses their products, I am unlikely to stop because of a single crappy experience, but it does impact my perception of their brand and it makes me second guess that famous attention to detail they claim to care so much about.

My point? My company isn’t Apple and chances are, yours isn’t either. We can’t afford to take micro copy for granted because losing a paying customer can have a major impact on our earnings. Details are important and often the small things are easily overlooked in place of the sexier elements of applications and websites.

Your pop up text and the manner in which you communicate the details of your business to consumers is important. The design of the elements of your website or app are important, but what about the words you use within those boxes and buttons? What are you communicating or not communicating and how might those words benefit your brand and your business?

Micro copy matters.

Content Strategy

• Speaking of SXSW, Firehead has put together a great roundup of some of the Content Strategy presentation malarky that went on in Get Your SXSW 2011 Content Strategy Presentations Here!
• Typographer extraordinaire Mark Boulton is publishing a Content Strategy book as part of his Five Simple Steps book series. In A Richer Canvas Boulton talks about how design needs to happen “from the content out, rather than from the canvas in.” Amen my brother! (Full disclosure, Contentini’s Dan has a Five Simple Steps title coming out later in the year called A Practical Guide to Web App Success).
• If You Talked to People – a cute reminder for those of us coming at content strategy from a marketing background.
• 10 European Content Strategists to Watch, begrudgingly because he linked to our post, Content Strategy: When Will it Break Out of Coastal US, while inferring that we’re from the US. It’s okay Janus, we forgive you.

User Experience

• The User Experience and the Psychology of Colour tests common beliefs we hold about what colors mean to users. The results aren’t really surprising – green is associated with success and red with failure – but the post underscores the importance of considering conventions and consistency when making color choices, particularly in an interface environment. It’s important to note that this is a Western-centric post, and that the results don’t necessarily hold true across cultures: check out the graph on Yahoo! Finance China, for example, to see how the roles of red and green are reversed.
• I was kind of reluctant to link to How to Ruin Good User Experience in 20 Simple Steps because I find the design of this site really painful. Google Adverts under your title? So 2009! But once I got past all the stuff competing for my attention, I found this to be a pretty decent read with a load of practical examples of unnecessary functionality that truly can ruin a user’s experience.

Shameless plug: make sure to check out our near real-time Twitter trends tool for more on what people are sharing in the disciplines of Content Strategy, User Experience, Web Strategy and SEO Strategy.

Content Strategy

• Content Talks is the new weekly content strategy podcast hosted by the omnipresent (and possibly omniscient) Kristina Halvorson. If we ever get invited on, we intend to perform Rebecca Black’s Friday a capella with Kristina.
• We really shouldn’t help to promote such obvious link-bait, but The quiet death of journalism at the hand of “content strategy” seems to conflate content strategy with bad content decisions. The repetitive use of quotation marks for “content strategy” and “content strategists” is a little patronizing too.
• A Content Strategy For Audience Engagement (published last year) is a better read.
• Content Strategy: The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need to Create an Incredible Impact Online may be overstating it somewhat (for a start, it concentrates solely on the production phase of the content lifecycle), but an interesting approach nonetheless.
• I wasn’t going to mention Jason Fall’s upcoming social-media focused “webinar” on March 24th, What No One Is Telling You About Your Content Strategy. However, the gamma correction on my MacBook LCD screen makes his profile photo look like a magician’s head floating in space, so that makes it worth linking to.

User Experience

• We’ve only just discovered the excellent Rosenfeld Media UX Zeitgeist, which dynamically lists popular UX articles and books. We’d like to think that our UX Twitter Trends tool inspired it, except that the Rosenfeld app was built about three years ago.
• If any single company has influenced the Contentini approach to persona and scenario design, it’s Cooper, so we were delighted to see their beautiful January article Passive magic, design of delightful experience get some attention this week.
• I have an irrational hatred for Smashing Magazine, mainly because they seem to constantly publish intelligent articles that distract me. Damn them and their well-earned success. Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed.
• The same goes fo UX Booth with their Using Lies in Research article.
• Google Analytics Unveils A New User Experience examines the fairly substantial upcoming UX changes to the app.

That’s it for this week.

Figure A: The results of a drunken flamboyant slug race across a sheet of graph paper

Regular readers may have guessed from recent posts that I have a Twitter obsession. Let me tell you why: for the first time, Twitter has endowed us with the ability to query and analyze conversations, opinions and proclamations. In real-time. For free.

I don’t feel like we’ve fully grasped this yet. People all over the world are talking to one another, and we have the capability to filter, aggregate and rummage through this data, without the damaging bias that is introduced when people know that you’re analyzing their thoughts.

How could we use this awesome resource as content strategists? Here’s one idea to get you started.

The above graph was constructed from two weeks of San Francisco tweets. It shows how the use of certain words changes throughout the day, adjusted to take account of the typical daily rise and fall of tweet volume.

There is a clear peak in use of the word “today” at 8am-9am, and again at 1pm, possibly reflecting on the morning’s achievements and grievances. “Work” appears to be a constant worry throughout the day. Thoughts of “tonight” and “tomorrow” gradually increase from 8am, with the former peaking at 7pm-8pm, and the latter at 10pm-11pm. “Yesterday” is the least mentioned, and is given slightly more thought from 8am to around 2pm, dropping just as talk of tomorrow ramps up.

Interesting stuff, but perhaps not particularly practical to content strategy.

The point is that we can easily conduct similar analysis for the audience of a website. What do they talk about? When do they talk about it? Who do they talk about it with? What kind of language do they use?

The data can inform website nomenclature that is better suited to the audience, and is more likely to surface against their search engine queries. Content can be published at times that slot into their schedule. Trends and opinions can constantly influence the subject-matter of content production, not necessarily reactively, but at least as part of a proactive ongoing assessment.

We’ve become accustomed to the traditional – albeit valuable – methods of market research, user interviews, persona construction, user scenarios and focus groups. All these techniques take snapshots of an audience that is more in-flux than ever. Twitter gives us a tool to progressively monitor and adapt our audience models, at low cost. Even without the powerful nuances of user interviews (e.g. the all important “Why did you say/do that?“), we can at least use the data to detect shifts in audience behaviour that can trigger a manual re-assessment of who we’re dealing with and what they need from us.

It’s just an initial idea, and as usual, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Ah, but actually, you don’t have to tell us. We’ll spy on your Twitter reactions instead.