Content, Data and Humans

Content, data and humans Randall Snare & Elizabeth McGuane

Randall Snare @randallsnare Elizabeth McGuane @emcguane Mappedblog.com @mappedblog iqcontent.com @iqcontent

A thought experiment let’s take the ocean . . .

Image from all-freeware.com Imagine if you were tasked with listing everything that’s in the ocean. How would you start?

Whales Image by Daren Stones, flickr.com/photos/photojour/ Listing by animal?

Jellyfish Image by St. Grundy, flickr.com/photos/stgrundy/

Sharks Image by Ken Bondy, flickr.com/photos/kenbondy/

Starfish Image from Phlog That, phlogthat.wordpress.com/

The beach Image by Elizabeth McGuane By human interaction?

Ships Image by Amberd Design Studio, AmberdDesign.com

Submarines Image from 3DM3.com

Mermaids Image from donaldsweblog.com By myth?

Coral reef Image by only_point_five, flickr.com/photos/eclogite/ By things that are disappearing?

Icebergs Image from Ice Stories, icestories.exploratorium.edu

Fishermen Image from Wilderness Classroom, wildernessclassroom.com

Pirates Image from pirates.sakraft.com

Seagulls Image from Ben, flickr.com/photos/visbeek/

There are a lot of things in the ocean

What stories can we create with all of those things?

Moby Dick Image from filmschoolrejects.com

Titanic

The Hunt for Red October

The Birds

The Little Mermaid

Fishing industry Image from lib.noaa.gov

Gulf oil spill

David Attenborough David Attenborough: the greatest nature storyteller of all time.

Disparate data can create an infinite amount of stories. You get to decide what story you want to tell

Do products ever sell themselves?

Sell by telling a story

Which comes first? How much we want an iPhone?

Which comes first? Or the way Apple sells it?

How our client sold A little bit... unsexy

And it wasn’t working Snapshot taken 1 month prior to iPhone launch

But this was the easy sell It’s an iPhone

Not really that easy

What the (historical) data said • We had always lost people moving from the brochureware to the online store - the start of sales funnels • From the data, we were able to make certain deductions

People don’t like to be corralled

People don’t like to be corralled We were making them choose what type of customer they were before they could even see a phone

Users hate this, the system demands it

When you can’t redesign the system • Do a magical redesign? • Write content that makes people buy?

But content isn’t fairy dust We had to consider structure, usability and psychology, based on the available data And we had to make every word count

So we collaborated • UX analyst • Content strategist • Analytics expert

The process

Shape content for the user, not the system

Give people more

The proof

The hard sell: Broadband

What was wrong In 6 months since product launch, only 12% of visitors (22,000) successfully moved beyond the broadband landing page Of those 22,000, only 1597 converted

Lots of red = bad

We had to be careful with words We had complicated products sold based on data transmitted (3MB, 7MB) per second We also weren’t allowed to say it was ‘fast’ - or we’d face legal smackdown

What we had

Fussy, unusable detail

What we looked at Referring sites

What we looked at Learning curve: People who don’t know Vodafone sells broadband

Page exits: 36%

Obstacle: People couldn’t get past this page

External search terms

Internal search

Poor organic SEO

So we had a lot to worry about • Are we using the right keywords? • Is the content too jargon- laden? • Can people tell the difference between the plans at a glance?

What we did

Clean, clear & up-front

Don’t make people hunt for the next step

The results

With no outside campaigns or ads, we saw a 100% increase in sales

Gather a body of evidence Then apply human expertise to your content issues

Health insurance The policy? Or the person?

Our mission: Design a funnel so people buy health insurance policies online.

Our data: Only about 1% of site’s users buy online 78% dropped out between step 1 and step 2

Our data: This site had 7 separate purchase funnels

Our data: Conversion rates were highest at evenings and weekends Highest rate at 9 pm

Our data: Lots of pogosticking Users can’t compare plans, must go back and forth

Our data: 66% of the people who buy their health insurance online are between 20 and 39 years old

Our data: 53% of the search terms are about specific medical or health like ‘swine information Site search terms categories flu’ or 6% 2%1% 2% ‘pregnancy’ 14% 53% 23%

Our data: Mutual fund The paradox of choice, company via Barry Schwartz example: “for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down by 2%. You offer 50 funds, 10% fewer employees participate than if you only offer 5. Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

What did we do? 1. Divided the content by persona, rather than by health plan 2. Wrote explanatory text 3. Designed the information for ease of comparison

1. Divided the content by persona, rather than by health plan Why? 53% of the search terms are about specific medical or healthSite search terms categories information 14% 6% 2%1% 2% 53% 23%

What did that look like?

2. Wrote explanatory text Why? Only about 1% of site’s users buy online

3. Designed the information for ease of comparison Why? High refresh rate

Design is a balance of data (both analytics and content) Data requires interpretation, which is a human endeavor. You can decide what to use from analytics data, and what to showcase from content data.

How analytics can inform your strategy The Mapped story . . .

We have a blog

Our strategy is selfish

We write what we like We went to see a movie . . .

And we wrote a sequel set in Ireland. This is how we write what we like.

We have a tiny following, but it’s people we respect in the content strategy and UX industry.

A response, a statement A new kind of post, that Elizabeth wrote in response to some conversation in the content strategy realm.

This was our most read post yet.

Who do you want to be? We adjusted our strategy a bit. We still write what we like, but we respond to what’s going on around us, like a newspaper (not this one).

The numbers game: misinterpreted analytics

Quality versus Quantity It doesn’t matter the numbers of your followers, it matters who they are. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t want a lot of readers, but it should mean that you care who those readers are.

No Q Yes Q We don’t need to cater to ‘fairytale slide template,’ but we should to someone searching for ‘bullet points on how to end a story’ because we write about stuff like that. We don’t provide fairy tale templates and we never will.

“hilarious bullet points” My favorite search term (and we totally provided hilarity)

Analytics is about language What’s important is what’s behind the numbers, which is a person, their behaviors, their motivations and the language they are using and reading.

Questions? Randall Snare: randall.snare@iqcontent.com Elizabeth McGuane emcguane@gmail.com

http://mappedblog.com	180
http://danielsouza.tumblr.com	99
http://onwhitespace.wordpress.com	47
http://mppd.me	8
http://contentstrategy.posterous.com	3
http://mappedblog.wordpress.com	1
http://www.danielsouza.tumblr.com	1

Content, Data and Humans

by randallsnare

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

7 Embeds 339

Statistics