In the spirit of filter or be flooded (Fast Company) and the Simplicity of Dr. Seuss (a funny must read on the need for content strategy), I’m sharing my draft of “What’s your story? Designing a holistic customer experience” in advance of my talk at the Content Strategy Forum. I’ve crafted something too long to present within my 40 minute time limit. I’m hoping that by sharing it with you in advance, you’ll let me know what you find most interesting, where you think I should cut, what intrigues you the most, or where you think my thinking is flawed.
For those not attending the Content Strategy Forum, I’ll be happy to continue the conversation here or on twitter.
View more presentations from Joyce Hostyn.
Joyce, this woo-woo, Marshall McLuhan, “Mad Men,” postmodernist stuff looks pretty in pictures but I have never found it helpful when trying to help real customers implement a Livelink system. You imply in one of these beautiful slides that Chin Shi Huangdi conquered China and buried himself with thousands of clay statues because he first thought of the memories he wanted to create, then hired a marketing person to tell stores. That simply isn’t true. He wanted to live forever. He wanted power. Power, control, the desire for influence, a yearning to be free: those are the forces that drive history and they drive the design of business systems today. Why can’t Open Text do something simple like deliver a product that adds metadata in fewer than 18 clicks? Sincerely, your follower, Bo Warburton
Hi Bob,
Actually the terracotta warrior statue image was related to a story around visiting the terracotta warriors in China and how the experience was a disappointment because there was no more to it than walking past a hole in the ground where you could see the excavated warriors. One of those cases of the hype not living up to expectations. We took a train to Xi’an and none of the Chinese people we met on the train understood why we were bothering. While the Chinese are avid tourists, they don’t see the warriors as a destination and are surprised that foreign tourists are so keen to visit them. And sure enough, once we got there, it’s the only place in China where the majority of visitors were from other countries. For us, the highlights of Xi’an were actually noodle street and the muslim market.
As for implementing Livelink, I completely agree we’ve got to improve its usability. We’ve been focusing on that for the upcoming release of Content Server 10 and other products in the Suite. The product interface is the most important touchpoint for knowledge workers as people are using it every day and every time they run into an issue that slows them down or frustrates them (such as too many clicks to fill in metadata) it becomes a misery moment.
I’m don’t believe in using promotional stories crafted simply to sell something only to have an unsuspecting customer implement to discover they were tricked (another misery moment). My definition of stories is looser and related to the overall experience crafted by a product, content (such as help, video, best practices, or communities), service, support, and so on.
And I think that it’s just as important, when implementing an ECM system, for IT departments doing the deployment to think about the overall experience, the overall story, they want knowledge workers to experience as ECM requires significant behaviour change.
Joyce
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Joyce. BTW it’s Bo, not Bob. I guess I jumped to conclusions regarding the slide of the terra cotta warriors. BTW again, I speak Chinese and have visited Xi’an twice, once as a college student and another time with my family. In fact, that second time, I was an employee of Open Text (started in PS in 1997) and took a side trip to visit some folks at a university in Beijing who were using a Livelink system courtesy of Siemens. My undergraduate degree (Harvard ’86) was in Folklore & Mythology, so I take stories seriously. On my current project with Encana I wrote the background section of the project charter as if the self-named Document Management Committee were actually an underground movement of agitators. And yet… and yet… the project will be about replacing and improving the Livelink interface. So what you’re hearing in my posts is cheerful skepticism. We’ve been telling and hearing this story about the UI that “it will get better” for so long, and all we get is changing “check out” to “reserve” in the function menu. And then back again. Where’s the Steve Jobs of Open Text?
Hi Bo (sorry for getting your name wrong!),
I think the problem in the B2B space in general has been that features have traditionally been seen as more important than improving what’s been seen as “just the GUI.” The Steve Jobs effect and pressure from people accustomed to much more usable, engaging experiences in the consumer space will start to swing the pendulum as people become less and less willing to put up with clunky interfaces at work. It’s a mindshift to get out of feature/function mindset and focus on the user experience, but one that has to happen.
Joyce