CFS - Our Offerings: User Experience

User Experience - Strategy

Multi-channel Strategy
Moving to multiple channels means taking a fresh look at communications. Do you want to inform, call to action, or cross-sell? How can you co-ordinate everything across channels? A multi-channel strategy lets you focus the right messages on the right channels. Our methodology helps you research and define what your customers need to know, when they need to know it, and how you will deliver it.

Multi-channel Strategy analyzes, designs, and develops holistic experiences that meet the target audiences' expectations when they engage with a company's products, services and information. By effectively differentiating the user experience across all points of interaction, companies can increase their overall customer satisfaction and realize improvements in the areas of customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty.

Multi-channel Strategy Approach

Visioning workshop to engage key stakeholders and ensure alignment
Client stakeholder interviews to understand business objectives
Competitive and comparative analysis to assess the current marketplace, and understand where it may go next
Persona and scenario development to understand the users' beliefs, emotions, motivations, needs, wants, and behaviours
Vision and strategy document to propose the roadmap and next steps

Content Strategy
At the inception of the Internet, technology was the focus of most online efforts. Today, users are demanding that content takes precedence. They go to the web to find information. It's critical that it's well-written, well-designed, succinct and easy to find. In order to understand the needs and wants of users, more and more organizations are turning to user-centered design techniques to assist them in crafting highly effective content that speaks directly to their users whether it's copy, images or multimedia.

Organizations are now embarking on sophisticated content strategy endeavours. And they're going back to their users regularly to check whether they're hitting the mark. Our content strategy team's comprehensive approach provides this analysis of clients' content assets and content development processes that result in a strategy for the ongoing creation of content that meets the needs of the business, the brand, and the customer experience.

The User Experience Content Strategy Team has helped many organizations with their content needs. Our approach is recognized as one of the most comprehensive in the industry specializing in online content. Some organizations have chosen to work with our team on the full suite of content strategy services, while others have chosen to carry out some components in-house while relying on our Content Strategy Team to provide enhanced expertise in the following services:

Reader or User Identification
The characteristics of readers or users affect the type of content you provide and the format in which you present it. This service uncovers information on segmentation, target audiences, user needs and wants gathered through:

Research based on existing data from the organization
Interviews with key user groups and stakeholders
Observation of users using your site
Journaling of users while using your site
Surveys on your existing site
Reviews of competing sites

Personas and Scenarios
Leveraging the user or reader identification outcomes, the Content Strategy Team creates a detailed persona or profile of target user characteristics and preferences for features, functions and content. User personas are essential to developing an understanding of how a variety of people with diverse agendas and motivators will interact with your site. These motivators and behaviours form the basis needed to create user scenarios.

User scenarios explore and communicate the likely actions of users when interacting with the site. With the users' needs in mind, the design team can optimize the interface to create a more engaging, usable application, while the content developers can ensure the information is exactly what the user needs.

Content Inventory
To understand what exists on the current site, the Content Strategy team creates an inventory itemizing the browser title, page title, content description and url. The inventory measures the magnitude of the site, and is a basis for any new information architecture redesign efforts.

Content Assessment
Using the inventory as a base, the Content Strategy team views the site item by item and provides recommendations on what content should stay, what can go, the quality of the content, how it addresses or does not address target user needs, and other criteria the customer may want examined. Assessment findings are generally divided into four evaluation categories:

Branding: How well the site complies with existing branding guidelines and provides support for brand attributes and user personas
Page Layout: How well is the content organized on the page including structure, calls to action and formatting
Editorial: How well the writing style, grammar, readability support the user experience
Content Gaps: How relevant the existing content is to the users, and is there any other content that they would expect to see on the site

Assessments can also include competitive assessment criteria, analysis of the content by target persona, and other criteria particular to the client's products or services.

Content Requirements
The Content Strategy Team recommends changes and rewrites based on findings from the assessment as well as identifying any gaps that emerge.

Web Editorial Guide
The Content Strategy Team develops Web Editorial Guides to help customers maintain their content over time. The Guide provides a set of standards to assist content developers in writing content that is appropriate and consistent across the web channel with a consistent voice and tone.

Impact of Content Strategy
What is the impact of skipping content strategy in your design or redesign effort?

You'll build your site, and no one will come because your content is not search engine optimized
You'll build your site, and key stakeholders will decide their messages aren't conveyed properly
You'll build your site, and frustrated users will flood the call centre
You'll build your site, and visits will drop off dramatically after the first few weeks while users go to the competitor
You'll build your site, and nothing will change about your business
You'll build your site and you'll get negative media coverage

To find out more about how the CFS User Experience Multi-channel and Content Strategy team can help your organization create a positive customer experience, contact Karen Yarmol-Franko .