Content design and how it helps deliver successful digital products at Mastercard was the topic of our recent member conference call. Heading up the Content Design practice at Mastercard's Tech Hub in New York City Melinda Belcher shared her perspectives and made a fitting comparison to the UX space as a part of the conversation.
Her challenge is delivering content at scale and content design is clearly an emerging term that’s resonating with many. Let’s look at how they do it at Mastercard and what you might learn from it.
Read moreIt’s been over a decade since Berlin-based industry analyst Tim Walters famously said:
Content is king. Context is everything
While focusing on delivering good content and blazing-fast websites, buyers of content technology like content management systems or digital experience platforms has witnessed a dizzying level of innovation, new start-ups entering the crowded marketplace, and a neverending list of new terms like headless and JAMstack. It’s been quite far from the consolidation and commoditization predicted by analysts.
Some vendors have focused primarily on improving the authoring experience. To be honest, there’s still plenty of room for improvement in terms of getting content into the system. At the same time, many vendors have focused on the delivery part, making your website fast and accessible. Some with a more technical focus, others more from a marketing perspective.
What few have done, is looking at what I would call the middle ground. The actual composition of the experience. Deciding what content goes where, how the different blocks are placed together, reused and ordered. It’s the key to composing the best digital experience and Croatian digital agency Netgen has taken a stab at making it easier with Layouts - an innovative tool.
Read moreAt the recently held Boye 20 Aarhus conference, four software vendors competed in the 2nd annual Small Feature Award on showing a small feature with big impact.
Congratulation to Aarhus-based Ucommerce who won with an impressively simple approach to making e-commerce better.
Managing categories and changing the category structure can be a complicated process in e-commerce tools. In just about 4 minutes, we saw how easy it can be. The final touch, so to speak, that everything can be done using keyboard shortcuts pulled this contestant ahead of the pack to win the Small Feature Award 2020.
Read moreAnyone can learn a framework like OKRs for example, but to be the best product leader you need more than that. You need the strategic skills to lead without authority, to inspire and to empower.
This quote is from a conversation with Berlin-based product manager Lisa Mo Wagner. She talked about what it really takes to be a true product leader, she shared her take on the role of a product manager, being a part of building something super valuable and much more.
Lisa works as Senior product manager at Berlin-based fintech Finiata, is the organiser of Women In Product - Berlin and is our expert of the month.
Read moreAccessibility has long been the bad conscience of digital leaders, but in recent years it has gained increased attention in modern web development.
The Web has always been intended for everyone, so it's important we can meet the different accessibility needs of all users. Similar to GDPR, new legislation, a desire to avoid lawsuits, and bad press, are driving most organisations to ask for compliance.
In a recent member conference call, Gavin Colborne from Little Forest, shared what it takes to achieve the highest level of compliance - known as triple-A - as a brand.
Read moreChange is hard. Even if the outcome of change is known to be positive, convincing people to use new technology, follow different processes and work together differently is often met with questioning, resistance, and much sighing.
This is understandable because any worthwhile change takes a lot of time and effort, which can mean a lot of money too. Even if investing in change means gaining long-term efficiencies and economies of scale, it can still seem too daunting a prospect to commit to.
This is one of the greatest challenges with content operations - securing buy-in from leadership and getting the organisation committed to long-term change management.
Read moreWhat’s really the value of content? And how do we measure the impact and value of our work on improving the customer experience?
As I’ve previously shared, one of the major issues is that management often does not have an understanding of the value of content. The root cause of this is due to a lack of business schools teaching accounting systems that actually account for customer experience.
What follows is a little bit of history, a little bit of accounting nerdery, and maybe a tangent or two - but I do promise I will get around to explaining how organizations can start to properly account for customer experience and produce incentives around that topic.
Read moreHow do you become an inspirational leader of a UX department? In particular, one that needs to gather existing habits, change some of them, and set a new direction. There are many good leadership books you can read and plenty of management theory, but in these strange and surreal times, we need to observe leaders in practice and learn from how they act and behave.
I recently spoke to Mads Norlyk, Head of UX at Jyske Bank in Silkeborg, Denmark about his role, recent lessons learned, and his experiences keeping the team creative and motivated.
Mads has been 3 years with the bank and was previously Digital Experience Manager at LEGO Education. Earlier he was on the agency side as User Experience Designer at Designit. Mads is our expert of the month.
Read moreUsing a wonderful example of the fictitious software firm Titanic Corp, experienced facilitator and agile coach Aino Corry made it clear in our recent member conference call, that the point of a retrospective is not to blame Peter, but rather to understand the circumstances that led to striking an iceberg and ultimately sinking.
Aino has recently written a book about antipatterns for retrospectives because she seemed to be making the same mistakes over and over. Antipatterns are like patterns, only more informative. With antipatterns you will first see what patterns re-occur in "bad" retrospectives and then you will see how to avoid, or remedy, the situation.
Read moreMore and more solutions are coming in the headless space. It is great to have more options, but you need to understand the pros and cons of each solution to find the best fit.
Ivo Lukac shares his insights and a few recommendations:
consider your overall strategy, where are you going with your project(s)
analyse what kind of architecture you need and research which products fit (unfortunately there is no better way than to try it yourself or find someone insightful you can trust)
try not to reinvent the wheel
Don’t lose your head
Read more“When you are on the customer side, you need to really own the problem and the actual solution. “
This quote stuck with me in my recent conversation with Gurdeep Singh from Danish insurance firm Tryg. He has previously worked for over a decade as a consultant in various roles at Accenture and Genpact and sees himself as an enabler between business and IT.
In late 2017, he moved to the customer side and joined Tryg, where he now is Product Manager, Artificial Intelligence & Robotics. He currently leads the Robotics Center of Excellence, where he spends much time working with his Indian-based team. Gurdeep is our expert of the month.
Read moreWith 3 chatbots in production and one more launched during the height of COVID19 in April, Danish insurance firm Tryg saw a substantial usage increase and also learned a few valuable lessons.
Aiste Hoffbeck is digital front runner at Tryg in Copenhagen and recently joined our member conference call series to share insights on their chatbots.
Read my notes from the call, including some additional perspectives from the Q&A.
Read moreIt seems content management has been dealing with the paradox of opportunity and frustration since the inception of the World Wide Web.
Douglas Adams was right - it is fun for nerds like us. To our credit, we spend a lot of time discussing these problems at length, and actually trying to build products and practices to address them - and in many ways, the underlying technologies and frameworks are vastly more effective to what passed for state of the art only a few years ago.
However, despite these advancements in technologies and methodologies which have made scaling these operations cheaper, faster, and far more capable, it’s clear from the research in the market; over time a similar percentage of organizations still have sub-par customer experience and despite falling prices for tools and services, overall costs for customer experience delivery still remain high.
In this post Mark Demeny from Contentful tries to break these problems down from a wider, strategic view, to a more tactical level.
Read moreThe stories that we tell ourselves drive behavior. The stories help us understand who we are and why we do what we do, but how can you actually get people to change their self story?
In our recent member conference call, Susan Weinschenk joined us from rural Wisconsin for a conversation on the power of self stories to drive behavior. Susan has a Ph.D. in Psychology and in 2013 she published "How To Get People To Do Stuff" where she describes the seven basic drivers of human motivation. Susan focuses on how to use human behavior research to dramatically improve the impact of your products and services.
Read moreData ethics might sound like an esoteric topic, but in our digital world, it’s increasingly something that both individuals and organisations are making a part of their key decisions. Data ethics or perhaps rather lack thereof have already had dramatic impact on the world scene with far reaching implications towards democracy and probably more aspects of our daily lives than we think.
I recently spoke to Copenhagen-based Pernille Tranberg as she talked about data, privacy, digital self defence and what you can actually do as an individual. Pernille is co-founder of the European think-do-tank Dataethics.eu and our expert of the month.
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