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Editorial Web Woes: Achieving Success through Differentiated UX

May 18th, 2011

Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Internet Strategy, Marketing, Social Networking, Usability, User Experience Design, User Research

Last week, our Director of Information Architecture Kelley McDonald delivered the keynote address at the American Press Institute’s “Designing the Digital User Experience” seminar.  I had the privilege to attend, hearing not only from our own Kelley, but from editorial playmakers from around the globe, including the Chairman of Folio Holdings Group, the Nigerian conglomerate attempting to build the largest media channel in Africa.  The overall sentiment in the room was clear from the outset:  publishers are in the fight of their lives, wrestling with an online space they don’t fully understand, while grappling with slashed budgets, staff, and uncertain guidelines for monetization. The two questions on everyone’s mind were the same: How do we attract visitors and keep their attention? And then how do we make money?

Kelley was invited as the expert in user experience which, he says, “Is no longer a choice, but a means of survival.”  He urged the publishing industry as a whole to redefine its business model from one of information publishers to one of service providers.  With news now published continually throughout the day, editorial websites have transitioned from single-day publications to living, breathing entities that utilize multiple paths for communication. With the innumerable ways people can access information, online news is no longer just about the content, but about the experience of viewing that content.  Kelley referenced Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb to help attendees ask the strategic queries fundamental to all organizations:  Is what you’re offering useful? If it’s not useful, who cares it’s usable?  Does it serve a purpose? You need to focus on fulfilling real needs.   Is it desirable? An aesthetically pleasing site can differentiate a brand and make it memorable. Is it accessible and optimized for search?  You can’t use what you can’t find.  Is it credible and trustworthy enough to leverage brand attributes? Is it sustainable and capable of evolving? Is the content targeted/tailored to an audience?  Creating real value is the only effective way to differentiate content and, ultimately, succeed in the digital space.

The more difficult question on the tip of everyone’s tongue was, “How do I monetize my content?”  Kelley didn’t have the hard and true answer because, honestly, no one really does right now.  Whether or not you can charge for content relies on many factors, and even the experts keep changing their minds.  Just look at the NYTimes: rescinded their pay wall in 2007, only to reinstate again this past March.  The fact of the matter is that it costs about as much to build a website with a bad user experience as it does to build a website with a great user experience.  The differentiating factor, however, is the exponentially larger value of a great UX over a bad UX.  So, the question really becomes: which UX are customers willing to pay for?  Kelley’s tactical advice centered on online advertising.  The goal in the web 2.0 World is to as seamlessly as possible integrate advertising with content and discontinue the use of “banal banner ads,” which people are proven to avoid.  Spreading advertising throughout your site makes it possible to tailor those ads to your content, ensuring they are more likely to be viewed by the right people. 

One of the major advantages (and potential challenges) of the online space is the ability to enable social interactions.  Facilitating conversations and supporting sharing is an effective way to encourage community participation and loyalty.  Several attendees cited the socially optimized sections of their sites as popular, successful areas where users upload images to supplement those in a news story.  Kelley pointed to NavigationArts’ work with Richmond.com to illustrate the benefits of being socially optimized beyond facebook and twitter.  Through geo-localization and community blogging, Richmond.com is actively engaging users.  Content creation, manipulation, and sharing all contribute to a site ecosystem that draws much of its value from the readers themselves.  For a more detailed look at our work with Richmond.com, check out the case study.      

Towards the end of the discussion one attendee asked, “What can we offer to differentiate ourselves?”  Kelley answered him with another question “Well, think about where there are unmet needs.  What data are you sitting on that you can extract value from?”  There are vast repositories of data out there that are publicly available, such as state employee salaries, police records, etc, which are especially interesting to local publications. The challenge in presenting that data is the user experience surrounding it.  Kelley said, “It’s not about forcing visitors to be interested in content you deem worthy.  It’s about extracting value from that currently static content and delivering it in a way that makes it more accessible, navigable, and exciting for your readers.  You have state employee salary information?  Turn it into an interactive mapping tool.  Turn the words and numbers into active pieces of information, and suddenly what was once a one-way path of communication has become a dialogue.”

Kelley expressed his admiration for the publishing industry’s ability to stand up digital products in very short periods of time. This rare quality can be a great asset, allowing for experimentation and quick reaction time.  One such example of this is a project NavigationArts did with The Charlotte Observer, creating a satellite social site which was very successful for 2 years and increased community participation.  Staff then rolled the social site into the Charlotte Observer website, synthesizing that social participation back into their main site.  Read more about our Charlotte Observer work in the case study.

While many organizations are paralyzed by the uncertainty of trying to monetize this new publishing world,  Kelley’s advice was to concentrate on a differentiated user experience,  achieved through identifying unmet user needs,  extracting value from data, and serving it up in a digestible way.  By thinking like a service provider and individualizing your site through the values you provide online, increased user demand will in turn drive opportunities for revenue.