Sunday July 30, 2006 / 2 Comments

Lately I’ve wondered if what passes for a basic company web site couldn’t be dramatically improved. I think this little musing started when, after writing about my frustration with the Geniant web site, I began asking myself “what kind of public (content) site could I be passionate about?” That question, paired with some other ideas I’ve been mulling over, led to some interesting possibilities…

A ‘Web2.0’ content site?
First off, how could a simple content site benefit from richer interactions. Specifically, how could some of the richer ‘Web2.0’ interactions benefiting applications also (when combined with what we know about cognition and emotion) raise the bar for the humble content site?

I think of it this way: What the submit button at the bottom of a forms page is to rich interactions (like Google maps or delicious), hyperlinked content pages are to… what? What does a web2.0 content site look like?

One off the cuff idea… (solely for illustration purposes!)
You’ve seen this page from amazon.com, right? What if traditional navigation for a professional services company was replaced by a series of sliders, where you could adjust the content based on things like tone of voice, interest in facts or stories or abstractions, and industry-specific content. Think of it as the ability to ‘tailor a message around your interest and preferred style of interaction’. Isn’t this what we do in social situations?

Creating Passionate Users
Second, consider some of Kathy Sierra’s comments around creating passionate users, namely… “how do we make the visitor the hero of the story?” In face to face sales calls we figure out a person’s priorities and how to make them look good—how can we do this online? The gaming industry has refined this idea again and again through multiple levels, rewards, and ever increasing challenges. With a website, what is the ‘prize’ someone is seeking in your content? What are the ‘things’ they can collect along the way? Of course narrative experiences are different for different people, which would introduce consistency issues, but is that really such a problem?

Creating flow
On a similar note, instead of religiously trying to dumb down a site, why not make a web site just challenging enough to be interesting but easy enough so as not to be boring. This is a central idea of creating flow), which has recently made its way into application development why not content site development?

Telling a good story
I’ve been reading Annette Simmons’ The Story Factor which describes the value of stories to inspire, influence, and persuade. Isn’t that the purpose of a corporate site for a services company (or any sales medium for that matter) to inspire, influence, and persuade? How could we draw people in through a site using narration or finely crafted stories?

What happens to content after it has been published?
Thomas Vander Wal has made some great comments about content use and reuse, commenting that people live within the real world and that information found online is often carried over into real world contexts. Take for example the contact information or directions found online—people typically print these directions or paste them into a mapping application; why not design for this activity? Things like vCards or Live Clipboard are early examples of this type of thinking.

Beyond adherence to microformats or other standards, how are we structuring content for reuse? Are we considering what happens to content after it is published on the web site? And how could we present content in such a way as to facilitate (or even suggest) reuse?

Emotional interfaces
Imagine interfaces designed not only for knowing and doing, but for feeling as well; interfaces that adapt to people based on personality, history, activity – whatever variable you define. In his presentation Emotion, Arousal, Attention and Flow: Chaining Emotional States to Improve Human-Computer Interaction, Trevor Van Gorp presents two (functionally) identical mobile phone interfaces, styled differently to represent dominant versus submissive personality traits. This is true of product designs (contrast the Dodge Ram with the VW Beetle), but how about changing the desired emotion state to accomplish a particular objective? What if things like style switching, language, and other subjective qualities of an interface changed based on usage?

Random encounters…
I’ve seen other elements of what I think I’m imagining, like seamlessly integrating video interviews with employees, or this web site with a save feature. This last addition makes sense considering many visitors to a site are only interested in specific pages offered by a company, and to that end they collect bookmarks or print out the relevant pages. Imagine being able to collect, organize and save a set of pages—case studies, service descriptions, selected leadership bios—creating a ‘personalized’ version of some company’s web site matched to your specific needs.

Hasn’t Flash done all this before?
Yes and No. There’s a parade of really great flash sites that offer rich interactive experiences, but there is a vital difference between these and what I’m imagining (aside from the fact that content is typically an afterthought!). These kinds of interactive experiences—usually created by ad agencies—are strategically designed to create a brand impression. Impressions are best created by appealing to emotions, for which motion, sound, visuals, narrative, exploration—entertainment—are all far more effective than dry text. This is why Burger King’s ‘Subserviant Chicken’ was a success—not because it did or didn’t sell more chicken sandwiches, but because it (along with other similar ideas) contributes to longer term organic growth by positioning BK for a new generation of buyers.

More to the point, checkout Tazo tea. I love this little site. As far as written content goes, it doesn’t allow for cutting and pasting, printing, searching, crawling, or forwarding of content—all things you could do with any XHTML page. But, while it is lacking as a content site, it is quite successful at creating an overall brand impression.

Or for a less extreme example, checkout Emerald Nuts It’s a great little site promoting, well, Emerald Nuts. I’ll stop there. Who goes to this site for any written content? But, the impression left by the interaction and animation is more important than any content being served up. This is entertainment that successfully shapes our impression of the product brand.

In these instances, the immersive experience is more important than the content. For more on how these ‘immersive experiences’ differ from content sites or applications, check out George Olsen’s expanded version of Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience as well as this model from Challis Hodge.

So what am I describing?
What I am trying to imagine is a (service-oriented) company site where the content is served up in a richer, more emotional way, without content taking a backseat to the experience.

Ready for some homework…? Take any professional services company, with less than 50 pages on their website. How could the site be improved by applying any of the ideas described above? Looking for an extra challenge…?

• How could AllRecipes.com provide recipes in a more emotional way?

• How could the ADA web site offer more personalized interactions?

• How could Engadget be more engaging?

• How could a conference site be altered using any of the ideas listed above?

One last thought…
Another interesting facet to all this is that the boundary between content site and application starts to blur. Boiled down to their essential functions, most web based applications simply offer different ways to interact with different kinds of information. Search engines, photo sites, spreadsheets, online banking, eCommerce, social bookmarking—these are all about information retrieval. And the ability to display, sort or filter that information in a way that is personally relevant. So why treat ‘static content’ sites any differently? Written content is just a different type of information. And the interface is a great way to serve up information in a more dynamic way than is available with ink on paper.

Recently, while working with an E&P company on a reporting application, I encountered a curious situation. Their one line ‘summary reports’ had become very dense with 15 lines of ‘summary’ information, due to the fact that one report had to provide information to multiple audiences, each focused on a different piece of information. While a compact, dense report like this makes sense in the physical world, in a virtual environment, each audience could benefit from a summary report that only serves up information relevant to their interests. Instead of scanning a report looking for specific information, make the information come to individuals as needed, based on set criteria. This is the unique advantage of an interactive medium. It is a shift from ‘let me find it’ to ‘bring it to me when and if I need to know’.

As an information architect, I talk a lot about what people want to know (content) and what they want to do (tasks). If we begin to treat content web sites like applications, the question changes from what do people want to know (a focus on content) to how do people find out information, and how can we tailor that information per individual. This goes beyond hyperlinked paths to information and into more exploratory territory. It’s a subtle distinction, but one that changes the interface from a hyperlinked textbook to a dynamic and shifting interaction.

So…
There you go. It’s a random buffet of thoughts, I know. But I wanted to share (and capture) some ideas I had for how a future version of the Geniant.com site could take shape… We’ll see.