Feature

posted 19 Dec 2006 in Volume 3 Issue 6

Workshop: Web content management

Why you need to ban ‘users’

The term ‘user’ is virtually meaningless. Killer web content is the product of knowing who your website visitors are and what activity they want to perform on your site.

By Gerry McGovern

Every time I hear the word ‘user’, I shudder a little. I find it one of the ugliest words in the English language. It’s dehumanising. It strips people of personality and humanity. It’s a generic, meaningless word. Calling people ‘users’ is the same as calling them ‘winkniks’ – it carries as much meaning and has as much warmth and personality.

‘User’, you see, is so general that it is meaningless. We use everything. To call people users gives us no sense of focus on what the dominant activity is, or what we need to do to help the person to complete that activity well.

What is the dominant activity on the web? It is reading. Sure, people read differently on the web. They scan-read – they’re highly impatient – but the dominant activity is still reading, whether they are using a search engine, filling in a form, buying a product or getting support.

If you understand and focus on how people read, you are on the right road to designing an effective website. So, call people ‘readers’ and it will help to clarify exactly why they are on your website. Well, there is another good reason. Drugs and the web have some unfortunate vocabulary in common: ‘users’, ‘traffic’ and ‘hits’.

Of course, calling someone a reader is only an intermediate step. We need to become more specific. By calling people readers we are forced to ask some important questions:

What is it they care about reading?
Do we have what they want to read?

We need to do something that is incredibly difficult: we need to put ourselves in the shoes of our most important readers.

Common mistakes

There is one mistake people make that pretty much ensures they will not be able to create killer web content. It is one of the most common mistakes in all writing – and practically everybody who writes has been made aware of it at some stage – and it is this: writing for the ego, not the reader; writing from the organisation’s perspective, not the customer’s. You know about this mistake, as you’ve heard about it many times before. Yet no matter how obvious it is, it is the single biggest thing that destroys killer content.

It is incredibly hard to write for the reader and not for the ego. It means going against millions of years of human behaviour, where survival meant looking out for ourselves and the small group we were associated with. It is still more natural for us to think primarily about ourselves and the organisation to which we belong.

To write killer web content, you must accept three things:

1. Driven by millions of years of conditioning, your customers focus on their own needs and those of their families and loved ones;

2. Making your customers feel special means understanding what they really care about;

3. What they really care about can sometimes be the opposite of what you really care about.

The first and most vital step in creating killer web content is to create a small set of living, breathing readers. People you can think of as you write. People you have empathy for and can care about. People you want to design the best website in the world for. ‘Persona’ is now a popular term for these people, so I’ll refer to them as ‘reader personas’ from now on.

The editor’s skill

If you are in charge of a website – an editor, in other words – you must interact with your reader on a daily or weekly basis. It must excite you to talk to and observe people and find out what they truly care about, because that often involves listening for what they don’t say.

Your web team depends on you for one thing more than any other: to tell them what readers really care about. To do this, you must have developed a fine gut instinct and your finger must always be on the pulse. If you’ve done this, then you will be able to listen to an idea and immediately sense whether it’s a runner or not. You will choose an idea, not because you like it, but because you know your readers will like it.

I want you to imagine you are the managing editor of the website of a large pharmaceutical company, which we’ll call Lagver. It launched its first public website in the mid-1990s – for doctors because that’s who this pharmaceutical company traditionally sold to.

Some years after the launch, the company decided to do some market research. It was shocked by the results. Only about seven per cent of the website visitors were doctors, while 60 per cent of visitors were categorised as ‘patients and caregivers’.

After more research, Lagver found that there was a dominant segment within the patient and caregiver group. Think of a family. If there is someone sick in a family, who is most likely to go on the web to research the illness? The mother – someone like, say, Mary, who is the mother of three children, one of them just an infant.

That’s a big change isn’t it? From writing for doctors to writing for mothers. The problem was that many of the Lagver staff responsible for writing content for the website would rather this research had never been done. They were comfortable writing for doctors; in fact, a number of them were doctors!

Writing for mothers required a significant change of mindset at Lagver. Doctors might have been comfortable with a term such as ‘cardiovascular disease’. However, mothers preferred a plain-English expression like ‘heart disease’.

It’s not just mothers who prefer plain English. According to Overture, a leading seller of web advertising, 8,863 people searched for the term ‘cardiovascular disease’ in May 2005, but 196,173 searched for ‘heart disease’ – 22 times more people used the latter phrase.

What Mary wants

I’d like to introduce you to Mary and her daughter, Jennifer. She has been suffering a lot of teething problems lately – at least that’s what the doctor says they are, but Mary is not so sure. She has two other children and they didn’t cry the way Jennifer does.

I’d also like to introduce you to Tomas, a young and ambitious doctor. Tomas graduated five years ago and belongs to a group of general practice doctors in an affluent and fast-growing town.

Even when presented with the results of the research, most of the writers for Lagver subconsciously think they are writing for Tomas, because in him they see themselves. Tomas is a medical professional like these writers and editors and they really want to tell him how great a medical organisation Lagver is.

Getting the writers to think about, focus on and write for Mary and other mothers like her is going to be an extremely difficult task. We’re talking about a culture change here. This company is not used to writing for mothers, patients and caregivers.

Some within Lagver might legitimately make the point that, just because there are lots of mothers like Mary coming to the website, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the website should have content for them. Lagver, after all, cannot sell directly to mothers.

However, while Lagver does indeed sell drugs and other treatments directly to doctors and pharmacists, it knows that the web has changed the medical landscape. Before the web, patients were much less likely to question their doctors or have their own opinions on the types of medicines they considered suitable. Now, many patients do research on the web first and then suggest things to their doctors. People like Mary are using the web to become much more informed.

So Lagver decides that it is important to have content for people like Mary on its website. What sort of content? Let’s say Mary wants to find out more about babies’ health. She might type the ‘care words’ ‘baby health’ into a search engine. Suppose she gets a set of results that includes links to the following websites:

Her country’s department of health;
A major health insurance company;
A professional journal on children’s health;
Lagver.

Which link is she likely to click on? I have asked this question all over the world and I have hardly ever found anyone who felt that Mary would click on the link to the Lagver website. Trust is a cornerstone of publishing. Once you have identified your reader, one of the first questions that you need to ask is whether they will trust your content.

If I was an editor of the Lagver website, I would need to establish what content Mary would trust me to supply her with. Perhaps Mary won’t see me as a trusted resource for general health information, but will she see me as a source of information on my company’s products? These are fundamental questions and the only way I can begin to answer them is by having a deep understanding of Mary and caregivers like her.

Keep the numbers small

The most important benefit of creating fictional people like Mary and Jennifer is that you externalise the target of the writing process. Mary makes you stop thinking about your needs and the needs of your organisation and helps you to think about what she cares about.

By putting faces on Mary, Jennifer and Tomas, you change your reader from an invisible user into a real human being with real needs. If you are a good writer and editor, you will have empathy with Mary and understand that she is naturally worried about the health of her child. That’s why she’s at your website.

Your readers need to become an integral part of your day-to-day work. You may develop an initial outline of them based on extensive market research and discussion, but they cannot live just in some report. An effective web manager/editor will carry their readers around in their head, constantly thinking about their needs. That way, every time they hear a content idea one of the first questions they will ask themselves will be, ‘Would Mary find this useful?’

You should aim to have three or fewer reader personas (with a maximum of five). If you have more than five, you and your team will find it hard to remember their names, let alone have a deep understanding of how they feel and think. You want to create readers that you can care about – or, at least, understand – because, if you care about them, there is a greater chance that you will know what they care about.

Choosing three well-selected reader personas will almost definitely be sufficient to meet the 80-20 rule. From the human cell to the web, networks tend to obey this rule. It is also known as the Pareto Principle, because it was originally formulated by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who stated that wealth distribution followed a predictable law, with a small percentage of people accumulating most of the wealth.

If you are like the vast majority of organisations – and I include governments, universities and other non-profits here – then the 80-20 rule dictates that a small number of reader personas will help you to achieve most of your objectives.

There is a view that the very strength of the web is that it is a ‘worldwide’ phenomenon and that you can indeed reach everybody and answer every question that anybody might have to ask. This is a dangerous myth. Besides the fact that designing and managing such a website would be hugely expensive and complex, it will simply overload your reader. Remember that when someone comes to your website you are charging them their time and attention. If it takes too long for them to find what they need and/or you lose their attention because you have given them too many choices, they will simply move on.

Dealing with conflicts between readers

Allow me to introduce you to Johan. He is an ambitious young man with a bit of cash to spare. He’s not in the super-rich category. He’s doing okay and doesn’t want to leave his money lying in the bank getting a miserable return. Johan is just the type of investor that Lagver wants to target.

Currently, Lagver’s investor base is nearly all large institutions, but the board would like it to be broader. The investor relations manager has done some research that indicates that the web could be a perfect vehicle to do this. His research indicates that large institutional investors don’t come to the web so much, as they have brokers to supply them with the advice they need. But for individual investors who like to do their own research, the web is perfect.

For you, as an editor of the Lagver website, knowing this is important when preparing content for the investor relations section. You might include a case study about someone just like Johan who invested a sum within his financial range five years ago and show the return he will have enjoyed.

There’s a bit of a problem, though. The needs of Johan and Mary are not the same. In fact, to some degree they are conflicting. Let’s say Lagver had record profits in its previous trading year. What sort of heading are you going to have on the home page?

Unless you’re very lucky, your website will have readers with conflicting needs and outlooks on life. Getting the style and tone just right requires real skill and the only way you’re going to be able to do this is to know your readers inside out.

You don’t need to get into huge detail about the personal lives of your reader personas. Mary, as a mother, sees herself as responsible for the health of her family. What type of movie Mary likes is not that relevant. Johan is an ambitious young professional who has some spare cash. It doesn’t matter what sort of suits he buys or whether he prefers latte to espresso coffee.

So, what does you reader need to have?

A name;
A face;
A place – where they live;
A little history;
Three of four major tasks that they come to the website to complete.

In conclusion, the rule on the web is this: Know your readers and know their key tasks. Have only content that helps them to complete these tasks. Everything else just gets in the way. Focus relentlessly until you discover the find-buy-pay of your website, and then make sure that people can start finding, buying, and paying the second time they arrive.

Gerry McGovern runs a web content management consultancy and is an internationally renowned speaker. He is also author of the recently released book, Killer Web Content, from which this workshop has been extracted. Gerry can be contacted via his website, www.gerrymcgovern.com.

Testing, testing, testing

You must find ways to discover how people respond to your content. Here are some things you should consider:

Make sure you have accurate, consistent data about your website

Many web managers have extremely poor data about website activity. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Make it a number one priority to clean up your data.

Focus on action points on your website

How many people are visiting the home page and then leaving? How many don’t fill in forms? How many new subscribers to your newsletter did you get this month? How many repeat visitors did you have this month, compared to once-only visitors?

Test, test, test

The data will only tell you so much. The best web managers make it part of their daily routine to interact with their customers. As a manager, there is no greater skill you can develop than to have a deep understanding of how your customers think. And there is only one way to develop this understanding: by a consistent interaction with your customers.

Usability-test once a month

Watch people try to complete a task on your website. The first time you do it, you’ll be amazed. Things that seemed so obvious to you may not be so obvious to your customers.

Consider ‘split testing’

With this advanced but very interesting approach, you publish two different versions of a page and use special software to randomly split your audience in half. The pages are the same except for one element – perhaps one uses a different heading from the other. Then you measure which page works best.

Thinking from the gut… of the customer

A group of people were asked to sample five strawberry jams.

These jams had been chosen from a list of 45 strawberry jams that had been ranked by experts for the US Consumer Reports magazine. The five jams used included the highest ranked (1st), 11th, 24th, 32nd and second-to-last ranked (44th).

“Left to their own devices, control subjects formed preferences for strawberry jams that corresponded well to the ratings of trained sensory experts,” study authors, Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler, wrote. “Subjects asked to think about why they liked or disliked the jams brought to mind reasons that did not correspond very well with the experts’ ratings.”

Basically, the more people were asked to explain their choices, the worse their choices became. “By making people think about jams, Wilson and Schooler turned them into ‘jam idiots’,” Malcolm Gladwell writes in his excellent book Blink.

There is an important point to be learnt about web behaviour. On the web, people are impatient and tend to behave instinctively and unconsciously. You will rarely

discover their behaviour by directly interviewing them. You must observe behaviour and seek out techniques that tap into the unconscious thinking of your readers.