Episode Transcript

Karen:

Hi, this is a Responsive Web Design Podcast, where we interview the people who make responsive designs happen. I’m your host, Karen McGrane.

Ethan:

And I’m your other host, Ethan Marcotte.

Karen:

And this week, we are so excited! We are thrilled to be joined by Noz Urbina. Noz, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Noz:

Thank you very much for having me.

Ethan:

But before we dive in, I’d like to say a few brief words about our sponsor.

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Karen:

So, listeners that are following along may know that we are sometimes occasionally doing one-on-one conversations with people in the field who we think are doing interesting work. Noz is someone I’ve known for quite some time and he focuses on what’s often called omnichannel, which I think has some interesting intersections with responsive web design and some interesting ways in which it’s not responsive web design. So Noz, maybe just to kick us off here, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your background, tell us a little bit about the work that you’re doing.

Noz:

I have a bit of an interesting background, probably, for your listeners. I started my career in structured and semantic content, going back about seventeen years. So, what’s exciting about it is that I have been doing multi-format, multi-channel content for nearly going on twenty years now, whereas a lot of the industry only really kind of got into the idea that there has to be a bigger strategy around channels rather than a per-channel strategy in the last three to five years. So, it’s been great actually because I was in my little corner with my omnichannel geeks and friends for the first decade of my career, and then suddenly everyone got really excited about this topic.

So, I’ve worked in various consultancies mainly focused on large enterprise and B-to-B, because that’s where these kind of multi-format channel and channel issues hit first. I’m still working mainly in B-to-B, but not exclusively. But it still tends to be the larger enterprises—financial services, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, enterprise software, that kind of thing. Things where you’ve got lots of content, lots of audiences, lots of channels, lots of touchpoints, possibly lots of languages, and possibly lots of regulations.

I am a content strategist, and I founded my company to put together solutions for people who want to bring all of that together in a cohesive way for a better customer experience. So, I would say that kind of our mission, as it were, is to help brands have a relationship with customers the way that people can with each other. Right now, if you talk to a brand, quite often the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. If you stop and start a conversation, they may have forgotten who you were in the meantime or what you were talking about. We’re trying to give an organization the memory and the coherence to be able to continue that conversation across all the many ways that a customer may touch them.

Karen:

My people!

Noz:

[laughs]

Karen:

So, I’d be very interested in hearing your definition of omnichannel publishing, and perhaps it’d be really great to have you sort of fold in your point of view on what that means for multi-device publishing. And is responsive design something that should be considered as part of an omnichannel strategy, or does that affect how organizations think about publishing across different channels and devices?

Noz:

So, this has always been interesting for me, especially when you and I have talked, Karen, is that I think because of the nature of our brand, we tend to be brought into the companies who are kind of trying to future-proof themselves. So, responsive design, for me, has always been a total given. It still kind of flips me out that m-dots ever existed or that the idea of having a separate website for each channel or something along those lines… How did that ever occur to anybody as being a good idea? I don’t get it.

So in omnichannel, we are trying to keep one conversation going across all channels, so absolutely responsive design is essential to that because we have a philosophy of de-duplication and removal of redundancy at all aspects. So, that’s code, that’s design, that’s systems. Anywhere we can, we try to consolidate, so we definitely want not only responsive design for multiple devices, but we want to be moving to an omnichannel design library so that designers who are working on responsive design for, let’s say, desktop/mobile/tablet are also working with the people who are going to be doing design—if you’re in a bank and you have ATM screens, or if you’re a retail environment and you have in-store digital kiosks, possibly touch interactive, possibly not; augmented reality, virtual reality… We want to have a cohesive and consistent design language across every single touchpoint.

So, responsive design, that’s your ticket to entry. If you’re not doing responsive design, it’s obvious that a company hasn’t strategized these things at all.

So most of the time, some sort of responsive design will be in there and the practices will be in there before I arrive. When we’re talking omnichannel, we’re looking at saying how can we take those same ideas if fluidity, flexibility, and single-sourcing and apply them to even more channels. Does that make sense?

Karen:

It does. I’m wiping a single tear away. It’s beautiful.

Noz:

[laughs]

Karen:

I’d be interested to hear you talk a little bit about the challenges that organizations face separate from responsive design, but given that they have all of these different places that they need to reach their customer and all of these different places that they need to publish to. Retail is a great context, because you really are starting to think broadly about not just the web, but you’ve got apps and you’ve got screens and you’ve got signage, and you’ve got the interfaces that your customer service reps are using, and the whole retail experience is changing. What does that mean for how organizations need to think about the content that they manage and how they structure and maintain it?

Noz:

I think I can start the answer to that by going back and completing the answer to what you asked me before, because I never addressed a baseline definition of what we mean by omnichannel. I did say something about having a conversation across all channels, but I want to make the distinction between multi-channel and omnichannel. In multi-channel, we have the ability to deliver or publish the same content consistently in multiple formats, on multiple channels. So, if I have my product descriptions, or promo, or brochure, or whatever, that same content can be pushed to, let’s say, print, web, mobile, and app. That’s fine, that’s very important, and again that’s a fundamental, almost a given.

The difference between omnichannel and that is that you are looking at experiences across those channels, so one human being or a couple of human beings participating in a process that will cut across those channels, and how do those channels do hand-offs and interactions with each other so that they’re mutually enhancing. Not so that they are able to duplicate the same experience—although sometimes you do want to be able to have a similar experience on many channels. But when you have the context—so if we take retail, like you just mentioned. You have a customer journey which involves at home online research, taking a mobile device into a retail environment, looking at some product, possibly interacting with a digital interface there that’s provided by the retail environment, and then walking up to a customer service representative or an in-store member of staff and that person will have a device on them which will have their view on the brand’s information.

In that scenario, we’ve got the at home research, which may be touching social; they could be looking at email that you sent them, they could be looking online; they could be looking at one of various devices in their home—desktop, laptop, phone app. Then they bring all of that into the retail environment, then they have the different devices there. And then you’ve got a whole other, what I would call human channel involved, because you’ve got these people in the store who are proxies for content. I think this is often neglected.

When I say omnichannel, I do mean omnichannel. So, human channels are conveying those messages via their training materials, via their digital devices that you’re going to access when you ask them a question, and so on and so on.

So, one of the most important things is to break out of that “How am I formatting per device?” kind of mentality and get into the flesh and blood of customer journeys and say, “How is a human being going to move through accomplishing an objective, and where are they going to touch different channels? And how can we make sure that all the questions that they’re going to have or all the needs that they’re going to have along that journey are properly supported?” That’s the mentality switch, I think, from publishing, which is a word that I don’t—I’m not a big fan of publishing because, for me, publishing is an inside-out kind of thing… Away from publishing to that multi-touchpoint conversation that goes on until that customer journey comes to some sort of resolution. That’s really the big headspace shift that happens when you’re going from multi-channel to omnichannel, and if you have an example like retail, or banking, which is the same kind of thing because you walk into a bank, or many others where you’ve got the physical environment—it’s that shift that you have to make before you can do omnichannel effectively.

Ethan:

Noz, listening to you speak, it’s really kind of fascinating because I’ve been reflecting a little bit on how responsive design in general was a response by a lot of organizations to a kind of channel exhaustion, where they were maintaining separate website experiences for tablet/mobile/desktop and trying to collapse them into one unified experience. As you’re thinking about this broader omnichannel strategy, how do you actually work with teams inside some of these brands to manage it effectively?

Noz:

Oh, wow. Okay, that’s a biggie. Where do I start? One of the first things that we’re doing now is customer journey mapping workshops. So, what we used to go in and do is they would say, “We want a content model. We want an adaptive content model that allows us to do variant delivery on all of our different devices,” and what we’re having is like exactly what you said with the old m-dot kind of philosophy. What was happening is maintaining different content sets meant a massive redundancy of effort and big risk. So, you’re publishing inconsistent messages on different channels. Like, I remember one example was actually from a colleague of mine who was in the industry, he said that he had a client who was offering a price discount on mobile that didn’t exist on the desktop. So, depending on which device you got, you could get a cheaper price. Like, that kind of insanity. That can also happen on all the other channels.

So what we do is rather than just build a content model which de-duplicates just for, let’s say, information integrity, we’re looking at a content model that comes back to supporting customer journeys. What used to happen in the past is they’d say, “We want to optimize our delivery so that these content and integrity issues go away so that we can work less and publish on all of our channels.” I would say fine and I would come in and then we would do an analysis, and we would collapse their various content models on the different channels and we would unify them, and then they could publish the same things on every channel. But eventually I started turning around and going, “Have you really analyzed whether you should be delivering this content, or is this just the content you’ve always been delivering and therefore we’re going to make that more efficient?”

So, I kind of said the “emperor has no clothes,” and started pushing people to do customer journey mapping as their first step and say how do people move across channels, what information do they need at the different stages, kind of regardless of device? What are people asking at these different phases of activity until they get their objective accomplished, and what content will support that? Then we model for that and we build for that, and then we do what we do for a responsive design, we decide where the cut-offs are. Where do we show just titles, just titles and short descriptions, full body, what requires a click, what is brought to the top, what do we surface, what content do we make most prominent depending on how you’re connected and the context you’re in.

So, I would say it’s very similar to what you’re doing in responsive design, it just takes more channels into account. I think you could do responsive design without necessarily having to address customer journeys, but it would just be a bad idea. So, I think that making everything around the customer journey and designing from there outwards, that’s been the thing that really makes omnichannel hang together. Beyond that, I could probably keep talking for another hour. [laughs] There’s so much. There’s review changes, ownership changes, then regulatory and verification with SME changes… There’s all sorts of spin-off effects, so maybe let me know which direction you want me to go down into.

Ethan:

Well, actually, that was a wonderful intro. But there was one other topic that I did want to ask about since you brought it up in your introduction, which was localization. I’m coming at it specifically as a designer who struggles with that on some of his larger projects. I’d be curious to know how that intersects with your work from an omnichannel standpoint, and some of the strategies you use to talk with your clients about it.

Noz:

I would say that localization is something when we’re going format neutral the way we do in omnichannel, and saying we’re creating content for all of the channels, so we’re not trying to necessarily build for any one channel… What that means is it becomes a lot cheaper and simpler to localize, because once you’ve got the content, you translate those assets and then they’re ready for delivery. What it doesn’t help you with is design. So, to be honest, I kind of offload that problem onto people like you and I say, well, we’ve got the content right and we feel it’s good, and we’ve got a content creation process that works across the different regions, and how you balance the fact that different languages will balloon or contract depending on which languages you’re going to and from, and how that works with design, that’s not my real area of expertise. I usually get somebody else in who’s going to make that all work out.

Karen:

What about how the big topic of personalization intersects with some of the work that you do? I would imagine that a lot of organizations, as they’re single-sourcing, that also, at least in my mind, opens up the opportunity to then be able to target more effectively.

Noz:

Absolutely. So, what’s great about single-sourcing and having a unified content model and an adaptive content model is that you can adapt not only based on context or device, you can start to adapt based on the person involved. So, personalization is, for me, the other half of the coin of what I work on now these days, because we have an opportunity, when we have adaptive content, to be very flexible in how it is presented.

So, I’ll give you an example in banking. Right now you could create responsive web widgets. Like, I’m going to create a hero, and that hero content is going to be an overview of this product. I was working with a bank and they’re putting their hero overview stuff in that block, and then they’ve got the rest of the product information. And then there’s going to be related products, related articles and stuff, which are in their little call-to-action blocks lower down. What was happening was that we’re only on one channel here, and we are on a responsive design, but the fact is those widgets have particular non-meaningful names. They’re called “hero,” or “carousel,” or “call-to-action,” and the content is actually embedded directly in them.

So, what we can do with personalization and omnichannel, once we’ve separated the content out and we have said this is a product overview, this is call-to-action, and each thing has a meaningful or semantic name rather than taking the content living in its visual design widget, that gives us the opportunity to put the same content in different designs. So, if I’ve seen an ad on Facebook and I go onto this page, if the ad content was targeted to me because I’m of a certain customer segment, when I get there I might want to see a different piece of information, or it might be better for me to see different pieces of information up in the hero.

So, let’s say I’ve got… you’ve targeted me because I have a premium account, I’m on Facebook, and I see this ad because you know I have a premium account. You send me over to this landing page, and I click from the landing page over to a product page. When I get to that product page, if the old hero stuff was for people who don’t have a premium account, maybe it was trying to get me to buy a premium account, then that doesn’t make sense. So, you’re going to change that hero information for me, and you can do that because that information is not part of the hero and it’s not part of that page, it’s held in the background, and whatever you want can get pushed up into that hero at the top when I land there. Similarly, if there’s call-to-action blocks below, each of those call-to-action blocks can be removed or added based on the fact that you know I have a premium account. So, again, if there was going to be something that didn’t make sense for me lower down, then you’re not going to put that there. Or if there’s something especially interesting for me, you can add that there. And you can do that across devices or apps, because you can track me based on cookies or logins, and optimize what messages I’m seeing where, independently of the pages or the fixed constructs that we used to work in in the pre-omnichannel paradigm.

Karen:

I love everything you’re saying. You’re speaking my language.

Noz:

Good, okay. Because here I would usually be relying on slides. [laughs]

Karen:

Well, this has been such an enjoyable chat. So, before we go, I’d love to ask if you have advice for perhaps organizations, people that are wrestling with some of these omnichannel issues. What would you tell them to do, or how would you tell them to think about the problem?

Noz:

Okay, so I’ll go straight back to customer journey mapping and say that the most effective omnichannel discussions put the customer in the center. Otherwise, you have a bunch of different people who are talking about their particular channels and… Have you heard the fable, I think it’s Asian, the fable of the blind men and the elephant?

Karen:

Indeed, yes.

Noz:

That’s my favorite example for this. So, you’ve got a bunch of people coming in, one blind man is touching the trunk and says, “An elephant is like a snake,” and the other one is touching the tail and going, “An elephant is like a rope.” Another one is touching the leg and going, “The elephant is like a tree.” So, that’s how these conversations often go. We all come in and we all have our channeled interests, and a lot of us are going, “Alright, where’s the bit of this meeting that’s interesting for my channel?” If you do customer journeys, then rather than everyone talking about their needs and wants and goals for their channel, everyone can look at the customer journey and say, “Alright, how are we all working together to support this process of the customer achieving something?” So that’s, I think, step one.

And then from there, you should hive off, and I think this is the same as most major responsive design rollouts—how can you isolate an area where you can try this out? Omnichannel strategies are not something you should leap into, so how can you isolate a journey or an area of content or a product set which is small enough and contained enough where you can test this and get the support of the rest of the organization to do what is really quite a significant change and can require the organization to really invest in changing its tools, its platforms, and its mentalities. So, that’s kind of my opening thing.

One last little detail is that a lot of people are still going to the, “Okay, so we need one CMS” mentality, and all the vendors you will talk to of course will say, “Yes, that’s absolutely what you should do, and that one CMS should be ours.” I’ve kind of gotten past the one CMS thing. I do think that it’s good if you’re doing format neutral content, that that content lives maybe in one system. But there is no organization that I know who has managed to get rid of all of their other management systems. So, the question is can those other systems—I remember you’ve mentioned other tools in the past that had an API where you could pull out the content into your prototype. All those other systems should be able to pull content from your format neutral repository, but it’s about making all the systems be able to talk to each other effectively and understand your content, rather than thinking, “The only way I’m going to do this is by getting one massive CMS to rule them all.” That’s kind of my parting advice.

Ethan:

Well as parting advice goes, Noz, that was wonderful. Seriously, this has been a wonderful chat. I’ve definitely enjoyed listening to you and Karen geek out a little bit about content and omnichannel strategies, and thank you so much for coming on the show.

Noz:

A pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Karen:

Thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of a responsive web design podcast. Thanks also to our sponsor, FreshBooks. Go to FreshBooks.com/RWD and enter RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section for a 30 day free trial.

If your company wants to go responsive but you need help getting started, Ethan and I offer a two-day onsite workshop to help you make it happen. Visit responsivewebdesign.com/workshop to find out more and let us know your company is interested.

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Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back next week.