Let me walk you through what’s been niggling at my brain.

Uncomfortable with the definition

The Content Strategy Knol says that “content strategy is an emerging field of practice encompassing every aspect of content, including its design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, management, and governance.”

Kristina Halvorson, of Content Strategy for the Web fame, defines content strategy as “the practice of planning for content creation, delivery, and governance.”

We’ve all seen Erin Scime’s diagram of the content lifecycle.

All good stuff. And yes, it all sounds very strategic – well almost. These definitions basically equate content strategy with a process. If your content strategy is good it’s because your process is good. The quality of the content is determined by the quality of execution. But something is missing. It’s not giving me the whole story.

Well-executed, lame content is still lame content

I don’t want to downplay the importance of good execution. We need it. But I would like to see content strategy put more emphasis on creativity. We need to pay more attention to the idea behind the strategy in the first place, what I sometimes call the strategy of content.

I’d like CS professionals (me included) to dedicate more brain-time to the creative uses of content, to creating new kinds of content, to building new kinds of customer experience involving content, to finding new strategic uses for content. If content is king and the customer experience is content, then we have duty to create better, more interesting kinds of content.

So here’s a plea for putting creativity in the driver’s seat of content strategy. As far as I’m concerned, creativity has been absent from content strategy – and I think that this is why I’ve been feeling uncomfortable. (or maybe all those damn vuvuzelas).

By pure coincidence, the day the computer finally arrived I got a call from the regional manager of UPS. We had a long conversation during which he repaired just about all the damage caused by the driver. Thanks to the information I was able to give him, he said he’ll be able to put an end to some problems that have been plaguing deliveries in his area.

Oen key takeaway of the whole experience is that the human connections between Apple and UPS aren’t as fast and seamless as the electronic ones. So while I can see in real time on Apple’s site when my parcel was delivered, Apple’s request for an internal inquiry took weeks to trickle down to the UPS regional manager. There needs to be tighter integration between customer and service provider, IMHO.

Mistakes happen.The true test of of a customer experience is what happens when things go wrong, not when they’re going right.

Full disclosure: neither company gave me any money or other incentives. They just listened to me, took into account my value as a customer, and did their best to reboot the experience. I felt like I had a duty to to finish the story and give a fair account of what happened.

“We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.”

But have Apple’s user experience designers taken a moment to think about UPS drivers?

What’s the link? A Kafkaesque experience that I’m currently trapped in.

Kafka wears brown

It all started a month ago when I ordered a new MacBook Pro, Apple LED display and extended warranty to replace my current aging configuration. A serious chunk of change.

A week or so after Apple debited my card, a UPS driver showed up at my door with two parts of three-box order. After asking the driver where the third box was, and being told he didn’t know, I signed for the two parcels. Or so I thought.

Turns out that the UPS tracking system shows I signed for three boxes. You guessed it. The missing box was the MacBook Pro. Several frantic phone calls and emails later, an inquiry is underway. And it doesn’t look good.

UPS is the sub-standard app

Why, because, according to UPS, I signed for three boxes. This is totally incorrect, but I have no way of proving it because of my signature. Or more exactly: because of a crappy UPS user interface.

I don’t know if the handheld terminal used by UPS drivers is the same around the world, but in France it’s a retro brown slab. When the driver gives it to you for signature all you can see is the signature box in a tiny monochrome window. There’s no recap of the items in the delivery. It doesn’t print out a receipt. It doesn’t show the driver’s name or ID number. To make matters worse, outside of Paris UPS doesn’t operate those heroic brown trucks you see in the ads. Parcels are delivered in leased white vans by guys wearing no ID.

Tail wags dog

After some teething pains, my experience with the customer service people at Apple has been good. But they are, as they freely admit, a bit powerless to resolve the problem. We’re all waiting to see what UPS says – and they have two weeks to say it.

I find this ironic, given Apple’s $231 billion market cap versus UPS’s $65 billion. I expected UPS to roll over like a crêpe and admit their mistake, but instead they’ve holed up inside a fortress of denial. They won’t talk to me, only to the sender. They won’t give me the name of the driver or the local phone number of the warehouse. As part of the inquiry procedure, I guess, someone from UPS called me the other day to ask if I’d received a delivery, but he had the wrong date. I had to give him the tracking number. Nice.

The price of bad UI

Someone is going to end up holding the bag, and there’s a better than even chance that it will be me. If UPS denies responsibility, Apple will have to decide whether to replace the lost MacBook Pro at their expense or tell me I have to buy a new one.

As you might expect, if Apple decides the latter, my opinion of a brand that I much admire will take a serious nosedive. (My opinion of UPS, which I used to admire, is irremediably ruined). The aftertaste will be bitter and long lasting.

I consider myself a better than average Apple customer. I’m loyal. When I moved to France 18 years ago the laptop in my bag was a PowerBook. I’m an evangelist. Besides owning several Macs, I have converted at least three people in my family over to Macs in the past two years. My mom and my father-in-law were next on the list. But now I’m having second thoughts. Phrases like “by the short and curlies” and “over a barrel” have started to pollute my mind. The brand equity Apple has built up with me over the years is being burned off by UPS like an oil rig gas flare.

UPS is Flash

If Apple won’t allow Flash on iPhones because they can’t control the quality of the apps, why does it let bad UPS hardware/customer service/hiring procedures harm the relationships it works so hard to create with its customers? Every company should be asking themselves the same question: are your service providers harming your brand?

My humble suggestion: Apple, please, force UPS to design an iPhone application that lets the buyer/recipient scan and sign for the parcels. Empower me, damn it.

In closing, I’d like to help Mr. Jobs write an open letter to UPS. To help him get started, here’s how I’d re-write the paragraph shown above (my italics):

“We know from painful experience that letting a third party service provider come between the brand and the customer ultimately results in sub-standard customer experience and hinders the enhancement and progress of the brand.”

If you’d like to help my cause, please share this blog post with as many people as you can. Oh, and if UPS is your delivery company, remember to order one item at a time and think twice before signing.

Prototype as if you are right.

Listen as if you are wrong.

Diego Rodriguez

The web has profoundly changed communications, or so goes the common wisdom. And a lot of what used to work doesn’t seem to work anymore. The web is abuzz with talk of conversations, social networks and content. As seductive and cool as all this talk can be, it often leaves me scratching my head.

My friend’s comment led me to ask myself a question: What if the web HASN’T changed communications? What if all it’s done is exacerbate two basic communications issues – I’ll call them the airplane dilemma.

• I have nothing to say: There are some days when there’s nothing to report.  If somebody asks you what’s up, you struggle to find an interesting answer. It’s just business as usual. Nothing good, nothing bad, just boring. If pushed too far, you may start resenting the intrusion, or worse, say something you shouldn’t have.
• I don’t want to listen: Now imagine you’re the person asking the questions. You politely ask “how’s it going?” and the person starts pouring their heart out to you or drowning you in information you don’t understand, don’t need or aren’t ready for.

At one time or another we’ve probably all found ourselves on both sides of the equation. I call it the airplane dilemma because when you take your seat on a flight there’s a good chance that you fit into one of the two categories. It’s rare that you have something interesting to say and sit next to someone who wants to hear it – or that you sit next to someone with something interesting to say that you’re interested in. When you do it’s magic, but it doesn’t happen very often.

From airplanes to websites

Website content faces a similar dilemma.

Nothing to say: The thought of becoming a publisher with an editorial calendar strikes fear into the hearts of most companies (not to mention sound nowhere near as exciting as working on a TV commercial).

Communications and marketing departments still seem to be most comfortable producing “fire and forget” collateral like brochures and producing ad campaigns. Why? Because in both cases it’s easier to say one thing a thousand times than it is to say a thousands different things once, without being repetitive, abrasive or confusing. The model is focused on the end product (printing, media planning) and not in the end result.

Not ready to listen: And what about the customer? Well, finding something interesting to say is only half the journey. Making it interesting for the customer is the other half. In the old days, we’d blame customer apathy on “noise”. The message wasn’t getting through because of all the clutter. But when a customer comes to your web site you’ve go their attention, at least for the first few seconds. If there’s clutter, you put it there.

You can have the funniest joke on the planet, but if you can’t tell it right no one is going to laugh. The same rule applies to web content. Your web content not only has to be of interest, it needs to appear interesting and accessible enough to get the customer to make the effort of listening (yes, listening is work, but more on another time).

One of the corrections presented a real problem. It added a sentence that ended with “…permet de travailler à la façon d’un certain monsieur Jourdain qui faisait de la prose sans le savoir.” It you don’t know already it’s a reference to one of Moliere’s famous plays, “The Bourgeois Gentleman,” in which Sir Jourdain discovers that he has been speaking prose all his life, and didn’t even know it.

And that’s the problem. Not everyone knows who Mr. Jourdain or even Moliere is. Inserting a reference like this is showing off. It doesn’t help comprehension or clarity. It’s an inside joke, a wink between people in the know. To make matters worse, it is more accessible to French speakers (theoretically) than non-French speakers, which is out of place in a multinational corporation, even if it does have French roots.

So I decided to adapt the English to reflect the spirit of the correction, while getting rid of the reference. I also suggested fixing the French version. The client wasn’t too happy with the disappearance of Mister Jordain, and insisted that Monsieur stay in French, which means the sentence is clearer now in English than it is in French. Tant pis…

A couple frantic calls to customer support (my penny) revealed that you can’t consult reservations that include a train ticket and hotel reservation. My reservation was in the system, but I can’t see it.

But instead of telling me this, the error message says the reservation is cancelled.

Just how many phone calls from customers like me are they going to field before they change the 10-word message? Is it a ploy to get me to call their customer service number (do they split the profits with the phone company)? I don’t know. But what I do know is that I’ll think twice before booking a hotel along with my next train ticket.

Everyone has an opinion on whether Apple is handling it correctly or not.

But what I find fascinating is how similar the reports are to the accusations made back in 2005 about  faulty cruise control systems. That year several drivers said that their mild-mannered Renault family sedans mysteriously transformed into uncontrollable cruise missiles. Braking, cutting the ignition, pulling the handbrake wouldn’t stop the car. These problems only seem to have happened in France. And oddly the news reports just faded from view. No headline court case. No class action suit.

Fast forward to 2009. Exploding iPhones are everywhere in the news in France. the government has launched an investigation. So has the European Commission. But why isn’t it happening in other countries. The reports coming out of Britiain and the States mention overheating but not exploding screens.

I’m eager to see how this plays out.

Of course, this isn’t a real story. This kind of thing never happens with print. Now re-read the paragraph, substituting “IT department” for “printer” and “web site” for “brochure,” and you’ll understand why I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about IT departments.

I’ve been working recently on several internal website projects directed at employees and involving content and content strategy. Needless to say I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with corporate IT. I’ve decided that they are the dotted-line rainmaker of any project. I don’t care what anyone says. The best content strategies, the best wireframes,  the best functionalities, the best site structures can all wither and die in seconds when IT utters those fateful worlds: we can’t do that.

And they always do, or at least they always seem to. I fantasize about IT guys saying: “That looks great. It’s about time someone changed the site. Sure, it’s a departure from what we’re used to doing, but times have changed and so have users. We’d be proud to be associated with such a great web site.”

Instead they throw up road blocks and bandy around jargon to scare project sponsors. They explain that they can’t stream video. That they can’t provide a comments function. That they can’t embed objects. That page templates are coded in stone. That the site map can’t be changed. They wield the list of no-nos like a whip, until we relent and agree to scale back the project and our ambitions.

But if you listen closely to the whistling of the whip you can pick out something else. First, you can hear hidden pleas for recognition. Maintaining an IT system is a thankless job to begin with. Why would they gladly accept the hassle of implementing a change, espcially when they weren’t involved in the project from the beginning? Also, you can hear nervous discomfort. Often the IT department sees the intranet as a library, not as a community center. It’s not a noisy gathering place, it’s a quiet repository of information. It’s as if the library’s value lay in the Dewey decimal system, not the ideas contained in the books. When they say “we can’t do that” they’re actually saying “we’re not comfortable doing that and we don’t see why we should.”

So on my next project I’ve made a promise to myself to get IT involved right away (even if they don’t want too). Also, we’re going to stop seeing them as printers — and hopefully they’ll  stop seeing themselves as librarians.

I’ve been working on a big website redesign project that has got me thinking a lot about the the role of words in user interface design. Words are often an afterthought for designers, but they can help simplify an interface.

Case in point, this label that I spotted on a water heater in the men’s room. It’s hard to read but says: si le temoin ne clignote plus contacter votre installateur, which translates roughly to: if the light is no longer blinking contact your installer.

Huh? As far as I’m concerned, blinking is unclear. Like a flashing yellow traffic light, does it mean stop or proceed with extra caution or what? What the photo doesn’t show is the color of the LED: green. So is blinking green better or worse than full green? And will it turn other colors?

If they could only afford one LED, I would have suggested a red one that is default off with a sticker that says: red light=contact your installer.