Practical Content/UX Application with Jared Spool

At the end of January, a few colleagues and I attended Jared Spool’s - Delightful Content Means Business in Denver. Spool’s lecture, while not game changing, provided a tremendous amount of insight and practical application. The resounding theme to the lecture? If your users can’t get the content they want, your business model fails. Supporting his claim, he provided a wealth of high-profile case studies, excellent methods on getting to the best solution and most importantly the five priorities every biz executive cares about when approached with your content/design solution. Somehow he aptly managed to explain these ideas through an episode of South Park where underwear stealing gnomes were trying to turn a profit without a business plan. Needless to say, the evening proved to be delightful all on its own.

The standout piece for us seemed to be the 5 strategic priorities, as we consistently try to balance user and business goals. They are as follows:

This makes so much sense. Not only does it make sense for a for-profit world, but how can we turn these principles into a guide that suits our clients that operate in a non-profit world? How can we use this guide as a way to measure our value to our projects? Actually, it’s pretty simple. For our smaller, membership based non-profit clients, this could turn into: 

  1. Increase New Donations
  2. Decrease Operating Costs
  3. Increase New Membership
  4. Retain/Add Value to Existing Membership
  5. Increase Visibility/Support

By making sure that our process for content/ux/design/development transparently adheres to supporting these priorities from the get-go, we can effectively make sure both user and business goals are balanced properly. A solid process can help support the creation of great content and as an added bonus, this allows both sides of the table to start speaking the same language from the beginning. An effective roadmap that should guide us through the project at every turn. 

Simple, practical application… so refreshing! I can’t wait to start modeling these goals to fit the various types of clients we serve. 

Content Design User Experience

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