Business: Content Development

Picture this: You’ve just signed up a new customer, and they’re excited to get going. Everything seems great on paper—until their questions start rolling in.

“How does this feature work?”

“Why can’t I customize my dashboard?”

“Why won’t this integration connect properly?”

Despite the best efforts of your support agents and Customer Success team, confusion about your product might be too much for your customers. Without proper guidance, they could become frustrated and eventually decide to leave. This scenario is all too common. Over 90% of customers believe that companies could do a better job of onboarding, and a UserPilot survey shows that only 24.5% of users adopt a core feature, while the rest abandon it because they don’t immediately understand how to derive value from it. Read More

If you frequently read UX articles online, I’m sure you’ve noticed the trend to use analogies in describing user experience. In writing about user experience, people have drawn analogies to pizza, yoga, fishing, parenting, riding a bike, home renovation, crossword puzzles, professional wrestling, talk shows, road trips, fitness classes, and ghost hunting?

UX professionals have also written articles describing valuable lessons they’ve learned about user experience from Seth Rogen, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Martha Stewart, Don Draper, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, the Terminator, the Avengers, the Blues Brothers, One Direction, Super Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the Berenstain Bears?

I’m guilty of writing two of those articles myself: “The Ghost Hunter’s Guide to User Research” and “What I Bring to UX from James Bond.” Read More

This is a sample chapter from Ahava Leibtag’s new book, The Digital Crown: Winning at Content on the Web. 2014 Morgan Kaufmann.

Chapter 2: Making the Case for Content

Content drives the sales process. Even if your job title doesn’t include the word sales, you are still trying to achieve something. Content is responsible for getting you there. Think of it as the fuel in an engine. Now, consider what we’ve done in our society to ensure we have enough fuel to power our cars and homes. That’s how important content is to your business.

Not everyone understands this in your organization. But you do. That’s the first step. Now you have to convince the right people that to move the business in the right direction, they need to invest in content: Content production, distribution, and management. How do you do that? Read More