Notes and news, insights and inspiration from the autonomous collective mind of GS.

Posts in Content Strategy

Content Wants to be Mobile!

Jeffrey Schrab by on March 11, 2013

Here's a follow-up from an article I wrote last year, Content Wants to be Available! Karen McGrane gave a talk at Philadelphia ACM SIGCHI group on mobile content. Of course, she nailed it. Ignore at your own peril – 2014 is the year that mobile overtakes the desktop in terms of WWW audience.

The distillation of the distillation:

  1. Technology disruption happens quickly and usually occurs from the low end.
  2. ”... there are shockingly huge groups of people for whom the mobile Internet IS the Internet …”
  3. ”... stop thinking about ... web content as a thing that has a one-to-one relationship to a web page ... be free to think of ... content as a fluid that can be poured into many different forms: web pages, RESTful services, native applications, or some form we haven’t even dreamed up yet …”

Here are a few of my own thoughts on 1 and 2. It’s been pointed out that in the past, owning a home computer is something that wasn’t an affordable possibility for the economically disadvantaged. But a smartphone IS something that is at the edge of affordability today. This means that there is a whole class of up-and-coming netizens for which their first experience with the Internet (and possibility personal computing in general) is happening in a mobile form. This is a group of people that has known nothing else prior.

For a HUGE percentage of future Internet users, their first Internet experience will be a mobile one.

This applies to developing countries/cultures, as well. Charles Stross, author and prognosticator of the future, recently pointed out that countries that are making the leap to develop infrastructure (electricity, trains, roads, telecommunications) will start with the latest-greatest technologies and go up from there. Again, this is another audience that never had experience with the Internet – but their first experience will be mobile.

The takeaways here are:

For a HUGE percentage of future Internet users, their first Internet experience will be a mobile one.

Categories: 
Content Strategy
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1

Content Wants to be Available!

Jeffrey Schrab by on June 8, 2012

For any product manufacturer, exposure of content so that it’s accessible by way of a service – not just a Web page – won’t merely be necessary but expected.

At GS Design, we’re often called upon to share our views on future trends. A current request to do just that led me down the path of asking myself the question: What’s in the future for making Website content available?

I believe the near-future goal will be to provide site content not just as pages but as a service that can generate structured data that’s usable for a wide variety of purposes, not just Web page generation.

Examples:

  • A Website could expose its product details/specifications via a data service. External consumers, such as aftermarket dealers, could re-purpose Website product content in a style of their choosing. Because this data is not a copy of the product data but an actual up-to-date stream of data from a corporate Website, a single point of content control can exist across a wide variety of sites.
  • Exposure of product content by way of a service wouldn’t be isolated to just Websites. Reuse of site content in non-Web platforms – such as natively coded applications for mobile devices – should be made possible.
  • “Search Engines” are the past, “Knowledge Navigators” are the future. Knowledge Navigators, like Apple’s voice-directed “Siri” service, will become more prevalent. But in order for this to work, content needs to be exposed in a semantically rich way. We strongly believe that in the future, Apple (and other vendors) will provide APIs that allow anyone to expose knowledge sources. Content exposed as a service will make this possible.
  • Television is about to change. It might be Apple that will do it. It might be Google. Or it might be Microsoft. It doesn’t matter. “Channels” are going away and “apps” will be how you access rich “channel” video. No longer will information-enhanced television content be restricted to bottom-of-the-screen tickers and crawlers. While watching any sports event, you can ask: Who’s that rider/driver/athlete right there? What team are they with? And what parts do they have on that motorcycle/car/bike? Furthermore, how television content is being requested is expanding. It used to be that a thumb-flick on the remote was the only way of making a content request with a television. Even today, there are more ways than that. Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect can direct television content requests with the wave of a hand in the air. By using Apple’s Airplay technology, an iOS device can direct a television content request by touch. Availablity of content and the variety of methods to access content will surely continue to expand.

For any product manufacturer, exposure of content so that it’s accessible by way of a service – not just a Web page – won’t merely be necessary but expected. People will be disappointed if they can’t ask questions and get instant gratification of receiving the knowledge they’re looking for at that moment.

To talk about “Website visitors” will be an outdated concept. The content available from a Web source will have its tendrils extend much farther than a corporate Website.

Categories: 
Content Strategy, Technology
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The Museum That Roars

by Scott Kurtz on May 31, 2012

QUICK – What do you picture when you hear the words, “motorcycle museum”?

Do you think of a dusty warehouse somewhere with a bunch of bikes lined up like dominoes, just waiting for someone like Pee Wee Herman or perhaps an actual 7-year-old to tip one over and start a slow-motion chain reaction?

Or do you picture a gorgeous riverfront campus and a beautiful world-class facility – featuring interesting, informative, and interactive exhibits – that rivals some of the most famous museums in the world?

H-D Museum

If you’re not familiar with the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, you might tend toward the former image. And that’s too bad. Because if you’ve ever seen it for yourself … well, you know what I’m talkin’ about!

Closing that “perception gap” was one of the challenges put in front of GS Design when we were asked to build a new Website for the Harley-Davidson Museum. The old one just didn’t quite convey what a magnificent place the Museum is. It didn’t give site visitors a good sense of the depth and richness of Harley-Davidson history; the overall quality of the Museum visitor experience; or how much the facility has to offer in terms of group tours, special activities, event venues, and more.

I like to think we met that challenge very well – and then some. The new site is beautiful, easy to navigate, and looks great on tablets. The quality of the imagery we had access to helped make sure of that. 

We also incorporated modern best-practice programming to ensure the site was as flexible, efficient, and easy to maintain as possible. Everything from minimal http requests to the use of Web fonts throughout the site was designed to keep the tech low-weight and the pages quick to load.

The reactions to the Website, like the H-D brand itself, have been legendary. I think our client Lucy Burke, H-D Museum’s eMarketing project manager, put it best:

“The new site is a work of art. What a great source of pride to be able to showcase our Museum in such a dramatic, artful, and functional way. The new site expands the Museum visitor experience to riders and non-riders, and serves as an enticing gateway to accessing and experiencing the H-D brand and the H-D Museum campus experience.”

But don’t take my – or Lucy’s – word for it. Check it out at h-d.com/museum. While you’re there, be sure to check out the “Visit” section … so you can plan your trip to the H-D Museum. And see for yourself why GS Design feels so honored to be associated with this amazing place.

Categories: 
Content Strategy, Design, Development, GS, Site Launch
Tags: 
Harley-Davidson Museum, Site Launch
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3

Content Versus Container

Jeffrey Schrab by on June 30, 2011

Content Strategy.  For web communications, it's on the forefront of the mind of every industry professional these days.  Or it should be. As an industry we've been focusing on the container not the content for years now.  To be fair, it's only recently that the technology developed to a point where we didn't have to work so hard to coax code and graphic design to do what we wanted it to do and could think of concentrating on other things. Like the reason we make websites in the first place. Content Strategy reminds us that we've been putting the cart before the horse for quite some time now.  And as an industry we are waking up to that fact and making changes to the very production process of web communications.  Recently I read an interview with Karen McGrange, an upcoming speaker at the Do It With Drupal conference.  Karen is a Content Strategist at Bond Art + Science. In this interview while discussing the importance of content, she nailed it:

I think so much of web design and development is approached as just that: design and development. What does it look like and feel like? What are the technologies we'll use? How will we code this? There's been this third leg of the stool, the content, that we've never really talked about, or we've treated as somebody else's problem. We say, "Oh, that's the client's problem!" or, "We're going to come in, and we'll do a redesign and put in a CMS, and that will solve everyone's web problems!"

One commenter of the above article extended what Karen had to say by saying:

Content is rarely the focus of web redesigns and this often leads to massive budgets being used to create incredibly attractive "containers" (and of late, attractive and 'responsive' containers).

Really good stuff.  Everyone must read this. (via Kristina Halvorson)

Categories: 
Content Strategy, Design, Development
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