Energy.gov conceptual homepage design

What is it like to have free reign to redesign a government website? I found out when HUGE was commissioned to help the US Department of Energy redesign Energy.gov and in the process, rethink what a government website should look like and be about.

In true HUGE style, we wanted to go big and bold. And this wasn’t only for visual design. We had to rethink how a massive governmental body would need to shift in mindset to be able to publish content to both niche and general audiences. In the end, I worked closely with the User Experience Lead and Creative Director to come up with a vision that truly interwove design, brand and content together. It was a superb and critical collaboration and a case study in itself for how content strategy plays an important role in upfront digital strategy.

Task:

Our task was two-fold. Our initial research lead us to create two target audiences. Target one was massive change in terms of government sites. Our core mission was to speak directly to everyday American citizens. Citizens needed to know what their government was up to, how they could make a difference in their own homes and communities and be informed and proud of the innovation that was going on in DOE sponsored labs and congressional initiatives. Exposing this activity and innovation was also a way for us to inspire the next generation of energy science and emerging energy technology thinkers and doers.

We also wanted to create a game changer for government content. To do this, we isolated local content from national content. There were a number of content types that could be served to individuals based on their zip code: rebates, tax incentives, news and specific maps & data infographics. By chunking out this content when a user enters their zip code, we were able to serve them the most relevant content for them to immediately get context of how the Department of Energy is working for them and also encourage them to act quickly.

On the other end of the spectrum, we knew we had to design for an audience of specialists, technicians and individuals involved in energy policy on the hill. The challenge here was that this content, which currently lived within the numerous offices and departments within the larger DOE appealed only to these niche constituencies and was not well contextualized or translated for the general public.

Content Strategy Solution:

Content Strategy Roadmap and Vision: A redesign meant a new plan for how to position the department as a new brand and how to communicate this story in the general public’s language. This strategy outlined exactly what content types would be in the new site, where they would be situated, how the infographic data would be aggregated and how the organization would need to position a centralized publishing body with set roles to pull this new site off.

Taxonomy:  The scope of new topics that the DOE would be covering needed to be comprehensive enough to cover what the department does, but also account for terms that they would be covering in the future. Mainly, this meant creating a taxonomy that centered on public facing topic areas. The completed taxonomy served as a topical universe in which the central publishing body used as a guide in creating and maintaining news articles, maps & data and topic pages.

Information Architecture: We knew that we needed to craft a site that could cater and grow into serving a core audience of the general public, yet allow individual offices to speak directly to subject matter experts as appropriate. The result ended up being a site map that positioned public facing content (news, blog, interactive maps and infographics) as a separate area reserved for departmental pages and their specific audiences. We also created a defined set of flexible templates; some in which both the central publishing team and individual department publishers could share, and others that were designated for one group only. Doing this created a limitations of control in which the individual departments would be creating pages that were only living within the architecture of their individual section and the larger information architecture would be preserved.

Publishing Guidelines: We knew that the central publishing body would not be creating every single page on the site. Therefore, we created a handbook for each of the numerous department content producers to consult in order to ensure they were creating on-brand and on-topic pages. This was used as a user’s manual for training new content producers as well as a “content style guide” to maintain quality over time and give guidance around when to use certain templates as mediums for communication in the right places.

Learnings:

This project largely succeeded because of two key reasons. Firstly, the Department of Energy was ready and willing to take risks in defining what the new standard of government websites should be. Secondly, the Department positioned a central publishing and governance body to oversee and evangelize the new designs within the organization, larger government and piquing the interest of the general public through social media channels. Cammie Croft was at the helm of this project – straight from a previously proven track record at Whitehouse.gov. By the time we came on board, she had organized the central publishing body and started a blog and social media initiatives that were proving to be solid two-way conversations between the government and general public. We also worked well and closely with her team to create content structure and editorial voice going forward. I cannot express how much that these two aspects needed to be in place in order for an organization of this magnitude to pull off a dramatic change in the way they speak to and provide information to specific audiences at appropriate places on the site.

Given the momentum and support we had (through our immediate DOE stakeholders and up the chain to Secretary Chu and President Obama) to freely create the next generation of governmental sites, I think we succeeded. It’s exciting to think that we took a step forward in creating templates and architecture that allow government offices to publish content specific to their niche audiences as well as created a platform in which the overarching story translated and contextualized the niche stories. It’s exciting to know that we were part of opening conversation and increasing transparency into an otherwise relatively mysterious government body.

I was honored to be a part of Steve’s research and included in chapter 13 of Curation Nation, dedicated to content strategy. Over the past two and half years or so, the discipline of content strategy has risen dramatically. As a user experience professional and former librarian/museum professional, I was initially drawn to it due to it’s focus on the creation and maintenance of meaningful web content.

I’m thrilled that Steve included myself, Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic and Jeff MacIntyre of Predicate as representatives of how content strategy is the avenue in which businesses assign professionals to collect, sift and contextualize content for their target audiences.

As I mentioned in my article “The Content Strategist as Digital Curator” in A list Apart in December 2009, no one of course epitomizes the curation strategy more than Arianna Huffington. The first time I heard Huffington speak was at a special evening talk sponsored by the (if my memory serves me correctly) New York University school of journalism. I remember sitting with future journalists, editors and publishers – eager to hear what tactics Huffington had to share. This was some time around 2008 and of course since then a lot has shifted in regards to how digital news model needs to evolve. However, the thing that still sticks with me (and presumably Steve Rosenbaum as he dedicates a sub-chapter to this) is the emergence and importance of link economy.

Up until the Huffington Post launched, we thought of our digital domains as simple ecosystems. Simple ecoystems included your immediate family – main website, mobile site, campaign sites and maybe an intranet. In this post HuffPost world, content owners and businesses need to manage complex ecosystems. In this scenario, you have your simple ecosystem (your immediate family) and the extended family who is pointing to you: social sites, mega-aggregator sites, and brand partnerships. The complex ecosystem is the link economy.  In my own practice, I work with my clients to make sure they are not only focusing on the simple ecosystem, but also planning for the larger ecosystem in maximizing the link economy.

Curation is definitely something that is here today and isn’t going anywhere. I think the buzzword has certainly reached it’s peak – and greatly summarized as the zeitgeist it is in Rosenbaum’s book. I’m looking to a future in which the digital curator maintains an important role in cutting through the digital clutter, but skeptical that merely anyone can call themselves one. Rosenbaum concludes that “we are all curators.”  I see this happening in off-line forms as well: curator of clothing, accessories and food items (Brooklyn has really picked up on this)! Perhaps it’s the former art historian in me coming out, but I like to think of the talent of curating  like writing itself. Technically we all know how to write – but it takes a special talent to be able to string words together into a prose that moves us. And it takes yet another talent to be able to create a layer of context to simplify, interpret and add color.

In the future, I think the future of digital curating may evolve two parties (similar to how the relationship of the museum director and museum curator exists): 1. the strategist defines the digital ecosystem and long-term plan and 2. the curator who is actively growing the content well and harvesting that which is created by his/her team and generated by the community. I see the role of the curator becoming more of a specialist who spends their time searching through the sea of goods to become a purveyor of content goods and tastemaker for the target audience. This curatorial lead may then influence and help other staffers within the organization understand what makes valuable content for the brand and then enlist them in creating and maintaining content based on this criteria.

With it comes a power-packed crew of content strategists and technologists ready to talk the future of smart, targeted and user-benefitting mobile content experiences.

Look for mobile industry-defining talks from:

• Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic on the extension of mobile
• Jeff MacIntyre of Predicate LLC and Scott Merkle of Auto Trader on mobile for car shoppers
• Colleen Jones on taking advantage of the mobile moment (hint: now!)
• Margot Bloomstein of Appropriate Inc. on mobile-specific messaging
• Scott Abel on mobile content delivery

I’m excited to be speaking with fellow HUGEr Jessica L’Esperance. Jess has been developing mobile experiences as part of larger content ecosystems for some of our biggest clients at HUGE. She’s also teaching a class on mobile interface design and will be bringing some juicy insights and details of her approach.

Our conversation, titled “It Takes Two to Make a Thing Go Right: A Content Strategist and Designer Talk Mobile” will be an investigation of the mobile design process from two perspectives. In our experiences, the two disciplines are indivisible and interdependent in the design of mobile products.

Registration is open and happening now. Do it.

I want this to be the first show ever that gets more viewers on the Web than what it got on terrestrial television.   -Ashton Kutcher

Is it possible we can be inspired by this guy's digital strategy? Image Courtesy Scrape TV

Earlier this year, Ashton Kutcher’s show “The Beautiful Life” was cancelled by the network CW. As a result, Kutcher proclaimed the above statement and headed for the hills of You Tube to create a special channel for the show. The result was pretty intriguing. Although the viewership didn’t quite top the initial broadcast episode, the show ultimately attracted a cult following that should have turned some heads.

Similarly, the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon writing crew has (intended strategically or not) devised a show that is easily sliced and diced into catchy, viral segments. Instead of putting all bets on the entire show getting a watch, breaking up into funny clips (the biggest success story as of late being “History of Rap” duet with Justin Timberlake) encourages social sharing and ups the chance that the brand will benefit from increased visibility in non-network channels.

Online TV is becoming increasingly fragmented in the way that it’s digested. Whether it’s Hulu, DVR, Netflix, Amazon or bought through iTunes, it needs a plan for which channels it’s distributed, which parts and (here’s the strategy part) – why.

In my latest post for HUGE’s Notes on Digital, I explore how TV network execs can learn a thing or two from Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and Ashton Kutcher. There’s a good lesson that it seems some executives are tuning into. After I posted, someone brought my attention to comments by NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker who stressed that digital TV demands a different approach. According to Zucker,  ”Broadcast networks will have schedules for next few years, but in an on-demand world, content matters more than schedules.”

Huh!

Read the full Notes on Digital post

A typical generic slideshow. Courtesy: HUGE

In my experience, slideshows are often one of the first content types to gain “required” status by business owners – so much so they have become as ubiquitous and necessary as the article template. And – since they have been proven to be key in increasing page views (and advertising dollars), online editors and content producers have used this functionality to both positive and negative effects.

Core to the format is of course, storytelling. On the positive side, there exists compelling photojournalistic essays. On the negative side, there have been sightings of jam-packed slideshows including entire recipes within the text field of the slideshow.

In Notes on Digital (published by HUGE), I investigate good and bad cases of slideshow and how to consider whether or not you’re maximizing the functionality or limiting the content that sits within.

Read the full article here

For a while now, I’ve wanted to quit Twitter. Reluctant from the very beginning, I only became a joiner so that I could keep up on what my professional colleagues were talking about.

But even with that, I quickly became overwhelmed with the amount of content published that didn’t support my original “educational” goals. It became hard to say it was worth weeding through the clutter of daily reportings and thoughts on the world for the nuggets of news flashes and thoughts on interactive design or content strategy.

Enter Jimmy Fallon. Before corporate brands, celebrities were the first brands to use Twitter to increase their loyalty and increase presence across channels. Why Jimmy Fallon is important is not simply his activity on @jimmyfallon. It’s the interaction between broadcast and digital that just makes sense. This isn’t the first time broadcast has tried this cross-promotion. Shows constantly push Twitter streams at end of shows or between segments. See @cbsnews, @theofficenbc, @lost. But in most cases, these are just streams of updates or news.

Here’s the thing about Jimmy Fallon and the whole social media thing: it’s not that Fallon’s old-fogey late night competition doesn’t “get” Twitter – that is irrelevant. What is so amazing to me is the result in which his Twitter outreach has enabled for free content for his segments and has successfully created user-generated content for TV.

One segment of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Fallon uses his Twitter account to ask users/fans to answer a thematic hashtag. For example, his team will create hashtags such as #myparentsareweird or #thereshouldbealaw.

It’s so simple, but it works. By creating a dialogue that extends between broadcast and Twitter, Fallon moves back and forth between being Jimmy Fallon the late night star (with the status of late night greats) and Jimmy Fallon your college bud (on Twitter). Whether or not he reads the responses before he says them on air isn’t important – because it feels like he is hanging out with you reading them off a shared computer screen cracking up with you and your friends.

Thinking more on the broadcast/digital connection, the fact that Fallon stated on this episode of  The View that he doesn’t care about his super late timeslot because his generation watches him on DVR and other channels like Hulu anyway. Jimmy, you are right – and the next time I have a conversation about cross-channel promotion and strategy with my clients I will push for redefinition of key success metrics that figure in and reward this cross-channel activity.

Sure these all are baby steps, but for now I’m going to to stick around to see where this goes. Thanks Jimmy.

Even Steve Rosenbaum thinks so — so much he wrote about it for Fast Company. Read it on Huff Post.

About this time last year, 18 content strategists converged at the IA Summit to talk about all things content – so it was amazing to see that in only one year, a content strategy conference would sell out.

Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic tracked this momentum in her keynote via search traffic using content strategy terms and a light-hearted comparison of content strategy work to the waste clean-up work of Pixar’s Wall-E. Rahel Anne Bailie of Intentional Design also keynoted, speaking to the importance of the content lifecycle and its four quadrants. According to Bailie, the first phase is the analytical phase and without this, the following three tactical phase would be like wandering without a map.

Some other amazing speakers came out for the event as well:

• Jeff MacIntyre of Predicate LLC who spoke on the importance of editorial strategies as well as hosted a panel on the growing practice of content strategy in Europe.
  
• Rachel Lovinger (Razorfish) showed her stuff on semantic content
• Colleen Jones of Content Science spoke on the importance of content analysis
  
• Jonathan Kahn of Together London said it right when he boldly stated that UXers get distracted with features and functionality
  
• Claire O’Brien of CDA (London) proclaimed that metrics moved ahead of content and now it’s time to put 2 and 2 together
  
• Sylvie Dumaul of Duke Razorfish spoke on the state of content strategy in Europe
• Sara Cancilla of Facebook showed how even user-generated content needs a good content strategy
  
• Ken Yau spoke of the largest content strategy elephant in the room: localisation/internationalisation of content. It became very clear over the course of the event that this is a growing need that content strategy needs to find a solution for.

Full presentations can be found on Slideshare under Content Strategy Forum 2010. And if you want to indulge in the long story of content strategy refugees in Paris due to the volcano, check out #csforum10 on Twitter.

This presentation was given at the Content Strategy Forum 2010 sponsored and organized by STC France. This (sold out!) event was a mass convergence of 200 content strategist and content-minded people from over 18 countries.

Presentation Synopsis:

In the 1990’s, the term “shovelware” was a way of describing how print businesses ported their content to the internet without any re-editing, reformatting or real thinking about which content type would be the best medium for their message. Today, our industry has devised standards around “webifying” content so it is useful and meaningful for the screen environment.

Now that content has a home beyond the desktop, mobile content is in danger of becoming the next form of “shovelware.” With mobile, we aren’t thinking strategically — and the biggest risk for this is subsequently assuming insanely short timelines without carving out a dedicated discovery phase time to engage in mobile-specific user and device research to create effective mobile content strategies.

This presentation puts more definition around mobile content and show you how to communicate the need for a mobile content strategy— To add a practical spin on the theoretical, I share new research findings on mobile content and provide some insight on how to achieve a higher return on your mobile content investments. More on this conference..

These thoughts were originally published in  Issue 297 on A List Apart, December 8, 2009

The term “curate” is the interactive world’s new buzzword. During content creation and governance discussions, client pitches and creative brainstorms, I’ve watched this word gain traction at almost warp speed. As a transplant from museums and libraries into interactive media, I can’t help but ask what is it about this word that deserves redefinition for the web?

Curation has a distinguished history in cultural institutions. In galleries and museums, curators use judgment and a refined sense of style to select and arrange art to create a narrative, evoke a response, and communicate a message. As the digital landscape becomes increasingly complex, and as businesses become ever more comfortable using the web to bring their product and audience closer, the techniques and principles of museum curatorship can inform how we create online experiences—particularly when we approach content.

Read the whole article on A List Apart or feel free to discuss here!

Way back on November 9, 2009 I attended Louis Rosenfeld’s workshop in Washington DC on site search analytics. As part of a book release Search Analytics: Conversations With Your Customers, co-authored by Marko Hurst (who recently presented at HUGE) this workshop proposed a practical strategy and  useful tips and tricks for getting your site to perform better, be smarter and be more contextual to your users needs.

I’m looking forward to the release of the book for additional insight, but here’s what I took away in a nutshell from the day:

Data Gets You Hot – Remember the game “hot-cold” from the playground? You’re getting closer; no you’re not – you’re ice cold! In the context of web, data from your analytics software or search logs is like a cheatsheet to this game. Search analytics gives you the confidence and justification to drive your content program in a focused, backed-up way. It gives you the foundation to make content for what your users are looking for – or tells you when you are “hot” or “cold.”

A Site Search Analytics Strategy is like an Archaeological Adventure – Wading through the remains of the past in search for valuable golden trails of information is the art that resides between hard data reporting and user experiencing guestimating (of what users want). Within this data, you have a window into the lives of your community – you can live in their shoes through exposed seasonal keyword trends and see what time they search for certain things. You can reconstruct (through design, architecture, linking and metadata) the paths through which they would typically flow (or want to flow); serving those who are yet to come.

Data Makes the Subjective Substantial – Interpreting search records to inform content decisions gives you footing to make smarter content decisions. Have a creative editorial vision? In addition to (or maybe in lieu of) spending time and money on fancy focus groups, take a look at your search data to see if you can identify clusters of terms and/or untapped topics. But this can’t be done by a computer. Believe it or not, humans are still smarter than computers – and the absence of a human interpretation means a loss of true meaning. Allocating human resources to your data analysis offers you interpretation of context and identification of subtle relationships between items in your site.

The Middle Torso is the Wild West – These are Louis’s own words and what he means is paying attention to the middle torso of the long-tail curve. More specifically, according to him “the middle torso is where the new wave of terms appear and where short head terms go to die.” When you graph your data, you’ll get a group of keywords that are used most frequently and most often.  This short head (at the front of the curve) is the most stable aspect of what your users are looking for. The rest is a fall towards a long-tail of unique phrases that are generally too specific for content targeting.

Grasping Search Stats Helps Your Metadata Plan – In times of poor tagging and scarce resources site search analytics can offer you a means of employing a metadata strategy that prioritizes the most important content (most valuable in terms of search). In this scenario, only the premier content gets an overhaul and energy dedicated to optimizing it. Some nerdy librarian-type might argue this as a triage approach to metadata application — one that ignores moving towards standardized metadata. Why put your valuable time and money against terms that are not your highest performers? In times of resourcing, budgeting and time despair, I think this strategy is spot on.

Check out the shared presentation: