Some of the industry’s top subject matter experts gathered at The Christian Science Monitor to discuss how strategy, technology and people can come together to deliver better, more efficient user experiences.

The first speaker, Kevin P Nichols, Executive Director of Avenue CX, discussed the importance of focusing on consumer needs to stand content up for success. He is the author of UX for Dummies and Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide

“Putting the consumer first requires more than just gesture,” he explained. “In many cases, it’s changing the DNA of operations and strategic focus.”

Kevin’s presentation provided the audience with several key takeaways:

• Leverage a consumer first approach
• Content creation processes should work backwards from the needs of the user, the channels they engage. Tie your business goals to tend to user needs.
• Understand that measuring performance requires a cross-channel view
• Consumers are creating their own cross-channel paths. The customer lifecycle requires analysis (journey mapping, etc.) before content needs can be determined.
• Ensure operational readiness
• It’s important to have a consolidated view across channels to ensure a successful cross-channel experience. It’s important to have the right people, content, support and governance.
• Enterprise focus is the right option
• Governance should incorporate cross functional areas across the enterprise, through a top to bottom approach beginning with the executive sponsor, down to the governance team, and to the working groups (strategy, operations, technology, publishing, taxonomy).

In order to stand up its content, a company needs to understand the behavior and motivation of its consumers. There is no one way to do this. Nichols recommends several approaches such as conducting user research, building personas and mapping out cross-channel user journeys.

Governance should be at the center of a consumer first model. Once content is published, it needs to be consistently measured through stages of the cycle shown above. A strong governance function ensures future decisions are based on the analysis of real data, not opinions.

Nichols emphasized customer experiences must be considered through the entire lifecycle of content interaction. These days, customers choose their own cross-channel paths through many forms of media distribution.

Dave’s presentation was about closing the experience gap through connected journeys. Below are some highlights from his presentation:

Even though digital is all about connection, gaps may exist that prevent your organization from completely connecting with your customers. Wieneke explained how delivering useful, personalized digital experiences require strong alignment between your digital experience strategy, your CMS and your customer data platform.

The simplification of content options results in a more solid connection with your consumer. It also decreases confusion for the consumer and improves the User Experience.

It’s important to choose a CMS that can integrate with all your business platforms while providing multichannel consumer engagement and efficiency.

Our next presenter was Subrata Mukherejee, Vice President, Product Management of The Economist. He gave the audience an overview of The Economist’s digital strategy. He focused on three core questions:

1. Where to allocate our transformation dollars?
2. How to elevate lifetime value of customers?
3. How to future proof our digital ecosystem?

The following are some highlights from his presentation:

The heart of The Economist’s digital ecosystem is based on providing the right solutions for insights & retention, customer experience and finally, the consumer platform. The Economist uses a best-in-breed approach to integrate many systems and solutions into a single digital ecosystem.

This is how The Economist manages their platform efficiently. eZ Publish is in the mix, providing e-commerce processes for subscription management. eZ also integrates with The Economist’s CRM and paywall solutions.

The audience at re\VISION Boston included a mix of marketers, content strategists and technologists from companies of varying sizes. To close his presentation, Subrata provided the group with some key takeaways on how to increase business efficiency for digital experience management.

The final presenters at re\VISION Boston were eZ’s very own Roland Benedetti, and Bård Farstad. They discussed current trends in content management and demonstrated real world examples of how organizations can provide rich multichannel experiences through well-designed information architecture.

Structured content means content is separated into independent parts, making its behavior more predictable. The independent parts are often labeled “fields” in the context of a Content Management System, but are commonly called “chunks” by content strategists. Because these parts are separate entities, they can be edited independently, and used in different contexts. Structured content is great for multi channel delivery, monetization, translation, discovery and personalization. eZ has a more detailed blog post on structured content here.

The event wrapped up with a panel moderated by Bård Farstad, and a number of questions from the audience.

From left to right: Kevin P. Nichols, Roland Benedetti, Subrata Mukherejee and Dave Wieneke.

eZ Marketing debuted our latest t-shirts at re\VISION Boston — homage to our hometown of NY!

Stay tuned for a video of the full event.

Originally published at ez.no.

From the design perspective it’s a very well known concern. Designers are trained on how important it is to communicate their process. Dan M. Brown’s book is an example of communicating design through clean and detailed specs. Nonetheless, this isn’t enough. We need to be more systematic in our approach.

One key element that goes towards this effort is building a set of User Interface Guidelines (UI Guidelines). You may know this term, or maybe you have checked out some UI Guidelines online.The most famous ones are Google’s Material Design.

Though primarily used for the responsive utilities, the popular frameworks Bootstrap and Foundations are in fact also sets of UI guidelines. The challenge when using Bootstrap and Foundations is that your interface and interactions can look the same as everyone else’s. Furthermore, you need to take care of your company’s brand identity, so it’s more useful (and clean) to define your own library rather than overwrite the codebase.

What are UI guidelines?

UI Guidelines are the digital evolution of print-based graphic design guidelines, where the correct style and use of colors, icons and typography is defined. In order to create a cohesive experience in your application interface you need also to determine its different layouts, as well as each component included. Aside from components should be patterns, which are components repeated throughout your app. Finally, your product should be designed taking into account users of all abilities.

The most common metaphor used to describe a set of UI Guidelines are Lego’s building blocks. Nathan Curtis even put the theme on his book’s cover, Modular Web Design. He set the bar with his Modular Design paradigm making the book a really good recommendation for anyone interested in this particular field. For him, a “Component Library” is a collection of reusable building blocks for rapidly creating consistent screen designs.

There are more metaphors when talking about this topic. Curtis’s cover also includes the recycling symbol. When advocating for a UI Guidelines we can adapt the Three R’s of the Environment: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. In our case we could adapt the Three R’s to focus our efforts on the efficiency, constrained design and modularity. We have commented before the efficiency benefits. Regarding the other two, building a set of UI Guidelines will help us to have a constrained design, knowing when it’s really necessary to design new elements. Last but not least, modularity, as one of the main objectives of UI Guidelines is the ability to create new components out of smaller ones.

Finally, there is also Brad Frost’s paradigm: Atomic Design. He uses chemistry as an analogy. In his approach, you begin with the smallest unit — atoms — and define a new system that bonds together to form molecules, which when combined turn into more complex elements scaling up in complexity. He is one of the new voices that brings a fresh vision about UI Guidelines.

Why do you need UI Guidelines?

Susan Robertson’s article on creating style guides frames the most important benefits of UI Guidelines: faster development time, improved communication among all the stakeholders involved in developing the interface (designers, developers, product managers, etc.), and keeping both code and design consistent throughout the site. I would underscore the importance of consistency among them because it strengthens the usability of your site’s UI. Precisely, Norman Nielsen Group acknowledges the benefits of having guidelines for Agile environments, where the fast pace of development requires efficient design workflows.

Two approaches to developing UI Guidelines

Building a set of UI Guidelines is just the opposite of following a cooking recipe. In his book, Nathan Curtis emphasizes that if you have a consolidated, extremely detail-oriented workflow, and a fluid communication across departments in your company, then maybe there’s no need to define anything. Add to this the fact that you need to adapt this experience to your company’s regular roadmap. Bear in mind that this process requires investing time and resources. If you thought that this can be tackled quickly, like in a 100 meter dash, you are taking the wrong approach.

Because there are multiple ways of addressing this process, I am going to focus only on two approaches that are applied at different levels. In the first approach, we place all the components in one static library where everyone can check and replicate them in the codebase. In the other approach, we create a dynamic library that is part of the codebase, hence any change is automatically implemented to any interface.

Regarding the first approach, placing all the components in one library so everyone can check and make use of them relies on coordinated work among teams. Furthermore, extending the codebase becomes easier, since it will be based on a standardized process, as Susan Robertson points out. Besides the direct benefits, there are other indirect advantages.The onboarding process for new staff within your design or engineering teams will be more productive if you refer them to the new library.

The second approach clearly differs from the first I just described. Ian Feather gives some quite interesting reasons to opt for the second approach, and also criticizes the first one. For him the biggest threat a set of UI Guidelines can have is falling out of sync with your application. When that happens they lose their purpose. For this reason, he brings to the discussion the engineering perspective, with all the constant work that simple CSS updates can require. Feather proposes to create a very simple API to fetch all the templates from the Component Layer. Translated into plain English: apply design changes immediately throughout all your application interfaces. You can check Lonely Planet’s Guidelines as an example pushing towards this direction.

Outcomes of creating UI Guidelines

Creating UI Guidelines is a serious time investment. You will notice that among most of the people that have shared their experience about this topic, like Future Learn’s post on building a new pattern library, a new inventory is one of the most commented outcomes. In addition, when implementing a set of UI Guidelines for large and complex websites, like in a multi-device environment, they are even more powerful. Finally, another outcome is how they will affect the different teams involved in the product development process. UI Guidelines will probably modify some of the usual working paths among teams, in a good way. They will increase their efficiency and will communicate better.

In any case keep in mind that every company has its own culture, hence each process towards this outcome will be different. The decision of implementing UI Guidelines has to bear in mind the short-term benefits, but also the mid- and long-term ones. In addition, it’s important to keep an Agile mindset when developing UI Guidelines. As Susan Robertson states: “It doesn’t have to look perfect to be useful.”

Resources To Get You Started

Maybe you are feeling a little bit overwhelmed right now. Keep in mind that someone else has been through this before. Anna Debenham shared not only her process, but also a list of front-end style guides and pattern libraries that you can use for kicking-off your process. There is more complementary stuff by Bryan Krall. If you just noticed that each guide or library is totally different from each other, don’t panic. Tyler Sticka for instance, took some time researching Debenham’s list and came up with a shared spreadsheet that includes instances of observed patterns, and also adds new ones. I’d suggest to not follow one guideline verbatim. You have to adapt your library to the real components your site has or may need. It’s a communication process, so talk to your engineers and listen to their needs. Your language dictionary should offer meanings in both design and engineering contexts. The same applies to the components of your library — they have to be able to talk in design and engineering languages.

Originally published at ez.no.

Selecting the right agency is crucial for your website, app or other digital properties to be successful. One size certainly doesn’t fit all. Even though most agencies are capable of handling an intensive web project or app, you have to pick the one that is right for your needs.

Many organizations opt to bid their digital projects via a Request for Proposal (RFP) or Request for Quote (RFQ) process while others meet directly with multiple service providers and then make a decision. Here are some questions you should ask during your first meeting with a potential agency to ensure you get the best possible team on your project. These questions would also be important aspects of an RFP or RFQ.

1. What are your agency’s primary services?

It’s important the agency’s primary services accommodate your project vision. Some agencies focus on back-end work only while others are experts in digital strategy, marketing or creative. In a previous post we discussed how to plan your next web project and described the various types of agencies, so take a look for more information.

2. How is your agency set up?

Learning about the structure of the agency breaks the ice and begins the vetting process. You should ask how the firm operates, how many employees it has, and the qualifications of the team members who would manage your project. This is also a good time to ask about the company’s core values and see if they align with your organization.

3. Does your agency outsource any of its services?

It’s important to understand what aspects of your project will be managed in-house and which tasks, if any, will be delegated to third parties. Outsourcing is not necessarily a deal breaker but it’s not ideal by any means. You should ask the agency to provide detailed information about their partners’ qualifications. Still have doubts? Ask to set up a meeting with the agency and the third party. Also be sure to confirm with the agency how project management and communication will be handled among you, the agency and their outsourced teams.

4. What is your agency’s typical project management approach and implementation process?

Building a website or app can take a long time and expectations on both sides should be realistic and communicated clearly from the very beginning. No matter the nature of your project, it’s essential the process is well defined and the project is managed efficiently. A well-organized agency will have their standard implementation process documented in some fashion, and the Account Manager should be ready to speak of his or her project management processes, and how they keep the client up-to-date on milestones, deadlines and delays. Before you select an agency, discuss all of your milestones and define a timetable for the project.

A good agency defines KPIs and goals with the customer before the project begins and uses them to steer project management. Clearly defining metrics up front prevents the customer from being distracted by “irrelevant” topics like the positioning of a picture. A goal/KPI may be defined as an increase in revenue, better customer satisfaction with self service or saving cost by digitizing a process. It may be simply creating a mobile version of the client’s site. Post project, the agency would compare these previously defined goals with the actual results to determine project success.

5. Which technologies and systems does your agency use and why?

Digital agencies typically specialize in a specific programming language and a particular CMS or CMSes. Ask the agency to explain why they favor certain systems and what the benefits are for your business.

Some key considerations include:

• the platform’s extensibility and flexibility to support current and future business needs
• the strength of the repository and the ability to customize the content model
• the ability to deliver content on websites and beyond, to apps and the Internet of Things (IoT) — even if this seems far into the future, it’s best to think ahead!
• the ease of integration with internal and third party systems via APIs
• the user experience for content creators and developers (especially if you may take the project in-house down the road)
• the availability of extensions and of course the roadmap

Also be sure to ask the agencies about the limitations of each system, and listen for a transparent, well-informed answer. Then do your own research on the systems themselves — an investment in a CMS is a strategic decision that requires careful consideration in itself.

6. Can you show me similar work from your portfolio?

In addition to the technology question, this is also imperative. Ask the agency to walk you through some projects for other clients in the same industry, product type and primary challenge. What did the agency learn from each project? See if they can deliver some best practices and show they know which pitfalls to avoid, and listen carefully for how they talk about their clients’ KPIs. If the agency doesn’t talk about objective metrics, that’s a red flag A good agency will internalize their client’s KPIs for the end product and this should come through in how they talk about their past projects.

7. Can you provide a proposal with some alternative approaches?

Challenge your prospective agency to show they can think outside the box. They’ll surely provide a proposal but request they provide some alternative ideas as well. You may uncover some new insights and you’ll be able to test if they can solve a problem in multiple ways.

When discussing the proposal, pay attention to the picture they paint. Are they being transparent about potential complexities, or areas where there are trade-offs between two approaches? Favor the agency who proposes clear ways to simplify a project into phases and deliver on incremental requirements — this is a good indicator of business value and ultimately project success

8. Can you provide me with 3–4 client references?

Sure, most references will be vetted by the agency and thus quite positive but strike up an honest conversation and just listen. People love to talk about their projects and you may very well find out an agency is exactly the one to hire… or if the picture isn’t so clear.

9. Beyond your technology and strategic expertise, what else do you offer to build a strong collaboration with your clients?

Building a website or app is an intimate process involving regular interaction between your team and the agency. Needless to say, a cultural fit is very important. Pay attention to how the agency answers this question and, in general, how they interact with you throughout the discovery process. There needs to be a soft connection for good cooperation — it isn’t only a digital interaction.

We hope these questions provide a strong foundation in your agency selection process. Needless to say, your organization should compare quotes from different agencies, taking into account everything from their proposals, portfolio, company vision and references. At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself, which agency shows they understand my business and my goals and has the project experience and expertise to deliver.

At eZ, we are dedicated to helping organizations improve the customer experience and we achieve success through collaboration with top agencies. Our partners have deep portfolios showing their expertise using eZ software and other technologies to meet customers’ needs and deliver a range of digital experiences.

Stephane Grunewald, General Manager/Partner at Kaliop Canada, an eZ Partner, says,

“Most websites today are the center of your business. It’s part of your revenue and marketing. It has to generate leads and sales. You need to brainstorm with your agency to make sure the revamp of your site will be profit driven. This concerns not only the user experience but also back-end CMS you will use. Your agency should be able to support all your efforts.”

If you are interested in learning more about our partners and how eZ’s CMS can deliver, create and optimize your content, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Image Credit: Freepik

Originally published at ez.no.

1. eZ provides financial services companies with a highly secure, enterprise grade CMS.

Security is paramount for financial services organizations, and eZ provides a well-managed open source ecosystem backed by a commercial company — the best of both worlds. For over 15 years, we’ve driven the design and development of our platform with contributions from top-notch developers in our open source community, and every step of the way we ensure our software is stable and reliable.

From our dedicated QA team to our systematic use of agile development practices such as automated testing and continuous integration, we provide our clients and partners with heavily vetted software releases and the foundation to apply the same best practices in their own custom development. We also offer regular system audits and professional services specialists who assist clients, ensuring the same level of attention and care goes into your extensions as our core.

Still, security issues might happen and we have a strict process in place for dealing with them. When a security issue is detected, we provide our enterprise clients with a fix before any information around the security issue is made public.

2. eZ enables financial services companies to integrate the CMS into their business workflows.

eZ’s CMS provides fully featured, open APIs, making it easy for finance companies to integrate their content platform with various internal and external systems throughout their business workflow, such as e-banking, doc management, authentication and identity management, application management, CRM, marketing automation and other platforms. Finance companies can also integrate third-party applications, platforms and content onto their eZ-powered sites and native apps. For example, many financial organizations deliver their users streams of content from publishers such as Bloomberg and the Associated Press.

3. eZ helps financial services companies repurpose and repackage their content.

eZ’s content engine provides finance companies with a versatile mechanism to reuse information. Across channels and contexts, banks, investment services providers and insurance companies can easily repurpose content such as articles, images and videos for new campaigns, microsites and other initiatives, all while maintaining brand consistency. For example, an investment services firm can manage content about a mutual fund in one location and reuse it in various contexts such as a webpage about the fund, on a microsite, in an app and so on.

4. eZ allows financial services companies to provide an excellent mobile experience.

In our highly mobile world, users demand access to information regardless of their location or device and with eZ, finance companies can reach their users everywhere, no matter the platform. We provide responsive templates out-of-the-box in the CMS, making it easy to deliver financial tools and content to mobile users. For example, if your organization has an interactive financial calculator for mortgage payments, eZ provides responsive templates so your users can access the tool while they are on the go.

Many finance companies are tapping into the Internet of Things (IoT) and eZ provides a solid foundation for experimenting with connected devices such as digital kiosks and in-venue digital signage. A decoupled CMS, eZ can be used as a traditional CMS or a headless CMS, so content can easily be routed to any connected device via our APIs.

In addition, modern banking is starting to become quite app-centric and because eZ is a decoupled CMS, it can be used to manage and deliver content to mobile apps. eZ provides a flexible platform that banks can tap into for mobile app development, let alone their websites.

Banks are going mobile and it’s paying off big for their bottom lines. A study by consulting firm Deloitte states that “mobile banking will surpass online banking as the most widely used banking channel by 2020 — if not sooner.” This is a win-win situation for both the bank and its customers. By reducing the amount of brick and mortar branches, banks are able to decrease their operating costs and in turn charge less fees, and consumers can do their banking conveniently. Source: Tower Group, Deloitte

5. eZ helps financial services companies facilitate collaboration within the organization.

eZ’s CMS supports collaboration across teams by providing organizations with out-of-the-box workflows for content review and approval, and the flexibility to create custom workflows to meet their needs. In addition, our granular rights and permissions system ensures each user is assigned the proper access to content and sections on the site. Financial services organizations often deal with sensitive information and while rights and permissions may not be the most talked about feature in a CMS, it’s certainly a business critical component for finance companies and one that eZ prioritizes heavily.

The Flex Workflow in eZ Enterprise makes it simple for editors and marketers to collaborate with colleagues across teams.

6. eZ makes it easy for financial services companies to deliver localized content.

With eZ, finance companies can manage their content in as many languages as they want, all in a single platform. Our CMS keeps content centrally organized so businesses can work efficiently on translations, and customize workflows with translation agencies and freelancers. Our CMS also generates translated URLs for every page, and an editor can always manually adjust them, based on their SEO strategy. If you are a bank with international customers, eZ makes it simple to provide localized information to regional markets, and we give you full control over your content.

7. eZ helps financial services companies provide marketing agility.

The editorial user experience is critical for us, and finance companies are keen on increasing business efficiency. eZ allows editors and marketers to respond quickly to new market conditions, breaking news and events without burdening IT. Our CMS puts editors in the driver’s seat, allowing them to build and manage landing pages, maintain blogs, publish articles and schedule content easily.

8. eZ enables financial services companies to provide personalization for users.

For a financial institution offering many types of products, personalization is a critical requirement for converting and upselling customers online. eZ’s content repository allows finance companies to customize their content model and draws powerful connections between pieces of content. With structured content, an organization has the capability to serve users additional content related to a given topic or by a particular author, for example.

eZ also offers eZ Personalization, a cloud-based service that delivers users relevant content via on-site recommendations, newsletters and search results based on their browsing history. A user looking for a particular insurance product may be recommended similar offerings related to what they are currently viewing, or a customer with interest in retirement planning may be recommended relevant products and services.

The American investment management company Vanguard has many different kinds of mutual funds in their product catalog, and users can easily filter this table to suite their needs. Organizing information for customers in this manner requires a solid information architecture. Finance companies should look for a modern CMS with a flexible content repository.

Do you work for a financial services organization? What do you look for in a CMS? We’d like to hear from you so feel free to leave a comment. And if you are interested in exploring our CMS, please contact us for more information.

Originally published at ez.no.