In this presentation, Wyatt explored the intersection of knowledge and content management and highlighted various knowledge models and content models. She illustrated common knowledge and content challenges such as metadata hierarchy, “strings” over “things”, and infinite reference loops and provided examples of how semantic knowledge models and content models can address those challenges with contextualized case studies of EK clients who use CMS to capture, manage, and act on knowledge. Attendees gained insight into:

• The types of information assets that cross the boundary of content and represent organizational knowledge;
• The role of the CMS integrated with a larger knowledge management ecosystem to not only engage and delight content consumers but also to enable organizational decision-making; and
• The integration of content models and semantic models to enable interoperable systems.

The post Getting More Value Out of Your Content appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Knowledge Portals, as described in Wahl’s blog, integrate data and information from multiple sources so that organizations can more efficiently generate insights and make data-driven decisions. However, if our goal is not just to enable knowledge insights but also to improve learning and performance, there are some additional design imperatives:

• Findability of content by task or competency
• Focus on the actions which enable learning
• Measurement of learning and performance

Findability of Content for Learning and Performance

When designing a Knowledge Portal, one of the key considerations is how content is organized to optimize findability. Recently the EK team designed and developed a few Knowledge Portals and the information architecture and metadata strategies centered around business-specific concepts:

• For a global investment firm, the key organizing principle was deals and investments. Employees of the organization needed to see all of the data and information about a particular deal in one place so they could spot trends and analyze relationships between data points more effectively.
• For a manufacturing company, the key organizing principle was products and solutions. The Knowledge Portal needed to dynamically aggregate all of the information about a product, from the technical specifications to the customer success stories all in one place. That place became one dynamically assembled page for each product.

A Knowledge Portal gives you the ability to see all of the diverse knowledge assets in context. But developing the skills and abilities to apply and solve complex problems using those knowledge assets – that requires dedicated learning and performance improvement strategies. When the goal of the Portal is not knowledge but instead improving learning and performance, the organizing principles change from business concepts to competencies or tasks.

• If the primary driver is to improve learning, the organizing principle becomes competencies. For example, Indeed.com identifies eighteen essential sales professional competencies. These competencies, such as upselling, negotiation, and product knowledge, would serve as an excellent navigational structure and Primary Metadata Fields for organizing a learning-focused portal for the organization.
• If the primary driver is to improve performance, the organizing principle becomes tasks. Put yourself in the shoes of a busy sales professional trying to complete a simple task, such as preparing and delivering a product demo, unsure of the correct process. The sales professional needs to quickly find the performance support and supporting knowledge necessary to complete their task – they don’t want to wade through a competency-based navigational structure about higher-level concepts like upselling. Instead, they seek a system that allows them to find action-oriented, task-focused information at the point of need.

The technical applications of these concepts are manifested in a few ways. In its simplest format, the key organizing principle informs the navigation menu, as shown in the gif above. Competencies or tasks can also serve as the top level of a hierarchical taxonomy, enabling users to filter search results by competency or task.

If we want to get beyond search and navigation and start to use AI to automate recommendations of content, we can build an ontological data model as the foundation of this functionality. In this instance, the key organizing principle must become central to our ontology. This can often be achieved by having many entities of a particular category or class. For example, in a Learning Portal, there would be more competency entities than entities of any other category or class. In a Performance Portal, we would emphasize task entities in the ontology design.

Actions to Enable Learning and Performance

Findability of knowledge assets solves the problem of access to knowledge, but to develop skills and abilities, users must invest a bit more effort. Through active engagement with new information and content, individuals can enhance their understanding, retention, and application of knowledge. A Learning and Performance Portal builds on the foundation of a Knowledge Portal by not only aggregating information but also incorporating features that encourage active engagement and interaction.

A typical level of engagement and interaction might be reviewing a piece of learning content (reading a summary of a process and or watching a video about it) and then answering a question. E-Learning courses often handle this through multiple choice, true/false, or matching questions. These types of assessment questions add multiple benefits at once – we collect formative or summative data about learner performance, and we also provide the learner an opportunity to pause and reflect on what they just read. Instructional designers have a lot of tricks up their sleeves to promote interaction and reflection, including branching scenarios and gamification. These types of dynamic interactions must be incorporated into our Learning and Performance Portals rather than simply enabling users to see all of the information in one place.

Another way we can promote dynamic interaction and reflection with new ideas is by enabling interactions with real people. When our Learning and Performance Portals aggregate all of the information about a competency or task in one place, we should include relevant Communities of Practice (CoPs) and contact information for Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). What better way is there to actively engage with new concepts than by asking questions and engaging in dialogue? What better way to learn a new task or process than by helping to collaboratively improve it?

Measuring Learning and Performance

In a Knowledge Portal, typical data points collected include the number of unique visitors to the portal, which pages they’re spending time on, which pages have high bounce rates, and what terms users are frequently searching for. This data helps us understand the performance of the content and the portal itself. But in a Learning and Performance Portal, we need to understand the specific learning content users were exposed to and, ideally, data that indicates mastery of concepts and/or successful performance of tasks.

In compliance-focused situations, data must be able to confirm that a specific employee fulfilled the requirement of accessing the correct information, serving the purpose of liability avoidance. Data that indicates that the employee completed a course or watched a video suffices in these cases. EK developed a Learning and Performance Portal for a client, which captured Experience API (xAPI) activity statements for each individual, tracking not only whether they started an instructional video but whether they watched it all the way to the end. We were able to generate reports showing which users never viewed the video, viewed but didn’t play the video at all, played a portion of the video, or completed the video.

While compliance remains an important requirement, utilizing Learning and Performance Portals enables organizations to go beyond simply checking off completion. They allow for a more comprehensive assessment of learners’ knowledge and skills, providing a more holistic view of their learning journey and progress. Depending on the learning strategy employed, Learning and Performance Portals can capture additional data beyond mere completion status. This may include tracking whether learners correctly answered formative or summative assessment questions and the number of attempts it took them to do so. Furthermore, the portals can record any earned badges or certifications as a result of completing specific learning activities. xAPI activity statements can be used to track whether or not a learner connected with an SME, joined a CoP, chatted with a mentor, or performed well in a multiplayer game.

By capturing this data within Learning and Performance Portals, organizations can gain insights into learners’ proficiency levels, their progress in mastering specific topics, and their overall engagement with the learning materials. This data can be valuable for assessing the effectiveness of the learning programs, identifying areas where additional support or resources may be required, and finding and recognizing individuals who have demonstrated competence through job performance.

Summary

A modern learning ecosystem requires a diverse body of learning content, from eLearning courses and webinars to performance support and communities of practice. Often we need multiple systems to best enable this diverse learning content. A Learning and Performance Portal can provide that single entry point for learners so that they can find everything they need to develop a new competency or perform a task all in one place. Further, this learning content is automatically aggregated – removing a manual content maintenance burden from your instructional designers and trainers. If you can use some support in the design and development of a Learning and Performance Portal, Enterprise Knowledge can help.

The post When a Knowledge Portal Becomes a Learning and Performance Portal appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

EK’s Zach Wahl, CEO, and Rebecca Wyatt, Partner and Division Director, will join Jeffrey Kwaterski, Chief of Digital Learning and Knowledge Management for the Peace Corps, on the Government Technology Symposium Webinar to discuss Expanding the Nexus Between Distance Learning and Knowledge Management (KM) on April 19th at 2:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT). The speakers will apply their combined expertise in knowledge management and distance learning to define the gaps between the two fields and explore how to improve their connection in the modern digital, information-driven world. Webinar attendees will glean how to enhance learning initiatives by employing the strategic implementation of proven KM standards and tools to benefit distributed learners. 

Zach and Rebecca will bring their experience facilitating collaboration and learning with distributed teams, their knowledge management domain knowledge, and their experience developing advanced learning strategies and systems to the dialogue.

Register for the free online event here: Government Technology Symposium Webinar

The post EK to Speak at Government Learning Technology Symposium Webinar appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Motivation

Motivation is a complex factor to understand, but psychologists, neuroscientists, and learning theorists have amassed quite a body of research. We know that motivation can be positively influenced by intrinsic motivation, experiences of success, and overall positive system user experience.

Learning ecosystems that leverage curiosity and interest to drive intrinsic motivation create much better learning outcomes than learning ecosystems which depend upon compulsory training or fear. There are obviously a lot of process and cultural elements that influence curiosity and interest-driven learning, but knowledge management technology has a role to play as well. In knowledge management, we talk a lot about the findability and discoverability of information:

• Findability describes the ability of a system user (in this case a learner) to find the information for which they came to the system. If I want to learn the basics of graphic design, I might execute a search for “graphic design basics.” Findability refers to my ability to find a beginner eLearning course so I can get started.
• Discoverability describes the ability of the learner to discover new information in the system which is useful – but for which they weren’t even searching. In the example above, I search for “graphic design basics” and find an eLearning course, but I also find an entire training plan with multiple levels of graphic design proficiency and supporting learning assets for each. I didn’t know those additional resources were there, but I’m thankful to discover them as they provide me not only with the course, but with a roadmap to continue advancing my skills.

A well-designed knowledge management portal supports both findability and discoverability of learning assets. Enabling the discoverability of additional learning assets and learning paths inspires curiosity and helps create an intrinsic motivation to learn.

Research shows that learners who experience success are also motivated to keep learning. Knowledge management technology can build success experiences into your organization’s learning ecosystem by automatically conferring certificates when learners complete metadata-enabled learning paths. Knowledge management technology can also create personalization of feedback by leveraging some of the same tools we use to deliver a multitude of content personalization experiences – componentized content and a robust metadata strategy.

Motivation is also strongly linked to the overall user experience a learner has with the learning technology. Learning is a process which requires sustained attention and effort, and if a learner is frustrated with outdated information, a lack of cues to guide attention, or visual clutter which creates cognitive overload, motivation is greatly reduced.

Attention

It is difficult for learners to sustain attention, and many learning activities take place in an online environment where there is fierce competition for that attention. Many traditional training approaches rely on unrealistic expectations of our ability to pay attention. Full-day, instructor-led workshops or even hour-long webinars are examples where learner attention can drop off drastically.

Knowledge management technology can provide solutions to this problem. Componentized content can enable the chunking of educational content in such a way that the same core components of content are reusable across multiple learning contexts. SCORM packages promised this benefit, but SCORM was only designed for reuse within eLearning courses. With ever-increasing demands on learner attention, we know that diverse learning opportunities – including informal learning and social learning – are absolutely critical. Componentized content in a CCMS can actually enable the reuse of content in any context – not just in courses.

A Headless CMS delivery architecture can provide further benefits and allow for the personalized delivery of these reusable learning asset components across multiple learner experiences. If you’ve created a reusable learning asset that explains how to create a budget report, a Headless CMS would enable you to publish that information to:

• A checklist that provides context for a project manager to create and update the report; and
• An explanatory reference sheet for a department director that explains how to apply the information in the report for department-level strategic planning.

When we leverage the latest knowledge management technology to create reusable, componentized learning assets, which can be reused across multiple learning experiences, we allow ourselves to create shorter, varied, and personalized learning experiences, which will help our learners sustain their attention and improve learning outcomes.

Summary

A modern workforce faces many demands for their time and attention and it’s easy for learning to get put on the back burner – even for those of us who love learning. When designing a learning ecosystem, it’s important to remember the learning theory that helps us best support learners and set them up for successful learning outcomes. Supporting learner motivation and attention are key. Knowledge management technology has the potential to improve the motivation and attention of learners – and thereby increase learning outcomes. If you’d like to apply knowledge management best practices to the design and development of your learning ecosystem, EK can help.

The post Knowledge Management Technology to Improve Learning Outcomes appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The panel will discuss practical applications of headless CMSs for product documentation, knowledge management, marketing, and learning & development. The discussion will explore the common use cases and business outcomes that headless CMS can bring to these varying initiatives, offering practical advice on how to get started within your organization.

The online webinar will be held on June 18, 2021 from 11 AM – Noon Eastern.

Register

Panelist Bios

Rebecca Wyatt (Host)
Rebecca has spent her career at the intersection of Learning, Knowledge Management, and Information technology. With over twenty years of experience across the public, private, and non-profit sectors, Rebecca is an expert in project management and design, development, and implementation of Knowledge Management and Learning and Development (L&D) systems and educational content. She is particularly excited about the ways in which decoupled and headless content management have the potential to be transformative for the ways in which organizations grow and nurture the talents of their most important assets – their employees.

John Collins
John Collins is senior content architect on the Content Platform team at Atlassian. Long ago, John was an award-winning community journalist, but he made the move to the software industry more than a decade ago and has extensive experience with content strategy, technical writing, UX writing, and localization. He has spoken internationally, but John is still learning and exploring content, design, and how best to get users the content they need.

Preston So
Preston So is a product architect and strategist, digital experience futurist, innovation lead, developer advocate, three-time SXSW speaker, and author of Voice Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2021), Gatsby: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly, 2021), and Decoupled Drupal in Practice (Apress, 2018). He has been a programmer since 1999, a web developer and designer since 2001, a creative professional since 2004, a CMS architect since 2007, and a voice designer since 2016.

A product leader at Oracle, Preston has led product, design, engineering, and innovation teams since 2015 at Acquia, Time Inc., and Gatsby. Preston is an editor at A List Apart, a columnist at CMSWire, and a contributor to Smashing Magazine and has delivered keynotes around the world in three languages. Preston is based in New York City, where he can often be found immersing himself in languages that are endangered or underserved.

Noz Urbina
Noz Urbina is one of the few industry professionals who has been working in what we now call “multichannel” and “omnichannel” content design and strategy for over two decades. In that time, he has become a globally recognized leader in the field of content and customer experience. He’s well known as a pioneer in customer journey mapping and adaptive content modelling for delivering personalized, contextually-relevant content experiences in any environment. Noz is co-founder and Program Director of the OmnichannelX Conference and Podcast. He is also co-author of the book “Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits” and lecturer in the Master’s Program in Content Strategy at the University of Applied Sciences of Graz, Austria.

Noz’s company, Urbina Consulting, works with the world’s largest organizations and most complex content challenges, but his mission is to help all brands be able to have relationships with people, the way that people have with each other. Past clients have included Microsoft, Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals, Mastercard, Barclays Bank, Abbott Laboratories, RobbieWilliams.com, and hundreds more.

The post Headless CMS in Action: Understanding What it is, and How it can be Used in Your Organization appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

A headless CMS, one in which the content authoring “body” is separated from the content distribution channels (or heads), allows an organization to:

1. Author once and publish to multiple channels; and
2. Reuse the same content in multiple contexts.

This relatively new type of content management system offers several points of business value over its traditional cousins. When is it worth it? What business problems can a headless CMS help you solve? Why should your organization adopt a headless CMS solution?

Create More Compelling Content With Audience Segmentation

We all want to create engaging content that grabs the attention of our audiences. But the reality is, that is nearly impossible unless you define your audiences and write to their specific needs. When you try to create generic content for everyone, you end up creating dull, flat content that isn’t exciting for anyone.

That seems like common sense, but when you break it down further there are some implied technical requirements:

• You probably have more than one audience.
• If you’re going to create content which meets the specific needs of each audience, you’re going to need similar versions of the same content.

Supporting similar versions of content is a tricky content governance issue (we’ll get into governance below), but with the right content engineering, you can maximize your ability to create custom content to meet audience needs, while minimizing the burden of maintaining similar versions of the same content.

Consider this example. If you’re creating content to teach staff members in your organization how to follow a process, you’ll likely document the process step by step. If, instead of creating one single Word document that outlines the entire process, you create structured content where each step of the process is a unique field, you are then able to more effectively reuse each step for multiple audience needs.

When you break down the document paradigm and craft reusable content components, a headless CMS can deliver them for multiple audience needs.

KEY POINT:  In all of these examples, the core content (the steps) is the same. It is the context surrounding the core content which must be customized for the audience. Rather than maintaining the core content in multiple places, a headless CMS with properly engineered content models allows for the reuse of the core content to meet the needs of audience segments. This is the foundation of effective content personalization and localization. It’s the building blocks of more engaging content.

Improve the Efficiency and Accuracy of Content Updates

As noted above, effective audience segmentation, content personalization, and content localization, all require contextualizing content for a unique audience and purpose. If you’re not careful – and your CMS is not well-designed – this could result in a lot of duplicate content. Generally speaking EK recommends avoiding duplicate or similar content because it is a nightmare to maintain and govern.

Let’s look again at the content reuse example from above. We’ve created step-by-step documentation of a process and we’ve reused that process documentation for three different audiences. If we’ve done this the “old fashioned” way, this means we’ve probably created three different documents or web pages. What happens in that scenario when there’s a change to the process? We’ll have to update the content in three different places (and, inevitably, we’ll lose track and forget to update at least one of the three).

So let’s pause a second and break down the business problems here:

• Time Wasted: Content creators maintaining content in three places instead wastes time. Multiply that over all of the content your organization maintains and this is a very expensive problem.
• Inaccurate Content: When your team remembers to update content in only two of the three places, the overall perception of accuracy and reliability of your content are eroded.

KEY POINT:  A well designed headless CMS enables the reuse of content so that your content creators only have to make updates in one place when content inevitably needs to change. This improves the efficiency of your team, and improves the overall accuracy of your content.

Summary

A headless CMS enables the efficient reuse and re-contextualization of content for multiple audiences, platforms, and purposes. Reusing content can help your organization realize a ton of benefits including better audience engagement with segmentation and personalization, saved staff time and money when content updates can be made in one place instead of many, and improved accuracy of (and subsequent trust in) content. Need help architecting and deploying a headless CMS? EK’s team of engineers can help.

The post Understanding the Business Value of Headless CMS appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Traditional content management systems (CMS) offer a full “one-stop-shop” for your organization’s content management needs. They allow you to author, manage, and deliver content to your end users all from a single solution. This approach is often called “monolithic,” as all of the functionality is packaged together as a single application. While this can be incredibly efficient for small scale implementations or certain use cases, traditional CMS solutions can fall short for organizations looking to effectively and efficiently scale their content delivery and customization capabilities in order to offer richer, more relevant, and more connected content to their customers, whether through marketing materials, technical documentation, or product offers and information. This is especially true when it comes to delivering that dynamic, tailored content through a variety of channels like the web, mobile applications, last mile utility devices, and so on.

This lack of flexibility has led a number of enterprises to adopt a “content-first” approach by leveraging the so-called “headless CMS” (also known as “decoupled,” or “omnichannel” delivery) which separates content authoring and management from content delivery. As its name suggests, the “head,” which represents the content presentation layer, is separated from the “body,” or the content repository, leaving just the “back end.” Content housed in a headless CMS can then be seamlessly delivered via APIs across a wide variety of applications and devices, allowing for more dynamic reuse of content that does not compromise presentation and avoids duplication of efforts. 

What is a Headless CMS?

A headless CMS is a platform that serves as an authoring, management, and repository tool for structured, connected content that can be used and reused by a variety of applications and channels through a rich layer of web services or APIs.  

Let’s deconstruct this definition: 

Authoring, management, and repository tool

Similar to a traditional CMS, a headless CMS still offers authors a user interface to author and manage content, but in this case, since that’s the primary focus of the tool, it has a lot more power. The headless CMS provides additional, more robust workflows, access rights, and controls. In other words, it lets your content authors focus on the creation and management of the content, while leaving the content delivery function to your user experience team. This decoupling allows for incredible flexibility both on the content creation and management side as well as the delivery side. More on content delivery below.

With a headless CMS, content authors do not have to get distracted by how the content they author will be presented. They can focus on where their expertise is most valuable – the actual authoring of the content itself. Taking this approach eliminates the need for training content authors on presentation tools and visual styling. Those tasks are delegated to both the UX experts and more specialized applications. This is why a headless CMS is often referenced as having a “content first” approach because it allows authors to hone in on developing the content (rather than look and feel) while leveraging a structured content model.

In addition to more robust content authoring and management of original content (created in the system), a headless CMS is also designed to serve as a centralized content repository. One of the key benefits is that content can be pulled from many other systems and managed collectively with one shared content strategy. 

Structured, connected content

Headless platforms take advantage of more elaborate and structured content models than traditional CMS tools. A structured content model breaks down larger content items into formalized components. As a simple example, take a news article. Instead of one large piece of content containing a formatted text including title, author, date, body, etc, with structured content we can break the article up into distinct logical components (content items in themselves) like: Title, Author, Short Intro, Key Points, Publish date, leading image, etc. 

Where this becomes really powerful is when we deal with more complex types of content. Take technical documentation, or user guides for products for example. Instead of one large, monolithic PDF document, that generalizes features about a model family and its submodels, we can now break up the content into components and tag each component accordingly. Namely, we can break up the user manual into components like Safety Guidelines, Product Overview, Product Precautions and Warnings, Product Features, and Troubleshooting Tips. With this structure, we can have several content items for Product Features for each product submodel, as well as their localized language versions. Thus, when the final user guide is dynamically assembled (more on dynamic content delivery below) on your product support website, the user guide includes only materials relevant to the specific model and submodel that the user owns, and is presented in the specific language based on your user’s location. The ability to personalize content delivery (for example, only showing users the instructions for the product model and feature set they own and not all of the product models) is predicated upon the ability to structure content in this manner. 

Break giant documents down into meaningfully structured components

Content reuse

When the content is structured in smaller components as described above, we can support enhanced content reuse. In the product documentation example above, components like Product Feature, Product Overview, and Troubleshooting Tips, can be reused to assemble different types of materials like quick start guide, help page, help blurbs within the product (in case of software), the official user manual, even marketing materials. It is the same content, we don’t have to create and maintain a separate copy of it for each use case. 

The same content components can be used for multiple content types and user experiences

Another example: Leveraging componentized content would allow us to have a single content item listing our Terms and Conditions that can then be leveraged (or plugged in) in any legal document or agreement that needs to include Terms and Conditions. Single content, multiple uses. Further, if we need to make changes to the Terms and Conditions, we have to make those changes only once.

Variety of content delivery channels and applications

By now, you are probably seeing the theme here. A structured content repository, such as a headless CMS, can be leveraged by a multitude of user facing content delivery systems, platforms, and channels, using the same content rather than having multiple versions for each delivery channel. 

Extending the product documentation example above, the same content items that we developed earlier, i.e. Product Feature, Product Overview, and Troubleshooting Tips, can now be pulled by a variety of channels to deliver your support content to your customer, at the time of need, in the most user friendly manner based on the situation. Think of an electronic product, say a robot vacuum, that comes with its own mobile app. The same exact Product Feature description content item, or Troubleshooting Tips can be displayed by the robot itself, in the mobile app, on your support website, and in your printed user manual.

A Headless CMS allows content components to be distributed to multiple devices

Content delivery platforms can apply their own, tailored, contextual look and feel for the content. The robot vacuum’s menu and display is likely very simple and limited, the mobile app and website can provide much more context and connected content, while your printed manual uses simple, straight forward formatting and spacing. 

Rich layer of web services or APIs

Ultimately, a headless CMS can be viewed as an extensive collection of web services focused on the authoring, management, and retrieval activities of the content management lifecycle, with a user interface specifically tailored to content authors’ needs. This approach provides your organization with more flexibility as to how you architect your solution and deliver your content, without compromising the structure or authoring of the content itself.

The diagram below provides a general idea of a content delivery architecture based on a headless CMS approach: 

A headless CMS separates the content creation (the body) from the head (varied delivery channels)

Make no mistake – a headless CMS still involves thorough strategizing, developing a robust content model tailored to your organization’s use cases, and tagging your content with rich metadata. However, if you can harness the full power of a headless CMS, your content delivery will be smarter and more sustainable, allowing you to give all phases of the content lifecycle the attention they deserve without compromising quality and allowing your organization to adapt quickly to changing content and user needs. 

Conclusion

It is evident that while a headless CMS architecture does require an additional component to deliver the content to its intended audiences, the decoupling of content management/authoring and content delivery allows for incredible flexibility, reuse, and customized delivery. This directly translates to business value such as: 

• Significant cost savings in content authoring and management;
• A vastly increased range of delivery channels for your content, leading to a wider audience reach; and 
• Tailored, dynamically assembled content catering to your specific user at the point of their need.  

In upcoming posts, we will address in more detail the topic of headless CMS, different types, business value, and how to determine what is the right approach for your organization. While content management is an age-old field, taking a more structured and decoupled approach can provide significant value to enterprises. Interested in a headless CMS for your organization? Contact Enterprise Knowledge. Careful planning, architecture, and content modeling are paramount to the success of such an endeavor and we are here to help.

The post What is a Headless CMS? appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Earlier this evening I was scrolling through one of my social media feeds and I came across one of those posts where someone is asking, “What did I do to get an ad for [insert completely

Designing a website that understands the likes and dislikes of a person is not a simple task. And the reality is, that website has to have some information about you to make accurate recommendations. We at Enterprise Knowledge build websites and intranets that focus on making your information easier to find – and sometimes that means we have to get beyond the passive (waiting for someone to enter a search term or navigate to the right place) to the active (recommending the right thing). So how do we increase the relevancy of our recommendations?

Option 1:  Recommendations by Taxonomy

A taxonomy is simply a hierarchical list of terms which can be used to describe the content on your website or intranet. EK’s website, for example, has a topic taxonomy with seven topics including Change Management & Communications, Content Strategy, and Technology Solutions. This blog – because it’s about a technical solution – is tagged to the topic Technology Solutions.

As you read this blog, the EK website learns that you are currently reading at least one blog post in the topic area, Technology Solutions. We can therefore assume, that you might be interested in similar blog posts and recommend others which have been tagged to the Technology Solutions topic.

Recommendations by taxonomy are relatively simple to build into your website or intranet so this can be a cost-effective entry point to recommend content. While the relevancy of the recommendations is not as technically rigorous as some of the other options, relevancy can be improved when care is taken to design the most effective taxonomy for you organization – and to tag content accurately.

Option 2: Recommendations by Ontology

An ontology is a defined model that organizes structured and unstructured information through entities, their properties, and the way they relate to one another. Building upon an existing taxonomy, relationships can be created between the taxons, or concepts. As you read this blog, the EK website uses an/its ontology to know a lot more about the content including who wrote the blog (Rebecca Wyatt). Our ontological model knows additional information about Rebecca Wyatt through her biography on the EK website. Using this additional information, the system could recommend content regarding educational technology and the development of systems which increase knowledge transfer and learner outcomes. The content doesn’t have to be explicitly tagged with metadata – our ontology allows the system to infer these connections and make additional recommendations.

Recommendations by ontology are incrementally more complex than recommendations by taxonomy, and this increased complexity can improve the relevance of recommendations. However, the devil is in the details and these additional benefits are maximized if the ontology is effectively designed.

Option 3: User Preference-based Recommendations

In both of the previous options, content recommendations are made solely based upon what the system knows about the content a website user is currently viewing. You’re viewing this blog, we know this information about this blog, and you might like other information which is similar to this blog. This is a great approach in a highly restricted environment where it’s difficult to store information about the website’s user (such as a Federal system where PII is a concern).

In a less restricted environment, however, we can improve the relevance of content recommendations by building user profiles – allowing users to indicate topic-level interests – or by using cookies and analytics to store information about what types of content a user has viewed on your site in the past. In these examples, the fundamental approach is the same, but the user profiles and cookies give us more information with which to curate the right recommendations than one, single article that is currently being viewed.

Option 4: Collaborative Content Recommendations

Options 1, 2, and 3 are all examples of content-based recommendations – meaning they rely on similarities between the content on the site to make recommendations. If you like this piece of content, and other content is similar to it, you might like the similar content also. Even in option 3 – which takes into account historical records of user actions and user preferences – we’re still finding similarities between the content and one, individual user.

Collaborative content recommendations are a little different in that they rely on how other users have behaved in relationship to similar pieces of content. To create collaborative content recommendations, the system will create a user profile about an individual user (similar to option 3), but will identify users who are similar to each other – not just users who are similar to content. For example, on the EK website, we could create two groups of users:

1. Technical Site Visitors and Developers:  We could categorize visitors to the EK website who we know are interested in more technically detailed knowledge management information into this group. This could be site visitors who indicated they are developers or information architects – or they could be visitors who seek out technically detailed “how to” blogs posted by EK’s Technology Solutions team. 
2. Business-Oriented Site Visitors:  We could categorize visitors who are interested in the business applications of knowledge management into this group. We might place visitors who indicate that they are non-technical executives or project managers into this group – or we could categorize people who routinely read EK’s blog posts about Change Management and KM Strategy in this manner.

After we identify which site visitors are most similar to you, we are then able to make recommendations to you based upon similar visitor activities. If a visitor to the EK website who is very similar to you liked this blog post, you might like it too.

Collaborative content recommendations can be very powerful, but they do depend on a large data set for their accuracy. Because of this requirement, this is a solution that is best leveraged for websites with a lot of visitors. This is how Yelp and YouTube recommend content to their visitors.

Summary

If you’re building a website or intranet that is recommending content to your site’s visitors, you’ll want to invest in the most relevant content recommendations. There are a lot of factors to consider when deciding whether recommendations by taxonomy, ontology, individual user preference, or collaborative content filters are the right solution. Need some help making this decision and building the right tool? Enterprise Knowledge can help.

The post Why Did This Website Recommend That? appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Despite the improved learning outcomes which can be gained through the use of performance support tools, learning and development professionals often struggle to create them. As knowledge management and instructional systems designers, we can make the creation of performance support tools much more efficient by analyzing the commonalities between tasks and creating meaningful content types. Applying knowledge management best practices, such as effectively designed search results with action-oriented search can lessen the content creation burden on learning and development professionals.

Checklists

Often, a learner only needs a checklist to help them follow a policy or process correctly. An effective intranet or knowledge management portal will often include a checklist content type to make it easier for your subject matter experts and web content authors to create checklist content. Your content authors can quickly fill out a form like this one.

By leveraging a checklist content type in your intranet or KM portal, your subject matter experts will be able to efficiently create and publish checklist by simply filling out a form. When they publish the form, they will have created something that looks as professionally designed as this great checklist example from weddingwire.com.

Creating checklists via a specialized content type not only improves the efficiency of content creation, improving the content creation process in this manner has additional benefits. Those benefits include: improving visual design and creating consistency in the way checklists are presented in your system – reducing cognitive load and improving learning outcomes.

Quick Reference Guides

Quick-reference guides (or “cheat sheets”), are short tools which give the learner just enough to get the job done without having to read all of the instructions. Quick reference guides can be handled in multiple ways in a knowledge management portal.

Option 1: Quick Reference Guide Content Type

Quick Reference Guides can be a very simple content type in your knowledge management portal. When creating this content type, common fields might be:

• Task Name: Single-line text field which defines the name of the task the quick reference guide will support. Effectively the title of the content.
• Key Concepts: Character-limited richtext field which enforces the brevity of the text, but allows the content author to explain the most important concepts or steps to complete the task.
• Full Instructions: Field type is restricted to a link or a document upload and provides a way for the content author to provide a direct connection between the quick reference guide and the full set of instructions.

Option 2: Quick Reference Guide Search Results Type

Depending on the maturity of your system, it’s entirely possible that you do not need a specific content type to fill the need of a quick reference guide. Your search index could find simple things like the name of a task and a brief summary of the task from existing content – returning this existing information directly in your system’s search results page. You could even include action-oriented search buttons which would open the full set of instructions directly from the search results list – saving the learner one unnecessary click.

If you want to take things even further, your system could recognize your quick reference search result as a “best bet” and always give priority to this result as the most relevant content when a user of your system searches for a named task.

Summary

Learning and development, as well as knowledge management professionals are often extraordinarily busy  –  trying to meet more needs with less resources. By leveraging custom content types, EK consultants can help make their job much more efficient, allowing them to create polished looking content quickly and easily. In addition to content types, we can also provide them with the tools and knowledge to leverage well-designed search results to bypass the need for content creation at all. If you’d like an analysis of your existing web content and some custom content type and search design advice, contact us at Enterprise Knowledge.

The post Designing Content Types for Performance Support appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Moreville’s User Experience Honeycomb advanced the conversation from just discussing usability and gave designers of web products a more complete tool for strategically analyzing and improving the overall experiencing of interacting with web products. With this increase in completeness came an increase in the complexity of the analysis and discussion. As we decide which facets of the UX honeycomb to prioritize in our product development, accessibility often gets a lower priority than the others (unless we’re developing products for the Federal government). Accessibility is ranked towards the bottom of the UX honeycomb at our peril, however. As discussed below, designing an accessible web product cannot be separated from the other aspects of user experience.

Accessible

IT Accessibility simply means that our web products and content must be accessible to anyone – regardless of disability. In an analysis of the intersection between accessibility and user experience it is important to acknowledge the obvious fact that accessibility is one Moreville’s facets of user experience. If someone is blind and requires the use of screen readers to access the content on our websites, their user experience is going to be poor if we haven’t built an accessible product. But the strategies we employ to ensure our web products and web content are accessible ultimately impact other aspects of user experience beyond the “accessible” facet of the honeycomb.

Findable

One of the core services of Enterprise Knowledge is knowledge management strategy and design, so creating findable content is near and dear to our hearts. One of the key ways we ensure content is findable (sometimes via keyword search, and sometimes via faceted navigation) is through metadata. 508 compliance requires key metadata be associated with any web content. At minimum, this should include:

• Title
• Author
• Subject
• Keyword(s)

If you’re creating content directly in a CMS, this will often be accomplished by “tagging” content (i.e. this blog post is tagged to topic/subject = “Content and Brand Strategy” on the EK website). If you’re creating a document like a PowerPoint presentation or a PDF that will be uploaded to a document management system, you can add the metadata under File > Info > Properties. Adding this information to your web content will simultaneously improve the findability and the accessibility.

Valuable

Take a moment and think about the product value statement for any product you’re developing. Is it:

• To improve employee performance through improved access to learning resources?
• To provide an enticing view of goods and services for sale and encourage consumers to purchase them?
• To raise awareness about the mission of a philanthropic organization?

I challenge you to think of any product value statement where accessible features and content would not enhance your ability to realize that value. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 1 in 5 people in the United States have a disability. This is not a small market segment – you can’t afford to leave them out.

Useful

As designers of web products we must always be confident and creative enough to challenge assumptions and ask whether the products we’re creating are actually of some use. Web products that are not accessible are inherently less useful. As professionals, we shouldn’t let managers or clients push us to design and build less useful products – it’s not in anyone’s best business interests.

Usable

Often when we talk about user experience, the conversation focuses on ease-of-use (usableness). While making our products more accessible can make human-computer interactions more complicated, a well-designed, accessible system can understand enough about the user to personalize the experience and offer the least-restrictive option to meet that user’s accessibility needs. Barring the level of complexity (or budget) for an automatically personalized user experience, we can allow users to self-select the level of accessibility and assistance that is required. For example, not everyone needs an audio-described version of a video or a companion video transcript, but offering an option to our users can only improve the usability of our products

Desirable

The principles of emotional design (focusing on how a user feels when interacting with a product) can help us use improved accessibility to design desirable web products. Research tells us that we can affect the desirableness of a product through three key strategies:

• Visceral emotional design – Here we design for aesthetic pleasure. When we factor in aspects of accessible product design like adequate contrast ratio, we are improving the visceral emotional design of the product.
• Behavioral emotional design – Here we focus on how well the product performs the desired functions. There’s a lot of overlap between behavioral emotional design and designing a usable product (discussed above).
• Reflective emotional design – In reflective emotional design, we help our product’s users understand the product’s impact on their lives – even when they’re not actively using it. To design for this we really have to understand our users and think about how we want them to feel when they use the product. It’s the most complex of the three tiers of emotional design, but again – improving accessibility, while not compromising style and simplicity, can only improve the emotions users associated with our products.

Credible

Stanford’s Web Credibility Research has resulted in this top 10 list to boost your website’s credibility. It seems pretty credible – supporting research and all. While accessibility is not directly mentioned, a site that is easy to use – and useful (number 7 on the list) repeats two elements of the user experience honeycomb discussed above. In short, good design is good design and a well-designed product improves accessibility, credibility, and overall user experience.

Summary

When designing web products – and creating the content which fills those products – it’s easy to think that the technical experts and leadership within an organization know what’s best. It’s important, however, to prioritize the needs of the system’s users, even if those needs contradict what we think we know. The tension between leadership’s desires and users’ needs already lends a layer of complexity to product design and content creation, and it’s easy for accessibility concerns to get squeezed out by that tension. EK’s consultants can help you balance the tension of these conflicting needs when designing your product and crafting content. Contact us to learn more.

The post The Intersection of User Experience and Accessibility appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.