Oh, Grow Up! Or at Least Get Some Chutzpah: Toward a UX Content Maturity Model
Summary: UX content is the logical and business-savvy place from which to develop and grow content standards to mature the entire organization’s content. The best way to take UX content maturity to its full potential is to have UX content leaders at high levels with UX content maturity as part of their OKRs. However even without that, anyone working with UX content in the organization can start where they are and begin to elevate an organization’s UX content maturity. This model may help, and also can be modified.
In my article “Elevating UX Content Standards: A Page from Print History or — What Would Mom Do?” I began to describe what a model of UX content maturity would look like. I argued that print publications’ content maturity levels are the gold standard for content excellence, and far outshine those of digital. This makes sense because print has several millennia on digital products.? While the first print publication came from the ancient Romans in 59 BCE, the first website didn’t appear until 1991. Don Norman coined the term user experience just two years later.? If print publication history were compressed into a single day, digital products would take up less than the last 25 minutes of that day.?
While print standards’ high level of maturity is deeply embedded in the publishing industry, UX content standards remain nascent, even though UX content potentially carries far more risk to the consumer than print or other journalistic publications. For example, when a journalistic publication makes a content error, someone might get offended, or roll their eyes. On the other hand, when a digital product makes a content or UX error, someone could miss a plane, lose their money, or even risk physical harm. Companies also face external risks such as declining net promoter scores, increased customer service expenses, and potential legal jeopardy.?
Despite its importance, the management and governance of UX content are often fragmented across departments of an organization.?Different teams follow varied standards. Legacy UX content lives in separate repositories from updated UX content, and the two may clash when they are published together, degrading the user experience.
Typically there is no UX equivalent of a newspaper’s editor-in-chief. This lack of central governance complicates efforts to maintain consistency and quality across an organization’s many digital products. The result is a UX content maturity level for digital products overall that lags far behind both its print and marketing content counterparts.
?The case for UX content standards
Organizations that prioritize UX deliver superior customer experiences, which in turn foster business success.?
The most successful UX content standards prioritization gets reflected and upheld by senior and middle-managers who count UX content maturity among their KPIs (key performance indicators). The irony is that while UX content standards measurably achieve business goals, content professionals often get blocked from implementing content standards by project managers, marketing colleagues, or legal team members. All of these groups have legitimate interests, but with no overarching standards governance structure, non-content professionals often fill the gaps with their own interests, resulting in products going live whose content does not align with the organization’s standards (if there are any). That phenomenon of getting overridden by non-content folks can also diminish morale among content creators, driving higher turnover rates.?
This relates to the lack of organizational leadership positions to govern content. Such positions include content manager, editor-in-chief, content standards manager, senior director of content, and chief content officer, where that position includes UX content and is committed to content alignment across the organization, which I am not sure exists — yet. Middle and senior managers can work with marketing, business, and legal colleagues to help align the entire organization around the important goal of “consistentifying” content across verticals.?
Without such leadership, digital product content inconsistencies persist, even despite content professionals’ best efforts. For example, highly skilled content professionals can be crafting superb content across many verticals, but without aligning on basic terminology decisions, the customer experience can wind up contradictory and confusing. Fortunately, cross-organization processes, with or without official content leaders, can help to repair those costly content standards inconsistencies, and mature the organization’s content profile overall. I’ll give one example below.
To pre-empt the question of why center UX rather than marketing content, marketing content maturity already has been well theorized by many content professionals. So has UX in general — just Google either of these to see. However, UX content per se is largely missing from this equation, even though it constitutes the heart of the customer’s ongoing relationship with a company. If marketing content is the personal ad profile and the first few dates, UX content is the long-term relationship and marriage that the company wants to maintain as long as possible. Therefore, UX content standards should lead the charge for defining content maturity throughout the whole organization. To take the metaphor one step further (and I promise I’ll stop after that), the idea is to keep the relationship running so smoothly, that marriage counseling (customer service) never needs to intervene. That helps prevent divorce. (OK, I went one more step.)
A model for UX content maturity
A UX content maturity model helps organizations to assess their current state of UX content maturity, and to elevate and maintain it. The maturity model below is divided into several levels, from emerging to thriving:
Elevating UX Content Maturity: Practical Steps
To evolve from one stage to the next, organizations must invest in the development and governance of UX content standards. This includes:
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The role of leadership and collaboration
Content leadership is critical to advancing UX content maturity. This involves seeking out and fostering collaboration between and among departments to align on standards; establishing respect and trust through understanding the different departments’ many goal; and building credibility through transformational conversations. Content leaders must actively seek to cultivate relationships with their peers across departments, from marketing to design to customer service. This the best — nay, the only — way I have found to evangelize the value of content, and lead efforts to bridge organizational silos.
Even in organizations where formal content leadership is lacking, individual content professionals can take the initiative to drive change. By engaging in collaborative, cross-functional conversations and forming alliances with like-minded colleagues, they can initiate processes to elevate UX content standards.
For example, when I worked at Symantec (at the time, called Verisign-now-from-Symantec), the company was about to introduce a value-added product to their SSL (secure sockets layer) certificates — a vulnerability scan, plus an actionable report. I noticed that different teams were calling the product by different names:? vulnerability scan, vulnerability report, and a scan plus vulnerability report. All of those names were more or less correct — however, the best customer experience dictates that we create one name to describe one thing. So I called a meeting with the business manager behind the product, the analyst, the marketing copywriter, the product manager, and the designer. We agreed that we needed a single name for the product. Once we started discussing it, it took less than an hour before we agreed that we would call the product (drum roll) a: Vulnerability Assessment, with
● Weekly scans?
● Downloadable reports?
● The option to rescan
I recently did a search, and those terms persist today, more than ten years later. I wasn't a consultant or even a manager — I was an individual contributor who mustered the chutzpah to herd a bunch of colleagues into a room to talk to one another.
Leading the way
One definition of leadership is inspiring others to your vision. The graphics above represent one vision of UX content maturity that I intend not as a final definition, but rather a jumping-off point to adapt to your organization’s content needs. However, I do think it helps to have a vision rather than no vision when starting this work, especially if you’re an individual contributor who’s carrying a content maturity flag on your own at first.
Initiating that conversation at Symantec was an example of elevating content maturity by getting cross-functional alignment on the terminology for a new product. It worked. The result was a more consistent user experience conducive to increased net promoter scores and reduced customer service calls.? Creating a workflow from that meeting to repeat for future products would have instituted a process that would have elevated the content maturity level even further.?
If you have a passion for content, and see possibilities for how to elevate your own organization’s content standards and maturity, I encourage you to start by simply having conversations with your colleagues about what’s possible. You’ll soon find out who cares and who doesn’t; who has time and who’s swamped; who wants to brainstorm with you and make connections, and who’s content with the status quo. In other words, you’ll find your “peeps!” Also think about those who create content in flows adjacent to yours — for example, marketing copywriters who work on content that sells the products you write UI for — that’s an organic alliance from which you can think about a single product’s end-to-end user experience. From there, you might establish a “consistentification” workflow that you can repeat for other products — another step toward elevating UX content maturity.?
From that point, though it will take time and additional effort, you can branch out and bring others together to create ever-expanding content consistency and efficiency — for example, invite those who write the emails to join the fun. Worst case scenario, you make some new content work friends. I have found that even in the most content-unfriendly organizations, it makes the job so much more enjoyable when I can collaborate with colleagues who are also passionate about content.
A final word on UX content maturity leadership bears reiterating: chutzpah. It’s Yiddish for extreme audacity. Chutzpah comes in handy when, as in many cases, your organization lacks sufficient formal content leadership. If you have a bit of extra time — and many content professionals are overworked, and therefore don’t — but if you do, mustering some chutzpah* to reach out and have those initial conversations with your marketing and other UX content-adjacent colleagues across the organization could be the start of something not only beautiful, but also effective in elevating your business’s UX content maturity. It might even get you promoted to a formal content leadership position.
* If you'd like some encouragement, or to borrow a cup of chutzpah, message me!