Are Halland: The Core Model – Episode 108

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Are Halland’s “Core Model” has guided the work of content strategists, information architects, web marketers, and other digital professionals for more than 15 years.

The model grew out of the need to align stakeholders around a practice that could balance user needs, business concerns, and content creation for websites.

It has evolved into a versatile tool that can improve the content experience in any digital product.

We talked about:

• his quarter-century career as an information architect, consultant, and educator
• the origins of the Core Model in 2006, as a solution to the content industry’s “Tower of Babel” communication problem
• the tragic ongoing story of the “typical website” and how it buries the important content that users are looking for
• the elements of the Core Model – the target group, the user task, the business goals, the inward paths, the core content, and the forward paths – and how they serve as a silo-busting communication tool
• enhancements to the model that he made as he wrote his new book
• the importance of identifying top user tasks that your content addresses
• the need to think like a behavioral designer as you design the forward paths from your core content
• the use of the Core Model in the increasingly important discipline of content modeling
• the increasing adoption of the use of the model in apps, marketing content, customer journey mapping, omnichannel strategy, and even mundane artifacts like invoices
• his new book, which has been 15 years in the making – the Norwegian edition is available now, and the English version is scheduled for release in early 2022

Are’s bio

Are Gjertin Urkegjerde Halland is the inventor of the Core Model, and has 25 years of experience with strategy, content, and product development.

He has worked both as a consultant and in-house with business strategy, innovation processes, user research, UX design, content strategy, and information architecture.

From 2006-2019 he worked for the Norwegian digital agency Netlife Design, implementing the Core Model as a cornerstone methodology.

He now works as an independent coach, speaker, facilitator and consultant, helping people take advantage of the simple power of the Core Model.

Connect with Are online

• Twitter
• TheCoreModel.com

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 108. Every once in a while, someone comes up with an elegantly simple model of a complex business process. Fifteen years ago, Are Halland did this for the content strategy and information architecture professions. You can understand his “Core Model” in about five minutes and start applying its strategy, business, and design methods right away. But then, you can also spend fifteen years – as he has – discovering new ways to use this powerful tool.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 108 of the Content Strategy insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Are Halland. Are is best known as the inventor of the Core Model. And that’s why I was excited to get him on the show to talk about that. So, welcome Are. Tell the folks a little bit more about the work you do and how you to develop the Core Model?

Are:
Yeah. Hi, Larry. Great to be on show. I’ve been in the business for a quarter of a century I found out the other day. So I’ve been calling myself an information architect since 1999 I think. And I’ve been a consultant mostly, but also in-house, but I work with right now, I’m a freelance or working for myself with my wife actually. And we do facilitation course as speaking engagements and so on and within strategy. Yeah. Behavioral psychology and content strategy and whatever, use the experience, yeah.

Larry:
I love that you have like a behavioral foundation to your work. Tell us where the Core Model came from?

Are:
Yeah. Where did it come from? It was in back in 2006 actually. So it’s 15 years ago actually. So, that speaks a little bit about the model being timeless in its nature. But in 2006, I’d been working as a consultant for around 10 years, around the dot com area, with all those fancy project, huge project teams and technology. And we made portals with thousands of pages. Nobody thought about the content and people didn’t communicate. So developers, designers, stakeholders, leaders, everyone worked kind of, what it call this? The Babel Tower. So, there’s something we are missing. We are missing the most important thing. We are talking about things that are not that important. We need to talk about the content and the user needs and the strategic needs.

Are:
And what came to mind like, I don’t know, Neo in the Matrix, there is no spoon. Let’s just flip the model around. Let’s start with the most important thing. Let’s start with the core. When a user finds the answer for a particular user task, and where we at the same time reach a business goal. So if you can kind of pinpoint it to that unit of information, then you know where to start and you can discuss the real content, the real issues, the real user needs, the real strategic goals in the context where it’s not too complicated.

Larry:
I love the way you just said that because you just described strategy, content strategy, that balancing of user needs and the business goals. But you also hinted at the because, one of the ways I’ve seen you talk about the Core Model is like that old way that you were just talking about where nobody’s talking and you end up with these infinite grid site map things, and you showed this line, I just remember this one image where there’s three or four core pieces of content or core tasks that users want to accomplish that you pick out. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Are:
Yeah. I wrote an article a few years back about the typical website, which is the story that goes again and again for 25 years [and] still happening. You have a website that’s huge, users can’t find their answers. Customer service is bogged down. Frustration in the organization. “We need a new website.” So you call in a fancy agency, start with the logo, discuss the front page. Then someone makes an information structure. I found out usually it’s about two weeks before launch someone remembers, oh, we need some content. Then you take all your brochures and you migrate them up into the new website and you launch and everyone’s happy, but you haven’t fixed anything because the content is still unprioritized. And then a few years passes and people can’t find their own way around, customer service is bogged down. We need a website redesign, and you start all over again.
Nobody has done anything because, so that’s kind of the typical story of a redesign. And the point is that the user is only interested in one page, nothing else. So, all the rest of the website is just in the way. And it bogs down the internal search navigation, even Google has problems. So the thing is for this particular user, the rest of the website is just in the way. So, we have to think of that page as the front page for that user. This is the contact point for the user. And if you manage to prioritize those important core pages, then you can really focus on what’s the most important user tasks.

Larry:
One of the many uses of the tool is that ability to prioritize. But there’s some other sort of benefits of the model that you’ve talked about. Like not only prioritization, but also the collaboration part of it. And just the way to think about content. Can you talk a little bit about some of those high level, and I want to come back though to that model, but I’d love to talk just about the benefits, like you just mentioned prioritization a couple times, but is that the main benefit or what do you see as helping people most when they adopt the model?

Are:
I think the most important thing about the model is that it’s a prioritization tool. But it’s also, it’s a thinking tool for turning the perspective. But the third thing is that it’s a tool for communication because it’s a very simple concept. It’s key elements in the Core Model, it’s the target group, the user task, the goal, the business goals, the inward paths and the core content and the forward paths. So, and this is works like in Esperanto, between different competencies and silos in the organization because everyone can relate to those simple terms. So, that’s the beauty of it, is when you use it, in what we call a core workshop, where you have stakeholders from all the organization, you have developers, you have designers, you have communication people and HR and marketing, whatever product owners, and they work together in pairs, core pairs.

Are:
You pair them up across silos and competency and make them work very concrete on this core sheet and work with the core. They worked with each core in a core pair, and then we have some exercises and it’s really fast paced. And I’m not saying funny, but people have a good time in these workshops and they end up with something to create that they can agree upon. And that, which is a great foundation for developer, for making functionality, and for content strategies to point back to this is what we agreed was the prioritized call to action and important elements and for the designers as well. So everyone can point back to a point where we all agreed on something, and then we have some common ground and we can talk together, not just in a core workshop, but also afterwards. So it’s the communication tool part of it is the great thing I think.

Larry:
That’s one of the things I love about it. Is this really useful artifact to gather around and work together on. And so you’ve mentioned, I think at this point you’ve mentioned, I think all of the components of the model, but can you walk through it just sort of, this is kind weird doing it on a podcast, because it’s such a visual tool, but if you could make your best attempt at an audio explanation of the model?

Are:
Yeah. So its six elements. And by the way, people are used to this black and white sheet with if they’ve been using it, they be using the black and white model. But it’s re-designed in, when we did this work, we also reconceptualized the entire Core Model. So each element now has a distinct color and a distinct shape so that you can work with them separately. And you can also think more modular and build a customer journey from core to core and so on. And it also works digitally and hybrid as well. So let’s to take the sixth elements. The first one is the target group where you try to pinpoint who are the actual user, preferably with a name and characteristics, empathy mapping. You can combine the Core Model with more or less every other tool that you’re using, but describe the user, get the feeling for who they are.

Are:
That’s the first part. The second part is the user task. What are the users coming to the website or your digital service or your app or whatever, what are their tasks? And this is actually the top task perspective from Gerry McGovern. He’s been evangelizing for years. He also wrote the foreword to the book as well. So he’s a fan. That’s the single most important thing that you can use to prioritize the content. So, if you have document that use the tasks from being search, blogs, web stats, customer service statistics, or top task analysis, and that’s the kind of the prioritization rule that you use. The point is, you have to answer the major use of task, that’s the deal. So that’s target group, you use the tasks and then you have what we call goals for the solution.

Are:
We used to call it business goals, but you also have some public organizations, and others. So what you’re talking about, you said the term micro-strategy, actually, because you want to take the abstract overall strategy and take it down to earth and relate strategic goals to this particular webpage or whatever it is you’re working on. So, if you take the overall strategy and apply it to this thing, contact point, what are the measurable goals that we can use for this particular instance? That is an entirely different perspective on strategy as well, but that’s okay. Let’s see target groups. User tasks. Goals and then you have, that’s the kind of the top floor or the model and the bottom floor is actually, it’s a customer journey through a contact point. So you have the inward paths, which is how users will find your core content.

Are:
And that’s of course, search engine optimization, it’s marketing, it’s inbound, it’s information architecture, it’s all tools that you used to bring traffic to the solution. So, that’s getting users mainly. And it also helps to where we think in scenarios. Okay, where are the user? How are they thinking? What is their mental and physical context? And you use that to create good inward paths to a core. And then usually we skip the core content and we go to the forward path.

Are:
That’s the behavioral psychology part of it, which is, Where do you want to lead the customer or the user next? So you have business goals, right? You want to sell a product or download a newsletter or change behavior or whatever. You have to think like a behavioral designer. And the points are, what I actually trying to achieve? And what does that mean? How do you need to prioritize your calls to action so that you actually, the user behavior is the way you want it. So, when I have all these five elements, target group, user tasks, goals, inward path, forward paths, then you come to the core content.
Now, you have like a dashboard where you can pick the user tasks and the calls to action and search words and so on. And then you try to make the simplest and most prioritized and the optimal solution for this particular scenario. And that makes people think in an entirely different way about content. Because now you have all this context and then you can prioritize within that context. So that’s basically.

Larry:
I’ve got to say, I love that. And you did great. I was little nervous when I asked that question, can you even describe this? And you did a brilliant job, so thanks so much for that. But also, I can’t remember when I first found the tool, but it’s been embedded in my work for a long time. But the way you just talked about it, I’m seeing all kinds of other possibilities and other more power to it. Like pretty much anything in a digital organization has a touch point with this model, like marketing and content strategy and user experience design and all that. Can you talk about, and you’ve mentioned already, like the paired technique that you use in the workshops and things like that, but tell me a little bit more about how this, because I think we all want to break silos and this seems like a really good tool for that. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Are:
Breaking down silos? Yes. Oh yeah. Like you say, it represents the different parts of the organization. So, marketing that’s the inward paths of course . . . forward paths . . . strategy. That’s kind of strategy people and the user tasks, it’s user experience. And then it all comes together in content design really. So everyone has perspective to content design and the thing you said, it’s a power tool. The beauty is that it’s so simple, almost banal. You can understand it in five minutes, but then you can work like me for 15 years and will find a new twist to it.

Are:
Wow. It’s behavioral psychology as well. I didn’t know that. Until my wife, who’s a behavioral psychologist and also the co-author of the book actually. It’s not just me, it’s me and my wife. So, it’s new aspects all the time. And just mentioned that one more aspect that’s getting more and more relevant these days is content modeling and using this Core Model approach to define content model because content modeling is also a cross-competency exercise. So, it works really well for describing the content model, how elements relate and so on. And I had a talk the other day with Carrie Hane, the author of-

Larry:
Designing Connected Content. Yeah.

Are:
Designing Connected Content. And she’s using the Core Model as well, as the foundation for working with content models. So, that’s a really interesting area to learn more about.

Larry:
Well and again, that kind of points back to the power of the tool, because I’m thinking both of that. That it’s like, if you just diagram the model a little bit differently, it’d look a lot like an entity relationship diagram or a domain model, you could model it that way. Another thing that occurs to me though, is as you’re talking, I know this came out of websites. But this model … I use it, so I know at least one person is using it as in product design or in product-content design. But also I’m thinking of like technical content, technical support content and documentation and things like that. And just, marketing is an obvious place, and website content. Do you have a feel, are people adopting the model outside of web projects?

Are:
Yeah, absolutely. Obviously when using it for other kind of channels than website, so if you are writing a Facebook post or a content marketing article, then it’s great to use the Core Model. We’ve also been using it for the designing apps. So, when you’re design a screen for an app, then that’s the core and how people get there and what should happen. And really, if you think in service of service design and customer journeys, any kind of contact point and across the journey is the core. It could be a letter from a public instance or it could be . . . whatever.

Larry:
Yeah, as you talk about that, I’m thinking all of a sudden of the evolution of customer journey mapping and I got to say it didn’t occur to me until like a month ago that like, oh, Are has described this already, like with the inward path. I’m like, duh, you just stitch it together and it becomes a journey. But then, and that gets in this whole, and the way you just described that, it seems like a really good tool for implementing an omnichannel strategy. That like our customer might be looking at a kiosk in a store or getting a letter from the sales department or reading the website. Is that how it’s being used as well? Sounds like.

Are:
Yeah, it’s an omnichannel too. Absolutely. So, only inwards paths, obviously point from different channels and the forward paths is typically logging into an application. And then the application screen is the core as well. When you say the last two projects or to the two projects I’m working on now are actually startups who have products. And we are making this conversion journey somehow from whatever context the different users have, how do we get them to the site and how we make them convert and starting to use the platform. So, it’s a customer journey from the Google search to the log-in page and also follow-up emails. So you can map the entire customer journey with different course and forward paths to the next core, etcetera.

Larry:
I’d love to dig in a little more into the core. Because it’s literally the core, the central piece of this model. And just a little bit about because you talked about like Gerry McGovern’s top tasks and the empathy mapping and journey mapping and things and tools like that. But how granular does it get? Are we talking about one specific interaction or one webpage? All the examples you’ve given are like that, but tell me. Can you define “model,” the term, and how you’re using it here?

Are:
I used to say it was the optimal information unit that solves user tasks and a business goal. It reaches a business goal, but in the book thinking it’s most important contact points between the business and the user, those are the cores. But it could be anything, it could be a page, it could be a module within the page. It could be a web post, it could be a flow. So like check-out flow. So, it’s part of. . . There’s no correct answer in terms of, used to model and find out. And that’s also an important part. You shouldn’t define what the core actually is before you had defined the framework, and then you see what risk. We had an example that a few years ago when Norway’s biggest telecom company and they sent out, what’s the bill, the receipt, the-

Larry:
Oh, the invoice?

Are:
Invoice. Yeah. So, we’re going to make a website that explained the invoices, because people can’t understand it. And when we started that, using the core model, it became obvious for us. The problem is the invoice, not the website. People don’t want to go to a website to have the invoice explained. So the core was actually the invoice itself. So then the project changed into redesigning the actual invoice. So, that’s one example of you should be open to, that answer is something else than what you thought.

Larry:
Well, and I love that example too, because you used earlier in the conversation, you talked about the model being just sort of banal, this ordinary normal thing, and I’m like, dude, you’re disrespecting your work, but the way you just described that, it’s like, no, this is like, sometimes it’s a little banal, a little artifact like an invoice, that’s the most important thing to the customer. And really giving some core attention to that is going to improve the customer experience. So that’s, yeah. I love that.

Larry:
I can’t believe it. We’re already coming up close to time, but I want to make sure, you get the last word? Is there anything last, anything that has come up in the conversation or that’s just on your mind that you want to actually, and one thing I want to make sure we talk about too is tell us a little bit more about your book? We got to, because I’m excited to see this.

Are:
So the book. I’ve been thinking about the book for 15 years and I have written the book maybe seven times, and I’ve been thinking too much about this. So, and the thing that made this actually happened was when I got my wife on board, and she could help me really crystalize things. So, the book is coming hot off the presses on Monday, actually, the Norwegian book. So it’s exciting to see how people receive it. And the plan is to have it translated and make an English version of it sometime early next year, March or February, hopefully. And also, Confab, I’m hosting a core workshop on Confab. That’s in April.

Larry:
Usually in April or May, I don’t know the dates next year, but I’m excited. I’ll go just for that. Yeah.

Are:
So come to Confab, have a chat and I’ll sell you my book and talk about the Core Model.

Larry:
Nice. Well, thanks so much, Are, one last thing. What’s the best way for people to stay in touch? Do you have a social media account or other place you like to connect with folks?

Are:
Yeah. I have an English account on Twitter, which is @CoreModelBook. That’s the name of the account. And then also have a website explaining the Core Model. And you can find out that TheCoreModel.com. So that’s, for now, it’s a Medium blog, but I’m making a website that’s more in line with the new concept and design for the Core Model. So the thinking is that this would be an universe with a book and websites with core pages and everything.

Larry:
Nice. Well, thanks so much, Are. Great conversation. I really enjoyed talking with you.

Are:
Likewise.