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Noz UrbinaNoz Urbina can help you navigate the hype around personalization and create genuinely helpful customized content experiences.
Noz focuses on the fundamentals that create useful, usable adaptive content. He starts with customer journey mapping and persona creation to develop an evidence-based picture of his users. Then he builds modularized content models that address those user needs.
The result is a human-centered content system that serves up content tailored to answer users’ questions wherever they are in their journey.
Noz and I talked about:
- his background as a pioneer in the field of content strategy and his OmnichannelX conference
- the need for precision around the use of the term “personalization”
- how to create actionable personas and discern user needs and goals, and how to determine why any one segment might need personalized content
- how to figure out who your customers and users are
- the importance of using journey mapping to identify the questions your users need answers to
- how journey mapping is all-too-often done as a crafts project, not as a genuinely customer-centered exercise
- how his background in technical documentation helps him to this day
- how customer journey mapping can elicit aha! moments among stakeholders
- how content modeling both prompted his interest in customer journey mapping and helps him do it better
- the need to craft answers that can work across a number of delivery channels
- his Legos and Russian-doll analogies to describe componentized content
- new natural language processing (NLP) technologies that can help guide consistency and style and categorization
- the small but growing number of vendors of these tools – and his appreciation for this small tools ecosystem (a few examples: PoolParty, OntoText, StarDog,Acrolinx, UXPressia)
- his observation that tech is not the problem – that’s never what’s holding back big enterprises – the real problems are lack of internal organization, processes, content models, and content design
- how unlikely it is that even the biggest, smartest companies will ever create a holistic end-to-end customer experience system
- the upside of the incompletion of 360-degree content strategy adoption: wherever you are, you’ll always have the opportunity to move forward
- the importance of developing good content models
Noz’s Bio
Noz Urbina is a globally recognized leader in the field of content strategy and customer experience consultancy. He’s well known as a pioneer in customer journey mapping and adaptive content modeling for delivering personalized, contextually relevant content experiences in an omnichannel environment. He is also co-author of the book “Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits” and lecturer in the Masters Programme in content strategy at the University of Applied Sciences, Graz. In 2013 he founded his own consultancy Urbina Consulting and in 2018, co-founded the omnichannel events organisation OmnichannelX.
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Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast Intro Transcript
You want to feel like you’ve been heard and understood and that companies are giving you exactly what you want. Personalization is the business tool that can make this happen. Unfortunately, personalizing content is not as simple as installing software and hitting the “start” button. It requires lots of user research and a strong understanding of how to model and organize your content. For the past couple of decades, Noz Urbina has been listening to users and building the adaptive systems that power content personalization.
Interview Transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 85 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Noz Urbina. Noz is the founder of Urbina Consulting. He runs the OmnichannelX Conference, and he’s also a faculty member at Graz University, where he teaches in the content strategy masters program in their University of Applied Sciences in Graz. So welcome, Noz. Tell the folks a little bit more about yourself and what you’re up to there at Urbina Consulting.
Noz:
Hello, Larry. So I have been a content strategist coming on 19 years now. I was kind of in the original guard, I would say, of the omni-channel, multi-format, multi-channel crew. I was very lucky to get into this game straight out of university and kind of be taken under the wing of some pillars of the industry, Ann Rockley, Scott Abel, Rahel Bailey, I could go on and on. I was very lucky in my early career with the peers who were around me, and that was a very enjoyable ride. I started my own consultancy about six years ago, and then we founded the Omnichannel Conference two years ago. So next year will be our third year where we’re working on dates and plans as we speak for the Omnichannel Conference. And that keeps me very entertained. Let me put it that way.
Larry:
Well, I went to the conferences, God, I’ve completely lost track of time, but somewhere in the last couple months it seems like I was at omni-channel likes and really enjoyed it.
Noz:
Great.
Larry:
Yeah. Thanks for doing that. What I want to talk to about like you said, you’re the omni-channel guy, but you’re also really well known for personalization. I really want to focus on that today because personalized content, well, first of all, it seems kind of over-hyped in some circles. So I would love to get to the reality behind the hype around personalization, but also what it takes for a content strategy practitioner to consider all the things that go… It’s a complex enterprise and I’d love to kind of give folks a feel for if they’re thrust into a personalization exercise/enterprise of some kind, give them a fighting chance at doing what you do every day. Well, first of all, what is personalization? It seems like you’re like, if you customize your profile on a new site and then you start to see different content because of that, but that’s just like the tip of the iceberg, right? Can you talk a little bit about the various manifestations of personalized content?
Noz:
Thank you for framing it in that way, because I think that a lot of the problem in the discussion about personalization is due to people kind of not understanding what is meant when we use that word because they’re… Like anything that has any artificial intelligence component these days, it kind of gets almost blown up into being magic. And also, I think one of the great pains in the whole marketing content strategy UX world is that whatever the discipline or area is, gets associated with its most obvious loudest first implementations. So when they think people think of personalization, they think about creepy follow you around algorithms, or ads, or maybe recommendation algorithms like an Amazon suggestion that you might also like this product kind of thing. Whereas when personalization is done well, people don’t even notice it’s happening.
Noz:
So I like to say generally that the relevance is personalization under another name. So anytime you are considering your audience and actually building content that is particular for subsegments of your audience, rather than your audience as one monolithic block, you’re going down the personalization route. So personalization not to be confused or made synonymous with algorithmic or artificial intelligence methods, although those can play a role. So what I like to recommend people to do is start from the basics. Get back to your fundamentals. Who are target personas? What information do they need? When do they need it? And why might they need different information in this subsegment versus this subsegment? And if we made that difference, what difference would that make along their journey? So that’s getting it back to the fundamentals, not of algorithms and technologies and recommendation engines which the vendor community and the technology community would love to make this all about. Get back to the things that content people know, audience, purpose goals, and so on, moving people along their journey.
Larry:
Yeah. And that gets into like, I love that we can start really the start that UX focused kind of customer centric look at this. Like, okay, what do you need? Where are you likely to be in your journey? Can you talk a little bit about your methods? I know I’ve heard you talk before about how important journey maps and persona development are. Can you walk through just kind of a high level overview of how you approach a new project like that? How you discern what those users might need?
Noz:
Yeah. I think the thing to kind of reassure people is that even in my work which tends to be with larger multinational kind of organizations, even in the kind of projects I do, you can do this on roll. You don’t have to have $100,000 of a user research budget to develop your personas just to get started. You can do this pretty much tailored to the level and size of your project or your organization’s need. So first, it’s figuring out who those people are, however you want to name them. I like working from well-researched, well-thought out personas. If that’s not available to me on a project and we have to move forward in a do or die situation and say, “Okay, well, let’s move forward with these roles that we have.”
Noz:
And we know that we have, for example, a technical influencer and we have the budget holder and we have the executive, and then we have the user. So I mean, let’s say we have those four roles. Or if I’m in medical devices, we might have a maintainer, an in-house support person, a nurse, and a doctor. So we have four other roles. So what are the roles? Then start figuring out their informational needs. So their tasks and their objectives. What are they trying to accomplish? If we don’t have a lot of budget for this real persona research to get into underlying emotional goals and so on, then we’re just looking at tasks. What does that role have to do? We know that they have to do this, that’s their job. And then from those tasks, my whole methodology for customer journey mapping is about breaking down questions over time.
Noz:
So take a scenario. I’m a nurse and I’ve got patients come in and I’ve got a new machine that I’m working with. And I don’t know how do this procedure, and I’ve got five minutes to figure it out. So that’s a scenario, or I am responsible for evaluating new billing packages for my company. So I’m going to research all the SaaS software options on the market and develop my shortlist. So you take a role and you take a scenario and you say, “Okay, so what would that person ask?” What would they ask first? And then questions do those questions then lead to along the journey? So customer journey mapping, I often see it done as a kind of arts and craft project where you’re trying to basically create this kind of these different smiley faces. And you just create this arc over time and it says website, newsletter, et cetera.
Noz:
I hate those with a deep passion, because that’s not useful to me as a content creator or as someone who’s prone to plan out personalization to really do anything. So the customer journey map for me is it does have an emotional arc, but it could have the thing that I need to know is what does this person need to know at what stage along the process? And that’s where I can say, “Okay, well, this kind of person they get really focused on this information at this stage.” So are we providing that? Are we providing that in a way that is accessible to them when they’re in that situation at that time? So are we surfacing it proactively or do they have to go hunting for it? And is it different than the other personas? And that’s it. So once you’ve kind of worked that out, you can start doing content personalization. You can do it with pen and paper if you wanted to and mail it out to people, but you’ve figured out who you’re changing things for, what the value add is, and what the end goal is you’re trying to support.
Larry:
Right. So always I love that’s just the highest level of user focus you could have, because I think so many journey mapping projects start with, “Well, hey, we want them to be doing this at this point.” It’s all product and company focused rather than user focused. So yeah, I appreciate it. So, that’s great. And one of the things that I’ve heard you say elsewhere about the benefit of doing it that way is that there’s some, what we call in the business “stakeholder alignment” stuff going on there that you’re building these maps. There’s some real power in there of being able to communicate with your various folks that you have to deal with in this. Can you talk a little bit to that?
Noz:
Yeah. Absolutely. That’s one of my favorite parts and this was career changing for me. As you know, but as many of your listeners might not, I started originally in technical documentation and I made the transition to general content strategy and then more focused on marketing content strategy. And now really omni-channel – to say that I’m working with new policies groups, and technical documentation, marketing, getting ready for chatbots, whatever people need. And customer journey mapping was instrumental for me because what I found was none of the people who bring me into a project are working everywhere and they don’t have the perspective necessary to kind of figure out a customer journey map the way that I was asking. So I was saying, what does their process look like? Where they’re trying to get to? And so why are you writing this? Because for me as a content strategist, the emphasis is on the strategy, not in the content.
Noz:
So I’m going, do you need that piece of content? Does this need to exist? Where can we cut? How can we make it more concise, more trim, more optimized? I think about content the way that Apple thinks about design. What is the stuff that they need to do their tasks and how do we optimize the experience around that? But with words. So I’m always looking for, what can we shave off? What can we smooth? What can we round? What can we make cleaner? And they would go, “I don’t know, we publish that because that’s what we’ve always published or, well, that’s what the executive thinks we need to publish, or that’s what the head of product management told us to publish.”
Noz:
And so what the customer journey mapping kind of forced them to do was go around the houses in the departments and also talk to some customers and try to map that journey out. And inevitably there would be this incredible kind of aha moments that what happened when these people would be in the room together and put their perspective in one bucket and switched around. There was an understanding of the customer, which would sort of suddenly take a leap forward in the team overall and how they interact. And then people would start taking each other’s emails and book follow up meetings with each other. And these bridges would be built that would help the company operate better all because we were just asking what information should we be writing for people.
Larry:
At that point, I love that because that’s the classic content strategy problem is silo busting. And if this is a method that does that, boom, I think a lot of people would start approaching that way. There’s so much in what you just said. So many details to be worked out after that. For example, I think you’re kind of betraying your roots in technical content, because this is so baked into you. I’m worried I might have to extract this out of you, notion of working with modularized atomized content because you were just describing the front end of that where all the customer needs and stuff. Deep underneath there, we need content that’s organized in a way that you can fulfill those needs. Tell me a little bit about that leap from that outside customer facing thing down to whatever your content repository looks like or how you put that together.
Noz:
Yeah. So, it’s funny because I started with this back to front because what I used to do is that people would invite me in as a content modeler to help them build this structures, build their content models, do the information typing and content typing, and get that into their content management system. And I would come in and say, “All right, so let me look at your content.” What are you trying to do? Let’s say we want to do this, we want this appear over here, we want to reuse that over there, wants it great. I would model that all that up. And it was as I got into the customer journey mapping process and over time seeing how that didn’t perform in the longterm that I said, “Okay, we have to do this customer journey mapping part.” Because you’re rushing along to get the CMS launched or relaunch the site, or get whatever published.
Noz:
And because we’re not doing the basics, which is designing from user requirements and real understanding of the audience, it’s never coming out right. And that’s not kind of my fault because I’m doing what you asked me to do and what you paid me to do. So what these two processes have in common is the question. So the piece of content is driven by a question. So you have a question that someone’s going to ask at some point, now that might be answered on a phone, in a chatbot, in an app, in print via a sales rep or a trainer or a customer support person, or a field service person, et cetera. A partner via the extranet. There’s all these ways that the actual asker might get this response. So what we want to do is we want to be very flexible and say, “All right, no matter who’s asking this, this response now is a reusable thing.”
Noz:
And we want to make that self-contained. We want to say, “Okay, well, this is probably useful for these kinds of people in these kinds of situations, but we’ve created it with an open future.” Each question has a response and that’s either becomes a little module of content, or it becomes a block within the reusable module content, or it becomes an update to an existing module of content. Everything we do should kind of work like a Lego brick. We have little ones, little tiny ones, which might answer very simple questions like what’s the date of the conference, December 12th. That’s the tiniest possible thing you could have. It’s just that little data factoid. And that will go into a group with other things like other things about the event, or other things about the product, other things about the campaign. And then again, that will be like Russian dolls, or imagine if you were making Russian dolls out of Lego.
Noz:
So you’ve got these larger and larger groups, but at each stage they could be separate at the game, they could be built into something else. And you can grab the whole bunch and use it as a unit, if you want to. So those two concepts of the Lego bits and the Russian dolls is the core of reusable content. We have to create it that way, and then we have to label it in the repository so that we as creators and managers can find it to reuse it when we need to.
Larry:
Right. And so much of that, I’m curious now about the challenge. So much legacy content is not like that. It’s like big blobs of documents or PDF files, or different CMS things. How, I want to say excruciating, but how challenging is that to like extract this componentized content that you need to do proper personalization from when you go into an existing organization? Is that easier these days than it was 10 years ago or is it still an issue?
Noz:
It’s much easier than it was 10 years ago? There’s certain the one technology that kind of really makes life easier. Well, no, there’s two. One is natural language processing for consistency and style. So, if you’re trying to bring content into the Lego world where it’s reusable, it’s got to fit together properly. So you can’t have mismatched terminology on the top half a page with the second half of the page, or you can but you don’t want to. So now there’s tools on the market which can actually read language and state stylistically you’re off here. And last time you called it a button and this time you’re calling it an interface. So there are tools now that can read infinite number of pages and give you consistency reports on how you use language, how you use specific terms and allow you to target your trouble spots and address them.
Noz:
The other one is natural language processing for categorization, because nobody likes tagging. I teach people tagging methodologies. I designed tagging methodologies. I don’t like having to figure out what are the tags I should put on this thing because once I’m done writing it, I want to be done. So I think most users, you can maybe get two, three tags out of them on any piece of writing that they’re doing.
Noz:
So if you’re in a system that’s really complicated and you want richer tagging there’s NLP can now read the content itself and say, “Well, it sounds like you’re talking about X, Y, and Z, here’s 10 tags.” If the robot is wrong, you can tell them, “Okay, these three are wrong, but you can apply these seven.” Being able to do that, not only to each pieces of content I write, but throw it across 10,000 PDFs, 5,000 webpages and a 100,000 Word documents and say, “Okay, where are all the stuff where we talk about windmills? Where all this stuff where we talk about onboarding? Where’s all the stuff we talk about et cetera.” And allowing you to get your arms around is this ocean of words and actually start to group and categorize, and then prioritize makes that whole process much easier.
Larry:
Yeah. I mean, that’s part of the content strategy role, right? This newer role of somebody taking an enterprise wide look at like, well, how do we say that? Or how do we express that? And you mentioned, I think I gathered from everything you’ve said to this point that you’re not a tools first guy, like you’re coming about vendors earlier and stuff. I know there are tools, I can’t remember the name of it, but I’ve seen demos of a couple of those tools that do that contextual analysis as an author’s creating, it’ll say like, no, this is how we say that. Or things like PoolParty or tools like that for the taxonomy and other tagging stuff. Is there a pretty good ecosystem of those tools now? Tell me a little bit about that.
Noz:
It’s still a small niche, which honestly I like. It’s more trouble for me when there’s 50 vendors for something, because then we have to kind of go through the whole triage of why this one, why not that one? When, as you said, I’m not really like a tools first guy. I have tools that I like, because I think they work well. I like to have a few good tools which do me for most situations, but if not, I’ll work with whatever the client has. If the client says we’re working with AEM, we’re working with AEM. If working with Sitecore, or Drupal, or whatever, I adapt myself to the situation. But I do have tools, especially like that, which often they don’t have in-house yet because they’re pretty new. Yeah.
Noz:
PoolParty is one that comes up a lot. Ontotext, this is a repository that sits underneath PoolParty. Also, Stardog which does a similar job. And then for the linguistic style, like the style thing, I find that I’m often working with Acrolinx, which I like. And then for the customer journey mapping, I really like a platform, it’s a SaaS called UXPressia, U-X-P-R-E-S-S-I-A. And UXPressia what I like about them is they’re not building pictures. It’s not about making a PDF or a poster. It’s about making a shareable cloud asset, which multiple people can collaborate on and you can update and link two reusable personas and reusable journeys and so on and so on. So those are tools that I’m working with on a regular basis. The CMS is the most variable one because there are thousands. Obviously in the big companies that comes down to a couple of dozen, but I’m still surprised by the amount of variation I get that we’re working with.
Larry:
There’s a lot of fuss in parts of the tech world about is like headless CMS’s in the whole decoupling of the CMS from the front end and that must be a common thing in omni-channel. Are there any big enterprises that are doing a good job like of however they do it, whether it’s enterprise experience management thing or a headless thing where you’re building your own APIs and connections and stuff? Is that world getting more complex and interesting? Is there more than just picking whether it’s SiteCore or AEM or something like that or?
Noz:
Yeah. So I’ll answer it, but then I’ll also give a caution that I don’t want to drift too far into the tech side with this because it’s so not the problem. It’s so not the problem that is stopping people from doing this project. And this is going back years, whether it’s tiny organizations or whether it’s big multinationals, it’s not technology that’s really stopping them. It’s organizing themselves, putting in processes, putting in content models, actually designing their content for purposes, and so that it has features and functions for different channels. That’s what’s holding people back. We run our stuff off of WordPress, and we do structured content, and we can do personalization, and we reuse across different deliverables like different micro-sites, password protected, not password protected. You can do this with just about whatever tool you have.
Noz:
Yes, there are more sophisticated tools coming out there. And like at both of the OmnichannelX conferences, Cisco presented. And they are doing some amazing stuff with artificial intelligence to judge next best action, next best things to put on under somebody’s nose, across channels and so on. And absolutely you can do that, but I think that 80%, 90% of the market, and therefore I’m going to assume 80-90% of the listeners are getting in the situation where they’re not asking what color should I paint my Ferrari, they’re going how can I get my license? How can I get into my first vehicle? So I like to focus on that. So yeah, the headline thing is useful. It’s a very useful way to get all your stuff into one place and kind of centralize.
Noz:
But the fact is, and I always want to level set here, is that even when you’re working with a kind of organization that I do, none of them have this. And I don’t think any of them ever will. I always say, everything in content is like a laundry. It is never done. You can be more or less on top of it, but it is never done. No one has a holistic management of their end-to-end customer experience. No one has the 360 degree view on every touch point in their business. I’ve never seen it.
Noz:
I’ve only seen companies who are, let’s say they’ve got a very large marketing organization and that they’ve managed to get that under wraps globally. But then you say, “Okay, well what happens in support?” And they go… Or that you have like a support and marketing, on OmnichannelX we had a support marketing team that worked really well together. Documentation never came up and I won’t name names, but I’ve seen some of the most sophisticated this, and then you ask about that and there’s a big gap. So I want to reassure people that wherever you are, you can move forward in this direction as long as you keep the fundamentals in mind.
Larry:
Right. You’re reminding me, I’ve seen Jared Spool present many times the varying levels of UX maturity in an organization. And something very similar going on here it sounds like.
Noz:
Yeah.
Larry:
Yeah. Hey, Noz, I can’t believe this. We’re already coming up close to time. I would love to continue forever, but I like to keep these around a half hour. But before we wrap up, I want to make sure is there anything last, anything that’s come up in this conversation or that it’s just on your mind about content strategy or omni-channel stuff that you want to share before we wrap up?
Noz:
Well, I think we’ve mentioned a couple of times that we’ve come up with the new conference next year. That’s on omnichannelx.digital. People can check that out. They will still be talking about last year’s conference if you check it right now, but that is a good place to check out and you can sign up for the newsletter. The other thing I wanted to talk about was, I would say if you’re into personalization or you want to personalize content, if you don’t have a content model and so just in case people misunderstand, content that model is not your plan or your business model for content, it is what are the types of information we’re going to create? Do we create case studies? Do we create articles? Do we create how tos? What are the types of content that you create?
Noz:
And that’s not blog post PDF, Word, it’s what is the information type inside that? And then how does that break down? What bits would we change if we’re doing a white paper for this audience or a white paper for that audience? Would we change the case studies? Would we changed the examples? Would we changed the business challenges? Decide what those things are, give them names, because if you haven’t done that, then you’ve already kind of failed the personalization. You’ve already admitted defeat and all you’re going to do is create a recommendation engine that says, do you want this white paper or that bad white paper? But you have no way to actually effectively manage two flavors of a white paper for two different audiences.
Larry:
So I love that. That’s kind of, I can’t remember where, but this has come up like three or four times recently, this importance of naming, and naming conventions and everybody being on the same page about these concepts you’re talking about. Well, thanks. Hey, one last thing, Noz, what’s the best place for folks to put, you mentioned the OmnichannelX conference, and I’ll put all this in the show notes as well, but social media or other websites that you’d like folks to check out.
Noz:
Well, for work I’m a big Twitter guy and LinkedIn. If you want to actually kind of engage and chat and stuff, LinkedIn, I’m pretty easy to find. I have a pretty unique name. And then there’s of course our website urbinaconsulting.com, which is ripe for relaunch. So I’m hoping to get a brand-new visual identity out soon. We’re excited about that. Yeah. That’s really the best four places to get ahold of me.
Larry:
Great. And like I said, I’ll put all that in the show notes. Well, thanks so much, Noz. I really appreciate the conversation.
Noz:
My pleasure, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Larry.
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