Tamara Adlin: The Power of Personas – Episode 59

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Tamara Adlin uses the power of user personas to align teams and help them develop better products.

Tamara literally co-wrote the first book on how to develop and use personas. She has subsequently developed several practices that help teams align executives and other stakeholders on how to build genuinely customer-focused products and services.

Tamara and I talked about:

• her discovery of the concept of personas in Alan Cooper’s book The Inmates are Running the Asylum in 1999
• the book that she and John Pruitt subsequently wrote together, The Persona Lifecycle, based on workshops that they had conducted
• the problem back in 1999 that Cooper was trying to solve – engineers designing user interfaces and writing UI copy
• how focusing on a small, specific segment of users with the persona methodology can – paradoxically – satisfy many other users as well – and how the example of the development of the roll-aboard suitcase illustrates this
• her work at Amazon from 2002 to 2005 – she had a great team and access to voluminous data, but struggled to come up with personas based on that data
• her work during the same time period on smaller teams with less data during which they developed “ad hoc” persona creation
• how turn assumptions into hypotheses jumpstarts persona creation, which can then be validated with data
• her insight that “the only assumptions that can hurt your products are the ones that you don’t know about”
• the importance of crafting personas that resonate with the assumptions that business leaders hold
• the origin of the term “ad hoc persona” and its evolution in her practice to “alignment personas,” a term that better describes the value that the concept delivers
• how she elicits business goals from the executives she works with – a Mad Libs exercise and an approach that lets her feign being “the dumbest person in the room”
• how she practices UX on her UX practice
• early UX pioneers who helped launch the widespread acceptance of the discipline: Jakob Nielsen, Steve Krug, Don Norman, and many others
• some of the antecedents to the persona concept – from marketing, human-centered design, etc.
• how personas have taken their place alongside scenarios and use cases in the UX tool kit
• how focusing on statements that start with the words “I want” or “I need” is a better approach than aggregating psychographic and demographic data and pondering pain points
• how this approach can start a conversation between the persona and the product or service you’re designing
• the ultimate goal of her work: “help the persona happily do the things that make the business thrive”
• how she is both “excited and totally intimidated by content strategy”
• the importance in UX of making the transition “from thinking about users to thinking like users”
• some lessons that content strategy as a discipline can learn from the UX profession
• some connections between UX and content strategy

Tamara’s Bio

Tamara Adlin is an author, speaker, and consultant in the fields of user experience, executive alignment, startup strategy, and career development for women, especially in technical fields. She co-authored the Persona Lifecycle books, which have become part of the User Experience canon. Since then, she has developed a new Alignment Persona methodology to bring alignment to executive and stakeholder teams and clarity and focus to entire organizations.

In her consulting work, she has worked with established companies from Apple to Zillow, dozens of startups, and international organizations like the United Nations. Before launching her own business, Tamara was a User Experience Lead at Amazon. She has a Master’s Degree in Human Centered Design and Engineering from the University of Washington, and has always been fascinated with the problem of getting lots of people with different backgrounds to communicate and work well together.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

Keeping in mind a specific person as you design a product or service results in a much better user experience. Tamara Adlin is one of the original experts in the practice of persona development. She literally wrote the first book on how to create and apply user personas. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the power of personas and how they’ve been incorporated into UX practice. We also talked about parallels between the development of the fields of user experience design and content strategy.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to Episode Number 59 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to have with us Tamara Adlin. Tamara is … I recently heard her referred to as a persona goddess.

Tamara:
Well, If I am, I’m one of several. . . But sure, I’ll take it.

Larry:
But you do go back, because shortly … Tell me a little bit about the history of personas and how you got … Because Alan Cooper wrote that famous book, and you … Tell us that story.

Tamara:
Yeah, sure. So in 1999 my then boss handed me the book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Why High Tech Products Drive us Crazy and How to Stop the Insanity [Restore the Sanity], which yes, I can rattle off in addition to some quotes from it. That was written by Alan Cooper, and it made a big splash in the UX world, which was pretty young at that point, and it made a big splash with me, obviously. I got really excited about the idea of personas, ended up collaborating on some workshops at the Usability Professionals Association conferences with John Pruitt and Holly Car, Holly Jamison Car at the time.

Tamara:
We got approached to write a book, because we ran this workshop on so many people were trying personas and the efforts weren’t going as well as everybody thought they should. So we got really curious about first of all, how do you create personas, because there weren’t any instructions. Then once you created personas, why didn’t they work more often? So we got really interested in that and created The Persona Lifecycle books out of that experience.

Larry:
Okay. So that’s interesting. So the stuff that Alan Cooper wrote about it, he didn’t provide real instructions. You just kind of said, “Hey look, we use personas. Our software’s better. Have fun with it.” That’s kind of how-

Tamara:
Yeah. That’s a great question. No, most of the book was a discussion about what he thought was a problem in business that was highly related to the fact that by default engineers end up being the ones who design user experiences. Because before the whole, remember this was 1999, before the whole field of UX exploded, the people who were coding were the people who are deciding where the buttons went and what they said.

Tamara:
In the middle of it, he had three chapters, excuse me, nine, ten and eleven in which he introduced the idea of personas. He described personas as fictional characters defined with significant rigor and precision, whatever that meant to everyone, and that you could then use them and that if you focused on a persona or a small set of personas, you are more likely to make a product that was extremely delightful to lots of people then if you try to satisfy lots and lots of people.

Larry:
That’s a great paradox, that by aiming for just a tiny sliver, you satisfy more people.

Tamara:
Yeah.

Larry:
That’s a great-

Tamara:
Yeah. There’s a really good example he uses in there of the roll-aboard suitcase. The roll-aboard suitcase is today, I don’t know that there’s a more ubiquitous product out there. But when it was originally designed, it was not designed for families. It was not designed for screaming children. It was designed actually specifically for pilots, and there’s even differences between pilots and flight attendants if you get down into the details. But it was designed for pilots. I believe I’m right about this, and the design fit a pilot’s very specific needs. It carries about two days of clothes, a pair of shoes. You could strap that big briefcase they used to carry around on top of it.

Tamara:
But think about what it didn’t do. It didn’t fit underneath the seat in front of you, because there is no seat in front of the pilot. But it did roll easily down the aisle. And I think what happened is that people saw these things in airports and saw that they really nailed a particular problem and they wanted one. I think you mentioned in a conversation before there was like only one place you could get them originally.

Larry:
Yeah, because I did that. I was one of those people. In the late eighties I traveled a lot for business, and I think it was more of the flight attendants that I saw.

Tamara:
Yup.

Larry:
But I was like, “I got to get one of those.” And there was like one in one of those inflight catalogs. I think there was one place where you could get it.

Tamara:
Sky Mall or something.

Larry:
Exactly one of those. Yeah. So totally, yeah, I was one of those rippling out users-

Tamara:
Yeah.

Larry:
Of that gadget.

Tamara:
So I mean today you can get them in every size, shape and color. They have Spiderman ones. They’re everywhere. They have wheels on the suitcases that are obviously meant to be checked in.

Tamara:
But focusing on one user on this imaginary pilot who had qualities of very real pilots based on research. And based on research on the requirements of the job and all of those things, the original roll-aboard suitcase was very, very specific.

Larry:
Now I want to go back. As you were leading into that you talked about how Alan Cooper had a very specific kind of description of the benefits of this and kind of how to get there. But I’m curious about the details, how you took that insight from the travel bag to one of your famous applications or attempted applications of the persona thing was your early work at Amazon back around not too long, when was that? That was not too long after the-

Tamara:
Well I don’t know if it’s famous or not.

Larry:
Okay.

Tamara:
Well I’ll answer, there’s kind of a couple of questions in there. In the original Inmates Running the Asylum book, Cooper basically says gather data, find patterns in the data and create personas. That was one of the reasons why we were inspired to do the workshops is because we’re like, wait a minute, we need more details. And he added more details in his books about phase, which are big textbooks on UX design and, and other people have done that too. But we really were like, okay, find data, find patterns in the data, create personas was not enough. And we were like, oh gosh,, we need more than this. Which is why we started getting excited about creating a process.

Tamara:
I don’t know that the work I did on personas at Amazon is at all famous, but it’s famous in my brain anyway because it’s kind of interesting. We ran those workshops on how to create personas in 2000, 2001. I started working at Amazon in 2002, and I was there from 2002 to 2005 at which time I was also working on the book with John Pruitt, which was a nightmare. But that’s another story, not because of John. John’s great. But writing a book is a nightmare.

Tamara:
I thought, well, okay, here I am with the company that has the largest database in the world at the time, let’s try it here. And I had support. There were members of the data warehouse team, there were analysts. I had great people on the team trying to help me. What I discovered is that trying to create personas out of data for all of Amazon didn’t work. I think that’s true because it’s way too broad, and so you end up with these personas if you have any that are really just these broad descriptions that don’t help you decide what text to put on the page.

Larry:
Yeah, it would just be like describing shopping behavior.

Tamara:
It ends up being spot … Yeah. So they used to talk about spear fishers, or people would just come in for one thing and leave or browsers and that’s what you kind of end up with. The problem with that is that it doesn’t help me make decisions. So I worked for months with the best of the best trying to wrangle the data into personas and it didn’t work.

Tamara:
Interestingly, at the same time I was doing some very ad hoc work with the teams that were putting together the interfaces for buying a loose diamond or buying car parts, two separate teams obviously, at the same time, which is amusing because of course when you think about buying a diamond or a vendor for an Impala, you think amazon.com.

Tamara:
Anyway, with those two teams, we didn’t have a lot of resources. They were really trying to get a lot done quickly, and I ended up creating what I then called Ad Hoc Personas with those teams where we sat down for a couple of hours and we sketched out key qualities and issues and questions and concerns that various users of those two interfaces would come across. Then we used those, sure assumption-based Ad Hoc Personas and they were really helpful because we could create an entire story for Educated Ernie who knows everything about diamonds before he starts shopping versus Last-Minute Larry who has decided, yes this Valentine’s day he is going to propose and has no idea about diamonds.

Larry:
Right.

Tamara:
Those kinds of things turned out to be incredibly useful.

Larry:
Interesting. And I can kind of see why because you said they’re kind of assumptions, but these are well-founded assumptions. You’re working with a product manager. Was there some data informing that or was it mostly that couple of hours at a conference room?

Tamara:
Well look, by the time a UX person gets involved with any team or any company, they’ve gone through a lot to get to where they are. Where they are now is we’re going to build a product. So there is some data that went into that decision or there was a vending in a startup. There may not be data, but there was a whole process of getting funding and all of that.

Tamara:
These people have been thinking about this problem for a long time, and in most cases we’re not sending people to the moon. In most cases we’re trying to sell them diamonds or auto parts, right? And if that’s the case, then yes, user research is important. Getting insights about the way people really do things is important.

Tamara:
But if you’re trying to find a way to get consensus and alignment around who you’re building this product for, it turns out that what we label as assumptions can get you really pretty close. And so where I am today, fast forward with my whole alignment persona thing, which is what I call Ad Hoc Personas now. It’s the same thing, is how about before you go try to find data, you have a hypothesis. Because in seventh grade they told us have a hypothesis before you gather data. And I think that creating these personas as a means of aligning a team first and extracting all those assumptions then gives you a great way to go get data to validate or invalidate.

Larry:
Right. That that makes so much sense, and I’m trying to picture the mindset of … So many people now seems completely data driven instead of data informed. This sounds data informed but kind of honoring those, just all that amalgam. Because I’ve been a product manager and done things like it. There’s a weird collection of stuff that you get that I can see it totally informing that kind of ad hoc process of just you’re not making it up.

Tamara:
No.

Larry:
It’s well founded.

Tamara:
That’s right.

Larry:
Yeah.

Tamara:
I came to the decision in the little quip that I always say, is that the only assumptions that can hurt your products are the ones that you don’t know about. Because what I was doing was watching. I was watching these persona efforts and I was watching people do these great efforts with it could be hundreds of thousands of dollars. And putting these amazing posters on the wall and giving out mugs and squeeze toys and t-shirts and having events or whatever, have actors come in and it wasn’t working. And I thought, well, why isn’t this working and what does it mean that it’s not working?

Tamara:
Well, what it means is that the personas that you create are not working if the people who are in charge of making the decisions about the company and the product are not using them. So if that’s the case, I just wondered why aren’t they using them? It seems easier to say Phyllis than to say user. At least it’s more specific.

Tamara:
The reason they’re not using them is because no amount of data can displace an assumption by someone who thinks they know what they’re doing. And people who start businesses, start businesses not because they’re idiots who have ingrained assumptions that they are just dead set on sticking by. It’s because they have some idea to create some product for some set of people that solve some set of problems in some unique way and they’ve thought about it a lot.

Tamara:
So they have those ideas and no amount of data will shove those ideas out of their brains until they get a chance to test. Will people who wear bobby socks and carry parrots on their shoulders really want this product because I think they will.

Larry:
Right.

Tamara:
No amount of data is going to tell them that the parrot is irrelevant until he tries it.

Larry:
Yep. And so the name, going from ad hoc to alignment, it sounds like in there is something about the kind of aligning the people involved around. And it seems like personas can be a very powerful tool for that.

Tamara:
Yup.

Larry:
Because once you’re talking about a person, an embodiment of a person rather than an Excel table full of data, that’s a way more memorable and useful tool, right?

Tamara:
Exactly. So the word ad hoc persona actually came from Don Norman. I gave a series of workshops with John at the Nielsen Norman Group conferences, which was a huge treat. One of the best parts was we got to have lunch with people like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini and all of these big, these great thinkers in our field. We were talking with him at lunch one day and I was telling him that actually in my real work as a consultant at that point I wasn’t using data at all. I was just trying to get everybody to get their assumptions out on the table and getting them organized into these quick and dirty personas, and he coined the term Ad Hoc Personas in an article Ad Hoc Personas and Empathetic Focus. And his point was in agreement that anything that can build some empathy, data or no data, is helpful.

Tamara:
I used the term Ad Hoc Personas for many years, but then I started thinking what is going to make this methodology interesting and appealing to the people who might buy it? Because I’m a consultant, right, and this is a service or it’s a method I give away, but I also do services around it. I thought and asked friends, talked to them, what does this achieve? What’s the value proposition and differentiator? This achieves alignment, and to me stakeholder and executive alignment, if it’s not there is a way bigger problem than lack of data will ever be. Because if the executives or stakeholders are talking past each other and all think they want something different, then the product doesn’t have a chance.

Larry:
Right. Talk a little bit about your … Because you have some methods for that, like your Mad Libs thing-

Tamara:
Oh yeah.

Larry:
That we’ve talked about before. Talk a little, because that’s … What you just said all makes perfect sense. But you need tools and techniques-

Tamara:
You need some tools.

Larry:
For accessing that what you know is there-

Tamara:
Yeah.

Larry:
Or not there.

Tamara:
Yeah. It’s not my intention to make this a sales pitch for alignment personas. But to answer your question, yes, it does have to be structured. When you’re dealing with executives or even stakeholders like your grand boss or your great grand boss, you have to be organized and you have to speak in their language. So this workshop that I started developing in like 2004 and I’ve developed since then, takes key stakeholders and executives through this process of starting with a what they absolutely know and what they’re supposed to absolutely know is their business goals. Right? And every single time I have a contract with a new client, the first line in it is articulate business goals. I’m not saying we’re going to create them, I’m just like articulate. Let’s just write them down.

Tamara:
They all say we can skip that every time. They say we can skip that because we already have them, and I say send them on over. And never, not once-

Larry:
Have they actually done it.

Tamara:
Have I ever gotten them back. Because my theory is that every time more than two executives get together in a room and have a conversation, something changes and no one writes it down.

Larry:
Interesting. And then in subsequent meetings, nobody would admit-

Tamara:
Nobody would admit it.

Larry:
To having written it down.

Tamara:
Right, right. We talked about how you’re never going to walk into a C-suite meeting and see someone raise their hand and say, “I’m not clear on what our business goals are.” I mean it’s suicide. It just doesn’t happen.

Tamara:
But what the Mad Libs that you’re talking about, the first step in the workshop is sitting down and asking for measurable business goals. So those, the Mad Libs is, it starts with increase or decrease.

Tamara:
The second is some important metric by some measurable amount. Has to have a number, 20 percent, 300,000 whatever it is, in some amount of time, like within six months after launch, which just recognizes that things don’t change overnight, which you have to remind executives. That’s fine.

Tamara:
So it starts with this sort of business goal articulation and that’s the first hint to all of them that they’re not actually in alignment. The wonderful thing about business goals is they may not exist. That’s what I think, they don’t exist anywhere. But it’s never inappropriate to ask for them.

Larry:
Right. And we talked earlier about, you have a knack for phrasing that in sort of a nonthreatening way.

Tamara:
Yeah.

Larry:
It’s just sort of like, “Hey, I’m just curious about this.”

Tamara:
I actually really recommend that people write them themselves and then present them to their boss saying, “I know this is wrong, but I was just trying to sort of extrapolate what success would look like.” Right? “And I was trying to, and I know I’m not fully understanding the brilliant ideas that you guys have and women have in the C-suite. But here’s my stab and can you course correct me on this?” Which then gives that person a chance to send it to their boss and you show your belly. I say this all the time, I’m like, I’m just trying to understand what you guys are going for here and be a mirror to it and all that stuff and I’m perfectly happy being the dumbest person in the room, which is a role that companies need people to play sometimes.

Larry:
And in the C-suite, that’s probably the only role you can adopt. Right?

Tamara:
Right. Well, yeah, although I could talk about that for quite a long time. But yeah, it’s interesting and it’s very, very, very political. I think whenever there are parallels between UX and content strategy, you said something to me the other day that was fascinating that you think that content strategy as a discipline is sort of on the same path but about 10 years behind UX.

Tamara:
I think what we’ve realized, the lessons we’ve learned in in UX, is that we have to make ourselves usable to our users who are our colleagues and the executive teams. In order to do that, we had to sort of look at what we were delivering and how we’re explaining the benefits of what we do and tie them to ROI and tie them to just making people’s lives easier in the organization.

Larry:
Right. Were there any early heroes? Because I could name a few in content strategy right now who are really advancing. But were there early folks in UX who really nailed that, in terms of being that helpful person and made people go, oh, we need that UX person here?

Tamara:
Oh yeah. Well I mean there’s … I couldn’t even name them all.

Larry:
Yeah.

Tamara:
Jakob Nielsen for sure, and the work that he did that helped articulate the really business benefits. There’s also the Daniel Krug book of Don’t Make Me Think-

Larry:
Steve Krug.

Tamara:
Steve Krug, Steve Krug.

Larry:
Yeah.

Tamara:
Excuse me.

Larry:
Yeah.

Tamara:
That everybody could understand. Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things and all the books since then, which really almost … They’re so fun to read that it’s that nonfiction that’s sort of delightful to consume. And I think that really got it out there too, and so many others. So many others.

Larry:
Okay. Yeah. So I’m happy to hear that I’m on top of the heroes. Steve Krug in particular I like. I love all those guys you just mentioned.

Tamara:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Larry:
I want to circle back a little bit to one of the things that’s interesting to me is where … I don’t know exactly how Alan Cooper came up with it, but I can picture other sort of antecedents to a persona, like literary or psychological archtypes or there’s other things. Did that kind of thing inform what you did or did you just kind of take what Alan Cooper was doing?

Tamara:
Oh, I just started with the Alan Cooper and ran with that. It was so earth shattering to a lot of us in UX because it was so obviously right that we just grabbed it and ran with it in a very excited fashion and then were very confused when it didn’t always work. But there are antecedents.

Tamara:
My degree is in technical communications. My master’s is in technical communications because at the University of Washington at the time, it wasn’t called HCDE yet, human centered design and engineering. So of course you’re taught to analyze your audience, right? And figure that out.

Tamara:
But there are official versions of this that go way back. Jack Sissors in the 1950s talked about, in a book called Designing for Humans, he talked about Joe and Josephine. [actually Henry Dreyfuss in Designing for People, 1995 – here’s a brief article about Joe and Josephine at Smithsonian.com]

Tamara:
He was really talking about physical attributes and human factors that help design products. Then it shows up again in marketing. And I’m blocking on the name right now of the guy who wrote the book in marketing that talks about this. Then it showed up in Crossing the Chasm, then when building, when designing and marketing products you should focus on one person-

Larry:
Well, yeah. I don’t know which marketing guy you’re referring to, but I Googled that. I was reading some Wikipedia stuff about the Alan Cooper book, and I think that marketing guy was influenced by Alan Cooper. I think it-

Tamara:
Well this was a book before his.

Larry:
Oh, even before that. Okay.

Tamara:
Even before. So all of this was before 1999.

Tamara:
Yeah. So I think, yeah, the idea of really focusing on an archetypal characters … I mean hell, the Bible, they’re all the way back, these stories, these characters that capture differences that make a difference.

Larry:
Yep. Yeah. No, I guess that’s why I kind of hang onto that a lot. Because it just seems like … Well, and that’s the power of it. It is so intuitive and it’s so … You’ve talked before about what a powerful, it’s the foundation of a good story. And people always-

Tamara:
You know what? Sissors was the marketing guy.

Larry:
Oh Sissors. Okay.

Tamara:
It was somebody else who was the Joe and Josephine. [see above]

Larry:
Okay.

Tamara:
I’m sorry, I wasn’t prepped for that.

Larry:
If I can get the time-

Tamara:
Yeah.

Larry:
I’ll do some Googling around and try to-

Tamara:
Oh I have it. I have it. I’ll give it to you.

Larry:
Okay, if you have that I’ll try to sort it out and get it in the show notes.

Tamara:
Sure. Sure. Sure.

Larry:
Because I think it’s interesting. I get way too involved in history sometimes. I got to … Yeah, anyhow.

Tamara:
Yeah.

Larry:
What was the other thing I was going to ask about? Oh, just talking generically about the benefits of personas, because that one that having a story. I don’t know, I’m trying to picture the role of the persona in the storytelling. Is it the protagonist or the antagonist or the narrator? How does that work in it? What are the other benefits of having done that work of creating a persona?

Tamara:
Sure. So I mean in UX we have our own set processes, right? I mean there’s a lot of variation in them, but the idea is, a lot of, in fact a lot more people are familiar with scenarios and use cases then are familiar with personas. Not anymore, but it’s a far more ubiquitous process to create use cases and scenarios. And those are basically stories. They are stories about the experience of using a part of a product or a product end to end. So if you’re going to have a character in that story and so not just the word user, that’s what a persona is.

Tamara:
Now interestingly, one of the reasons that I got away from the sort of standard way of creating personas is that so many personas have stuff in them that don’t help us understand the story. They have psychographic and demographic data in them and information and where the person lives and their preferences, some pain points and that can help.

Tamara:
My focus is on statements that start with the words I want or I need, and I know there’s a distinction between those two. For my purposes though there’s no distinction. It’s just how would this person describe what it is that they want or need out of this experience or this product or the service or whatever? And if the personas contain these want and need statements, then you can imagine these, map these scenarios or use cases or whatever.

Tamara:
I like to think of them as these conversations between the product or the feature and the persona. The persona starts the conversation by saying, I want, or I need X, Y, Z to change my insurance possibly in the next six months. Then the insurance website says, welcome, we have lots of opportunities to upgrade or change your insurance. Then the person says, okay, well what does it mean to upgrade insurance and how do I assess costs” And the website has a response to it.

Tamara:
In that sense, if personas are created right and we really can’t empathize and understand what they’re after, then we can understand better how to mold user experience, how to mold content, how to mold persuasion so that it works with the persona. So that the persona, this is another one of my guiding things, the ultimate goal is to help the persona happily do the things that make the business thrive.

Larry:
Right. Because that’s the whole point. Then I guess that’s the goal of content strategy is to meld user needs and business intent, and that’s what you just said kind of gets right at the juncture of that.

Tamara:
It is. I’m both excited and totally intimidated by content strategy.

Larry:
Interesting. Tell me, yeah.

Tamara:
Well okay, listen. So at the beginning of UX, it was usability, and everybody said, oh we need some of that usability. Nobody knew what it was, but they heard that usability was a good thing. We need some of that usability. And of course we know now that usability is just one methodology in the whole UX universe.

Tamara:
Content strategy I think is the same way. I think people know that they need or should be, it’s bugging, I should have content strategy. I myself am relaunching my own website for my business, my personal. It’s just me, and I know I need content strategy and I am so, I don’t want to learn how to do it. I don’t want to learn how to do it. I know I need it and I know what I want out of it. I want to be told how to craft the articles that I’m writing. I want input from there that makes me smarter, because now I just feel dumb about SEO, about SCM and I don’t want to learn it.

Larry:
Well that’s, there’s so much in there. But one thing I’ll say is I think we’re very … One of the things I did early on in my research about content strategy was I tried to create a DIY checklist. Like could I take what I had learned at that point, turn it into an actionable list of things that anybody with any digital or business savvy could just do? And I think I did it. So I’m happy to share, and that’s open source. It’s out there on the web.

Tamara:
We’ll see that’s genius because you’re making it usable.

Larry:
And goal is to get it down to where for somebody like you, because content strategy, the thing that’s really interesting to me about it, it’s this enterprise wide craziness of trying to make a consistent content experience across a whole bunch of stuff. That’s a lot easier for somebody like you, a small business person and an independent consultant. I just really think you can have a two or three hour kitchen-table conversation about content strategy and get you past that point of like, oh crap, I know I need it. And getting to where you actually can sit down and go, oh well this is … And it’s just a lot of the stuff we’ve talked about. It’s just being clear on your user’s needs, your customer’s needs, on your business intent. Getting clear on that, that’s probably half your time I would argue you should spend on that. Then the rest of it is details about designing your content in a way to satisfy those needs. Engineering, I mean for you it’s probably going to be a blog or a very simple website and then having … But anyhow, I think that content strategy is a pretty fractal practice that any one part of it can be as small or as big as you want or need it in your situation.

Tamara:
Well, okay.

Larry:
I think.

Tamara:
So as somebody who’s-

Larry:
I think.

Tamara:
No, no. I think it’s exactly right, and I keep thinking about that conversation we had about what lessons can content strategy as a discipline learn from UX.

Larry:
Yeah.

Tamara:
Because I think UX has achieved a lot of the stuff that content strategy wants, right? And let’s accept your hypothesis that you guys are on virtually the similar path in business towards relevance that we are on. However you’re, let’s say, ten years behind. Let’s just accept that and say, yes, that’s true.

Tamara:
If that’s true, then what I can tell you is some key experiences from UX. One of them is, it’s almost like the second you start having conferences in any discipline you screw yourselves over. Because everybody gets so into all the details and the minutia and how many users should we have in a usability test and the problems with assumptions versus data and all this other stuff.

Tamara:
Meanwhile, still to this day in UX I do this I-want-I-need statement thing because it is life changing for executives to go from thinking about users to thinking like users. So it’s life changing to go from a guy who wants to do yoga because he sprained his hamstring to I need a quick and easy exercise I can do in the next ten minutes. Right?

Tamara:
That is different. And my point is, You saying that, oh hey, creating a checklist or saying that there is such a thing as two to three hour coffee table content strategy is extremely valuable and I think everybody in your discipline should be attempting to do that. Also I’m going to say something heretical.

Larry:
Please.

Tamara:
Content strategy is a terrible name for what you do. Because I don’t under … It sort of feels like something I need to know but I don’t know what it gets me. So in UX, the initial consultants, and still the consultants in the eCommerce, they all call themselves conversion experts. They don’t all but-

Larry:
When did that term … Because a CRO and all that, that’s a pretty new thing to my

Tamara:
I think these are all … Anytime-

Larry:
Rebranding.

Tamara:
Yes, and the explosion, the fractal explosion of a field.

Larry:
Yeah. Well you’re not going to get a lot of disagreement because content, I think every content strategist I know at some point has question that label, but nobody’s found a better one. And I have like five slides for each concept in this one deck that I present about what the heck is content? What the heck is strategy? What does that mean? And even as I do that, I’m like, yeah, it’s still inadequate. But if you have a better idea, we’re all ears.

Tamara:
Do you know about the term satisficing? That’s a term that was popular in usability.

Larry:
I’ve heard that term, yeah.

Tamara:
So satisficing means you learn enough until you’re satisfied.

Larry:
Yeah.

Tamara:
It’s sufficient, satisfactory, just enough. And I think always keeping in mind that no one is going to want to know as much about your discipline as you know.

Larry:
Yeah.

Tamara:
That’s very hard for us. I tell people I can speak for four days on personas, but speaking on it for a half an hour on personas is hard. It’s because I think it’s the more we know, the harder it is for us to get back to a point where we can remember what it’s like not to know.

Larry:
Yep. No. And I think we all need that gift. We should all be working towards that ability to take it from an hour-long conversation to get the get our elevator pitch . . .

Tamara:
So I thought of one for you guys.

Larry:
Oh.

Tamara:
Yeah. It’s not an elevator pitch. Well, it’s just the way I would describe it, and I’ll tell you this is going to be dissatisfying to a lot of our listeners here. But what I would say to an executive is, Think about yourself visiting some website that has nothing to do with your industry. Think about yourself. The insurance example, let’s imagine that you’re having another kid or you have a kid who’s getting in too many accidents and you have to figure out something about insurance and you’re not in the insurance industry.

Tamara:
Picture yourself going to that website. What is it that you do, right? Everybody says nobody reads websites anymore. But the truth is everybody always reads websites just a little bit, right? So the first thing you do is you glance at and you scan some words. And my question for you is who’s worrying about those words? Because those words have to do a lot of work for you, and that’s just the words on the homepage.

Tamara:
Now, the reason I think that’s going to be dissatisfying to the listeners to this is that it’s not just the homepage and that’s marketing copy and it’s not even transactional, blah, blah. I don’t care. If you can open the eyes of that executive to – There’s a huge pile of stuff that could be working so much harder for us, then you’ll get their attention.

Larry:
Yep. That’s the attention getter to the ahem or the thin edge of the wedge, whatever you call it, that getting the foot in the door. And I think like I was saying, this came up earlier, we’ve got some role models and we’ve got our Steve Krug’s-

Tamara:
Sure.

Larry:
And like right now, my last interview is with Andy Welfle and Michael Metts who are really, they’re these committed evangelists and empowerers of word people in the UX world specifically. So there’s some intriguing overlap there too. But I still think we’re … Anyhow, the more ideas you have about how we can better work our way in.

Larry:
But that kind of tip about like I think a lot of what you just said about just the one snippet of homepage copy, just having that as an entry point to then the conversation naturally unfolds from there and you go, oh and that’s connected to this and that affects this and you’ve got to have rules about how to do that and somebody has to actually do that. But then you need the content strategy.

Tamara:
Well and then you have to connect it. You eventually have to connect it to something that could go in a spreadsheet because business isn’t business until it’s in a spreadsheet.

Larry:
That’s, by the way, the dirty little secret of content strategy.

Tamara:
Is spreadsheets?

Larry:
That’s our only tool. No, it’s not the only, but word processors and text editors-

Tamara:
Yeah.

Larry:
And spreadsheets, yeah, for content audits. Anyhow, yeah.

Tamara:
No, I literally tell people in UX if you need to get the business people more on board, figure out a way to deliver your stuff in a spreadsheet. They’re used to them.

Larry:
Interesting. Well, maybe the … I don’t know that that’s why we’ve done it is because of the nature of the stuff we’re working with.

Tamara:
The nature of the content.

Larry:
But maybe that’s our in with the business people, and one of the things that came up in that conversation with Michael and Andy last week was the idea that we don’t have an exclusive tool. Engineers have all their frameworks and programming languages and the designers have Figma and Sketch and Creative Cloud that you need. And we just have Word. And everybody has Word.

Larry:
So they don’t, I think that’s part of our problem as a discipline is getting people to understand that it’s not just a typing exercise.

Tamara:
Well with UX, everybody thinks that they can do it too. I think it’s very similar. I think we’re in very similar, have very similar issues in that regard. And the other problem with UX is that the better you are, the less it looks like you were needed in the first place.

Tamara:
So if you create a solution that looks obvious, nobody’s going to say, wow, that must’ve taken a million hours. They’re going to say that’s the only way you could have designed it. That’s how I would have designed it. Because they don’t understand-

Larry:
Exactly. Yeah.

Tamara:
The difficulty of getting there.

Larry:
No, we see the same thing in content.

Tamara:
See I think about content strategy. I’m sure I’m just thinking about SEO, but I think about Google Analytics and my eyes roll back in my head and you’re talking about Word, right? There are enormous, even me, a UX person who’s been in this field forever, I have no flipping idea what it is that you actually do and achieve.

Larry:
Yeah.

Tamara:
So the more, sure, you guys could listen and say Tamara’s just lazy and doesn’t read the books, which may be true, but it’s more useful to you to think that more people are like me than not like me.

Larry:
Yep. Well, I think the other thing about that is that these are both team sports, UX and content strategy. And that if you don’t have the wherewithal or just the interest that you find like that.

Larry:
I have a buddy who’s a genius with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager and all that stuff and I’m like, thank you, Josh.

Tamara:
Yeah, yeah,

Larry:
Yeah, and I’m assembling my little virtual team and you’re going to be part of my UX guru stable-

Tamara:
Uh oh.

Larry:
Whatever I call you guys over here.

Tamara:
Other duties as assigned.

Larry:
Yeah. Hey, we’re running a little bit long, which is totally fine in this conversation, but before I wrap up, I want to give you a chance. Is there anything last, anything that hasn’t come up as we’ve been talking about? UX content strategy, personas, anything that you want to make sure we get in the podcast?

Tamara:
I think it’s going to be cool. I think your analogy of fractal is really right. I think that when UX started, you started usability and now there’s like ten different job descriptions. And I’m sure with content strategy it’s going to blossom in a similar way.

Tamara:
In addition to it being fractionally blossoming, I think there’s so many parallels in places where it’s almost like one of those plugs or cables that has multiple connections to multiple other cables between what you guys do and what we do. And I think that there are going to be some clashes and some conflict and there’s also going to be great simpatico. Then we’re going to run into the people who do brand, and that is going to be yet another fascinating problem to solve.

Larry:
That has been coming up. In fact, my next, I need the line him up but a buddy of mine I just reconnected with, we’re like pancake buddies at a friend’s pancake breakfast. I discovered he’s like a branding guru and we had this great conversation, kind of like the conversation you and I had before this. And I’m like, oh Chris, I got to have you on the show. So stay tuned – because I think you’re right. And there’s a lot, just branding in particular, but even communications about marcomm, techcomm.

Tamara:
Sure.

Larry:
There’s just a huge amount of overlap. That’s a whole other thing that I’ve done.

Tamara:
We all have made something fundamentally basic, which is think like a user and try to connect what they want to what you have. There’s like 17 job descriptions, there’s 4 different disciplines, and we’ve kind of cocked it up. But we’ve had to, because there is a lot of intricacy in this, there is a lot of detail, and it’s hard. It’s hard to be simple.

Larry:
Yep. I’m going to leave it right there.

Tamara:
Okay.

Larry:
That’s a great place to end. Thanks so much.

Tamara:
Oh, it’s my pleasure. I look forward to learning more.