My latest column for UXMatters offers 10 practical tips, or recipes, to help anyone who touches content bake in some influential goodness. Check out 10 Recipes for Persuasive Content.
One tip is to create a distinctive tone. Bliss is one of my favorite examples.
I recently helped design a music mastering service from soup to nuts. So fun! The process reminded me that content plays a key role in the service experience. I first became aware of this fact a few years ago at Cingular Wireless, where the human-centered design team worked on projects for all customer touchpoints—IVR, store kiosk, customer service representative, website, you name it. Get the content wrong in or across any of those touchpoints, and the service experience implodes. Here are a few specific reasons why well-crafted content adds business value to a service.
The business-customer relationship for a product often is short term. The customer shops, compares, buys, and then the relationship is mostly over. With a service, the relationship often is long term. When a customer signs up for a service, whether a mobile service plan or NetFlix, she often is signing up for a period of time or certain number of uses. If anything requires good communication, it’s a long-term relationship. 
The substance of this communication is largely content.
Of course, the direction of many services is automation, such as paying the service bill online. Automation saves businesses money by being more efficient and requiring fewer employees. Automation often is more convenient for customers, as well. The tricky part? Preserving a personal feel or tone in the service, especially for the long term. How can you make your service seem different from your competitor’s if it is largely automated? One way is through outstanding content that has a distinctive voice.
For the music mastering service I mentioned earlier, the president had a large hand in crafting the content’s voice. I think it largely worked because he designed the service for someone like him. The voice seemed authentic. Also, many of the “web 2.0″ services have extremely informal and human-sounding content, which I think helps create an authentic voice. A huge brand for many products and services that has impressively managed to keep a distinct voice is Virgin. I look forward to seeing how voice evolves as service design grows.
Virgin's unmistakable brash voice is clear even on a log in page.
The response to this blog has been wonderful–a winning experience, you might say. SO winning that some cool things are happening, and I want to update you.
One of my favorite colleagues, Darnell Clayton, and I just released an article, “Emotion and Voice User Interfaces” that explores emotional factors when designing VUIs. We think integrating VUIs with GUIs, especially on mobile, has huge business value now—and enormous business value in the future. So UX professionals need to learn how to design them.
The handy publication UXMatters has invited me to be one of the experts in their new feature column “Ask the UX Expert.” I’ll face the challenge of answering a real question from real UX professionals every so often. The challenge will not be easy; user experience professionals are not afraid to ask hard questions! But I’m looking forward to giving useful answers.
I have lined up some fascinating interviews with leaders and innovators in user experience, mobile, speech / voice, content strategy, and more. I can’t give away all the secrets yet, but the first interview will appear very soon!
Believe it or not, I think some academic theories out there are useful to winning content. Rhetoric, for example, offers some guidance on tackling contextual subtleties of persuasion.
Rhetoric is the study of using language effectively and persuasively. If we use language effectively and persuasively, we can have an impact on what people agree to as reality, or context. Rhetoric begins with a concept from Aristotle that remains influential to this day—persuasive appeals:
Aristotle stressed including a mix of these appeals as a fail-safe way of influencing everyone.
Today, using rhetoric is more about understanding your customers or a situation well enough to know which type of appeal to emphasize—or de-emphasize. For instance, when someone who has just been diagnosed with an unfamiliar disease visits the Centers for Disease Control or Prevention Web sites for information, the content needs to be sensitive to emotions such as worry and apprehensiveness. Likewise, when I worked in the wireless industry, I observed the role of emotions time and again in customers’ interpretations of and reactions to bills. In that context, sensitivity to emotions such as anger and frustration is key. In either of these contexts, sticking to logos—facts, quantitative evidence, and so on—might be best, because adding emotional language or tone to an already emotional situation increases the chances for interpretive noise. For instance, in my experience with IVRs, customers who checked their amount due did not like hearing the number from an all-too-chirpy automated voice.
Another aspect of emotions to consider is the company’s or brand’s attributes—which ideally align with the target customers’ values—and how to convey them. For instance, the care-free, clever brand of Bliss Spa, focuses on pathos and ethos appeals through light-hearted, pithy, often-rhyming product descriptions and testimonials. They don’t ignore logos—and duly note a product’s quantitative results—but it’s not their emphasis.
Modern rhetoric expands the definition of language to encompass more than words, emphasizing the role of graphics and actions in being persuasive. We can extend this idea to video and every other type of content available to us today. It’s important to look at the rhetorical influence of an entire communication, not just the words. Modern rhetoric also points out more subtle aspects of persuasion. For instance, identification theory states that emphasizing common interests is powerfully influential. Consequently, a speaker who establishes his or her ethos as being like the targeted customer or being an actual customer has subtle but strong influence. That’s what makes testimonials, online reviews, and related communications so significant.
Rhetoric is more than theory. It helps make winning content a reality. For more on rhetorical and other theories, see my article “Rediscovering Communication.”