In order for any website to be truly effective it needs to meet one overarching goal – it should be easy for users to engage with the site and find the content they are looking for.  Unless you are working with a small microsite or a very basic blog, the primary way to accomplish this is through thoughtful site navigation.  While everyone naturally wants to have an effective website, there are many challenges to overcome when building out your website navigation.

Some of these include:

• Structuring your website based on internal business units without understanding how your users think
• Generalizing about how users will want to narrow in on their intended content
• Confusing your users with how you’ve chosen to group content

The two primary navigation methods, search and browse, both have their place in the modern web.  Although browsing is arguably still the dominant way to consume content on most websites, as a site becomes larger it can be become quite difficult to solve user pathway challenges with structured navigation. Additionally, users are becoming increasingly comfortable with using a search interface to discover new content as they grow accustomed to navigating large and extremely complex sites on a regular basis.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Before embarking on a website redesign or making adjustments to your navigation, the best source of how to proceed is your existing data. A great place to look for data is in your web analytics package. If you have seasonal spikes, be sure to pick an appropriate length of time to review. If you have a large spike for an annual conference, perhaps look back a year or two. Review the most common paths that users are taking on your site, and figure out what content is most relevant to your users and what you might be able to remove or simplify. Less is more in many cases.

Tip: Be sure to redirect aged out pages to current parts of your website. This is particularly useful if the pages had good traffic in the past, but are no longer relevant.

Once you identify and remove unnecessary content, consider the metadata for your remaining content. This is a topic that deserves its own post, but essentially you should examine the thoroughness of your metadata and how it is organized. Do you have good batches of structured content?

• Examples of possible metadata include: Authors, Articles, Press Releases, Products, Product Types, Dates, Events and any other specific taxonomy related to your lines of business.

Now that you understand what content is essential to keep, and how much structure exists, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you have the right metadata to support an effective search solution?
• Does the quality of the metadata meet your expectations?
  • If not, would it be possible for your team to enrich this data?

If you answered yes to both of those questions, you might be a good candidate for a robust search solution.  In either case, it is helpful to think about how each method of navigation works and how it would tie in to your content and business goals.

Which One is Right for Me?

Browse

Browse is the primary navigation system on most sites. It is usually revealed with drop-down menus at the top of the page and often navigation on the left-hand side of content pages. Depending on your site’s depth of content, additional navigation can be seen typically in the center column above the content itself, or at the top of the right rail. As you can imagine, deep websites can easily drown the content with heavy navigation all over the site.

             A simple navigation menu, from Velir.com

When building your browse-based navigation, consider these tips:

• Put yourself in the user’s position. Orient your navigation so that users are not beholden to internal business units unless there is a very strong identification across your user base with these classifications.
• Reveal deeper navigational options as the user explores. Users tend to be overwhelmed when presented with too many options too early.
• Stick with established patterns for key activities. Primary navigation belongs near the top of the page. Utility navigation for user log in or search belong in the upper right corner. These patterns have emerged over a very long time. You should deviate patterns only after a thorough evaluation of your audience and their sophistication.
• Over the last few years, “thick” footers have emerged as a sort of table of contents for your site. While this is handy, you should balance the heft of any footer against the rest of the site. Your footer shouldn’t be taller than the rest of the site.

Search

Search navigation is very familiar to those that shop online. Sites like Zappos use search to enable users to explore the website’s rich product offerings. While Zappos also provides a browse model, they are really creating their browse experience using the power of search. This ability for users to pick their entry point to the site is very powerful. Users can find the same products through a seemingly endless combination of options. Each category of structured content is an opportunity to introduce faceted search to your site, allowing you to narrow results by certain characteristics.

When building your search-powered navigation, consider these tips:

• You can easily leverage search to power list pages and related content features
• All facets are not created equal. Prioritize your filters so that the highest value facets are presented first.
• Be sure to spend time tuning the ranking priorities for your content to surface the most relevant content at the top of your search results.

Tip:  If your site exists among a family of closely linked sites, consider federated search, as well. Federation is a fancy way to say, the search tool will also search these other websites for content. If your sites are a community of related sites, this may enhance the findability of content across your web ecosystem.  Search platforms like Coveo can be a great way to integrate faceting and federation into your website along with powerful insight metrics that can help you to continually refine your search parameters.

An example of faceting, from brookings.edu

Summary

While one approach will never be appropriate for all websites, more organizations are adding search-based navigation to their website. By looking objectively at your traffic, analyzing the richness of your metadata and working to understand your users, your site can encourage engagement from everyone who visits it. Not only will your users get more value from your website, but you can be sure that every piece of content you create is accessible and easy to discover.

The most recent UXPA Boston meeting was held on April 24th at Essential Design in Boston’s Leather District.  April’s speaker was a gentleman named Bill Hartman, the Research Director at Essential Design who is well-known in the user experience community for his prototyping class at the Design and Usability Center at Bentley University. Bill’s talk was titled “A Business Case for Human Factors,” included quotes from Socrates, Oscar Wilde and Mary Poppins, and featured references to FDA guidelines on usability engineering and cool photos of medical devices that look like a cross between a Roomba vacuum cleaner and the Lost in Space robot.

The talk also sparked a lively post-presentation discussion among the fifty-or-so attendees, and I wanted to share a couple of themes we touched upon:

The Relationship Between Design and Usability

Bill introduced this topic with an Oscar Wilde quote, “I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.” In my opinion a witty, brilliant bon mot from Wilde will brighten any PowerPoint slide. But what’s really important about this quote is it reminds us that the rather prosaic and functional term “design” that we profligately toss about on Tweets and at TED conferences has some deep 19th Century roots (although it was more commonly referred to as aesthetics or beauty at the time). Wilde reminds us that the process of making things beautiful is entwined with the process of making things useful – something which every user experience practitioner should remember.

The Relationship Between User Experience and Strategy

Bill mentioned the challenge of “being invited too late to the party.” This is exemplified when the user experience team does not have the opportunity to participate in the ideation stages of a product but is only brought in at the execution stage.

This is frequently the result of two assumptions made by a project team. The first basic assumption is that “we know our users and know exactly what they want, because they want what we want.” In psychologist circles this is known as “confirmation bias” and can be an enemy to objectivity.

The second assumption is that knowledge workers produce the most value with interim deliverables as opposed to critical thinking. A user experience professional is – as software development expert Tom Demarco reminds us – a knowledge worker. The value of a knowledge worker is their ability to solve complex problems. When brought in at the start of a project, a UX professional, with their methodologies for researching user profiles and context, can assist in defining the strategy and help the team reach the right design faster. Would you hire a landscape designer to mow your lawn?  They could certainly do it, but it’s doubtless not the best use of their time and talent or your budget.

We hope to host a user experience evening at Velir in the near future. Let us know if there are any topics that you think we should cover and we will keep you posted on our blog and over social media as the event progresses.

It is no big secret that a well-managed website should evolve as new business challenges are introduced, and as new web capabilities emerge such as responsive design and dynamic personalization.  But beyond embracing the latest trends, it is vitally important to look back at your solution periodically with a critical eye to ensure that it is performing optimally.

Problems can arise within a Sitecore solution for a variety of reasons.  Decision points finalized during a discovery phase may not be used by content authors in the way imagined early on in the project, or portions of a solution envisioned may go unused or end up being used differently than was originally intended.

Improve Your Website and Save Staff Time and Resources

At Velir we established our Sitecore Audit service to facilitate optimizations and help organizations understand how authors and visitors are interacting with a website once it has been launched.

Our process enables our clients to take advantage of Velir’s deep Sitecore expertise without committing to a long development project. During the course of an audit, our team works to:

• Gather independent feedback on site build.
  There are always a lot of decisions along the path to a new website. By stepping back from the tactical decisions made during the build, and investigating the underlying business needs, we can assess your implementation in an unbiased manner.
• Conduct onsite stakeholder interviews.
  Our team interviews key users of the system to determine their key challenges and identify what features they might use or ignore.
• Run software analysis.
  We use our custom-built, proprietary Audit Tool to deeply analyze the Sitecore solution. We use this data to produce a series of reports that help surface any potential problem areas and provide objective data about utilization.
• Provide recommendations which improve function and stability.
  We write up our recommendations in a detailed report and present our findings to the internal website team.

Once the recommendations report has been produced, our clients determine what, if any, actions they would like to take. We can work with our clients to implement all of our recommendations, or help make cost-benefit decisions on which improvements would be the most valuable.

Sample findings

1. One client found that 25% of their Sitecore build was not being utilized by the content editors. As a result of this, we were able to help our client adjust their solution in order to improve data entry usability and increase editor satisfaction.
2. Another client was using enumerated fields in their build to accommodate up to ten authors for each Sitecore item. In their case, there were 4 fields per author x 10 potential authors, creating 40 fields under each item just in case the editor needed them. Our tool uncovered that only two authors had ever been specified. After presenting this data to the business, we were able to adjust the input method, resulting in a more streamlined solution that was far easier to manage from an editorial standpoint.

These are just a couple of examples of how a Sitecore Audit can create huge improvements for an organization without a large budget or a long, drawn-out timeline.

Could your solution use a tune-up?

Think of the journey towards conversion optimization as an exercise in reverse engineering.

We’ll start by assessing high-level macro concepts and desired outcomes, which tend to be already known, or easier to define.  Don’t fall into the trap of trying to solve for every scenario and possibility up front.  Implementing optimization and personalization concepts on your website usually starts with generalization, not specificity.  Let’s get started.

1) Define the objective.

Start with the macro view and it will set a clear course for all of the more granular steps.  Before you can get specific, you need to start with a direction.  Is the goal to increase sales revenue?  Promote awareness?  Encourage advocacy?  Usually the top-level goal is something that’s tied to the bottom line of what keeps your organization in business.  Whatever it is, everyone involved needs to understand and agree with the ultimate objective you’re working towards. Otherwise you may find yourself starting over when you get to the finish line.

Example:

• Business Objective 1:  Grow sales of Product XYZ by 20% over the next 12 months.
• Business Objective 2: Increase online newsletter subscriptions by 15% over the next 6 months.

2) Identify the outcomes required to achieve the objectives. 

This is the first step towards getting more specific, but we’re still at a generalized level.  We’re not yet concerned with the “how”, just the “why” and the “what”. What would need to happen in order to accomplish those objectives defined in step 1?  To increase revenue, perhaps you’ll need to sell more products, increase subscriptions, or generate more memberships. To promote advocacy, you might need users to sign-up for an event, download materials, or share content on social media.  Create a list of outcomes that correlate to the business goals and objectives.  Everything you do going forward will be connected in this fashion to ensure that you don’t lose sight of the big picture as we get further into the weeds.  Remember, we’re still not concerned with “how” we make it happen, we just want to identify “what” needs to happen.

Example:

• Outcome 1: To grow revenue of product Line A by 20% in 12 months, we’ll need to increase conversions from 1 visitor out of 200 to 1 out of 150.
• Outcome 2: To increase online subscriptions, we’ll need to increase sign-ups from 1 out of 100 visitors to 1 out of 75.

3) Determine the individual user actions required to produce the outcomes. 

This is where we start getting specific.  Begin by laying out all of the steps that a user would need to go through to generate the outcomes defined in the prior step.  What content and calls to action are needed to guide the user to conversion?  Does the user need to be motivated or incentivized to take the next step?  How many steps are there, and can they be minimized?

Example:

• Click a link to enter the online store
• Apply filters to locate a product
• Select product characteristics (size, color, quantity)
• Add item to cart
• Click on “view cart”
• Fill out checkout form
• Submit order

This concept can be taken even further by introducing the concept of “value”.  Each step in your process can be assigned a value score in Sitecore DMS, which allows you to track points accumulated by a user along the way.  Points may be assigned to each step in the conversion process to track progress and engagement.  Perhaps we observe that users with a high value score aren’t converting at the final step.  We may need to motivate them to finish the task, so we could leverage DMS to generate personalized offers that are only presented to those with a value score above a certain threshold.  Or maybe we need to streamline the checkout process to make it easier for users.  There are no shortage of possibilities for how you can use the power of Sitecore DMS to refine your strategy and test outcomes.

4) Implement, observe, and refine.

Now that you have all of the leg work done, it’s time to execute.  Since we’ve defined all of the steps required for a conversion and assigned value scores, we can now sit back and monitor DMS analytics to observe user journeys and outcomes.  This process allows us to drill into each step and identify problem areas that may be preventing a user from advance towards the next step in the conversion process.

Example:

Let’s assume that not enough users are getting past step 1 – you’re simply not getting enough traffic in the pipeline to start the conversion process in order to meet your goal.  Hit pause and take it offline to consider ideas that will drive more traffic into the store.  Perhaps you could try a campaign on the home page that features a discount code.  Maybe you can make the “shop” link more prominent.  You could consider running an email campaign targeting users that have purchased products in the past, to let them know about a new offering.  Continue this analysis across all of the steps, focusing on one step at a time.  Each problem should be a small one to solve. Resist the temptation to advance to the next step until you’ve satisfied the prior one.

Each problem area may need to be broken down into more granular steps.  For example, filling out the checkout form is one high-level step in the conversion process, but we could also drill further into each field on the form and determine the ones where most users drop off.  Maybe we’re asking for too much information, or maybe the form is frustrating to fill out.  By dissecting the user experience you might discover that a simple tweak to the navigation, a change in the wording of your marketing message or the visual design of a button can have a major impact on conversion rates.  Which brings us to another powerful concept of Sitecore DMS: Multivariate A/B testing.

Using Sitecore’s Multivariate A/B Testing Module to Optimize the Conversion Process

Once you have your conversion steps defined and implemented, it’s time to figure out what’s working well, and what can be improved.  Up until now, we’ve been operating under a lot of assumptions.  One way validate these is through Sitecore’s Multivariate A/B testing module.  Multivariate A/B testing can be applied to test and refine all of the conversion activities defined in Step 3 above.

In the example above, we observed that we needed to drive more traffic into the conversion pipeline in order to increase conversions and meet our revenue goal.  Let’s assume it was determined that the best way to do this was through a campaign on the home page that features a sale offer in the main carousel, encouraging users to enter the online store.  Now it’s time to experiment.

With Sitecore’s Multivariate A/B Testing Module, we can easily configure a few different campaigns, run them simultaneously, and then sit back and watch the results.

Example:

• Campaign 1: A sale offer on the home page that provides an offer code to receive 20% off any order over $100.
• Campaign 2: Free shipping on any order over $50.

We could start by adding both campaign slides to the home page carousel, and set them to be presented alternately to every other visitor that comes to the site.  So, roughly half of the visitors will see Campaign 1 when they view the home page, and the other half will see Campaign 2.  Depending on your level of patience, you can set this to be time based, or visit based.  Essentially you’ll just want to collect enough data to draw a meaningful conclusion on which campaign is proving to be more effective.

You can also apply this concept to other aspects of your conversion steps until you maximize the results.  The power of multivariate testing in Sitecore is that the system does all the heavy lifting and calculations, making your job much easier.  The “multivariate” part means that you can run multiple tests simultaneously, and Sitecore will figure out the optimal combination that yields the best results.

Example:

• Home page promotion with offer code to receive 20% off any order over $100
• Home page promotion offering free shipping on any order over $50
• Banner headline that reads “Spring Sale”
• Banner headline that reads “Get Free Shipping”
• Call to action button in blue that reads “Shop Now”. 
• Call to action button in red that reads “Shop Now”
• Call to action button in blue that reads “Enter Store”
• Call to action button in red that reads “Enter Store”

If we look at the above, there are many possible combinations to test.  Running tests on each of these individually would be a very manual and time consuming process.  With Sitecore DMS Multivariate A/B testing, you can simply configure all of them at once and let the system sort it out.  Instead of sitting in a conference room speculating about which campaign will be more effective, you can now use live user data to answer the question definitively.

Conclusion

In summary, here’s what you can to do to get started with Sitecore DMS for conversion optimization:

• Define your business goals and objectives
• Determine the outcomes required to accomplish the goals
• Reverse engineer the steps users need to perform to achieve the outcome
• Test and refine until you maximize conversions

With Sitecore DMS, you don’t need to shake up your whole site on day one – and you might never need to.  You may just need to refine the design of a button, change a color, or tweak some verbiage to start seeing an uptick in conversions. Don’t get paralyzed by trying to figure out all of the possibilities up front – dive right in, start small, and build up.  Before you know it, you’ll start seeing how Sitecore DMS can empower your marketing team to drive measurable results.

Now that we are in the final months leading up to the public release of Sitecore 7, that speculation can finally be put to rest.  Our Sitecore MVPs were given the chance to download a technical preview of the software and have spent the past couple of weeks familiarizing themselves with the new features and diving deep into the code base.

Without a doubt the theme of Sitecore 7 is scalability – this release lays the foundation for the product to easily handle millions of content items.  Although the lion’s share of improvements found in Sitecore 7 are “under the hood,” there are benefits in store for the end user as well.  Many of these benefits are related to the enhancing of Sitecore’s internal search. Read on to get a glimpse at what you can expect to discover in Sitecore’s new version, and learn what impact these search upgrades will have in terms of the user experience for authors and administrators.

Improved Search Interface

Most notable is the introduction of a new search presentation built directly into Sitecore.  This gives authors and administrators powerful new tools to search for content items from many different places within the Sitecore user interface.  One of the most notable places to access the new search interface is through the new search tab located next to the Content tab on any Sitecore Item.

When a user selects this tab they are launched into the search interface.  In the below example I am searching the media library for “phone”, and Sitecore returns to me a number of device images.

Content Faceting

A big improvement to search in Sitecore 7 is the addition of search facets.  The facets are shown in the right hand side of the image above.  Facets are a powerful search filtering tool that allows you to quickly drill down to the results that best match specific criteria.  Facets become critical when you have large amounts of data to search through.  In the example above, if I am only interested in the “extra large” “jpeg” images of phones, I can quickly select those criteria to narrow down my list to the 10 matching results.

Flexible Search Results

Search results can be presented in several different views including list, grid and image based results.  This will be particularly useful when searching for media library items.

Sitecore search results – Media View	Sitecore search results – Grid View

This much improved search interface is incorporated throughout Sitecore.  It is accessible from both the page editor and any content item in the content editor, on the home node of the Media Library, as well as in the Insert Link and Insert Media dialog boxes.

Quick Actions

Applying an action to a large number of items at once is a long sought-after feature for many experienced Sitecore editors.

The new search interface in Sitecore 7 allows commonly performed editorial actions and commands to be run on all results returned by a search query.  This bulk editing capability can be used to perform actions such as adding tags, publishing content, setting workflow state, or apply campaign goals that are defined within Sitecore’s Digital Marketing System (DMS).  These quick actions are a great addition and will definitely allow for quicker and more efficient management of content.

Simpler Organization

The improved search capabilities in Sitecore 7 have enabled new ways to organize content.  While content items are still presented in the familiar tree structure, Sitecore 7 introduces the idea of an “Item Bucket” used to store large amounts of unstructured content.  Any folder can be converted into a “Bucket,” at which point you can create any number of items in that bucket without being concerned about the underlying structure. Simpler Organization

Buckets help to deal with two common content tree scenarios that are less than ideal.  The first is when you have a folder that contains hundreds or thousands of items.  It is very difficult to locate specific content in these folders, and they would also suffer from noticeable performance problems.  The other common scenario is when very deep Sitecore trees are used to organize content.  This often takes the form of multiple levels of alphabetical folders, or date based folders.  Both of these approaches can be put aside in favor of Item Buckets.

Items contained in a Bucket are surfaced through the new search interface, and every Bucket folder will default to a search screen when visited.  This search is very robust and may surface items by name, template type, field content, or other item metadata.

Final Thoughts

It’s clear that the Sitecore 7 release is about increased scalability. The foundation has been set to allow the CMS to handle tens of millions of items as easily as it handles tens of thousands of items.  While most of these changes are under the hood, Sitecore 7 has updates in store for the CMS authors and administrators as well, the majority of which tie back to the improved search engine and interfaces.  Making proper use of these search tools, Sitecore users should find it easier to locate, edit, and organize their content.

For those of you who were hoping for user facing additions to the CMS, we speculate that they will be found in the 7.1 release.  At last years Sitecore Symposium we learned that the product team focuses on developer features and user facing features in alternating releases, so we expect that 7.1 will contain many user facing improvements and new features.

If you are already a Sitecore customer and are considering an upgrade, you should talk to an experienced Sitecore Partner like Velir about your solution and whether an upgrade makes sense for your needs and budget.  Organizations with smaller content indexes may not be able to take full advantage of many of the new features, although in many cases the benefits could still make an upgrade worthwhile.

Check out Dan Solovay’s blog for a deeper look at the technology behind Sitecore 7, and look for more posts from us as we get closer to a final build.

Intro to Data Visualization

Data has become one of the chief commodities of the modern age. It can be used to measure performance and tune business strategies, to appeal to advertisers and investors, or to tell a story.  Many companies in recent years can attribute much of their success to their ability to capitalize on data – Facebook and Google are two very prominent examples of this.  But even the most extensive, valuable data has little worth if it is not displayed in a useful way. Well-presented data can illuminate relationships between different pieces of information, expose trends, and allow us to understand difficult concepts in a way that can be digested quickly and easily. This is the function of data visualization.

The Interaction Design Foundation describes data visualization as “the graphical display of abstract information for two purposes: sense-making (also called data analysis) and communication.” While this definition may seem broad, it underlines how commonplace data visualizations actually are.  In fact, many ways to visualize data are familiar to any elementary school student; tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are all types of data visualization that have been used effectively for centuries.  Early scientists and explorers used the principals of data visualization to understand the positions of stars and other celestial bodies, to make maps that could aid in navigation and to create geometric diagrams to represent mathematical principles.

The New Frontier of Data Visualization

Although it has a very long history, the field of data visualization has been going through a technological and creative renaissance in recent years.  There are many specialized software products available, enabling individuals and organizations to create increasingly sophisticated visualizations from many different data sources.  Major media outlets such as the New York Times are employing large data visualization teams and are investing significant resources into creating unique and complex visuals to enhance their delivery of news and information.

Much of our work at Velir focuses on our clients’ need to present large amounts of data in a visually compelling and intuitive way.  Organizations such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, and the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, rely on presenting extensive data sets to educate and inform the public and to measure the impact of their work.  Although the data itself varies widely from project to project, and each solution is unique, our end goal is always the same: to deliver a finished product that is engaging for end users, and easily managed by editors and administrators.

To help us accomplish this, we’ve developed our own proprietary platform to help our clients manage and visualize data: Velir Datacenter.

What is Datacenter?

Datacenter is Velir’s signature data management system, and is used to transform formatted data into infographics, tables, maps, graphs and other visualizations.  Essentially Datacenter operates much like a content management system – however it’s heavily focused on publishing data.

Datacenter provides web-based data reporting systems that can be easily navigated by end users. Menus, profiles and reports are all easily created through Datacenter’s relational abilities. Datacenter can be used to completely power a web site, or used as a tool to integrate into your website.  Virtually any kind of structured report data can be used with Datacenter, and can be easily accessed and managed through the web.

How does Datacenter work?

In many data reporting systems, each data set exists independently of each other. With Datacenter, the power of the tool lies in its ability to relate data sets to one another. Data subjects (such as states, cities, races, genders, years, etc.) can be cross-related in order to report data that spans multiple data sets. For example, when one data set has data for “Massachusetts”, Datacenter knows that another data set’s “Massachusetts” is the same place. These types of relationships can be combined to do things such as “get all educational data for white males under 18 in Massachusetts for 2008”.

Once data has been imported, it can then be managed through an intuitive administration system where authorized users can manipulate data values, time frame ranges, meta-data such as notes and sources, and virtually any other aspect of the system.

Our team of data visualization experts works closely with our clients to create an overall aesthetic and determine how to best present customized data – as infographics, tables, maps, graphs, etc.  Visualizations can be built into an existing CMS such as Sitecore or Adobe CQ, and integrated with 3rd party tools such as the full set of Google visualization tools, various mapping platforms and others.

Datacenter was built to complement existing business intelligence and statistical data analysis tools.  These systems process raw data into final data sets that can be uploaded into Datacenter, enabling them to be published and visualized on the web in a flexible and easy-to-manage manner.

More information on Datacenter is available on our website.

We’re now in the era of CXM – or customer experience management.  It’s no longer about getting text onto a web page without writing code – today’s platforms are much more sophisticated with a strong focus on marketing.  Turning content into HTML is a given; it’s now about how businesses can engage with their audience in a consistent and rewarding way, across every channel, everywhere, all the time.

So what does CXM really mean?  It’s a relatively new buzzword/acronym, and it’s not very well-defined.  It’s more a concept than a single solution, and it covers the spectrum of interactions that a customer may have with a company.  That said, most people using the term are usually referring to customer interactions and touch points from a digital or systems perspective.

What does CXM mean for WCM/CMS?  WCM won’t be going away, and CXM is not displacing WCM.  Rather, WCM is now a part
of CXM, along with customer relationship management (CRM), analytics, e-commerce, search, and various other platforms that are related to customer interactions for businesses.  Effectively, CXM is just a wrapper for any and all platforms that involve the “customer experience”.

System integration is the new focal point of web solutions.  Finding ways to tie your systems together to create one unified, manageable, and enjoyable experience for your customers is how most successful organizations are currently addressing the notion of CXM.

This concept of integration is not new – it’s something that has been going on for years with many of the popular enterprise content management solution stacks, and it’s what we find ourselves doing on the vast majority of projects we work on at Velir.  CXM has effectively been underway for years now, but now we have a cool name for it and along with new concepts and tools to employ.

What does the future hold?  Currently there’s no one in the marketplace offering a true CXM solution.  Some vendors appear to be heading in that direction (Adobe, IBM, Sitecore) through R&D and acquisition of platforms, but the reality is that there are many best-of-breed solutions for each of the systems that CXM encompasses – and most of them are not offered under one umbrella.  Specialization still trumps generalization in the web solutions arena, at least for now.

We’re now looking ahead.  With disparate platform integrations becoming the new normal, we’re now heading into more sophisticated areas like optimization, personalization, and engagement across platforms.  CXM is not just about integrating systems (as mentioned earlier, that’s nothing new) – it’s about providing customers with truly optimized and personalized experiences on every device, and in every setting that they encounter your business.  Look out for more posts on these exciting new topics coming soon.  Until then, enjoy your new acronym.

Think about websites that you visit regularly, or ones that you visited recently for the first time.  How much of the content on each page was relevant to you and your interests?  How hard was it to find the information that you were looking for?  How difficult was it to perform the task that you wanted to complete?

There are sites that we want to visit, and there are sites that we have to visit – to pay our bills, buy a product, or get informed.  Most of these websites cater to very broad audiences. We’ve all had experiences with sites that we find disorganized, loaded with irrelevant information, or just plain aggravating to use.

There’s one major reason why this happens: the site wasn’t designed for you (the user), it was designed for the masses – or worse – a company’s internal departments who had competing interests that were not aligned when the site was created.  Here are some of the telltale signs:

• Only a fraction of the page contains content or links that you find relevant
• The home page is littered with promotions that have nothing to do with why you came to the site
• The navigation and section titles are named after company departments or jargon that you are not fluent in
• It takes too many clicks to get to the content, or you need to click aimlessly to explore the site to find what interests you

If you’re involved in any way with the creation or management of your company’s website, it may not be as hopeless as you think – you just need a pragmatic way to eliminate opinions and keep things focused on the audience – not your internal departments. The easiest way to turn things around is to start by asking simple questions and let the answers determine the design and architectural decisions.  You’ll end up with a website that will give the users what they want, turning them into loyal fans who might even enjoy visiting your website.

What does your audience actually want from your company online? 

This is the all-important question, but don’t answer it just yet because your answer will likely be based on your personal opinion. Internal assumptions and a lack of focus on the users are what plague most websites. Stick to facts and data first and there will be room for opinions later. Here are some steps on how to keep it factual and relevant:

1. Review the analytics.  Look at what’s really happening.  What are the users’ tendencies?  Break it down from different angles – for all the users who come to your site via search engines, how long do they stay on the site?  What’s the bounce rate?  How many clicks does it take before they find what they came for?   What’s the user journey for people coming from your top five referral sources? Is anyone even clicking on that giant carousel that takes up 65% of the page? After you dig through all the research, here are a few actions to take:
   • Remove or deprioritize all content that is not being accessed or searched for (de-clutter the pages)
   • Promote all of the high-demand content so it’s not buried behind too many clicks
   • Reorganize your content based on the most popular user journeys
2. Ask the users. Ask your audience what it is they want from the site. Why do they even come to the site in the first place?  How do they normally get there?  What information are they most interested in seeing up front?  What tasks do they need to perform, and how frequently?  Do they understand your company’s vocabulary and how you’ve named your products and services?  Does the navigation make sense to them?  Here are some tips to address the results:
   • Use naming conventions and terminology that are universally understood by people outside your organization. Most users have no clue what your proprietary branding actually means in layman’s terms. It’s fine to incorporate branding, but you must make it sensible and intuitive for people who haven’t been introduced to it previously. Just call things what they are, and then layer in your corporate jargon later (and only if it’s critical to your brand).
   • Avoid grouping your content and navigation based on your internal departmental organization. Your website should be organized from the perspective of the end-user. Use data and input from actual users to end the internal battle for page real estate and give the users what they want, not what you want.
   • If it turns out there is a wide range of preferences across your user base, consider applying personalization techniques and/or letting users set their own preferences
3. Track & Monitor.  After you employ the above techniques, make sure you revisit each consideration periodically. Yearly or quarterly evaluations will ensure that your site keeps up with evolving user preferences. Websites should not be viewed as one-time projects to invest in every 3-5 years. They’re a perpetual work-in-progress that require maintenance and attention.
   • Redesign once with a flexible framework and thoughtful foundation. Then maintain and enhance it incrementally.
   • Avoid waiting until things are dated or so unusable that you need to redesign the entire site. That’s more costly and the money would be better spent maintaining and updating a site that has already been organized thoughtfully.  The idea is to let it evolve naturally, instead of through disruptive wholesale changes.

Next time you’re on a website, ask yourself “is this annoying to use, or does it make sense?”  Your users will be asking themselves the same things. Building a brand and creating an experience involves more than a well-designed website, but it’s a great way to start pleasing your audience to keep them coming back for more.

I recently worked on a couple of projects where I implemented the multivariate testing included in Sitecore DMS. During implementation, I found that as I was navigating through the site I had a hard time analyzing the amount of engagement value and goals I was accruing. I ended up running subsequent SQL queries to verify the data was being correctly recorded in the analytics database.

After a couple of days of manually tracking the data, I decided to build an Information Panel that tracked the data for me as I progressed through the website. This panel provides information regarding the current visitor, the current visit and the goals that visit has accrued. This proved vital for allowing our Quality Assurance group to adequately test the new functionality, and gave clients a visual to indicate which goals they are triggering during their user acceptance timeline.

Along with the tracking information, the module contains three useful features:

• New Visit Button: Instead of closing your browser or opening a private browsing window to initiate a new visit, simply click the New Visit button and the DMS cookie is cleared and the Information Panel is refreshed.
• Flush Button: For performance reasons, Sitecore DMS batches its SQL statements to the database. For testing though, we want immediate results. There are configuration changes we can make to increase the amount of writes to the database or decrease the amount of time we need to wait until the analytic data is written, but the Information Panel’s Flush button tells Sitecore to write the data back to the database whenever we need it to.
• Refresh: The Information Panel is wired up to update itself every 3-4 seconds by using jQuery AJAX. This button ensures that the panel is displaying the latest data being tracked.

To add the Sitecore DMS Information Panel to your instance, download the Sitecore package and add a reference to the Information Panel web user control in your layout file. You will also need to add a SQL function to your analytics database, which is found here.

The Sitecore DMS Information Panel library works on Sitecore 6.5.0 (rev.120427) or higher due to schema changes within the analytics database. You can find the Sitecore Analytics library on GitHub as open source. I welcome any and all contributions, large or small! :)

Thanks,
Tim Braga
Email: tim.braga@velir.com
Twitter: @tbraga01

Why a new field type?
A project that I am currently working on called for a requirement outside of Sitecore’s native functionality. The client needed to display widget on their page containing a list of internal and/or external links. At first I was thinking we could accomplish this by a rich text field, but as this would allow the client to enter any html the widget could easily break as it was not designed to handle images, tables and so on. Another approach would be to add multiple general link fields to the template. Although this would work, it would also be a maintenance and programming nightmare as each field needs to be wired and cannot be bound to a repeater. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the best solution would be a new custom field.

General Link field vs. General Links field
The General Links field was created to solve a couple problems, so let’s start by understanding Sitecore’s General Link field. The General Link field is pretty verbose and allows the content author to make a single link to many different types of sources such as a content item or an external link. If you look at raw values you’ll notice that Sitecore defines the link with an xml node with a variety of attributes such as LinkType, ID, and Anchor. The new General Links field wraps the same xml node in a <links> tag which allows us to hold many <link> elements per field as shown in the xml code below. This code also makes it easier to read the value into xml and serialize each node into objects.

Sitecore’s General Link field also does not give the capability to add Link Text to the link. Although we can counter this by having a single-line text field accompany a link field, the content author then has to set the link field and use the single-line text field to type in the text they would like that link to contain. With the General Links field we can easily click on one of the link items to put it in a selected state and simply click the “Set Link Text” button.

Binding to a Repeater
The new General Links field makes binding multiple links from Sitecore much easier than before. We are able to instantiate the field type and iterate over or bind the list of links to a repeater as shown in the example below.

Install the Package (You need to sign into Sitecore’s Marketplace): Sitecore Marketplace
Download the Instructional Guide: Instructional Guide
Contribute to the Suite: GitHub

As always, I look forward to your feedback and comments. Feel free to contact me @ tim.braga@velir.com or follow me on twitter: @tbraga01

Enjoy and Thank You!
Tim
@tbraga01