Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc.

Category: Information Architecture

Building a Custom Application to Reimagine Digital Strategy
One of the most influential life lessons that I follow every day is about planning—which teaches us that if you fail to plan, then you are planning to fail. You may wonder if planning really is that important. Uh, yes—yes, it is.

As part of a digital agency, planning is one of the core phases of every project we engage with. The ability for us to strategize as a team really feels like a game of chess. Every piece has a purpose, and if you plan well in advance, you just might make it out alive.

When it came to planning, communicating, and documenting data architecture, I noticed that our organization had some inefficiencies— repeated issues that chewed up both time and money. This past year, I sought out to design and develop a tool that would build in efficiency into our process—and look good while doing it too.

Digital strategy has always been about connecting people to information through well-informed navigation.

For most projects we’ve engaged with, there had been some level of documentation around research and data architecture. Who is this product for? What information are they seeking? How will they get to this information? Digital strategy boils down into a few primary areas.

3 Primary Areas of Digital Strategy

1. People

Until the robot apocalypse occurs (it’s only a matter of time), the products we design and develop are to be consumed and engaged by people. Whether we put together assumptions on personas or we conduct user research and interview actual people, it’s important that we document the characteristics of these people to help us understand them better. The better we understand, the more accurate our recommendations become. Empathy is a powerful emotion that we can use to connect with people.

2. Information

Information can come in many forms, such as products or services. They can also tell stories and evoke emotions. We use content strategy methodologies to define and organize content that audiences seek. More specifically, content models help document information with a brand and define the relationship between them. These relationships help shape data types, taxonomies, and templates.

3. Navigation

The bridge that connects people to the information they desire is through well-informed navigation. Even the most desired information becomes useless if people cannot ultimately find it. We frame our content and navigation around sitemaps. Sitemaps help us show connections between our content, giving us a bird’s eye view of the product. Keeping our content well-organized allows us to provide better design solutions.

Identifying Documentation Pain Points

After countless hours of reviewing documentation across various projects, I was able to audit how we were documenting and setting ourselves up for digital success. Spoiler alert—it wasn’t pretty.

Each project was almost entirely different in their approach to documentation, yet they all shared similar problems, like:
- Too many documents
- Too many file formats
- Too many locations
- Inconsistent branding
- Proprietary software or hardware
Needless to say, our documentation was fragmented and ineffective.

Challenges With Visual Sitemaps

One document that we typically produce in projects is called a visual sitemap. These are graphical representations of a website or applications content, and the connections made between them. What makes them unique is how we apply illustrations that best represent the kind of information each page may have. Visual sitemaps can give us a glimpse into user journeys, template architecture, and so much more. Often times, we print these sitemaps on a wide-format printer, which gives us a tangible poster for the team to review collectively.

As you can imagine, large-scale sites or apps can make for some impressively large visual sitemaps. When producing these sitemaps projects can end up wasting lots of paper and ink – especially when you account for multiple revisions.

Challenges With Standard Tools

Using Google Drive as our repository for documentation was ineffective due to cultural diversity in technology and inadequate governance policies. For example, documents were being created in various applications based on personal preferences, projects were not being shared properly to team members, and nothing appeared to be brand-compliant. Drive was supposed to be the answer for us, but wasn’t measuring up to our standards.

We also tried making visual sitemaps in Omnigraffle. Personally, I love Omnigraffle for making diagrams. However, if the designers weren’t available to make edits, the rest of our team could not help; Omnigraffle requires both macOS and a paid license.

To make matters worse, additional methods for documentation got out of hand. Some details were posted as activity notes in our project management platform (which almost always gets lost), while others were simply emailed between one another. As if that weren’t bad enough, we’ve ran across files that were stored on people’s desktops—or worse—in their trash bin.

If you were not part of the project team from the very beginning, getting involved became almost impossible. The landscape of how we documented and stored our plan of actions was chaotic. When you can’t effectively communicate with your team or even comprehend what is going on, you lose efficiency.

Designing a New, Inclusive Application

It was time to design an inclusive, customized app to promote improved team communication and strategy. I wanted to design and build an application that:
- Centralized documentation into a single location
- Allowed access cross-platform
- Automatically applied branding to all documentation
- Reduced dependency on 3rd party software
- Eliminated ink and paper waste
By creating an app to address the issues, my goals were:
- Reduce Costs: Remove time-intensive inefficiencies, and uncover problems quickly with real-time metrics.
- Increase Product Quality: Allow teams to spend more time making awesome products.
What if we could use technology to help us make better decisions and improve planning? By allowing the application to display real-time metrics— like page counts, page title lengths, and persona distribution—we could make well-informed decisions around the data architecture.

I branded and called the app Sapphire—for its clarity, strength, and beauty around providing value to us. Sapphire’s core value is about being a real-time data architecture planning tool that can help us strategize digital products at any scale.

Benefits of Sapphire

More Empathy for People in Design

Sapphire makes it very easy to define and explore personas for projects. Every project can create as many personas as necessary, with just the right amount of information at a glance. It’s incredibly easy for team members—especially designers—to empathize with a person’s goals or frustrations.

Better Organization for Content

Creating well-organized architecture around a project became effortless. Each project can have content broken into data types, taxonomies, templates, and pages. In fact, you can also create relationships between pages and people. This allows us to understand who our target audience truly is.

Clear Perspective on Navigation

In the past, we had to document the same information multiple times. The best part about Sapphire is that both branding and visual sitemaps are automatically generated in real-time. If I could get people to focus on the content and nothing else, Sapphire could handle the rest. Visual sitemaps are fully interactive, allowing anyone to explore pages and their architecture.

Inside the Single-Page App

In order to provide such a rich experience, I wanted to ensure Sapphire was using the latest technology. With performance being an important factor, I needed to choose technologies that were built for speed.

Sapphire was built on React—as both a progressive web app and single page app—and used Google Firebase for its NoSQL real-time database. Users were authenticated securely using Google Domain Authentication and was securely hosted through Google Cloud Hosting. All of these technologies were relatively easy to learn and integrate.

To power our intuitive sitemaps, I opted for jsPlumb framework over something like D3—primarily due to time constraints and the amount of effort required. I’ll admit, jsPlumb integrated extremely well with React and allowed me the power to customize as I needed to match the desired functionality.

Final Thoughts on Digital Strategy

Documentation allows teams to communicate and work together on projects of any scale, and digital strategy around architecture plays an important role in documenting how products should work. When we ignore documentation—or simply allow it to deteriorate over time— we are hurting our ability to communicate effectively.

By recognizing these problems, I was able to design, develop, and deploy a tool that helps us reimagine digital strategy and how we document data architecture. When we can work better together as a team, anything is possible. Make something people love!

This article was originally posted by Mark Riggan on Medium.
April 24, 2019
What’s the Future of Municipal Sites?

When I think about cities and city services, I can’t help but see them as user experience projects. As a UX-oriented person, maybe that’s just me being a hammer and seeing a UX nail, but as more and more diverse citizens rely on these municipal sites, city governments will have to take UX seriously to serve citizens in the future.

This UX perspective should extend from city hall buildings to services in the community to digital spaces like social media and city websites. I’m not only saying this because I think it’s the right thing to do, it’s also what citizens are increasingly coming to expect. Research from Accenture has shown that people are coming to expect more and more from digital government. Over three quarters of US citizens expect the same or better service from government websites as they do from commercial sites, and that number is growing. Some government institutions like the State of Georgia are catching on to this trend, though that appears to be more the exception than the rule.

Since we know how important city websites are, my user research team and I are always watching where these municipal sites seem to be headed. This can be a hard thing to pin down because there is so much variation in the execution of city websites, but here are a few trends that stand out.

Municipal Sites Will Focus on Findability

One of the hardest challenges of municipal sites is creating effective navigation systems. These sites struggle because they need to meet the needs of many user segments as well as the needs of many internal departments. Pick a city site at random, and chances are you will notice critical information buried in deep site structures. Deep structures aren’t necessarily always bad, but designing navigation for municipal sites is especially challenging because of the abundance of jargon in field. This in mind, here are specific ways municipal sites can improve findability:

Search

Search is an obvious way to get around the problems of navigation and hard-to-find information. While this might seem behind the times to include, you’d be surprised how many cities don’t have basic search aids like suggestions, autocomplete and spell check, much less filters to narrow results. With that said, many cities have begun promoting search even more by placing the search bar right in the middle of their home page. Take Las Vegas, for example:

If you want to promote search on your municipal site, put it front and center.

Intelligent Assistants

Many cities (and other government agencies) have begun to develop Alexa integration to help people find information. I have to commend these agencies for forward thinking, as I think voice interfaces are here to stay. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder how useful some of these tools actually are. It’s hard to accurately assess the value of these applications without some user testing, but my first question is: Which applications of these tools provide value and which are just shallow attempts to adopt a trendy technology?

For example, one of the apps currently available advertises providing information about the names of people in official positions. Put simply, that seems mostly useless. Other apps report to provide information about trash collection or street closure schedules. These tasks seem more practical. For example, imagine being able to instantly check whether you need to put your recycling out without having to consult a screen. I believe these tasks are closer to the types of things that people actually use intelligent assistants for: repetitive, fact-based information needs as opposed to subjective questions dependent on individual opinion. If I sound cautious here, it isn’t because I don’t believe voice interfaces could be useful–they could be–I’m just trying to stress the importance of basing these interfaces on real user needs.

“Get It Done” Wizards

Another approach is to present a navigation alternative by allowing users to select a catered guide to locate a page. These guides are usually presented as step-by-step processes (with numbered steps and all). In my view, though these are often presented as task wizards, they are typically just alternative navigation schemes that use actions as categories rather than the loosely-persona based navigations that city sites usually employ.

San Diego’s Get it Done feature: Users make choices moving from left to right and are linked to a page in the final panel.

These features provide an alternative finding method for users who struggle with or are not inclined to use other methods. That said, if a municipal site relies on these special guides to perform routine tasks, why not simply redesign the site’s information architecture so all categories are labeled as common actions? Are they simply bolting on alternative routes to popular content instead of simply designing their navigations around it?

City Sites Will Get Serious about Content Strategy

As a critical component of any website design, content strategy will also become a major focus of municipal sites in the coming years. And many of these sites have a ways to go—city web pages with a strong vision of their own strategy are more the exception than the norm. Here are some important ways that leading municipal sites will align their content strategy with actual user needs:

Timely Topics That Matter to Many Users

Cities need to prioritize and produce content that matters to the majority of their citizens. This means focusing on the key content strategy question: What do users actually come to the city website for? The answers should guide municipal site owners in deciding what content to prioritize.

One mistake I often see on city websites is there is too much focus on news or announcements (such as a press release of the mayor’s speaking engagements) rather than directly actionable information. Too often these news stories dominate screen space on multiple pages despite being of interest to only a small subset of users.

This doesn’t mean the latest news isn’t useful content, but municipal sites must prioritize common user needs over pure timeliness. For example, Boston’s site prioritizes things like parking meter schedules, street cleaning, and trash schedules over the “typical latest news” information—though these schedules should of course be kept up to date.

Embrace Citizen Communication

There is no more direct way to prioritize user needs than listening to those users in real time. Every municipal site understands the need for web-friendly ways for citizens to contact city officials, so most cities have webforms to request service, report things, and contact municipal employees—in addition to just posting phone numbers.

But beyond these standard methods, how else can municipal sites embrace citizen communication? Many cities (including Wichita, Virginia Beach, and Boston) have chat capabilities that allow citizens to immediately contact city employees for answers. These live chat sessions not only allow users to quickly express their views, but also reinforce that the city leaders are making time for a real person to listen to them. Additionally, they open lanes of communication for users who are not inclined to make a phone call or can’t wait for an email response.

The chat function on the Virginia Beach municipal site makes it easy for citizens to get quick answers.

It’s also worthwhile to engage users on social media channels like Twitter or Facebook in order to rapidly circulate important information and get citizen feedback. There’s nothing wrong with building a following by posting jokes or pictures of cute animals in the city, as these followers will later be able to receive your updates when something serious is happening. In addition, cities should develop a plan for how they will respond to unforeseen events on social media. For example, the city of Toronto famously found themselves on the spot after a picture of dead raccoon on a city sidewalk went viral.

The Future of Municipal Sites Is Now

Of the predictions made in this post, very few of the trends discussed rely on cutting-edge technology. Instead of some sci-fi dreamscape driven by neural integration with digital systems or holographic imagery, the future of municipal sites will depend on strong search capabilities, user-centered content strategy, and social engagement—all best practices you can implement right now.

To learn more about how government websites can better serve citizens, please visit our government services page.

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April 16, 2019
Ten Critical Elements of a Successful Retail eCommerce Site

It’s no secret that eCommerce is both extremely successful and extremely competitive. How does a site gain market share, loyal customers and revenue? It may seem mystical — lots of smart people have created good sites and not been successful.

The example I will use to illustrate the 10 critical elements is www.extremeterrain.com. I happen to also be an off-road enthusiast and this site caught my attention by how well it is put together. Our company didn’t build the site and we aren’t affiliated with it at all. It is impressive work, however.

This post doesn’t deal with anything related to marketing or actual fulfillment or customer service. Let’s assume that you won’t be successful if nobody comes to your site or you deliver really lousy service. Agree?

As you read through this list you notice a consistent theme. Trust. People very rarely do business with anyone they don’t trust. Most of the keys to successful eCommerce are related to establishing trust with the consumer. Trust in the company and trust in the product.

1. Precise, Targeted, Unique Emails on a Regular Schedule

Successful e-commerce sites use e-mail. A lot. So what’s different? Lots of people use spammy communications to try and drum up business for everything from drugs to Groupon specials.

Successful e-commerce mailing appears in your inbox as something very interesting and targeted specifically for you. Looking at the email below you will notice how many times they use the information they gathered about me to precisely target the email. “2009 Wrangler” is used in the subject, the header, and the sub-heading above the targeted product listing. Exciting Wrangler imaging is, of course, also used as the primary e-mail image.

2. Big, Detailed, Consistent Pictures

One of the things that makes customers hesitate to buy, even if they think they want the product, is a lack of confidence about the quality or whether it’s really exactly what they want. Having big, detailed, consistent pictures closes the gap from an in-store experience significantly and increases the buyer’s confidence that it’s what they are looking for. Where all the other sites simply have decent picture of the product. Extreme Terrain goes way above. They actually install the products on a Jeep and show how they look. In addition they allow their customers to post photos of their rigs with the products installed. It’s a home run. Who doesn’t want this parked in the garage?

3. Clear Descriptions

Just like having big pictures, clear descriptions help buyer to understand what they are really getting. This lessens their concern they are going to get something they don’t want. It doesn’t matter whether they can ship it back or not, most people don’t want to hassle with the process.

ExtremeTerrain provides 4 different tabs with detailed information about the product so the customer knows exactly what to expect.

4. Targeted Focus

Ok, let’s face the facts. This post isn’t about creating Amazon.com. Unless you have a spare billion and think you’re smarter than they are, you should probably choose a niche and stick to it. Once you choose that niche make sure it’s big enough that you can focus precisely on it without expanding in order to grow your revenue. Once you lose focus, you’re out in the tall grass without a GPS.

Extreme Terrain isn’t just about 4×4 parts in general. It is specifically about Jeep Wranglers. They probably have a mission statement somewhere about being the most complete and most trusted online resource for Jeep Wranglers anywhere. Small enough to get their arms around, but big enough to do one heck of a lot of business.

5. Real Reviews

Consumers can spot a fake review a thousand miles away. Fake reviews detract from trust and detract from conversions. Data actually shows that bad reviews boost sales. Read about it here (http://hbr.org/2012/03/bad-reviews-can-boost-sales-heres-why).

The point is that reviews increase confidence and increase trust and that increases sales. Seeing a pattern here?

Look how well Extreme Terrain does at displaying reviews. They are also in the main part of the page, near the add to cart and pricing. There are stars all over the page. Of course in order to display reviews you also have to be good at capturing reviews and enticing customers to leave them.

6. Clean Design, Organized Navigation

Don’t make your customers work to find what they are looking for. Good user experience is a must. You can get away with a few mistakes but once a user feels like it’s a struggle to get around then they associate the difficulty of the shopping experience with frustration and other negative thoughts and as you can probably imagine this doesn’t lead to happy customers.

7. Good Search

What makes a good search? First it should be prominent and easy to find. Second, the search should be contextual so search terms are suggested as you type. Third, the search catalog should contain all of the site’s pages; products, blogs, and static/informational. Finally, when the search results contain products the site should display images, descriptions, price, and reviews. It isn’t essential but having the ability to refine and sort the results further by price, category, manufacturer, rating, etc. is a nice feature.

Search has less to do with trust than some of the other items and more to do with common sense. If your customers can’t find what they are looking for then they can’t buy it. Duh. In addition, many merchants fail to capture internal search data so they can see what customers are looking for and perhaps not finding. It helps guide product selection, trends, and even promotions. Google Analytics makes it really easy to wire up so there’s no excuse.

8. Subject Matter Experts / Accessible Customer Service

Going back to trust again. Trust in the product and trust in the company. The more you can help customers to feel confident in what they are purchasing the more they will purchase. Sometimes the mere appearance of accessibility to customer service and focused expertise is enough.

9. Affordable Shipping / Simple Return Policy

People don’t like to pay for shipping because it feels like “tax.” To some extent they don’t mind paying for expedited shipping to get it faster because that’s a choice. I’m no saying shipping should be free, but whenever you can offer free shipping options that’s a huge bonus. Many sites have a minimum order value where shipping becomes free. This has a huge effect on improving the average order size.

The return policy goes back to trust again. The buyer’s threshold for confidence must be much higher if “all sales are final.” Conversely if you offer a simple, easy return policy customers will consider slightly more risk. Additionally more trust is created if you appear willing and eager to help customers if they are less than satisfied with their purchases. Mostly common sense.

10. Mobile Experience

This simply comes down to data. Lots and lots of customers do their shopping and browsing from mobile devices and tablets. These numbers continue to grow, although slower than they have in the past. It is near suicidal to provide a poor mobile experience to your customers.

Conclusion

As you can see, a lot goes into a solid, high-performing eCommerce website. And while it can look overwhelming, the end result is an eCommerce engine that will drive your business in ways you might never have imagined before. Ready to go further with eCommerce? Learn more about how we can help with your eCommerce needs and contact us to talk with an eCommerce expert ready to help you take your business to the next level!

February 19, 2019
Why Original Web Content Matters to Your Business
When your customers seek out solutions for the problems they face, the Internet is the first place they look.

[pull_quote]“They come for information that answers their question or helps them complete their task. They want that information to be easy to find, easy to understand, up-to-date, and credible.” -Ginny Redish[/pull_quote]

You need to make sure your solution is easy to find, easy to understand, up-to-date, and credible. The best way to do this is by writing original web content that grabs your audience’s attention.

To create content that stands out, it’s helpful to understand how your customers use online information. Thankfully, the explosion of data made available by the Internet has allowed us to analyze how web users consume online content and what drives their behavior.

How Consumers Use Online Information

Google has studied consumer shopping behavior extensively. Many shoppers now search for online product descriptions as well as professional and individual consumer reviews before making a purchase decision. Google calls this consumer decision-making process the “Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT).”

According to a shopping behavior study by Google and Shopper Sciences, the Zero Moment of Truth has become more important in recent years:
- 88% of U.S. consumers now engage in ZMOT research before making a final purchase decision.
- Consumers consult an average of 10.4 sources before buying and this rate continues to rise.
As consumers research their purchases online, the question then becomes: “Who is controlling what they see about your product or service?” If you don’t take action to provide the information they’re looking for, someone else will—essentially controlling the conversation with your potential customer.

The First Step to Leading the Online Conversation

How do you attract visitors and ensure they see your content instead of someone else’s?

In User Experience (UX) workshops with our clients, it becomes clear that website visitors often prefer search to find what they want, rather than browsing or navigating a website. This makes sense. Given the sheer volume of websites, menu items, and possible ways to browse, navigating content can be overwhelming.

Therefore, if you want to lead the online conversation about your products and services, the first step is to make sure search engines rate your page highly. The art and science of doing this is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

How SEO Relates to Your Content

According to recent research, Organic Search is responsible for 64% of your web traffic. The term Organic Search refers to Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) that appear based on their relevance to search terms the user entered. This is not the same as paid advertisements. As search engine algorithms become more sophisticated, they’re getting better at understanding what users are looking for. As a result, they can provide the most relevant possible results.

“Google is now putting a high emphasis on sites that are considered to have a high level of expertise, authoritativeness or trustworthiness.” This makes it essential that all your online content conveys expert, research-backed opinions in order to win consumers’ trust.

It’s also vital that you produce original, authoritative content that demonstrates thought leadership in your field. Don’t simply forward or re-post content other people have written. Instead, flip the 1% rule in your favor and become a content generator that others link to and follow.

By understanding what your audience is searching for and how search engines find it, you have insight to create original and trustworthy content that will catch the eye of your customers. If you’re looking for more guidance as you build a content strategy that works for you, we’re happy to help.
February 5, 2019
You’re Leaving Out the Best Parts of the Story

Why Storytelling Is More Than Plot

In the beginning, there was a business. The business made a profit, and saw that it was good. But there was a problem, and the business did not like it. And lo, our agency descended from on high to face the problem. Together with the business, we solved it. And then everything was fine and that’s why you should hire our agency too. #storytelling

We’ve read-and written (guilty as charged)-way too many case studies and content pieces like this. And while we know how shallow this content sounds, it’s understandable why it so often gets written this way. It’s simple, easy to follow, and has a clear Call to Action at the end. So, even if we don’t love this style, we don’t hate it either. But, if someone uses this style as an example of great storytelling in content marketing? To that we say NO NO NO, THIS SHALL NOT STAND.

Great stories are more than a basic plot. It’s not only about what happened first, what happened next, and what happened last. But, most (bad) case studies are like this. They’re simple plots where one special fix appears and everything becomes magically awesome. Of course, the miracle fix is being sold by the relevant company publishing the case study. Shocking.

That is a story, but it is not a good story. Let’s take a closer look at three strong storytelling methods. Then we can explore how you can weave these elements into your content. You’ll be able to create narratives that actually resonate with your audience. Your content shouldn’t inspire users to close the browser and forget what they read. You are capable of crafting a meaningful connection with your readers that inspires them to stay and learn more. (And thus, the hero’s journey began).

Characters: Include Actual Humans in Your Case Studies

It’s remarkable how many case studies try to use Joseph Conrad’s Hero’s Journey to tell their tale. The intrepid multi-national corporation, bold and brave, boosted its profit margins! A generous description would call this “efficient” storytelling. Sure, a business-owner might read the case study and relate to the fact that she too owned a business. But, there’s nothing in this simplistic model that elicits actual empathy. There is no emotion involved in connection with the story.

No one reads their kids a bedtime story about a company or an organization. (Except for that one guy…with that one kid…). We read stories about characters. We seek out believable people with dreams, feelings, and worries we can actually relate to. The most direct case study story ever, dodging any emotional resonance, might be what you want. Ok, you do you. But, if it’s not, then there is no excuse to erase the people behind a project or client engagement.

Our case studies always include at least one quote and picture from the team who worked on the project. These simple visual additions do a lot to remind readers of the human stakes in these stories and blogs. And don’t limit this to your internal team! It may take more time to secure a quote and profile image from your clients. But, seeing the human face of collaboration makes your content easier for readers to relate to.

Conflict: Be Honest about the Pains of the Process

As anyone who has ever participated in a big tech project knows, transformative new technology is never simple to implement, nor does it magically fix everything. Yet you wouldn’t know that from reading the average technology-driven case study. Too often the implementation of new software or systems gets summarized as “after a quick on-boarding” or “with this solution in place.”

Leaving out conflicts is a surefire way to make your reader disbelieve your story and stop reading. Instead, write content stories that do justice to the real, meaningful conflicts that happen when you introduce a new digital platform in a business or organization. Is the company losing anything worthwhile in this changing process? How hard was it for people at the company to learn the new system? What would they have done differently had they began the implementation from scratch?

We’re not saying readers want to read angry Slack transcripts between your IT and marketing teams. Instead, we’re saying your readers want to believe your story of success. Nothing makes a reader roll their eyes like seeing all the work of an implementation, or other conflicts, summed up in less than a sentence.

Themes: Ask Better Questions, Inspire Better Choices

Too often case studies and scenario-driven content read like badly-written parables. These shallow stories end with some cliched or pithy adage like “design is more than just pictures,” “cybersecurity can save your business,” or “that’s why customers trust [insert your company name here] with [problem].”

These conclusions aren’t necessarily wrong, but they’re boring. The best case scenario, as a result of these simplistic parables, is that your audience shrugs at the end. The worst case is that the audience feels insulted because you treated them like children who need an easy, clear moral at the end. One sentence takeaways can make the audience feel lectured to or “taught a lesson” rather than engaged and moved. In contrast, quality storytelling asks interesting questions and inspires smarter choices in an audience.

For example, let’s say you were telling a story about a company detecting a data breach and adopting a new cybersecurity strategy. A simple version of the story would conclude with “And that’s why you need end-to-end security.” A better story would embrace the thorny theme of how security strategy is essentially a question of Control versus Freedom. You can secure your business by forcing employees to change passwords every day, never carry a personal smartphone, and authenticate every email they send. However, that strategy drastically limits how much freedom and agility your employees have to do their best work. This in mind, the best security strategy for your company is a combination of technology and processes that fits your culture of trust and empowerment, while also protecting essential data from breaches.

This conclusion is more complex than “Security good, breaches bad,” but that’s the point. You want to engage your readers as thoughtful agents of their own destiny, not children who need simplistic morals to do the right thing. Offering meaningful themes shows your audience you want to partner with them rather than just sell them something and move on.

It’s Time to Tell Stories that Matter

Content storytelling isn’t some mysterious art that can only be practiced by award-winning writers. Instead, any marketer can adopt proven storytelling methods to make their content more engaging. From memorable characters, to relatable conflict, to meaningful themes and questions, good storytelling shows respect for your readers and inspires them to want to connect with you.

If you’ve got questions about how to implement these ideas or want to argue about how preposterous this all sounds, we’re game.

August 29, 2018
Gain Blog Freedom and Peace When You Show Non-Writers How to Write
When you have a small team working to do big things, individual goals can become overwhelming. One writer, trying to keep the company blog current and consistent, found a way. He brought non-writers into the fold. Here’s how he managed it.

For two years, I was the only writer at my company. If you want a web app developed, a homepage designed, or any kind of user data analyzed, we have a team for that. If you wanted to actually write about any of these things, my company came to me.

On my best days, this was the greatest of power trips. I decided how we described every part of our organization. Our philosophy and ideal way of working, all worded by me. I’d craft content about the kinds of customers we looked for. Or, I’d wax on about how we bend the internet to the will of all sorts of forward-thinking companies. I was able to create a voice for the company.

On my worst days, I felt like an alien. Here I was, trying to make my way around this planet where the dominant language was javascript. And storytelling? It only mattered if it convinced someone to give us more money. Like when I arrived at the office one day and found an 87-page sales proposal in my inbox. It came with only one comment: “Use your writer magic to edit this!”

Is Good Writing Magic?

After you get done screaming about editing a huge proposal, you realize your sales guys have a point about writing.

And after I got done screaming on the inside, I realized they have a point. Writing is magic. If I put together the right combination of words on a blog post or sales doc, I can convince someone to do something. For example, hire us. Writing, that is compelling, is not something that anyone can measure or quantify. Good writing is more art than science. I usually feel my way through my writing rather than calculating each word or phrase.

But how can you teach magic? I’m not Dumbledore, in that regard. But if I’m the only wizard capable of casting word magic in my company, I’m going to burn out and fast. It would be impossible to not get overwhelmed by how much my colleagues need my help. So what’s the answer?

Pull back the curtain on the magic and show how you do the trick. If writing is magic, then magic is actually the product of proven techniques which can be shared, repeated, and relied on. Now all I needed to do was coach my non-writers to write. Here are four tactics I found that made this teaching and coaching process work.

1. Break Down the Writing Process

If there’s one thing technical workers love, it’s a reliable process. As a writing coach, the more I can illustrate the individual steps to writing something clear and compelling, the easier it will be for my colleagues to follow it.

At Atlantic BT, the writing process I teach involves four steps:
- Come up with ideas and narrow them down to your core topic.
- Outline a blog post about the idea.
- Draft this idea.
- Revise the idea until it’s ready to publish.
I drew these steps from the writing process I learned in high school—begin with a thesis, outline 3 to 5 points which prove your argument, then draft and revise. Each point in your outline should include additional information to explain why they matter. It isn’t necessary to go into a ton of detail, but the more you write down in an outline, the easier the first draft will be.

Naturally, outlining isn’t the only way to write. But if you’re at all nervous about writing a blog post (and most programmers are), outlining your ideas in advance is the best way to prevent the frustration that often makes aspiring writers quit. Why? Because every time you feel unsure of what to write next, you can go back to your outline—it’s your map into the wilderness of unwritten ideas.

Once my colleagues have an outline, I encourage them to write a first draft as quickly as possible. The most important qualities in a first draft are speed and honesty. Speed prevents you from making excuses for not finishing what you started. Honesty ensures this first draft reflects all the ideas and feelings that led you to write this idea in the first place. Those things in mind, an aspiring writer’s main goal with a first draft is to finish it; her secondary goal is to make it the best reflection of her idea as possible.

2. Make Writing an Incentive for Everyone

Writing, even at its best, is hard work. It takes dedicated time, concentration, and the willingness to open yourself up to criticism from the entire internet. Even highly successful authors struggle with the self-confidence and discipline to write; acclaimed fantasy writer George R.R. Martin admitted that he sometimes wondered if he should quit writing and become a plumber—and this after writing numerous bestsellers and inspiring one of the most popular shows on TV.

If writing is a tough challenge for veteran authors like Martin, how daunting do you think writing a blog post will be to the average PHP developer? He’s got to overcome this fear before he even gets started. So how do you motivate him to try?

The most direct tactic is providing some kind of incentive. You could have a weekly writing contest in which anyone who works to get a post published on your blog receives a small cash reward. You could even take it a step farther. Every two months, the most popular post on your company blog (as measured by page views) could win a cash prize. By awarding the prize publicly, you can give each aspiring writer a little more motivation.

Another important incentive is to publicly recognize every single writer who carries a blog draft to publication. The simplest way to do this is by emailing or messaging the company to congratulate the new writer on his/her work getting published. However, I also like to tell my colleagues in our weekly company stand-up about our latest blogs so everyone can applaud the new writer to his face. The more you communicate that each person’s voice matters, the more likely you will recruit more writers for the blog.

3. Provide Time for Writing in the Workday

However, a little cash motivation won’t cut it if you’re asking a programmer to spend his or her own time with the difficult work of writing on top of regular tasks. If you want your employees to contribute to your company blog or other writing areas, make time on your employees’ schedules for writing blog posts.

This isn’t as simple as having a “free-writing hour” every day in the style of 8th grade homeroom. After all, you still need your programmers and technical types to keep up with existing projects, and losing an hour every day can hinder progress.

Instead, check in with your employees regularly to see if they have ideas for a blog post. If someone wants to write, the best thing you can possibly do is make time for them to do so on the schedule. This is especially true if their idea will help promote the expertise and value of your organization. By showing how your programmers not only have big ideas but also know how to write and communicate about them, you’re showing off the value of your company in a way that puts your people first.

4. Coach Your Colleagues 1:1, Especially on Revisions

If you ask anyone who has never taught how a teacher passes along knowledge, they’ll probably say something about giving a lesson in front of a class. If you ask an actual teacher, they’ll tell you the best learning happens in one-on-one conversations.

I learned this lesson the hard way. Atlantic BT gave me the opportunity to run my own writing class at lunchtimes once a week (free food included). I prepared fun presentations, came up with great GIFs, and offered the group all kinds of ways to generate ideas and blog posts. My colleagues had fun, took notes, and seemed eager to give blog writing a try. The only problem was they weren’t actually writing—weeks later, new drafts barely trickled in.

I had given my coworkers a good pep talk and some tips to get started, but my enthusiasm and advice weren’t enough to motivate my friends to do the hard work of finishing a draft. Instead, I began to approach my friends one-on-one, asking them about their ideas and how the writing was going. I then scheduled a meeting between me and each writer who was working on a draft.

The difference was remarkable. Once I began to meet and talk through a draft with an aspiring writer, we could quickly put together an outline on a shared Google doc. From there, it was easy to help them craft an introduction, string together paragraphs, and end on an action-oriented conclusion.

Democratize Your Blog Today

I now have another content writer on my team (“Hello, everyone!” -Other Content Writer). However, we could not have gotten our company’s blog content to this point had it not been for the Account Executives, Developers, and other technologists who helped write blogs for the ABT site. Their voices are a crucial part of what makes my company unique, and it’s one of the best parts of my job to help them share their ideas on our site.
July 30, 2018