A conversation with Noz Urbina

What do you love about the job you do?

So I’ve been thinking about this, and the thing I love is: the feeling that I’m participating in the progress of culture.

I’m a big Marshall McLuhan fan. I often come back to “the medium is the message” — the idea that we build a new medium for our use, and then that medium in turn shapes us as we use it. I’m a strong believer that the people that are defining this field are defining how humans interact. Ultimately, that is what shapes life. That’s the main thing I really love about my work, and just think is really cool: to be actively participating in the definition of our future and culture.

I realised another thing I really like when I was walking out of a meeting with a client the other day. I was looking at their situation, looking at their content, and thinking to myself: this is just terrible, this is a true disaster.

I realised that the client’s situation was holding millions of people back. It was such an incredible volume of people being effected. So, what I also really love is the fact that I have the potential to help so many people, and improve so many people’s lives, by being involved in the overall solution which is going to improve things.

When it comes to helping people, I just think it’s great to be a content person. Your potential one-to-many of action versus impact is so great. Every little improvement we make as digital professionals can have such a insanely huge impact on so many people’s ability to accomplish tasks and goals, and just have good experiences in their daily lives.

What are you going to be focused on for the rest of 2016?

Absolutely no doubt: it’s going to be Customer Journey Mapping.

I’m actually going to be talking about this more than people are probably expecting in my workshop. Basically, I used to do content modelling where I’d go into an organisation and we’d say “alright, let’s model your content so it’s more adaptive”. The problem was that we’d pretty much leave it up to the client to decide when to adapt, why to adapt, and to consider what type of content they were trying to create and what it was trying to accomplish.

First of all, I have to give myself a slap on the wrist for even allowing myself to forget some of the fundamentals of content strategy, or of user centred design. You can’t be strategic unless you define the strategic goal. Most importantly, that strategic goal must take customer experience into account. Slap.

So I’m at a point now where if I walk in and meet any client that says they want to do adaptive content modelling based on a content strategy they’ve already prepared, I make it quite clear that they can’t have their adaptive content modelling until they’ve eaten their customer journey mapping dinner. I’m extremely firm with this now. We must walk through realistic, journeys in as much details as necessary to validate the strategy and map that back to the model.

Everyone’s so excited about adaptive content, about multi-channel, omni-channel, and all this other really exciting stuff, but they’re not basing it on any real omni-channel customer journey. So how can we know if we’ve done it well?

When I’ve put together a content model without the journey maps, even if know it will function, it’s like having designed a phone, or a couch, or anything without insight who’s going to use it, or why, or when. It’s like someone saying “make me a car, I need a car!” — and I’m going “ok — I’ll build you a car”. You didn’t tell me you wanted a tractor, you didn’t tell me you wanted a sports car, so it could do all sorts of different things.

The fundamental point here is that we can not know what a good content model is, unless we have defined the user objectives that we are trying to support with that content. Obvious really, but when an enthusiastic and otherwise quite smart client says they’ve worked all that out and encouraging you down a path, sometimes you still need to push back and check the details.

An amazing number of clients say they want to be omni-channel, but they barely want to be multi-format. They just want to get their content so it’s not locked in web pages, so they can do apps and print and all that good stuff. The problem is that they’re not thinking about how this fits into a single human beings life as they try to accomplish an objective across multiple touch points. They’re looking at it from their own perspective, from their own KPIs, within the models, and frameworks and paradigms that they’re coming from.

It just doesn’t work: you can’t move onto a new paradigm of delivery, using your old paradigm of thinking. So I’m definitely all about Customer Journey Mapping at the moment.

What advice would you give us to prepare for the future?

Well, I have to fall back into the reason I’m so obsessed with Customer Journey Mapping right now. That being, that it addresses silos. It addresses being customer-centric across silos, and in multiple formats.

So my big piece of advice would be for anyone that is still thinking in ‘pages’. The advice is: that way of thinking has got to go. Anyone that is still thinking only in ‘websites’: you need to take a major step back, you need to take a vacation, read a book, have a break, take a head check and then come back.

We are not making websites: we are making content.

We are making content that supports a Customer Journey Map in various incarnations, including via human channels. So we need to be thinking about the people that consume our content, as well as the people that consume our content on behalf of our end clients. People like those in support, marketing, sales and training. We need to be thinking about that bigger picture so that we can design areas of content that can support these various channels to address particular points across the customer journey.

This is so far removed from: “I’m trying to make really good website navs”.

So anyone that thinks they make really good website navs needs to, again, take a step back and look at the bigger picture of what’s happening in the marketplace. Great navs are not what customers want, they want fluid information that addresses their needs… on the device and channel that they choose. So that could be print, it could be mobile, it could be the labelling of your posters at a stand at an event. You wont know what it really means for your customers until you’ve done Customer Journey Mapping.

I heard a few people say ‘mobile only’ recently, and I just think that’s a terrible idea. I mean, I’m currently staring at a 10 foot display in an airport — mobile is not the end of the device avalanche — mobile is not augmented reality, mobile is not virtual reality, and mobile is not huge interactive touch-screens or digital furniture: there is a still a lot coming. Just because we’ve reached a point of saturation with mobile, it doesn’t mean we’re done. You have to keep your mind open to the content channels and formats that are coming in the future.

What will people learn from your workshop?

People will learn the basics of Customer Journey Mapping, and the technique of Adaptive Content Modelling; they will learn the connection between them and how they can be used to break down silos. What we’ll be looking at is why the Customer Journey Map is so important in validating the quality of your content model and choosing the strategy for when you should invest in personalisation and adaptation.

We’ll also look at some techniques for notation methodology. I’ll be sharing templates for Customer Journey Mapping, and for Adaptive Content Modelling, and explaining how we can use these instead of wireframes and mock-ups, which a lot of people are still using, and I think are incredibly difficult to maintain when you get to any level of complexity in your model. With mock-ups and wireframes you’re effectively creating these prototypes of pages, which leads to having all the problems that you get with pages: you can’t single source, or mass update your mock-ups. Mock-ups are great for a certain type of review and discussion, but they’re not powerful enough for journey mapping or adaptive content modelling.

To be a bit ‘meta’, the thing I want to accomplish with my workshop is that when you leave that room, you will never look at a piece of content in the same way again. I want to give people a new pair of glasses to see every piece of content. I want them to see content not as a deliverable, but as one or more content assets that have been assembled for a certain point; a certain moment.

Rather than seeing a website, or a web-page, you’re seeing all the sub-components at a very granular level, thinking about the depth and time aspects of that content. Should I be surfacing titles and descriptions of images? Should I surface long descriptions, medium descriptions? Should this content be dynamic? Can I tie in other real-time data? How could I drive a better customer experience by leveraging personalisation? How could these components be repurposed for another need? Another audience? Another channel?

I want people to connect this content in context, and think about how it connects to other content they’ve seen. To consider if it is coherent with the other messages that can be seen throughout this channel or other parallel ones their users might be using. That new lens with which to look at your content, that’s what I’m trying to give people in my workshop.

What makes EuroIA special for you?

I’ve never actually been to EuroIA before, so this is my first one! I’m really excited about joining for the first time.

I live in Spain, and because so much of my work is in the States, it can be quite tiring to be doing so much work on another continent. I’m always really happy to be connecting with the European community, especially at EuroIA as it’s an event that’s so well regarded, and with such a great reputation. So I’m really excited about getting involved for the first time.

What do you think is the biggest opportunity for the Internet of Things?

I think there’s a flaw in the question, I mean, imagine I tried to ask you “what’s the biggest opportunity of the internet?”

I really struggle to have an answer to that kind of thing when there is such a vast number and variation of opportunities. When the opportunities are so massive, and they are so pervasive, I am humbled in the face of the question. I think this is something as big as the internet, or at least the implications are as broad.

We will be saving time and saving lives, opening minds, and we will have self driving cars… I’m sure some people will also think of the biggest opportunity in commercial terms, as in we’ll be able to sell lots of widgets or whatever else.

My first inclination would be to think about medicine, and the way that devices will be able to help us to be healthy, stay out of trouble, go places and do things that we couldn’t have done otherwise without great risk.

I also really like the combination of the Internet of Things, with what we’re now calling Artificial Intelligence. In the sense that AI’s grown out of big data analytics, we have the ability to look at so much behavioural information and make correlations between behaviours and actions, and problems in life.

So in the same way that the internet can be seen as an extension of our mental being, the Internet of Things becomes and extension of our physical being. This will allow us to share experiences and learn about ourselves from each other in a way that we’ve never been able to do before. I find this genuinely humbling.

What question haven’t we asked you that you think we should have asked you?

Ah, well my question would probably be “what is the biggest barrier to adoption for organisations to these new paradigms?”

And the answer would be “silos”.

Organisations are built wrong. Organisations are built around channels and formats. You have the support team, the web team, social media team, events team, etc. etc. etc.

This means that the cross functional, or the matrix, if you will, required to create omni-channel experiences, is very counter the current hierarchical, pyramid structure of corporate organisational layouts.

In short: organisations are built to screw over customers. They are not built to have different departments help each other, sometimes at the sacrifice of their current KPIs, in order to better customer experience. In some cases you can clearly see where it is actually discouraged for a department to help another, by the very nature of the way they work and are structured.

We have a massive disconnect between the organisational machines we’ve built, and the jobs we want them to do.

Silos are the biggest barrier to adoption, and the biggest thing holding back organisations from taking on any form of omni-channel or adaptive work, because these new paradigms are fundamentally cross-silo, and inherently customer-centric, not departmental-centric. If your KPIs are built around what your team has accomplished, within the old paradigm, then when you move into this new one your KPIs are often suddenly wrong. Your communication structure also becomes wrong, the reporting structures are wrong, the sense of responsibility, it’s just set up wrong.

We need to connect these silos, we need to, as Michael Priestly from IBM says, make silos permeable. We’re always going to have specialisms, teams, and groups, but we need a whole lot more connectivity, and more pipe-lines between them if we want to move forward to these new paradigms.