Jason Bedell - Interactive Marketing & Technology Blog

Bring Focus and Priority To Your Planning Process

Part of our job as marketers is to provide leadership when it comes to making smart decisions with your marketing/ad budgets. I've always been a big proponent of a strategic planning process. Start with your business objectives (which should be attainable, measurable, and time definite), define clear strategies to achieve those objectives, and finally derive tactics to execute those strategies.

What usually falls out of this process is a long list of tactics that can appear daunting. By prioritizing those tactics, you can help maintain focus and direction as you turn them into action items. This ultimately helps allocate your limited resources and budget to what will pay-off the most.

Assigning priority can be a tricky practice. There is usually differing views and subjective weighting applied and many times to fulfill personal agendas. Its no wonder that users, your customers, get lost in the banter. By applying a process to the practice, we can reduce the subjectivity.

I use a tool we call the Prioritization Matrix and it originated at Adaptive Path as far as I can tell. It has you rank tactics in two ways across four key categories.

• Importance: What is the potential payoff for executing the tactic. This is broken down in terms of importance to the business and importance to the user. Pretty straight forward.
• Feasibility: What investment will the tactic require.This is broken down into technical feasibility and resource feasibility. These usually take a little more explanation.
• Technical Feasibility: I look at this as level of effort (LOE). This is not about technology but more about the logistics of getting the job done.
• Resource Feasibility: This is a reflection of you having the right people with the right skill sets to execute.

The scores in these four categories will plot the tactic in one of four quadrants classified as 'Do First', 'Consider', 'Maybe Later', 'Don't Bother'.

While not sexy, and certainly not over complicated, this dispassionate approach to prioritization has proved invaluable. It can break through analysis paralysis and bring focus to planning sessions in disarray.

You can download the one I use here or the original one at Adaptive Path. Good luck!

Developing A Good Information Architecture

Nothing drives me (or your users) more crazy than a crappy navigation. A good navigation, or information architecture, can definitely make or break any site or online business. A bad one will result in a high bounce rate and horrible conversions. A good one will keep your competitors scratching their heads.

I borrowed our approach from Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville in their book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and it is about striking a balance between the context, content, and users (I don't believe in user-centric design, I think it can be too compromising).

• Context: By context, I am usually referring to the business context. What are the goals and objectives of the website. Is it suppose to merely promote yourself and your product or actually get someone to buy something? How is the site's performance going to be measured? Does it needs to be indexable by search engines and support bookmarking?
• Content: Content refers to the information, functionality, documents, meta-data, etc. the site needs to deliver. Notice this is not just the static copy, but the graphics, forms, and unseen meta-tags.
• Users: Finally, you must understand the mind set of your target audience. What is their level of sophistication with technology and the web. What need is your site fulfilling for them (this is ultimately a question of what value you are providing)? What is their need-state? What vocabulary do they use for your product or services? How important is access from mobile devises?

Ultimately, information architecture is about understanding what content and functionality needs to be delivered and then delivering it in the most consumable way possible to your users.

Consider SOA For Your New Website

If you are beginning the process to rebuild your website or have an opportunity to rebuild parts of it, you may want to consider a service oriented architecture (SOA).

A common approach to website development is to build pages with all the graphics, content, and fields you would expect along with all the programming/logic to pull data from a database, access information from an external systrem, or calculate a number from user input. This is considered a monolithic architecture and has a number of drawbacks, specifically reuse.

Since logic is being programmed right into a page, when that logic needs to be used in another part of the website, it will need to be copied to the other pages. This causes a problem when it comes time to make changes to a specific logic. The logic now needs to be changed in several locations instead of just one. Multiply this for several hundred logics across a thousand pages and the problem gets out of hand quickly (we call this a scalability issue).

An SOA approach to website development is about separation of concerns and isolating business logic from application logic (not to be confused with separation of code from content which is also supremely important). This means the logic used to pull data from a database, make calls to an external system, and do calculations is separated out from the rest of the website in what is called a 'service layer'. Web pages, in what is called the 'application layer', make calls to the service layer to retrieve or process information.This isolation of logic, separate from the pages, allows for the reuse of the logic across many pages.

Now there are many other aspects that go into taking a service oriented architecture and their are several others ways to factor logic out of pages. What is important is that the discussion of software architecture is taking place with some degree of emphasis and sophistication and an SOA approach is a great place to start.