— ROLE
Design Research Consultant
— TASK
Competitor Audit
Quantitative Research
Qualitative Interview
Personas + CEM
Content Evaluation
—TEAM
1 Design Researcher
2 Content Editors
Vietcetera is a media website that is working on shifting its focus on Vietnamese audience in April 2019. Its aim is to become one of trusted source of news analysis and opinion for Vietnamese Gen Z and Millennials in Vietnam.
The brand and its approach to content is still new to Vietnamese audience, this study aims to define Vietcetera’s target audience (specifically what kind of content they want to consume and how they want to consume them), and how the site & content can be optimise to serve their target audience.
The goal
To paint a clear picture of Vietcetera’s audiences and how Vietcetera can use these insights to tailor the services, product and content to accommodate these needs.
Who the target audiences are, their psychographics and behavioural needs
What they might be doing, and when they interact with Vietcetera
When they might use the product, daily routines & rhythms of their behaviour
How understand the underlying emotional & rational drivers of behaviour
Taking a step back
For this project, we employed content strategy shared by Morten Rand-Hendriksen (Figure 1) for the team to better understand what Content Strategy is and how UX plays in the context of Content Strategy. Following this framework, content strategy is a four-phase process:
Fig 1. Content Strategy framework
- 1. Content strategy starts with understanding the users, their motivations and goal, therefore it's necessary to employ user research to first identify the target users, learn about their attitudes, goals, needs and behaviours around what kind of content is delivered, and how.
- 2. Analysis and structure: synthesising key findings around user needs in the first stage, finding patterns, understand user expectations around content structure and organisation. To consider the expectations that users might have for the website like what they want, what they expect to find, and where they would expect to find it.
- 3. Guides, Templates and Workflows: decide on brands voice, tone and contents, workflow, content directions.
- 4. Creation and Management: making suggestions, content creation, measure and evaluation performance.
For the User Research phase, there were 3 key actions:
1. Understand the users
- Stakeholder Interview + Competitor Audit
To understand the business from the internal point of view, I set up several talks to different business stakeholders to understand their business vision, their business goal and expected outcome of the project.
Alongside with stakeholders interview, we also conducted a competitor audit by looking at other key-players on the market to see how Vietcetera content measure against them, what works and what not.
Fig 2. Competitor Audit Summarise
Like any design research works, I conducted further user research to understand user expectations around content structure and organisation, which will be used to inform the development of key planning deliverables such as site maps and user flows.
- QUANTITATIVE Research
Besides utilising Google Analytics to measure the performance of the site, we also used this opportunity to blast out survey to understand the audiences' first-hand feedback.
From the quantitative data, it helped us to form general understanding of the audiences' general demographic, interests and their most concern topics when it comes to information consumption.
QUALITATIVE Research
I conducted 17 in-depth-interviews with audiences from diverse background to understand their information consumption habits, and their concerns when consuming content in general and on Vietcetera specifically.
I also asked about their perception towards the brand, their reference, needs and wants.
- 2. Analysis and Structure
In this phase, we synthesise key findings around user needs from the first stage and consider key patterns around what, where, and how content should be delivered.
I employed Affinity Mapping to synthesise the gathered insights for easy collaboration with other team members.
We analysed the media consumption habits and reference of more than 400 respondents and discovered that about 70% of their content preference were highly affected by their age and social background. From this analysis and qualitative data, we made 3 key personas and defined their experiences with customer experience map.
PERSONAS
Personas is a great tool that help to build an empathetic lens so that we can see things from the perspective of the users our content is built to support.
EXPERIENCE MAP
By modelling our user’s aspirations, motivations, fears, concerns and frustrations, it is possible to tailor our content accordingly. This leads to a much better chance of satisfying our users with the content we provide. That being said, content is only one part of the picture. Without usability and a solid site structure, our users may not even be able to find the content they are looking for, let alone use it.
Together with Personas, we also employed Customer Experience Map to help our client better understand their customers and their unique experience when interacting with Vietcetera and how we can improve our product at specific touch points.
I included three personas with their specific experience when consuming content on Vietcetera to see the differences, each particular pain points and opportunities for all three persona types.
Customer Experience Map helps to build the relationship between brand and customers.
- 3. Guides, Templates and Workflows
Once we develop a baseline structure for our content, we now need to consider the tone and voices of our main content. Working side by side with content creators and editors, we brainstorm how products can connect emotionally with users, and how to use content to create a connection when users experience our product.
With the results from the research phase, we were now able to generate ideas when putting user at the center of content creation process.
We also deep dive into the team's current working process, to find and address areas where the team can make changes and how can we make suggestions to help them improve.
We were able to categorise the insights as three main challenges:
4. Creation and Management
By hosting and running several writing workshops, The Editors team was able to address and help in-house writers to evaluate their own performance and make improvement on their skillsets.
The next challenge that we look into is Management process and Content Strategy, as consultant, it's crucial for us that we understand and work together with the in-house team. By hosting brainstorming workshop with members, we found out different problems and concerns the team currently is facing. To help them generate solution for the problem, I helped to run some How Might We sessions to brainstorm ideas for their next course of action.
Project learning
1. Know your audiences
It's always important to know the product audiences in product research and development, but in content creator, we find it's the crucial ingredient to decide the success or failure of a media. When a piece of writing fails to resonate, it’s usually because it’s not what the audience was looking for. Understanding the audiences and develop an empathy for the people being targeted at is the first and foremost factor to set content creator on the track of creating content that will be meaningful and impactful.
2. Engage with them emotionally
Content marketing isn't just about clicks and shares, genuine engagement with the content being produced is a vital part of building a community. We want to get to know the audiences, yet we also need to continuously reach out and ask questions, especially in the fast-changed and ever growing nature of content creating industry.
3. Connecting the big picture
Content marketing and selling is a big endless cycle. It is important for the content creator to connect all the dots with data, empathy and understanding for users, and together with their own skillsets to create a piece of writing that is meaningful and impactful.