Susan Harkus

User-centred architecture
Engaging content & communications
= > Business-effective website

Writing to engage your users

Writing to engage your users

Most websites are not charitable institutions. Businesses publish web content to achieve business objectives.

Businesses don't simply want website users to read. They want users to engage: to be persuaded, to take up services or to make decisions 'under influence'. And what do users find at the engagement point? Content!

A blinkered focus on readable content fails

A writing for online 'industry' has grown up around teaching and coaching authors to write information for online delivery.

Advice and guidance focus on online readability. For example, use simple words and write short sentences; avoid passive voice; choose language appropriate for your audience; and provide headings that support scanning.

Content must be more than readable!

Of course, online information MUST be readable - readability is a pre-requisite for engagement - but readable sentences and scannable text won't persuade or prompt users to consider other services and products.

Readability alone will not generate user engagement with your website content.

Content must engage users

In a simple sales interaction, business wants to sell the product that the customer comes to the store to buy.

Each participant in the sale has a different agenda.

• The business agenda has a profit priority but also includes constraints such as discount limits and warranty liabilities.
• The customer agenda has cost and functionality priorities but also includes expectations or assumptions about such things as quality, availability and delivery.

The business achieves a sale and its business outcomes by addressing the customer's agenda: the set of explicit and implicit requirements that determine whether the customer engages and buys, or disengages and slides away.

Face-to-face with the salesperson, customers disengage politely, "maybe another time". Online, users are much more aggressive. When the content fails to address their agenda, they are off... AND... the opposition is only a click away.

The secret of engaging website content?

Think of your website as a collection of engagement points. Your users come to the website with a specific purpose. That purpose takes them to a page where you want them to engage: to read, take notice, be persuaded and commit.

How do you make engagement happen?

... It's not rocket science

Write and organise the information of each engagement point

• to answer user questions
• to sequence information in accordance with user priorities
• to satisfy user expectations
• to address user assumptions
• to mitigate user resistance and pushback

Agenda-based analysis drives content development

You can't write engaging content unless you gather user questions, priorities, expectations, assumptions and reservations and that's where I come in. I help business teams gather and organise their 'user agenda' knowledge.

Through collaborative analysis, we capture the insights that drive

• content layering into primary and secondary pages
• content sequencing on each page
• cross-linking to local pages, as well as other pages on the site

Talk to me

If your website content is not delivering the results you expect, talk to me about leveraging agenda analysis to increase user engagement.

Call me on 0439 734 231 or email me.