Map and measure journeys to influence your organisation

We all agree silos are bad. Other people, bad people, work in silos. But not us. We’re cool. Our gang is cool. And it feels good to be in a gang — support, shared language, a sense of belonging.

But here’s the thing: to anyone outside our content design gang, we’re also just another silo. 

The good news? Barriers between gangs can be crossed with a bit of understanding and planning. Find out what matters to the legal team, the fundraisers, the people in those “other” silos. What are their hopes and fears? What pressures are they under?

Building bridges starts with listening.  Meet them where they are. That could mean:

• Physical space – if you share an office, go to their side.
• Files and documents – they tell a story (even if it’s mostly fan fiction).
• Meetings and rituals – listen to the rhythm of their work.
• Informal moments – coffee chats, post-meeting gossip, virtual cuppas.
• Language – use theirs. It shows you get it.

How to work across silos

Map your journeys. There’s a chapter on how to do that in the second edition of Content Design. Map the full journey, not just the bit on your website. 

Usually, people in an organisation are responsible for 1 or 2 stages of a user journey journey. 

You can join up their goals with yours if you:

• help stakeholders to measure ‘their’ bits of the journey

• help them to see how their metrics connect to the metrics for the next stage 

Even a simple sign-up or sales journey will have quite a lot of stages. For example:

1. Reading a paid add in search or on social media (phone)
2. Reading a description on a ‘landing page’ (phone)
3. Going back to sign up using a form and paying a deposit (laptop)
4. Confirmation screen (laptop)

Find allies and run experiments together

All design is hypothesis driven design by Ben Holliday is one of my favourite posts.

All designs are guesses. Evidence and experience will mean you can make better guesses, but they’re still guesses. If you’re doing it the right way, it’s a team sport that builds understanding and relationships.

The reasons behind your design are called problem statements. And they look like this:

• We think [this thing] is true.
• We think that doing [this change or new thing]. 
• If it works, it will mean [that this will happen].

For example:

• We think the terms and conditions on the sign-up form are hard to read and this means people are less likely to fill in the form.
• We will simplify the language and use more line breaks.
• If it works, the proportion of people filling in the form after viewing it will increase.

There’s more than one right way to ask your colleagues about user journeys and content. The ones that have worked for me have meant:

• talking about ‘us’ and ‘we’,
• framing it as ‘trying’ something out, rather than suggesting taking control,
• showing respect for their intent and work.

People may be more up for this than you think, particularly if you can show that you understand the pressures they’re under. 

And even if the atmosphere is a bit hostile, people still need to act like they want to collaborate. And, if you’re a bit cunning, you can use that by asking somewhere a bit more public so they’re more likely to agree.

You could say something like:

I’d like us to explore ways we might be able to make this text in the form a bit easier to read while keeping your original meaning. Is that something you think we might be able to do together?

Marketing and paid search ads

A marketing person managing a Google Adwords campaign will ‘bid’ on words and phrases so that they can appear in Google’s search results. 

They will be looking at:

• impressions: when their ad appears in search results,
• clicks: when someone chooses their add link from search results,
• engagement: how interested someone is in what you're selling.

You can help them see the bigger picture by showing how traffic from their ad affects:

• the proportion of people clicking through to the next stage, probably a sign-up form
• on-page traffic quality indicators

You can also use:

• set up ‘conversions’ to measure high-value behaviours like completing a form
• funnel explorations to see where people drop off on a journey and how that varies when you make changes to content
• source medium to focus on traffic from 1 source, like paid ads

Show, measure and share the whole journey

A journey may start with paid advertising, but you need to know if people make it to the end. These tactics will help you to join things up, to measure the whole journey and not just bits of it. 

Being able to use data to tell that story is a powerful way to influence a whole organisation to work across teams and silos. 

What works for you?

Have you found a way to build understanding and spaces where you can collaborate? I’d love to hear from you! Please email jack.garfinkel@contentdesign.london