Invision proposed four talks about UX copy, about process, inclusive UX copy, how UX writers and designers can better collaborate, and how to improve forms with great copy.

Biz Sanford held the first talk. She manages Shopify’s voice and tone, sets content standards, and teaches her workmates how to write their own content.
Her talk was about consistent interface content. It is a core element of a well-designed user experience. She explained how to incorporate content throughout the design process.
Her main advice was to be specific. Any Lorem ipsum text or scribble should be banished from sketching to wireframing.

My key learnings about Biz inspiring talk

Step 1: Sketching

When sketching, we don’t find the exact words that we will use in the final copy. Our content will go through feedback rounds before it is final. However, we should already chose appropriate words. We should be especially careful with the following components that are key to the functionality:

• headings for pages and sections,
• key verbs and nouns,
• buttons and link text.
  Words are essential to the user experience, they lead the user to do what they want. Sketching with words will help you have a better overview of what needs to be designed. It is useful to work with a diverse team to gather different words: don’t stick to you own jargon.

Step 2: Wireframing

Her idea to break down in a table like Googlesheets or Excel all the content elements is most interesting! It makes sure we don’t forget a piece of the scenario. I find it especially useful for multilingual websites. The table provides an overview of the naming of all elements, their translation, and any design needed (like an icon). It can be shared with all team members. It will ensure a consistent naming of the elements in all languages.

Step 3: Content in low fidelity mockups

At this stage, we use realistic content and real data. To show that it is not a finalised version of the content, we can use a funny font (like comic sans). It helps every team member understand how it works without too many explanations. We want to gather robust feedbacks on flow and functionality rather than wording or typo.
My favourite advice she gave was to use the wording of your users. You can talk to the team members who have direct contact with your customers for example. I find that a team often uses specific jargons, maybe legal or technical and often does not realise that their users speak a different language.

Step 4: Content in high fidelity mockups

At Shopify, the project team organises polish reviews. The team sits together and ‘plays’ with the product to check that everything is right.
It is definitely something I would like to start here at Liip! It’s useful to have team members who did not write the copy doing some re-readings. When we are too focused on our work, sometimes mistakes slip our notice and external advice is the key to go back on track.

Questions & Answers with Biz

It was a live talk. Wand we could ask questions and comment. Here is a few themes that came up.
Content is often dealt with at the end of a project. How to be a strong advocate for content?
Designers are content’s best ally. Designers can encourage to use real content and use it early. People will follow. The usefulness of content is self explanatory when it’s already incorporated in the design.
Consistency is essential.
Users don’t care that one team did this and another team did that. Consistency builds credibility and trust. A good option is to create a glossary where all team members can contribute. At the best, the glossary is shared with the marketing team too.
Does the layout fits the content or does the content fits the layout?
Neither! Both of them shape each other, this is why content should be involved as early as possible. Designers and content strategists should collaborate all along the way.

Further readings on content at Shopify and usefool tools

If you missed Biz’s talk and my little summary woke your curiosity up, read her blog post Words and the design process - Greetings from a friendly content strategist. She explains everything with details, sketches and images. The content of this blogpost is very similar to the content of her talk.
The content team at Shopify shares many learnings. Read their blog to learn more on content and design.
For example I recommend Product content at each stage of a project - How content strategists help teams build better products. The blogpost helps you pinpoint where and when you can add-value in a project.

Julien, who participated to the meet-up wrote a great blog post (in French) to share his personal learnings La place de la Copy dans le processus de création.

Useful tools to test the readability

To test the readability of our English content, we can use the Hemingway App.
To test the readability of our German content, we can use the website Psychometrica.
Do you have such a tool for French?

Cosy setting to enjoy the talk =)

Watching the talk together and sharing learnings

Since it was a remote talk, we created a cosy atmosphere at Liip to have a chance to discuss and share our learnings. I very much enjoyed our evening! Thanks to all participants and my team mates who make fun and projects possible everyday !

What is OctoberCMS?

WordPress is based on simplicity - everything is a post, which makes it easy to use for content authors and developers. Thanks to this concept, (nearly) all backend forms look consistent which helps content authors a lot. But this simplicity makes it harder for developers to create backends for more complex content.

This is where OctoberCMS jumps in. It is a great mix of a file based and database driven CMS. Everything which is more or less static (like pages, menus and templates) is saved as files. Like this the content can be served really fast. However you can of course edit these entities directly through the backend.

Everything which is more dynamic and more complex (like events, news or blogposts) is stored in custom tables in the database. Thanks to this you will have full freedom on how to create your own types.

Complexity doesn't matter

With this strategy OctoberCMS can be used for simple websites as well as for really complex ones. When using it for simple websites, the user experience of the backend can be compared to the one of WordPress. It is easy to use and looks consistent. On top of that it adds some useful features for power users, like editing multiple content elements in tabs or keyboard shortcut. The most useful one is saving data with CMD+S / CTRL+S. I'm already at a point where I find myself trying to save blogposts in WordPress with this key combination (which doesn't work sadly).

When using it for a more complex website you'll get full freedom on what to use OctoberCMS for. You can easily use it as a headless CMS for any sort of web application. To help you with this, the backend gives you a base structure for list views and form views for each model. If required you can modify these templates to fit your own needs. The provided form widgets helps creating consistent backend forms for almost every use case. If needed you can create your own form widgets without any hassle. This means the backend is highly customizable which improves the usability when editing complex content extremely.

Still not convinced?

Let's look at some more, great reasons why you should consider OctoberCMS for your next website:

• Based on Laravel: OctoberCMS is based on the Laravel framework (which is based on Symfony. It builds a really solid foundation for the core, plugins and themes.
• Clean code: By using the Laravel framework there is clear coding style definition which helps your code base to stay clean.
• Open Source: The whole OctoberCMS project is hosted as open source software on GitHub which is a really important thing to build a big user community around.
• Easy to extend: OctoberCMS is built for extensibility. The best example for that is that even the most basic features, like creating and editing pages, are provided via a plugin and are not hardcoded in the core.
• Database query building with Eloquent: For database query building Laravel has Eloquent ORM integrated. With this you can easily create database queries which fits your needs.
• Database migrations: The whole OctoberCMS setup (core and plugins) is based on database migrations. This helps keeping the database consistent when installing or updating plugins or the core. With this mechanism you can easily rollback to an older version if something doesn't work as expected.
• Event driven: The whole setup is event driven which enables you hook into core or plugin processes and extend them easily.
• Twig templates: OctoberCMS uses twig as templating engine. This makes it possible to completely separate your data from the templates.
• Integrated assets pipeline: OctoberCMS comes with a twig based assets pipeline to compile and minify your CSS (support for Sass & Less) and JS files. All you need to do is including your source files directly in your twig templates and they get compiled, minified and cached automatically when calling the website the first time. If you have more complex requirements Laravel provides an abstraction layer above webpack called Laravel Mix which makes the creating of webpack based build tasks easy.

The bad parts

Not everything can be nice and shiny. So here we go with the imperfect or missing parts of OctoberCMS:

Core bugs

First of all since this is a rather new CMS project (compared to other big players on the market) you might find some more or less "simple" core bugs while implementing a complex backend feature. This can be annoying, but since the community is very active (on Slack or on GitHub) you will get help quickly.

i18n

Another important topic is i18n: OctoberCMS provides an implementation for translating content as a plugin. With it you are able to translate most of your content from a base language to other languages which works fine.

But since you always need your content to exist in a base language you are limited to only translating your website and not doing real i18n stuff like different content in different languages. The good thing about this is that the folks behind this plugin are working on that feature right now and since the plugin is hosted on GitHub you can help if you want.

That's all folks

We're really looking forward to build a lot more websites with OctoberCMS. And if you are a web developer you should really consider it when planning your next CMS project.

Report of the conference

SWISSQUOTE, EN 26 ANS, DEVENIR LEADER PAR L'INNOVATION ET LE MARKETING DE CONTENU

Jan de Schepper

At this conference, what I wanted to know was how to become a leader. I expected De Schepper to hand me over the strategic marketing keys to success. The secret recipe for me to make Liip, my entreprise, an absolute leader in web development.

What kind of advice did I get?

Swissquote, a content brand

According to De Schepper, the foundation of a company leaves a significant mark. The founders, Marc Bürki et Paolo Buzzi owned Marvel Communication SA, a company specialized in financial information softwares. Once they figured out that they could provide the services they were talking about, Swissquote became a bank and IPO'd as such on the 29th of May 2000. The focus of Swissquote was on content creation right from the beginning.

A basic brand structure

At Swissquote, they believe that the brand defines who they are and how they act. Their brand structure is actually not original, as it involves a vision and six values.

In De Schepper's words, a vision is like an Evening Star (Etoile du Berger in French). It is what leads your way.

To be the world's most pioneering and intuitive online bank.

They are two essential words building this vision: pioneering and intuitive. “We are and want to stay pioneer, because our concurrence is international.” says De Schepper. Thus, innovation is fundamental. Secondly, UX is key, everything from the service to the platform has to be intuitive.

Swissquote has 6 fundamentals brand values

• Dare to be different
• In pursuit of excellence
• Unite as one
• Always say it how it is
• Champion the customer
• Do the right thing

Tips and tricks to create content

Be customer-focused, not product-focused

You should create and use personas. Personas must define who the users are with as much details as possible. It is easier to produce content when you have someone specific in mind. At Swissquote, they statistically analyzed data from their users to create their personas. Then they did some focus group to refine their analyses.

Secondly, they analyzed the Trader Journey to see what can be done in order to increase the conversion from one step to another. The content is then based on the needs and expectations of the users during their journey. In other words, they analyse the blockers in the Trader Journey. For example, does the type user X miss information at a certain point in his journey? Which info? How can it be provided?

Think as a publisher

When you create content, you should think as a publisher, not as an advertiser. You do not promote your product, you provide:

• Information
• Inspiration
• Utility
• Entertainment

Create valuable content

In order to be valuable, the content you create has to fulfill the following adjectives (see picture).

For example: Authentic: do not speak about something you have no idea about

Sharable: People share because they want transmit something about themselves, who they are, what they believe in. It's egoistic. Provide content according to who your users are.

Collaborative: Have partners that bring you visibility

Plan the diffusion

Think in terms of three categories:

• Paid media : the content you pay to be published (advertisement),
• Owned media: the communication channel you own,
• Earned media: the channel that publish your content (for example, you video on someone else's page).

De Schepper best advice

…according to me, it is the best piece of advice: Iterate!

Try once, analyse, do it again with slight changes, analyse, try again and go on and on.

Swissquote Magazine as a case study

As an example, you can see the strategy of the publication in the pictures of the slides at the end of the article.

To conclude: apply your theory and iterate

De Schepper reminded me of my master class. I got out thinking that I should carefully stick to what I learnt. In the turmoil of daily business, I mostly feel that I should act and that standstill is the worst.

In fact, I know the theory to become a leader or make my entreprise a leader. However the team at Swissquote is a master in applying these theories. One of their most brilliant success, is the creation of a magazine, which is today an authority in their field of expertise.

The secret recipe is iteration. I should take the time to analyse. Each analysis is an opportunity to do better and increase the success of my next marketing action.

Swissquote Magazine