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Browsing through the SXSW Panels, I saw that Vignette’s CTO Conleth O’Connell is leading a panel called How Many Clicks to the Center of…? Given that Conleth has been with Vignette since the early days, and Vignette was one of the first companies in the enterprise content management space, I felt the title was a bit of a tease. So I contacted Conleth and asked him to elaborate: |
Lynn Bender: Conleth, thanks for taking the time. Please tell me about Success in 3 Clicks.
Conleth O’Connell: For a packed iPod of 400+ CD’s alone, try finding a specific song to play, it’s a lot of thumb scrolling (or clicks), now that’s on 80 Gigabyte iPods, it won’t be long before we have Terabyte iPods (1000 Gigabytes). Something has to give so we as humans can find what we’re looking for with a simple interface like an iPod. Vignette’s background of personalization and managing and delivering huge quantities of information over the Web sees a new wave coming called Personalization 2.0. We believe Personalization 2.0 will impact those interfaces and take into account the user, their mood, their environment, their patterns and their “persona” to help filter out what’s not relevant so we could actually achieve what the wise owl answered in the Tootsie Pop ad: Three. Success will be when getting to any information is within 3 clicks.
Bender: When choosing how to access their growing library of content, many people are choosing to assign tags to everything, rather than create a folder hierarchy. Clearly, folder tree will never get you everywhere in three clicks. However, unless you use multiple tags with boolean like operations, they don’t seem to be a solution either. How does one get to this three click success?
O’Connell: First of all you’re right. Classification and organization is still a static orientation based on a point in time even when the user is doing it themselves. When new assets come online (never been tagged before) or when older assets go offline, your tagging density changes and that may affect what’s prominent. This is important dimension is the classification and organization of the content. Now the question becomes how does it get used? That’s where the user’s intent must be taken into consideration. The user’s intent is affected not only by their own actions within a point in time, but also what others are doing around them. One of our panel members represents a firm, Baynote, that specializes on using the intent of the user to improve activities like search. We call this social search. Understanding what’s valuable when you search for a term (like a form in turbo tax) goes beyond the raw relevance rankings, it’s where did the crowd find value that matters the next time that query is issued.
Go to www.netapp.com and using their search box, search for storage. Network Appliance is a storage vendor, so you might expect a plethora of results. In the results page, you will see on the order of 250 or so results, and if you scan the results you see they are mostly product types. Now they have a link there that says “Raw results”; select that, and now you can see the difference in action. If you were looking for a storage product (a large segment of visitors do that in their case, probably even competitors), you went from search to finding the product line – 2 clicks. If all they had were the raw relevance rankings. It’s where the crowd finds value that matters the next time that query is issued.
Another example is www.nyc.gov. They realized presenting information how they are organized internally wasn’t working, so they added alternative views: Did you Know and Most Requested sections help bubble up information based on users coming in. Furthermore, they used user segments to organize the site: residents, business, visitors, etc.
Similarly, the state of Michigan (Michigan.gov) uses “How do I” and other task oriented organizations to present information on their site. Three clicks was our measure of success for them.
Bender: Tell me more about Personalization 2.0. It seems to center on providing multi-channel access to content. However, the content you describe would all be delivered from, or pass through a central spoke. How do you address the problem of multiple information silos?
O’Connell: Separating content from presentation is a fundamental tenet of making this work. A centralized hub is used to manage the metadata and the logistics of placing the content into the right environment. However, the delivery application that adds the presentation to that content is where the specific experiences are applied (mobile versus Web browser versus kiosk). There’s a corollary to this separation tenet which is always have a single system of record. By that I mean, edits only take place in one information source. All other uses of that information are then updated (the need for a powerful content management system includes knowing where content has gone). The importance of multichannel is the empowerment to take action by the user. The user is providing the disruption here by taking more control on how to use the technology. Not the technology dictating how to use the content.
For us multichannel includes all of the different ways users communicate and interact, beyond mobile and multi-device. It’s the convenience factor usually associated with mobile devices that clearly demonstrates the impact as can be seen in this Citibank mobile commercial on Youtube. This shows the wife persona-shifting to make a car payment (from passenger to financial caretaker). Rather than pulling into the bank or stopping at a hotspot, she uses her phone to call, but to make the payment using a Web application. Multichannel access allows action to be taken. We manage the content (single source of the truth) across all those different distribution channels. If you go to anytime.sky.com, you can see this in action. Customers can access the same videos available to them at home (set-top box), over the Web or on their mobile phones
Bender: You spoke of Personalization 2.0 as providing a unified login — do you see this utilizing an existing standard such as OpenID, or do you see it requiring a new standard?
O’Connell: I wasn’t presupposing any specific technology. I also don’t expect a unified login to occur as opposed to a “master login.” Between Microsoft’s passport and the Liberty Alliance and now other activities around CROWD and OpenID, I’m sure a solution, if not multiple, will be found and if users gain value out of it, then it will be accepted like wildfire. The overall effect I was trying to portray was that human capacity to ingest information hasn’t changed yet. The Web in its generic sense is growing beyond our capacity to absorb, so it will need to get personal to the point that there is “My Web” which will end up being a virtual representation of what I care about at a point in time, but it will never be static because I’m not static. J
Bender: It seems I see more about Vignette in the European tech news than I see here in the states. Is that my imagination? Does this have anything to do with the advances in the euro telecomm networks?
O’Connell: Our efforts on focusing on the Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment space with the Vignette Digital Services Hub solution began in the European, Middle East and Africa geography. Consumers in those markets are used to being served rich, interactive experiences over their mobile devices, and Vignette has a lot to do with that. We’re working with companies like British Sky Broadcasting, Vodacom and SABC to ensure their content is available to subscribers at any time on any device.
Vignette is well recognized aboard as a leader in content management and delivery for mobile devices. In the U.S., we’re best known as the pioneer of Web Content Management and have received a great deal of recognition for our innovative Web Experience Platform.
Bender: what are you looking forward to seeing/doing this year at SXSW?
O’Connell: I always find it fascinating to see how technology gets used in unexpected ways. We are really focusing on the next wave of experiences and interactivity from a mainstream perspective, so attending and participating in the Interactive festival itself is a great way of seeing a bit into the future.
See Conleth O’Connell’s Panel How Many Clicks to the Center of…? at SXSW Interactive
