Welcome back to our Essential Ingredients series. In our previous posts, we’ve covered essential topics such as Training and Coaching, Change Management, Content Strategy, Governance, Metadata Taxonomy, and Modular Content. Today, we focus on another crucial element: Enabling Customer-Facing Teams. The right user experience (UX) is key to empowering your team to find and effectively use your content, facilitating your customer’s buying journey.

Designing the Right User Experience

For customer-facing teams to be truly effective, they need to easily access and utilize the right content at the right time. This requires a well-thought-out approach to UX, particularly in terms of navigation and content search capabilities. Your Content Strategy is the foundation for the UX.

Know Your User

Designing your user experience must start with an understanding of your users. Identify the logical user groups based on aspects such as GTM function/organization, region, industry, product specialty—whatever logical affinity defines your groups. Think in terms of what content they will need to access to enable their work.

To develop a clear understanding of your users, there is no substitute to talking to them. Surveys can be helpful, but real insights emerge through conversation. Identify representative users from each group and ask them for 20 to 30 minutes of their time. Develop a standard interview script, and talk to them individually, not as a group. You will want to understand:

• What content do they currently use or wish they had to engage with their prospects and customers?
• What is their approach to finding that content today? This will give you insight into potential search terms and navigation structure.
• What customer circumstances trigger their need for finding that content?
• What are their challenges finding or using content today?
• What other knowledge do they need to find/use to effectively do their job?
• How would describe the perfect future-state of a GTM enablement platform?

Designing Effective Content Profiles

Both navigation and search efficiency begin with the thoughtful design of Content Profiles. Content Profiles define what content users assigned to that profile can see and use. They also determine the delivery mechanisms available for content within that profile. Use the insights gained from your user interviews to wireframe content accessibility for each profile.

Key Considerations for Content Profiles

• Affinity-Based Assignment: Assign users to profiles based on what they do, what they sell, and how they work. This ensures that the content they access is relevant to their specific roles and responsibilities.
• Visibility and Access: Clearly define which content is visible and accessible to each profile. Utilize dynamic folders based on your Custom Properties whenever possible. This helps maintain content relevance and avoids information overload for the user, while making managing the profile easier for content creators and system administrators. Remember that your Content Profile folder structure does not need to mirror your Library folder structure.
• Delivery Mechanisms: Determine the preferred delivery mechanisms for each profile, such as LiveSend, Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs), Download, or Email Blasts. Think carefully about enabling the Download mechanism. Every download potentially creates a new repository in your organization…the user’s local computer.

Designing Navigation and Search

Search

Seismic’s search capability is comprehensive, going far beyond simply title, description and applied custom properties. Users can search anywhere in the UX. The primary consideration for configuring search is to define the Search Filter list that is displayed whenever a user initiates a search. The search filters are based on your Custom Properties. Think through which ones you want displayed, and in which order, basing your decision on the insights from the user interviews. What filters are going to help the user most effectively narrow their search to exactly what they need?

Curated Navigation

Curated Navigation involves building a guided navigation structure based on Seismic Pages, document lists (Doclists), and navigation. The first step is to create a Profile Landing Page for each Content Profile. This will be where the user starts their curated journey. Some considerations for designing your curated navigation include:

• Contextual: Design your pages with a specific context or theme. For example, you may have pages built for specific sales plays, products or solutions, or customer markets.
• Utilize Page Widgets: Seismic has many widgets available for pages including text, image, navigation, and document lists. Use the widgets to create engaging and easy-to-navigate pages. Doclists should be dynamic whenever possible to simplify your content management.
• Generate Text with Aura Copilot: For text widgets, utilize Aura Copilot to generate text by entering prompts like you would for any LLM.
• Scroll-heavy vs. Click-heavy: a scroll-heavy approach features fewer pages that contain a lot of information, allowing users to scroll through extensive content on a single page. This method can be beneficial for users who prefer to see all related content in one place without having to navigate through multiple pages. Alternatively, the click-heavy approach involves many interconnected pages within a navigation hierarchy. This method is advantageous for users who prefer a more structured and segmented view, clicking through to find specific pieces of content.

Implementing and Testing Your UX Design

Once your navigation and search strategies are defined and content profiles are set up, it’s essential to implement and test your UX design. Involve end-users in the testing phase to gather feedback and make necessary adjustments. Continuous improvement is key to maintaining an effective user experience.

Best Practices for Designing Navigation and Search

1. Regular Training: Provide ongoing training sessions to ensure that users are familiar with the navigation structure and search capabilities.
2. Feedback Loops: Establish regular feedback loops with end-users to identify pain points and areas for improvement.
3. Consistent Updates: Regularly update content profiles and navigation structures to reflect changes in content and user needs.
4. User-Centric Design: Always design with the end-user in mind, ensuring that the UX is intuitive and aligned with their workflows.

Conclusion

Designing an effective user experience is crucial for enabling your customer-facing teams to maximize their productivity and impact. By thoughtfully combining curated navigation with robust search capabilities and well-designed content profiles, you can ensure that your teams have easy access to the content they need to drive successful customer engagements.

Stay tuned for our next post in the Essential Ingredients series, where we will explore the modern selling approach and how to align your go-to-market strategy with the customer’s buying journey.

For more insights and to see how our Essential Ingredients program can benefit your organization, feel free to reach out to our team. Together, we can unlock Seismic’s full potential.

Contact Us:
Market-Partners Inc.
800 Shiloh Canyon, Santa Rosa, CA 95403
+1 707 575 4712
[email protected]
market-partners.com

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