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“Continual decrease in time-to-market will result in a lean content strategy approach, where we have fewer weeks of strategy time. We will create frameworks that rely on targeted audits and research instead of broad time-consuming ones. We will encourage a model where content is created and then continually measured and tweaked. The reliance on measured content will see more partnering with the disciplines of analytics and data science.”

Felice Schulz, Director Content Strategy

“Content strategists will increasingly need to speak to automated migration/transformation solutions, and why they still need humans to administer, finalize, and optimize automated content.  Automation can’t link up or adapt to an enterprise’s unique business process without a content strategist acting as champion for creators and consumers. Automation will also compress many discovery timelines, making content strategy more affordable, expanding the domain to new types of clients and cultures — bringing another series of unintended consequences.”

“More companies and institutions for whom content is a foreign concept will discover that content is a critical piece to their major enterprise solution.  To deliver, we content strategists will need to team up in our notorious diversity.  Generalists, data scientists, taxonomists, editorial gurus, media librarians, etc. will band together to tackle these enterprise reforms, delving into change management, content marketing, content programming, thought leadership, and demand generation.  Content strategists will begin to act like mini-agencies, a kind of content strategy special-ops or super-hero team.”

John Postley, Senior Manager Content Strategy

“I foresee a whole new discipline emerging, using data sciences to drive personalized and predictive content strategy.  Stakeholder opinions will falter under the definitive proof of historical data, user experience tagging, and cohort analysis. We’ll understand more of the why behind content engagement versus the what. You’ll see a shift from planned content strategy to emergent, just-in-time content experiences crafted based on geolocation, CRM demographics, behavioral tracking and social media conversation.”  

Caryn Lusinchi, Content Strategy Manager

“As we approach the ‘post-screen era’ and traditional companies transform into digital service providers, content strategists will have to become service designers at heart. Our future interactions with smart devices, support chatbots and augmented/virtual reality will be all about providing only the information that is most relevant and useful to a specific person in real time, seamlessly adjusting to their environment, mood and behavioral history. In this vast space of new services, information and emotion become one and the same. Content strategists will feel right at home there.

Laura Konrad, Content Strategy Manager

“Authenticity in marketing, already a key differentiator for millennials, will gain greater import for brands as they navigate a widening cultural divide among consumers in the era of ‘post truth.’ Successful marketers will tap into the ethos of their consumers to develop powerful content experiences that resonate and reinforce their brand’s embrace of those ideals.”

Sheri McLeish, Content Strategy Manager

“Customers are getting more and more sophisticated with regards to published content. As the amount of content continually increases — the customer will select even more than now what they want to consume. Therefore, brands are forced to plan and distribute content more from a publisher than from a marketer’s perspective — from quantity-centric publishing to a quality-centric publishing approach. Less is still more.”

“Personalized content on conversational interfaces is going to be one of critical trends and challenges in 2017. For example, chatbots and other intelligent services will force content strategist to re-think content strategy and design. This also refers to VR technology.”

“Measuring content performance with regards to ROI is still a challenging issue at brands. Only a transparent content performance measurement model assures that the effectiveness of content and its benefits justify content production costs and a continuous content (marketing) strategy.”

Kamran Sorusch, Content Strategy Manager

“As consumers continue to anticipate and expect sharing of personalized content and information across a variety of channels – think Google Now, for example – platforms and standalone websites will become less and less important for (and visited by) people. Apps that deliver personalized information in a uniform experience will thrive as they expand into more pockets of the “self.” Think Mona, the personal shopping assistant that knows your sizes, tastes, and brand preferences, or Mint, which pulls multiple user financial accounts to create a unified view of finances. Brands should look to create, curate and aggregate content to provide unique, useful, or otherwise highly personalized apps of their own or make available for others to use.”

Jason Bushey, Content Strategy Manager

“Librarians have been saying it forever: Don’t believe everything you read (in any format) — check your sources for authority and integrity. Here’s hoping that the web-wide epidemic of click bait and fake news in 2016 makes 2017 the year that content authority becomes a priority and a differentiator.”

Andrea Mercado, Senior Content Strategist

“The power of nostalgia in advertising — and increasingly recent nostalgia at that (think the ‘90s and the aughts) — will continue to gain steam. Brands will leverage readily available references to a decade that, although fraught with its own issues, on the surface appeared to be a more pleasant and positive era and inject these fond recollections with brands’ own values and stories.”

Sarah Jones, Senior Content Strategist

“Consumer interaction with technology, especially in the form of augmented reality, will further expand in 2017. Companies and brands, including but not limited to services and retail, will create more opportunities for consumers to interact with technology to provide immersive and informative experiences. Eventually these experiences will evolve to be the norm, embedded within our everyday lives. Similarly, the use of gamification will continue to rise as a method to increase user engagement.”

Jennifer Sarbahi, Senior Content Strategist

“With so much content competing for peoples’ attention, entertainment apps like Bitmoji and Instagram need to offer playful or unexpected content experiences to retain interest. Instead of data and metrics, “downtime” apps will benefit by enabling more personalization and exploration features. For utility apps like Uber and Amazon, however, speed of task completion remains most compelling. As half of site traffic comes from mobile, brands mustn’t confuse utility with entertainment and strive for content that does not overdo it, but is impossible to ignore."

Becca Kanaverskis, Associate Content Strategist

“In 2017, more and more brands will realize the importance of taking a stance on issues facing our society. The more authentic and human a brand is, the less sales-oriented it feels. When consumers feel like they can relate to a brand on a social issues level, they will begin to see a part of themselves in the brand. Yes – taking a stance means that negative backlash is sure to come, but when that stance is actually relevant to a brand’s greater audience, the humanity of the brand will far outshine negative outlash and brand loyalty will grow.”  

Lauren Parran, Associate Content Strategist

“In 2017, there will be no line between commerce and media. The relevance of a brand will be directly tied to the quality of the content that supports it. Brands that can entertain, educate and inform their audience visually will see greater customer loyalty, especially in highly sensory and experiential industries such as food, athletics, and travel. Not only will these companies see ROI with high-quality video content, more influential content will result in growth for the whole industry.”​

“Consumers are more informed than ever and are using many outside resources to make purchasing decisions about products ranging from cars to cameras to baby food. Having an effective product metadata strategy is already key to running a successful digital business, but in 2017 having contextual data to guide consumers into purchase will be critical as artificial intelligence becomes a larger part of the shopping experience.”

Marcus Lee, Associate Content Strategist

“In 2016, entertainment and news showed the power of live streaming via social. With apps like Meerkat, Periscope, and Facebook Live bringing real-time video to the fore, brands need to think about how to create their own ‘in the moment’ experiences, produce live content, and monitor sentiments of others. Live video streaming allows for rapid content creation through Q&As, live events, company and product announcements, social experiments and campaigns, and behind-the-scenes views. Users may come and go as they please while offering instant feedback via likes, comments, questions, and live chats. Live video allows users to interact with brands intimately, authentically, and immediately. Just as audiences more easily connect to live performances, they will start to feel connected in the same way to live brands.”

Flo Wen, Junior Content Strategist

“An end-to-end cohesive plan for content across Strategy, Search, Social and Marketing will be the biggest win for brands looking to make a dent in the content universe. Content Strategy will continue to be uniquely positioned to help solve some of their biggest challenges by providing this holistic view of their future content ecosystem and support them as they build their own content centers of excellence.” 

Matt Geraghty, Content Strategy Manager

Myth 1: Experience can’t be measured.

Measuring experience may not be intuitive, but it’s certainly possible. The reality is that all it takes to measure experience is a clear understanding of solution goals and a selection of metrics and targets that are good indicators of those goals. The organization can then measure experience design effectiveness by examining the outcomes of these goals. We refer to this business return-on-investment (ROI) in user experience as the “return on experience,” or RoX.

In addition to business outcomes, UX professionals employ a host of direct metrics to better diagnose experience design flaws and prioritize areas to improve. These range from behavioral metrics – quantifying consumer activity through instrumentation and observation – to subjective metrics that quantify end-user reactions to the experience.

Myth 2: Design standards yield success.

There’s no question that sticking to a set of well-crafted design standards is an important part of usability. In fact, we regularly review and analyze digital solutions whose user interfaces comply with well-regarded standards. Yet many of these solutions offer extremely poor user experiences. These solutions might superficially look familiar, but when it comes to actual usage – they just don’t deliver.

In addition to consistency, effective user experiences rely on a deep understanding of the user model – that is, how end users think about the world, and their associated needs and motivations. Smart brands acquire this understanding through a combination of direct research and know-how, and then choose where to improve the experience by building well-crafted experience frameworks and content taxonomies reflective of the user model.

Myth 3: Analytics alone reveal user needs.

Activity and site logs illustrate what end users are doing, but not why. User behavior is a response to what users encounter in the current solution ecosystem. For example, if users are following ineffective or misleading content and navigational cues, or neglecting to follow potentially valuable but visually obscure links, then the site logs could be merely reflecting these poor design choices.

To gather valid insights about user needs and motivations, analytics need to be supplemented with consumer research and insights methods, such as contextual inquiry, digital ethnography, and participatory design. These methods are structured to elicit design-relevant input from end users that, in combination with quantitative analytics, can lead to deep insights that will improve the overall experience as well as specific, tactical UX elements. 

Myth 4: Consistency across devices leads to good experience design.

Propagating look and feel, as well as tone and voice, across devices makes sense. But a consistent experience across devices also entails explicitly tuning the interactions to the device, and further varying the experience to address the changing context of usage. Experience between channels is simply not transferrable. Brands must consider each channel individually while ensuring that the overall experience is consistent.

Myth 5: CX leaders create great user experiences.

A leading user experience demands a focus on learnability, ease of use, and productivity. The key principles of interaction design also include ensuring that users are aware of what actions are possible and how to select those actions. Yet the leaders aren’t always delivering against these best practices.

For example, Apple (the widely proclaimed master of consumer product design) leads the way in balancing form and function to appeal to both the core needs and emotional drivers of its customers. However, the founding fathers of Apple’s human interface design guidelines recently published a critical review of how Apple has abandoned user-centered design principles in favor of aesthetics like flat design and over-simplification. Where Apple products once embodied key principles of interaction design, they now seem to be heading in a different direction.

So, what’s next for brands?

Achieving breakthrough experience design relies on a strong, flexible, user-centered research and strategy process, as well as the right mix of talent. Our new report, entitled Dispelling 5 Myths About Experience Design, explores these myths in greater detail and offers practical recommendations for how brands can design better experiences for their customers.

Now in its 15th year, HRC’s Corporate Equality Index is based on criteria that have been created to encourage employers to advance the best practices, policies, and initiatives for LGBT workplace inclusion. With this score, Sapient has proven our ongoing commitment to inclusion by all major benchmarks of the Human Rights Campaign and solidified our stance that discrimination has no place in our business.

We also extend our congratulations to DigitasLBi and Razorfish for receiving perfect scores as well, demonstrating the strength of our shared dedication to diversity across Publicis.Sapient.