Purpose of Corporate Blogs

Corporate blogs are a great tool for companies to keep their customers (as well as the greater public) in the loop and increase customer loyalty.
Corporate blogs are blogs with very specific purposes that can be divided into the following categories:

•    Communication: Corporate blogs should be used to communicate with customers and the public; this is the most significant reason for companies to have corporate blogs.  Corporate blogs provide customers and/or the public with direct lines of communication to the company’s employees or even executives, thus empowering customers, leaving them feeling like valued stakeholders.  Conversely, executives and employees also value interaction with customers so corporate blogs are an effective and valuable tool for both sides.

•    Marketing Products and Services: Corporate blogs are also an excellent way to advertise new products and services.  Companies can also obtain valuable customer/user feedback about new products which can help them improve their offers for the future.

•    Maintaining Reputation: Corporate blogs can also help companies maintain or improve their reputation within the public sphere because they can be marketed as the only reliable source for accurate information about a company or venture.  This is especially important with so many other unverified sources floating around on the internet.

Corporate blogs are not the same as traditional blogs.  Traditional blogs are usually maintained by individuals or groups as a way of sharing their thoughts, ideas, advice, and experience.  Corporate blogs are a part of business and as such their purpose is different.  Maintaining a corporate blog is an excellent way to make a business not only more visible, but also more successful.

This blog post is the second in a series of two about Contextual Design as a usability method.

The Contextual Design sequence

In the first post on Contextual Design we clarified what Contextual Design is and why it is important for creating usable UIs.  Now it is vital that we discuss how the Contextual Design process occurs. Contextual Design is a process that happens sequentially in the following hierarchical steps: Contextual Inquiry, Interpretation, Data Consolidation, Visioning/Storyboarding, User Environment Design, and Prototyping. Each of these steps is equally important in contributing to the synergy of the Contextual Design process and buttresses the resultant user interface design in a positive user experience.

•    Contextual Inquiry:  Contextual Inquiry is the crux of Contextual Design. It is used to reveal what people actually do and why they do it that way. Contextual Inquiry happens at the very beginning of the design process and calls for one-on-one field interviews observing subjects in their natural working or living environment doing what they would normally be doing.
•    Interpretation: The interpretation phase is when the data from all the interviews is analyzed and detailed work models are created in order to ascertain context of use and aspects of work that matter for the user interface design team. What matters here is looking at the interviews from a macro birds-eye-view level for key insights across the board.
•    Data Consolidation: Data consolidation is the level at which individual interviews are analyzed. An example of a good method of processing observations from a bottom-up design approach (piecing together systems to give rise to grander systems) for data consolidation purposes is by making affinity diagrams.
•    Visioning/Storyboarding: Visioning is akin to brainstorming, but distinctly it is the gathering of a cross-functional team in order to create stories or visions of how new product concepts, services, and technology can better support a user in accomplishing her tasks. After determining key issues and opportunities from the consolidated data, the visioning team sets out to generate new concepts by way of scenarios of use. These visions are then fleshed out further through the use of Storyboarding.
•    User Environment Design: User Environment Design is the stage of Contextual Design whereby the stories created begin to become more refined in terms of product and system requirements. What are the different parts of the system? What functions are available in each part? How do all these components support and enhance a user’s work?  Where in the user interface design scheme should they be integrated? User Environment Design seeks to answer these questions.
•    Prototyping: Prototyping is an efficient way of creating preliminary partially functional UIs that can be used to test the structure of a User Environment Design for usability issues. But prototyping is also great as a communication tool for stakeholders of a project to flesh out user interface design ideas. Prototyping can be done through the use of paper prototypes (hand drawn or printed out) or, better yet, through interactive wireframe prototypes.

Performing these steps is an art of itself but can be immensely helpful in creating superior UI designs.