Communications Strategy

What is communications strategy? If a strategy is defined as a plan of action we design to fulfill a particular objective, then, simply stated, a communications strategy is a communications plan that we design to fulfill a particular objective. The key is that we must have an outcome in mind because if we don't know where we're aiming, then we likely won't hit any target. Moreover, we must have some basic understanding regarding how to use communication to both enlighten and influence people.

I have been personally fascinated with this subject since I was in high school studying Aristotle's principles of persuasive communication. My journey, which began then, has led me to many overlapping principles and ideas from many different sources and within the context of many different academic disciplines. What I have found every legitimate sourse to have in common are three primary phases to persuasive communication: attract, inform and invoke.

Here you fill find access to sources I've studied as well as conclusions I've drawn—all of which have shaped my philosophy and skills.

Excerpts from TRAIN OF THOUGHTS: Designing the Effective Web Experience

Composing Notions—Making Online Information Meaningful

The best way to guide people into comprehension of our online messages is to lead them through a sequence of well-composed notions. I define a notion as a moment in the life of a message. I see a message as a series of notions just as a train is a series of cars. Just as the various types of cars on a train carry valuable cargo, the various notions in a message carry valuable thoughts. What’s more, the whole of an idea can’t be fully understood unless there’s comprehension of the sum of its component thoughts.

Why is this such a big deal? From my perspective, online resources are too often designed to be diffused, branching networks of information, or tree structures, when in fact they should be designed to be series, or sequences, of information. The nature of a tree structure is such that, at every junction in the hierarchy, there are any number of branches that can be taken. This hierarchical approach can work on a limited basis when content is being sought, but when content is being encountered and ideas are being presented, I believe that branching must, in most cases, end, and a series—or sequence of notions—must begin.

03.02.00 The Constitution of Appropriate Notions

Although there are many characteristics of a great notion, the factor that determines a notion’s success is the degree to which it engages the human mind. If a notion is thought of as being engaging, interacting with the notion is considered to have been meaningful. If a notion isn’t thought of as having been engaging, it’s not considered to have been very meaningful.

According to Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, the meaning that a person derives from interacting with a notion should be similar to the meaning that a person derives from an interaction with another person. In their book The Media Equation, Reeves and Nass summarize research by H. Paul Grice, a philosopher and psychologist. Grice argued that conversations are basically an “exercise in which people try to be helpful.” The question then becomes, what characterizes conversations that are helpful? Grice’s answer is that people judge the value of a conversation based on four factors:

Quality
Quantity
Relevance
Clarity

Reeves and Nass feel that, just as in real life conversations, if the messages that our online resources transmit fail regarding any of these Q-Q-R-C factors, people will be naturally inclined to feel negatively about the experience. The remainder of this section will address these four factors in great detail.

03.00.01 Effective examples of notion sequences aren’t encountered very often on the Web because the role of hierarchy in the organization of information has been widely misunderstood.

The purveyors of this misunderstanding—usability experts! Most usability experts are overly obsessed with empowering “users” to the degree that these “users” are given options to branch away from ideas they’re endeavoring to understand, even when it’s in their best interest to stay on the same track for a while¹. If options to branch away simply must be provided, it would be better if people were given proper guidance regarding the benefits of branching into new directions. Effective guidance, however, is most often not provided. Even when branches are explained well, people can become discouraged when continually branching away from a central message because they feel as if they’re not making progress in their understanding of core ideas.

Certainly there are times when parenthetical departures are appropriate, but allowances must be made to not let people lose a sense of context within the underlying message. See Figure A See Figure B

03.00.02 The need to keep people on track is a familiar concept, but why is it so important?

It’s important because fully understanding an idea, in most cases, requires cumulative comprehension of each supporting concept. Learning a subject like math provides some examples. We must understand the concept of number before we can understand the concept of equation. We must understand addition and subtraction before we can comprehend multiplication and division.

Cumulative, conceptual comprehension also comes into play in other non-educational communications, such as in marketing messages. We must understand, for example, that we as prospective consumers of a product or service have a need before we’ll understand how a particular product successfully addresses that need. In any type of communication, our understanding of an assimilated concept is utilized and taken further in the transmission of succeeding concepts. We can’t skip any steps, or we’ll have gaps in our understanding. This again underlines the view of transmission of an idea as being a series, or sequence, of thoughts that must be taken in succession to one another.

In the remainder of this chapter, we’ll explore the issues related to formulating an online resources microcosm—composing notions to express thoughts. In the next chapter, we’ll explore the issues related to producing the macrocosm— the interactive sequencing of notions into effective trains of thoughts which express ideas that are appropriate and on target for individuals and a given situations.

03.00.09 An effective notion provides the next rung in a person’s ascent into understanding.

A notion helps a person to form meaning in the moment by providing the perfect piece in the puzzle of comprehension that fits nicely with what has already been understood as well as with what needs to be understood next for comprehension to continue.

Because it’s impossible to teach people much more than they already understand in any given moment, it’s important to really be on target with a notion. Being on target means that a thought that’s being presented is within easy reach of a thought that’s already been understood. If a new notion cantilevers out too far from a person’s current conceptual framework, it will stretch a person’s conceptual capabilities to the point that concentration will break. When this happens, a person tends to become overwhelmed and discouraged, and the likelihood of losing that person’s motivation to continue with a message is greatly increased.

One way to look at the gravity of situations like this is that we’re never more than one notion away from losing a person’s attention. See Figure

03.00.10 It’s as important that we consider how people will embrace each notion as it is important that we consider how people will embrace the whole of a message and of an online resource in general.

The notion that itself sparked my thinking on the subject of notions came from Krome Barratt:

“The permissible tolerances in the parts [of a thing] are related to the functional efficiency of the whole…The designer attempts to parallel the process of nature. If his commitment is to the making of a complete pattern, the precision of the individual elements becomes subordinate to that objective.” ²

Let’s break down this statement to explore its meaning.

03.00.11 What are permissible tolerances?

How do we determine the best way to compose our notions? Should we use words, pictures, audio, video, or a combination of them all? Should we provide a list of facts, or should we weave the facts into a story? What types of stories would be appropriate? Should we use charts or graphs? Should the presentation of a notion be fixed, or should it interact with an individual in some way?

The answer to all these questions is that the cognitive, emotional, and perceptual tolerances of the person we’re communicating with online should determine the nature, character, and composition of the notions that we present to that person.

The idea is to attune our notions to the interests and understanding of the people in our audience sets and subsets in order to gain a strong foothold in their consciousness. From there, we lead them up into understanding. Although this can be quite challenging because everyone’s needs are different, this is nonetheless the challenge of effective Web experience design.

The way this plays out is that if we know a subset of an audience is new to a product or service, for example, we must prepare notions for that subset in anticipation of its constituent’s unique needs. It’s not that everyone in that subset will receive the same sequence of notions. Sequencing depends on how each person interacts with the notions from moment to moment. In light of this, adequate preparation mandates that a pool of candidate notions be composed for a known subset so that these notions can be interactively sequenced as needed. If we don’t prepare for our patrons’ needs in this way, we’re in no way practicing effective experience design methods.

03.00.12 What is functional efficiency?

Components of a thing that are functionally efficient have a defined and precise role in the overall fulfillment of a specific need.

The worst communication mistake that a Web enterprise can make is to formulate its messages based on what it feels it needs to convey to people without first trying to assess what people need to understand and then formulate messages based on that assessment. This often leads to excessive, generalized, and wasteful transmissions of information that are anything but efficient and that are often not even functional. It’s like trying to blindly develop understanding in a person from the outside in, instead of from the inside out. This almost never supports an optimum flow experience.

The better approach is to first find out what a person has to work with in terms of his or her current interests and understanding and then build upon those interests and that understanding. This leads to appropriate communications in that they precisely meet a person’s need. The question is “How is this done?”

The answer is that we need to formulate a variety of notions to convey the same basic meaning from a variety of angles in order to address a variety of cognitive situations and needs. We must then interactively determine from which angle to approach the expression of that meaning. This can be done with or without soliciting the input of the person interacting with the notion.³

Based on this determination, an appropriate notion is activated from a possibilities pool and is introduced into the train of thoughts. Content and audience analysis can help determine the nature, variety, and scope of this possibilities pool and will provide great insight into what it will take to communicate an idea to different types of people within an online population.

03.00.13 What makes a pattern complete?

What makes beautiful patterns beautiful? Well, for starters, the essence of a pattern is that it presents a certain order. This order is the epitome of what Barratt defines as elegance. He defines elegance as something that functions well on multiple levels of awareness. This is definitely true of patterns.

When examining a pattern up close, we can see the precision with which a series of elements fit together to form one expression of the entire system. The characteristics that define a pattern can be appreciated at this level.

From a distance, the beauty and interplay of various relationships can, when taken together, reveal a broader vision for the individual series of elements that was examined on the microlevel. It reveals the pattern’s potential complete with the subtlety of variation that confirms the uniqueness, completeness, and overall value that justifies the existence of a design as a whole.

The notions that make up an idea can also be likened to the elements that make up a pattern. There should also be an introduction, realization, and confirmation of the vision that an overall idea presents as a person moves deeper and deeper into each message. As in good storytelling, by letting the vision of a online message communicate on various, interrelated levels like this, we make an online experience not only elegant and beautiful but also comprehensible and compelling.

03.00.14 How do we subordinate design to an objective?

Organizations generally try to have reasons for the things that they do. The same can be said for the people who interact with Web enterprises online. Unfortunately, the rationale for the design and development directions that online resources take often has more to do with an organization’s desire to play it safe and conform to the status quo than it does with being innovative in its efforts to genuinely support people’s online objectives. To be effective, a Web enterprise must instead subordinate the design of its online resources to the needs of the members in its various audiences.

The key insight here is this: Although ultimately the formulation of a pool of notions is subordinate to the overall objective of a Web enterprise, if the notions aren’t composed with the cognitive, emotional, and perceptual tolerances of the audience in mind, the development of the online resource may be an exercise in futility. If the objectives of the individual can’t be reconciled with the objectives of the Web enterprise, the endeavor to create a successful online resource is doomed to failure and should not be attempted. In Chapter Seven we’ll examine the process that will help ensure that this type of disconnect with the needs of a Web enterprise’s patrons has very little chance of occurring.

03.00.15 We find meaning in a notion by associating the thought it expresses with what we already know and then by reflecting upon it until we gain either deeper or broader insight.

To close this section regarding the role of notions in our online messages, I think it’s appropriate to take a quick look at how our minds comprehend and remember concepts. After all, the world of the mind is very mysterious, and most people aren’t very familiar with how it works. Although no one really understands exactly how the mind works, we do have some excellent theories that seem to get at least the basic concepts mostly right. Examining one group of these theories more closely can help us better understand the objective of notion composition.

03.00.16 As mentioned in 02.00.04, the Cognitive Constructionist Theories address how we form and maintain our conceptual frameworks—sometimes referred to as knowledge structures, schema, or mental-models.

These frameworks are the tools our minds use to learn, assign meaning to, and remember the people, places, things, ideas, sensations, and so on that we’re confronted with daily.

When the prior knowledge in our conceptual frameworks provides us with springboards for what we’re learning—understanding comes easily. If, however, we don’t have the conceptual springboards that associations with prior learning offer, “accretion,” according to Dr. Donald Norman (see 02.00.05), “… requires repeating the material over and over again (rehearsing), using mnemonic strategies, or writing down the information.“

When we first receive new information, we begin to search our conceptual frameworks for patterns, or networks of conceptual connections, that are similar in nature to the stimulus that we’re currently encountering. When we find a network of meaning within a conceptual framework that’s similar, we use that network as a starting point to relate the new information to what we already know.

03.00.17 Interestingly, we don’t actually remember everything about a stimulus that we perceive.

Instead, we effectively store only what the new stimulus and existing framework don’t have in common. When Web enterprises formulate notions to tap into and play into this innate associative learning strategy that we’re all wired to thrive on, they’ll have the best chance of helping people to both comprehend and retain the meaning that their notions are formulated to convey. In order to accomplish this, I believe that we must deliver notions that

Match people’s expectations
Provide the appropriate balance of quality, quantity, relevance, and clarity
Contain a balanced syntheses of media elements that are appropriate for a person’s perceptual and conceptual needs

03.01.08 When expectation is met with realization, a person’s mind becomes engaged in the flow of information.

Because the landscape of the Web is so cluttered with resources that violate people’s expectations, resources that do otherwise are almost certain to attract and keep mass audiences. People not only have expectations for a Web enterprise but also aspirations (hopes, dreams, and goals). When the aspirations that a person has are realized, it’s likely that a person will become engrossed in the experience. This leads to online sessions that are longer, more productive, more enjoyable, and more likely to lead to response interactions. Composing notions that are designed to be effective for individuals is the key to producing this level of success with our audiences. See Figure