April 6, 2009
A new approach for online engagement
Most companies experience a large difference between what their web site is and what they believe it should be. This frustration is quite continuous and the positive feeling of making progress with a new version quickly vanishes after its launch.
Web site suppliers understood this problematic quite well, but didn’t find the solution. Instead, they use it to their benefits, leveraging it on one side to sell a new expensive version and requesting on the other side the necessary validations from the customer before the creation process is over (when there is still some euphoria of what they believe it will do for them), to make sure there are concrete proofs that the customer satisfaction was reached (as waiting until after the launch would be suicide).
In this post, I make the assumption that the problematic relies at the technology level as customers want their web site to be an attractive and efficient online engagement platform, while web site technology can only deliver an access to a set of fixed information segmented into information pages. As a result, the engagement would have to emerge magically out of the intelligence of the content of the pages, which, except in a few very specific situations, will never happen.
What if we could put in place a better technology which would make web sites more dynamic, not in their content, but in their structure?
What if the resulting flow of interaction was adapting automatically and if the content of the web site was the documentation along this flow?
