 Cool. Cool. Can everyone, oh wait, can everyone hear me? I'll just look for a comment in discussion forum and then we'll end this screen section and go. Yep. All right. Cool. Cool. Let's do this. Okay. I am going to be running some slides. So I will just be checking periodically if, works. Works. So question, how do you get people to do stuff? And more specifically, how do you get people to do stuff that's written down? So I'm going to share my perspective as a content nerd from way back around writing style guides, but the principles that I'm going to share with you could apply just as well to any kind of policy or guidance material that's written down and that you want people to follow. So quick intro. I'm Matt Fenwick. I head up the content and cons practice at Oxide Interactive. We're a full service digital agency in Canberra and some of the recent projects we've worked on for National Archives, they were stuck in a consulting loop for about five years where they were getting reports on consulting reports on consulting reports. We came in and in 10 weeks we had an alpha and we then continued to work with them right through to deliver with beta and beyond. So that included UX research, information architecture, design system and a whole ton of content help. The other one we've worked on is the transparency portal for Department of Finance. This is a whole of government, online annual reporting platform that we developed. Both of these big projects were published to Drupal but use some fairly nifty technology that I'll share with you as we go. So, Star Guides. Look, if you're a content person, then you love having a Star Guide. It's this artifact that you hold onto, that you treasure as much as the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones, the Raiders of the Lost Ark. That's it. So it's this hugely valuable artifact that we invest a huge amount of time and we put all of our focus on. However, unfortunately, what ends up happening is that we realize that the Star Guide is an object of such immense power and immense potential to change the world that the only thing we can do with it is what ended up happening at the end of the movie. We take the Ark of the Covenant or the Star Guide and we file it. So it gathers dust somewhere on our intranet or somewhere in a binder on someone's desk and it doesn't actually affect any change. You know, we designed our Star Guide for a reason to influence people's behavior and that tends not to happen. And to understand why that is, I think we need to stop thinking about Star Guides as a discrete artifact and shift our thinking instead to Star Guidance. So what is the system of guidance that we are designing? And then how can we apply some basic UX principles to make that system work more effectively? And to show you what I mean, I'm gonna ask a question. I'm just gonna pull up. Let me see if we can do this. All right, I'm gonna do some fancy. Okay, you will hopefully see a picture of the road. I want you to commit that picture to memory. And then I'm gonna ask a question over in the discussion forum. I would love to see your thoughts on what is the reason that you drive on the left-hand side of the road? Go. Because expand, Simon. I love it. I love it. Don't, I'm in Greece. Because back in the day when people jousted and fought with swords, you used your right hand. Okay. I get find otherwise. What are the things that influence you? Passenger door on the left. Lots of cool behavioral cues. Yep. So what about the things in your environment? And I'm gonna pull up this slide again. What are the things in the environment that influence you to drive on the left-hand side of the road? Other cars, yep. Signs, stripes. Other cars following the law. Cool, cool. Lines. Okay. How I was taught to drive. So these are, by the way, I didn't know the one about jousting. So I too have learned something. We'll go back to my slides. So what I find interesting in all of these is that when I pulled out of the driveway this morning to drop off my kids, I didn't look at the road rules. You know, I didn't read the manual. So yes, we drive because it was the law and what I was taught to do. But what I find interesting is that I don't think I ever read the section of the road rules that said you should drive on the left-hand side of the road. It was just a habit. So my suggestion for us is that anytime we want to influence people's behavior, then we need to think about designing habits. So I follow the model from psychologist Charles Duregg, how habits work. And he says that every time we wanna change, break or form a habit, we need to design a habit loop. So an example is, let's say it's late afternoon. I'm feeling snacky. So that's the cue, right? That's a prompt. Then I execute a routine or a behavior. So I go to the cafeteria. I get muffins. And then I bring them back to my co-worker's desk. And there I get the reward or the result, which is everyone saying, gosh, Matt, you're such a legend. So in other words, that reinforces the behavior. So if we wanna change people's habits, we need to change one or more elements of the habit loop. And I'm gonna start with changing the cue. So the problem with star guides or a lot of the guides that we write down is that there's no cue there. They just sit in a desk or somewhere on their internet. There's nothing to prompt us to do the thing that we want people to do. So here's an example of a cue that's present in people's environment. You'll see a little tray with coins right next to the bedside table. So that's a prompt saying, last thing of the day, empty the change out of your pockets and put it here. Now you could approach your star guide thinking, well, we could just do a quick reference guide and maybe content nerds like me will print it off and put it up on their cubicle. But if you're anything like me, when you're working, you tend to be pretty focused and quite tuned out, even in your immediate physical environment. So what I'm suggesting we need to do is think about how we can embed the star guides actually in the authoring experience itself. Now I'm gonna share with you two tools that we use to do that. And those tools are Master Docs and Gather Content. Master Docs is a tool that we at Oxide developed. So Gather Content is a tool that's run by a lovely mob out of the UK. Both of them export to Drupal. Both of them do all of the things that you'd be familiar with from Drupal. So content modeling, customisable workflows, you can set editing permissions. Gather Content is designed for web content projects that works with pages that need to be linked together in some way. Master Docs is designed more for documents. So think annual reports, technical documents, scientific publications where you have a discrete document. It's usually quite long and there are usually lots of different people who need to contribute to it. Now, what I think is cool about these two tools is that it can actually support the ongoing use of Drupal. So what we're hearing from a couple of our clients and I know this came up last night as well, is a couple of them are looking at moving to WordPress because to them, the authoring experience in WordPress is a lot easier. Now WordPress doesn't have a lot of the controls and functionality that Drupal does, but it is easier so I've heard for people to pick up. So what I'm interested in is using some tool like Master Docs or Gather Content that effectively emulates a word authoring environment. Something has a very, very low barrier to entry, but you can still then export it to Drupal. So this isn't obviously gonna be a fit for every organization, but it is interesting where you want to have distributed authoring in your organization. You don't necessarily wanna have everything going all on your web dev or web publishing teams. So we're gonna explore how those tools can work with behavioral cues. Oh, and by the way, I can't see questions and comments right now, but I'll duck back in at the end. Cool, cool. So this is from Gather Content. This is a content type corner in the employee bio. And I wanted to zero in on this. So this is the field where we enter the employee name and you'll see there it says include your first and second names, but no need for titles or acronyms. So that is a queue that's present right there at the time that people are actually entering in the text. It's a reminder. Similarly in Gather Content, we have checklists that we can set up as tabs. So we could expect that the subject matter experts are going to remember to check the content to make sure it meets legislative requirements or we could give them a checklist that's right there in the authoring environment for them to use. Look, this brings up a bit of a problem that I have around the way comms, writing, web training is often done. It's often approached very much as telling people what to do. So you go, right, we've told people, now if they don't do the thing that we want them to do, that's their problem. But UX teaches us that it's not enough to just present information, need to structure it in a way that meets people's needs. So this is where having these behavioral supports or scaffolds are so important. And then here's an example from Master Docs. So Master Docs has a feature called documents in series. What that means is, if you've designed the structure for one document and you wanna do another document of that type, you can just start a new instance of that document and it'll have all the heading structure pre-populated. So it's again a cue for people to write about, who is at increased risk, which is Stational Diabetes and so on. Cool, cool. Next up, we can show, yeah. That was, sorry, Siri has attachment issues. So she just interrupts me from time to time. Sorry. Okay, so changing the routine. This is about making things easier or harder for people to do. And you remember in the photo of the road I showed you, there were the lane markings, the dots along the middle of the road. That's what we call a soft barrier. So it's saying, hey, you probably shouldn't, you probably shouldn't drive over here. But then there's a hard barrier, which is the railing on the other, on the side of the road. Make it almost impossible for you to veer off into the meadows. So this is an example of a soft barrier. It says, do not enter. This is from my six year old son's bedroom door. And I could technically enter the room if I so chose, but it's, you know, it's impeding my behavior a little bit. So that's a soft barrier. Here is a soft barrier from gather content. So you can see here that it's saying you've got 60 words for the employee name. If you go over the 60 words, then it will just, it will show red, but you can still do it. An example of a hard barrier in content. So LinkedIn connection requests, you literally can't send a connection request that's more than the requisite number of characters. Here's an example of a hard barrier from gather content. So gather content handy, so this is master docs, I'm sorry. Master docs where you, you want a whole bunch of the content to be exactly the same, but you want to have some flexibility in there. So you can set variable fields within master docs. So in this case gestational diabetes, where you can set it up. So that is the only thing that people can change. All of the other content is locked down. So that's making it impossible for business areas to go rogue and just rewrite the content at will, which they have a tendency to do. Cool, cool. So this is an example from gather content of the permissions that you can set up. This is going even more granular into setting exactly what different, different sort of role types can do. Master docs has a similar feature, but within gather content, you can set it so that people can review and comment, but they can't rewrite the content. So if you're interested in preserving the integrity of the content, it's brand voice, but you do want to get people's feedback, having this kind of feature can be super, super handy. Okay, next up changing the reward or the result. This is the consequence of their behavior. We like to use tools like readable, visible thread to run readability audits of web content. And so you can see here that the reach score for this content is 28 against a baseline of 60. That's calculated based on a combination of number of long sentences, number of complex words. Similarly, you can see that long sentences are 23% where we should be aiming for five or lower. Now there is a lot of debate around how much readability indexes actually tell you. And it's no substitute for a deep dive into Google Analytics or for doing user testing. But what it does do is give you insights at scale about the readability of your content that feel kind of sciency, you know? So for your stakeholders, and particularly when you're trying to influence business areas to write less fluff, then you can use a real readability score as an instant metric to take to them and kind of show a bit of a red traffic light where the content's not readable. However, I think it's really, really important to also look at positive reinforcement because the truth is nobody shows up at work wanting to do a bad job. So how do we encourage people when they're already doing the right thing? And how do we build up a support around them? And this is where I think community is so interesting because when you build up a community of practice around your style guides or around any practice for that matter, it complained to every part of the habit loop. So for example, in a queue, it could be my supervisor saying, hey Matt, remember to check the length in your sentences this next time, a routine. People won't always go to the style guide, but they will often ask a colleague. So if you have the style guidance shared and understood in the community, then someone can go, oh, hey Matt, what do we do about bullet points again? And the reward is the sharing of best practices, particularly if you have a community of practice built up around your style guide, you can share lessons learned and also congratulate people when they're doing a good job to provide that social proof, that sense of, sorry, social reinforcement. This is the way we do things around here. Now, in practice, this is how it can work. Start off by considering the tech for some organizations, just using Drupal is gonna work fine. For other organizations, particularly where you wanna have distributed authoring and editing, something like master docs or gather content can be really useful for people who just wanna use something that looks like word because that's what they're familiar with. Then you define the content types. So what are the varieties, the content that we need to be designing for? The style guidance, how do we want those things to be written? The workflows, how does that content move from draft to published and beyond? And then we put it all together, we integrate the style guidance into the content types, the right steps and workflows. I would should also be setting up some measurement. It's not enough students have a style guide. How do you track compliance with it? And how do you build up a community to support people? So we would love to talk to you if you're embarking on a website, project where content is important. Come and chat to us at the exhibition stand or I'm doing a free 30 minute coaching course myself on better ways of working on content with subject content, with subject matter experts, just for people who book by 20th of November. Please connect with me, shoot me an email, feel free to ask me any questions. And I'm gonna jump over to discussion forum. And yeah, I am here to answer maybe one quick question. Thanks Alexandra. Yeah, Daniel, road norms. Well, that's exactly it, that's habits. All right, cool. I'll just pull up my details again on this slide. Oh, it's coming. Thank you Sydney, bowels. Cheers Josh, thank you.