It's Made of People! A Strategic Approach to Dynamic Web Content Personalization

UAD7 Usability, Accessibility and Design

Location: Ballroom C

TUESDAY, 8:30 - 9:15 a.m.

Personalization gets a bad rap for being a creepy practice. But given the complexity and depth of higher ed websites, delivering relevant content and calls-to-action to our wide range of unique users quickly and efficiently is a must. By serving users dynamic content that speaks directly to their unique needs and communicates in a way that appeals to them, we can cultivate deeper understanding, drive more meaningful actions, and foster stronger relationships. We can accomplish this by inviting user research and content strategy to the party. In this presentation, we’ll use case studies to explain the process behind creating an effective, sustainable, and unobtrusive digital personalization experience that provides relevance for the user and ROI for you. This includes developing personas, identifying user needs and tasks, applying these insights to your website’s information architecture and user flows, developing and delivering relevant dynamic content, and analyzing user behavior to gauge success and refine your approach. The result? A personalized experience that is less like a creepy robot, and more like a friendly human who knows what you need and when you need it.

Presenters

Jim Dalglish
Practice Lead, Information Architecture and User Research, OHO Interactive

As a digital strategist, researcher and information architect at OHO Interactive, Jim Dalglish has worked with a broad spectrum of higher education clients ranging from Ivy League schools to private universities, land grant institutions and community colleges. In addition to his higher ed clients, Dalglish has worked as an online marketing and digital strategy consultant for Standard & Poor’s, Amtrak, Merrill Lynch, State Street Bank, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and the New York Times. Over the past fifteen years, he has created dozens of award-winning consumer software products, services, websites, applications, and platforms.

Georgy Cohen
Associate Creative Director, Content Strategy, OHO Interactive

Georgy Cohen has spent more than a decade wrangling content for universities. She is associate creative director for content strategy at OHO Interactive, a digital agency based in the Boston area specializing in higher education, and co-founder of Meet Content, a blog and resource empowering higher education to create and sustain web content that works. Cohen previously worked at Tufts University and Suffolk University, in addition to running her own independent content strategy consultancy in higher education. She speaks frequently, including keynote addresses at HighEdWeb Pittsburgh 2014 and HighEdWeb Arkansas 2011. Cohen's background is in journalism, including a three-year stint working in the fast-paced online newsroom of The Boston Globe.

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