Engagement levels are extremely important for a site whose primary purpose is content delivery. If the content isn’t engaging, the site will fail. Site engagement is extremely important for product managers, content strategists and customer service people, alike. To rate the sites in Engagement, our judges used the following principles:
- Relevance
- Accuracy
- Informative
- Timely
- Enjoyable
Content Management Strategist
Principal of Intentional Design
The Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Center is anything but engaging. It’s such a big mess there’s no way to tell when content was last updated (except blog posts and forum comments) and because Microsoft is the sole provider of the majority of the content, there’s no way to know how accurate it is. Without feedback and comments from members, there’s no way to learn from those who came before you. And, because they don’t allow members to repair errors, if there are any inaccuracies, chances are each and every member will fall victim to them. While there is a lot of information available, much of it is locked up in boring, hard to understand mumbo-jumbo, stored in tables embedded in ancient multi-pane online help systems that have been jury-rigged for the web. It’s not attractive nor engaging. #Fail.
The Mozilla Developer Network is definitely engaging. It’s got a fresh modern look, snappy content, clear instructional text, and, while not used often enough, there are “freshness dates” on some of the content. News and other popular and hot (timely) topics include a date so site visitors know they are engaging with the most current information available. When visitors encounter content types on the site that are socially-enabled, comments act as a freshness indicator, as they include the date the comment was made, and oftentimes, additional timely information. The quality of the content presented on the Mozilla site also has personality –something the Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Center sorely lacks. And, it uses the platform to promote additional content of interest, a great way to leverage the attention of the site visitors while they are already engaged and paying attention. Of course, the site could step it up a notch, and really engage users by presenting relevant content of interest (to those who are logged in, especially) that is based on what Mozilla knows about their network members, their behavior, pages they previously visited, etc. This to the direction this site appears to be heading. It’ll be interesting to see what they do (and don’t do) with the information socially-enabling a community provides.
