Content Storage Strategies Part Three: Smart User Satisfaction


Part Three: Smart User Satisfaction

Catalog-based access to content matches specific content to the user’s intent for the content, not merely to a content exposure opportunity.

An eXie catalog publishes access to your content collection with the appropriate settings of subject, categorization, and usage context already provided. In the eXie catalog:

Subject is readily discoverable through the catalog’s highly practical name

Categories of topics declare relevance of the included content

Usage context supports circulation with appropriate expectations

As a simple, familiar device for locating things, catalogs have an outstanding ability to provide exactly the kind of intelligence desired in the effort to access desired content.

The primary competition to a catalog is a “Results List” from a search engine. No one wants to be without the ability to use search, and most successful search engines work hard with algorithms to try to pre-condition the list of discovery results for a strong match to the searcher’s desire.

Furthermore, it is well known that the less we know about a content collection, the more likely we are to rely on exploring it with a search engine.

Frankly, that is why eXie is “not for everyone”. The plan to deliver valuable content to a user is normally highest priority with a content maker or presenter. For the maker or presenter, thoughtful anticipation of an audience begins “channeling” the content before it is even initially finalized instead of still a “draft”.

What the catalog does is to communicate simultaneously to the content maker, the collector, the presenter and the end-user how the content is intended to have value.

Additionally, it does this while using the same language at every stop along the way, and it does not require that one position along the way precedes any of the others. Any of the four positions can be the starting point for engaging the content.

Finally, for parties that perform in multiple roles among the four, the consistency across roles is self-reinforcing.

And one of our favorite observations at eXie is that the most likely multi-role party is the user who owns the content that they saved to use later themselves.

Jump to Part One: The Big Switch