Arun Rajagopal: Creating Effective User Experiences in Global Conversations

Classical communications theories propound a number of requisites for creating meaningful and effective conversations. 

One of them is clarity of expression. When a message is transmitted from a sender to a receiver, a process of encoding and decoding occurs. If you are looking forward to generate some response or result from your act of conversation, the message should be delivered in a form and content that makes it easy to be decoded or understood by your recipient. More importantly, this message should be what your recipient really, really wants to hear.

If you are talking to your customers, a community or even to a couple of friends in a social gathering, you should be talking ‘their language’, than your ‘language’.  In my opinion, this is the most important factor that creates effective user experiences in global conversations.

This simple observation has powerful implications when looked upon from a macro perspective. Take geo-political or socio-economic conflicts as an example. Most conflicts occur because we do not understand the ‘perspective’, ‘point of view’ or ‘language’, simply put - issues of the other side.

A successful marketing campaign in any medium; a truce; a breakthrough in science or technology or any successful achievement in any discipline happens when an attempt is made to understand ‘the language of expression’ of what we seek to achieve. 

The magical word is ‘research’ – the act of putting your ears to the ground to unearth insights that are waiting to be discovered. And then shaping experiences based on our findings.

This research should unravel:    

• What is that our recipients want from our conversation?    
• What do they want to hear?    
• What do they want to be told?    
• How should they be talked to?    
• What are the expressions that will create the desired response?

It also demands working from the challenging perspective ‘What should be done?’ rather than starting from the time-tested ‘How should it be done?’.   

Once we have these answers, we are ready to create user-centric, result-oriented and effective conversations with the world.

Readings of Interest:

1.      It's the Conversation Economy, Stupid – David Armano

2.      The Art of Listening – Lewis Green

3.      Getting Your Message Through – Valeria Maltoni

4.      Listen up (why your customers' native tongue matters) – Drew McLellan

5.      Conversation as Communication – Gerard M Blair

6.      Tips for an Effective Conversation – Keith Rosen

Arun Rajagopal lives in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman where he works as a Content Strategist for a leading media communications company. His avatars include: Advertising & Digital Copywriter, Anorak, Amateur Lensman, Cinebuff, Backpacker, Blogger, Social Media Conversationalist, and Aspiring Bus Driver.

Comments

[Lewis Green]

Arun,

Excellent post. On occasion, "we do not understand the ‘perspective’, ‘point of view’ or ‘language’, simply put - issues of the other side" because we believe conflict is in our best interests or because we take everything personally or because we believe that because we are a part of the conversation, everything said affects us or is about us in some ways. Those perspectives make forgiveness and truth difficult to attain and achieve.