In Jesse’s talk yesterday on Delivering Long-Term Design Value in a Short Term World, he mentioned that typically technology projects are built with data first in mind, then logic, and with UI tacked on top. He stressed the importance of not allowing your thinking to be limited by perceived technological limitations.

For the past few weeks as I’ve sat through ATG training, I’ve tried to be really aware of what ATG has to offer, and how to make its product and feature suite relevant to people in my organization. I’m currently in the business user/management training series, and the needs of this user base are dramatically different than those of the developers. I’ve been trying to think about how to explain ATG and how we can apply it in our work to the different user types.

Last night’s talk had me thinking about this even more. It’s not “ATG” that will sell, it’s what it offers the client. The whole premise of personalization and customization directly contributes to a better user experience, but using ATG for a site doesn’t inherently make for a better experience. It’s a means to an end, and all the tasks associated with determining user needs/wants/motivation still need to take place.

I’ve mentioned before that ATG is a technological platform that really is looking to meet a strategic need. Its standard implementation is rules-based, which is that layer of logic discussed yesterday. I think the challenge is that often from a UX standpoint, we want to achieve a certain result, without too much concern of the “how”. After the talk last night, someone mentioned pandora radio to me as an example of a personalized user experience with that “wow” factor. There is definitely an element of magic involved, which arguably makes the experience even more compelling. The average visitor doesn’t have to know how it works.

I feel that way about training, to some extent. For many of our creative or managerial types, they don’t need to know the intricacies of the platform, they just need to recognize the implications. Like any sort of personalization or customization, it’s about catering the message to the individual and satisfying his needs, to ensure he has a positive perception of what’s in front of him. There’s no need to overwhelm him with too much detail: it’s all about the “beautiful, elegant solution that works”

Today I’m sitting in the “Using ATG Scenarios - Driving Customer Loyalty Using ATG Scenario Personalization” training class. I caught the tail-end of “Exploring ATG Technology - Solving Business Problems and Maximizing ROI Using ATG Solutions” and I have to say, it’s quite interesting to be sitting in a class with the different business users. Their questions are moreso of the “can we” nature rather than “how do we”.

Last week I was in the developer training course for setting up content administration, so I was familiar with the interface the class is using. However, I won’t be in Commerce training until next week, so some of the more advanced functionality is new. I will be eager next week to see how we manage to achieve some of what my colleagues requested.

I’m glad I did some additional reading on my own, when some questions arose about affinity selling, I was able to ask if that was related to the ATG purchase of CleverSet. I appreciate that we’re learning everything ATG has to offer, but I’m trying to be particularly conscious of what functionality is related to which version or module. In fact, when there was a question about affinity selling coming from CleverSet integration, the instructor acknowledged that he wasn’t sure in which version of ATG it was incorporated; if it was in 2007.1, or would be coming in the next release.

We looked briefly at promotions and coupons, which I had a personal interest in. The other day I purchased roadId online, and was given a “thank you code” that could be used up to 20 times within the next 30 days. As online coupons become increasingly shared on sites like dealcatcher or even on message boards, I understand the need to limit the number of times a particular discount can be applied. As we were talking about the difference between a promotion and a coupon, I asked if this sort of limitation was supported by default on a promotion. (You can specify limits on a single user’s participation in a given promotion). The instructor said this was not a built-in field, but a scenario could be written to support this business rule. Shortly thereafter we were discussing coupons, and I wondered if perhaps that was a better object on which to enforce this limitation. Some of my colleagues and I were discussing the equivalence in the real world: for a discount, you wouldn’t turn away the 501st person to walk in the door, but on the other hand, you could prevent users from photocopying or reproducing a coupon. I don’t know that that really clarified anything for me in my head, but it was something to think about.

Some of my colleagues had some other intriguing questions: could we ensure that the recipient of the coupon is the one to redeem it? Again, the instructor said it was possible we could build this into a scenario. It sounds as though the redemption rules will be quite involved!

I guess I see the limitations on the usage of a particular promotion (coupons?) as an attribute of that specific element itself, not really part of a scenario (which I associate with user or system behaviour). As I mentioned, my coupon code for buying my RoadId is ThanksAndrea357853. It has particular rules governing its usage. If I do a google search on roadId coupons, I an find other such codes (ThanksKim357919, ThanksDoug330021). The basic rules for the promotion are the same (20 users, 30 days), although the start and end dates are different.

As I write this, I realize I really don’t understand the difference between a coupon and a promotion, unless a coupon is simply a means to a particular instance of a promotion…Ok, after re-reading the chapter about promotions and coupons, I think I understand the distinction. A coupon is just a trigger, like a scenario, that allows for the promotion to go into effect. That’s why you would set the limits on the promotion (i.e. number of times it could take place). However, whereas a disabled scenario would be invisible to the user, you would have to account for some error checking in the case of the attempt to use an invalid coupon.

Today was one of those up and down days– this morning as we went through chapters on “scenarios” and “delivering personalized content”, I was very excited, eagerly sending off notes to co-workers on how this could enhance our offerings. By the afternoon I was glaring at my monitor, able to see why things weren’t working (”the “Views an item from SongsRepository” event isn’t being triggered”) with absolutely no idea how to fix them.

But I suppose that’s what experience is for, right? It’s not meant to be that easy..

Once again, I felt very fortunate to be attending training with 10 of my co-workers; I feel the shared experiences will definitely add up to be worth more than the sum of its parts. I work with incredibly talented individuals, and I know we all asked some questions beyond the standard syllabus, and we’re all better for it. Any one person can poke around and discover things, but the comradery of the team meant we were all learning and sharing together. I’ve been in training classes with people I didn’t know, and I’ve even sat in classrooms with people term after term, but there is just a different vibe in our training class. We know the personal passions of the different people, and those biases/areas of expertise show in their questions. It’s been a great way to learn and collaborate together, and I feel confident that when we start to apply our knowledge, the outcome will be all the better with our having been training together.

Day three of training, and I really feel like today we started to really see the value of it. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been hearing about ATG since I started in June, but for many of the other developers, they weren’t sure what ATG had to offer that was so special. Today we looked at user profiling and scenarios, which seems to me to be the selling feature.

Simply, user behaviour can be tracked in their profile, and then content can be targeted based on that behaviour. If a user consistently looks at a given category of content, you can start making relevant suggestions. Scenarios can be of short or long duration, and can extend out to email campaigns and such.

Targeted content is big, but there are plenty of negative stories of “I bought a single baby book on amazon as a gift, and now I get baby-related suggestions all the time!” With ATG, you could set thresholds or time-sensitive rules to determine what would be inserted into ’slots’. You can also track if a user has already been served a particular promotion and the success thereof, to determine if they should be fed it again.

It sounds like fun stuff, I am the girl who thrives off books like “freakonomics” and “microtrends” and I think the idea of setting up these scenarios based on user behaviour (personas) is pretty appealing. We have some metrics guys at work who do their best to track user behaviour like click-throughs, but I feel as though this is really (I can’t believe I’m saying this…) Metrics2.0. We see the user behaviour, and we use it to personalize and improve on their experience (oh yeah, and serve important business needs).

I was explaining to a co-worker this evening, I think ATG is a bit of a hard-sell. It’s very tech-intensive (hence the three weeks of developer training we’re doing), but the real value seems to be for the strategy groups. I can see some definite benefits to the system from a business perspective, but it is up to the technical group to develop an architecture that supports these (potentially not-well-defined) goals.

In our course today, they recommended a role of “scenario manager” who would develop these various scenarios. Obviously I haven’t been through the business user training yet (and we didn’t even use the ATG Content Administration capabilities on the People’s Choice project), but from what I understand, developing these scenarios and rules can be quite technical. The communication of what is feasible technically and what is desired from a strategic point of view is essential.
Hmm… wow, and I’m just wanting to slide into a B.A. role, documenting and clarifying requirements. Isn’t that convenient?

When I interviewed at Resource last June, they mentioned a mysterious abbreviation, ATG. I smiled and nodded and knew I had some research to do when I got home.

So it turns out that ATG “makes the Web marketing and e-commerce software and delivers the on demand e-commerce hosting solutions that the world’s top brands use to power their leading-edge e-commerce Web sites; attract prospects; convert them to buyers; and offer stellar ongoing customer care.”

We actually used ATG to build pcavote.com, despite the fact that it was never intended to be an e-commerce implementation. What made it a good fit was the enticement of personalization, leveraging their scenario engine. We brought in some outstanding talent to help us through the architecting/developing of the solution. I was only involved in the implementation insofar as I became familiar with the some of the capabilities of the platform.

The very next project I had an opportunity to help out with was also built on ATG, although the solution was designed and developed quite differently. It helped to see how the benefits of leveraging the platform were realized even with such a different approach. It was one of those cases where the more I was on the periphery of projects, the more I knew I didn’t know.

Starting this Monday, I’ll eating, drinking and sleeping ATG for quite awhile. I will be attending ATG Technical/Developer training, and then as I transition to a less technical role, I will also be attending the Business Manager/Marketing track as well. (course listing) I’m very excited; as a front-end developer, I’ve been exposed to the dsp tag library, but in a very limited capacity. I’m particularly interested in attending the business user training, to see how the platform is presented to a less technical audience. I anticipate we’ll be able to better leverage the power of the platform with an appreciation of how it is being presented. I don’t know that we used ATG to its full extent with pcavote.com, perhaps because we simply weren’t sure what all it was capable of. I’m eager to see what we can do moving forward, and I consider myself very fortunate to be able to sit in on both tracks. I hope I will be able to help facilitate communication between the two audiences.

After a slow start, I am now well-immersed in flex training. Our instructor missed his flight into town the first morning, so started a good 2.5 hours late. However, we students in the class spent some time on our own discussing what we understood, and I think overall that was a valuable exercice. There is really nothing like explaining something to someone to see how well you understand it.

I enrolled in the “Developing Rich Internet Applications” but I think I may have been better off enrolling in a more advanced class. I had already done plenty of reading and playing around, as opposed to some students who had no knowledge of flex at all.

I have been doing some more research on Flex Certification and I expect I will be pursuing it. I managed to find a fair amount of information on Jun Heider’s blog. Although the timing isn’t ideal (I’m about to start two more courses for grad school this week!), I am going to work towards certification before the end of 2007.

• go through and make study notes based on the Flex2Blueprint Jun posted.
• subscribe to Lynda.com training for one month, watch the videos
• Ideally I’d like to take the “Programming the Visual Experience” training class, but I’m not sure if that will work out.

I will continue posting my progress on this as I go along–