IPA Case Study: Realising Value from Content

When the Institute for Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) came to Senior for their new website, it was vital that the website allow publishers to assign a value to every piece of content on the site; of course nothing is ever as simple as it seems and this case study looks closely at how Senior solved a problem like monetisation.

With up to seven user account types identified for the IPA’s website (each with different access restrictions) it quickly became obvious that there were going to be some very complex challenges ahead. The system had to remain powerful and flexible enough to allow very exact tailoring of price based on the user’s account type whilst ensuring ease of implementation and usability. Successfully specifying the monetisation of content was critical to the project’s success.

The challenges began with the back-end administration of the system. Content publishers required the ability to set the access restrictions and price for all published content; having to enter these rules and amounts every time would be onerous and would introduce a barrier to system adoption.

To solve this, Senior introduced the ability to create predefined monetisation templates in the administration area of the system, each of which could be selected at content creation. To further simplify the process, default templates could be applied to content by its type (such as News, Documents and Articles) thus saving publishers from having to select the appropriate template each time. Should another template be required, it should quickly and easily be selected and applied.

A further challenge was presented by the front-end of the website; it would have to adequately reflect the complexity and flexibility of the monetisation rules established in the back-end without confusing the website user.

Our interface design team set about identifying each possible combination of user account, access restriction and price in order to provide the programming team with a matrix of possible outcomes. Each page on the website actually matches its own rules with the user’s account type to determine how (or whether) to display the page, what price to display (if any) and then provide the ability to purchase that content or how to upgrade to an account.

The IPA website is currently undergoing usability testing with initial reports suggesting that the problem of monetisation has been successfully solved; you will be able to see just how successful this aspect of the development has been when the IPA website launches to the public in early 2008.