Noz Urbina: The RAUX Method for Accelerating Content Projects with AI – Episode 3

Noz Urbina Modern content projects begin with research to create lifelike customer personas and build detailed customer journey maps. Whether you're on a tight budget or have a team of UX researchers at your disposal, AI can help accelerate and improve the development of these personas and journey maps. Noz Urbina has developed the RAUX (Rapid AI-powered UX) method to help omnichannel content strategists develop realistic personas and craft effective customer journey maps. We talked about: his work at his consultancy, Urbina Consulting, and his learning hub, OmnichannelX the RAUX AI method he has developed to accelerate user research, customer journey mapping, content design, and content development and drafting his simple equation for doling out information in complex content environments how AI can help you aggregate and understand your sources of customer information to help build personas how he looks at customer journeys and journey mapping how content fits into his customer journey maps, and how AI facilitates the tedious work that precedes and informs how to address key customer needs the AI-driven persona-development prompt methodology at the core of the RAUX methodology how to prompt AI agents in ways that mitigate the biases that often come with public data sources how you can query an AI persona that you have developed with the RAUX prompt methodology to help you fill in the details of a customer journey map how LLM's propensity to hallucination is actually a benefit when you're trying to conjure human feelings, questions, and queries how AI lets us all become programmers without becoming coders how AI can help with content creation, especially tasks like brainstorming and drafting the importance of thinking about how to use AI at every stage of the content lifecycle Noz's bio Noz Urbina is one of the few industry professionals who has been working in what we now call "multichannel" and "omnichannel" content design and strategy for over two decades. In that time, he has become a globally recognised leader in the field of content and customer experience. He’s well known as a pioneer in customer journey mapping and adaptive content modelling for delivering personalised, contextually-relevant content experiences in any environment. Noz is co-founder and Programme Director of the OmnichannelX Conference and Podcast. He is also co-author of the book “Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits” and lecturer in the Master's Programme in Content Strategy at the University of Applied Sciences of Graz, Austria. Noz's company, Urbina Consulting, works with the world’s largest organisations and most complex content challenges, but his mission is to help all brands be able to have relationships with people, the way that people have with each other. Past clients have included Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Roche, and Sanofi Pharmaceuticals; Microsoft; Mastercard; Barclays Bank; Abbott Laboratories; RobbieWilliams.com; and hundreds more. Connect with Noz online Urbina Consulting noz at urbinaconsulting dot com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/svFi95biaSU Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 3. These days, designing content experiences starts with detailed customer persona development and extensive customer journey mapping. Whether you've got a six-figure budget or you're doing scrappy do-it-yourself customer discovery, AI can help you accelerate and improve your research process. Noz Urbina has developed a detailed methodology that he calls RAUX (Rapid AI-powered UX) to help you develop realistic personas and craft effective customer journey maps. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number three of the Content and AI podcast. I'm really delighted today to welcome to the show Noz Urbina. Noz is an omnichannel strategist at Urbina Consulting, but I know you do a lot of other stuff there too, Noz. Tell the folks what you're up to these days. Noz: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, as you said, I'm an omnichannel strategist, which involves a lot. It's a lot of customer journey mapping, a lot of stakeholder ecosystems, content modeling, metadata modeling, working with people like ontologists and taxonomists and systems architects to really build full workflows that support omnichannel. Noz: My job is I'm founder and I lead a lot of the projects at Urbina Consulting. I also have founded an organization called OmnichannelX, which was a conference but has been pivoted to a year-round buffet of learning opportunities. We used to do an annual conference, the usual four-day thing. And we found that we weren't going to be able to do physical after COVID. It was just the conference market is too difficult. And we only had one physical conference before COVID, so we never really had a chance to establish ourselves as a physical conference. Noz: We were going to do it online anyway. Why not make it an all year thing where people can come and they can pick and mix and they can go look at things from the archives and the library? We run the podcast regularly there too. It's actually doing a little bit too well because sometimes, what I'm talking in business situations, people go, "Oh, yeah, well maybe OmnichannelX can come in." And I go, "Oh, no, no, no." Urbina are the consultants. OmnichannelX is our learning hub where we try to advance the industry and provide learning resources for all the good people out there. Larry: Well, that's great. It's always good to have a little too much success, so congrats on that. Noz: Thank you. Larry: But hey, the reason I wanted to have you on the show today, this is the whole point of this new podcast is about AI and in particular using how folks are using AI in content practice. Now, my first two episodes were background setting and level setting on the whole field of AI. You're really the first person that I've had on, this is how I want the whole rest of the episodes to be like. You're out there in the world doing cool stuff with AI in your practice today. All that stuff you just mentioned, the customer journey mapping, content muddling, all those things. Tell me how... Well, you have a specific model, I know called RAUX, the Rapid AI-powered UX. Tell me a little bit about how that came to be and what you do with it. Noz: All right. Okay. You got to pronounce the cool way, which is RAUX. Larry: Okay, now I'm on board. Okay. Noz: The RAUX methodology, I couldn't resist the acronym. It's not just for UX strictly speaking. Depending on how you define UX. It's for any type of experience or content design, but it also extends into the early research stages and also the content development and drafting stages. Noz: What we found was that in order to be able to do content design, content strategy properly, we really had to do customer journey mapping. Because if you Google customer journey map, you get some very disappointing diagrams which are aligned with a couple boxes superimposed over it. And so I get a newsletter or see an ad and I click a landing page and I download a thing. And it's just this happy path of contact points and they put some notes on them. Noz: That's really inadequate for content people. If we're really trying to get into the informational needs and the informational journey and requirements of our people, the level of customer journey mapping that we were getting from your usual UX design process was not what we needed. Noz: What we've started doing at Urbina Consulting, because we're an omni-channel consultancy, is we're trying to put together a methodology which works for everybody. You can just use it for designing product, you can use it for designing digital experiences of any kind. We've come up with integration requirements. And for example, we realized that we needed to pull this data from the CRM, so in real time we could show on the website what was happening in the call center. Which is not your usual kind of content requirement, but it comes out through properly analyzing the journey. Noz: But it's a lot of work. What RAUX is about is using AI to accelerate that process. Taking the research you do have or starting wherever you are and using AI at several points in the whole content life cycle from research all the way out to delivery. Larry: Nice. And I know I do a little bit of content modeling and journey mapping myself. And typically, especially in journey mapping, that is one of the, we're all used to these giant grid things. We all work in spreadsheets all the time. But a good journey map is the ultimate, giant deepest spreadsheet you've ever worked with. And there's so many cells to fill and this is what this helps with. Right? Noz: Yeah, exactly. What we like to do is have a decent narrative. We want people to have a story that's told in the first person. We don't do, the user does this and then they click here and then they do that. Because I've literally found this in workshopping. When you speak about the user in the third person, you start to objectify them. Noz: That if you really want to drive empathy in the team when they read the narrative, they should be role-playing in their heads. They should be living the story that this person is going through. That's, the writing of that is a bit of an art. You have to be able to empathize and you have to be able to think in the first person and get yourself out of your own head as the person who might own these assets that are in question or be very close to the problem. Noz: That's a decent amount of work is also the figuring out the questions over time. Our journey mapping methodology at its simplest, you were saying there's all these cells, all these rows. At its simplest, it's literally just that.