Clarity, Focus and Relevance for Product Manager (and Marketers)

When we develop a message, trying to make sure clarity, focus and relevance are there is not hard. Usually I start out by prioritizing the message components. Let's take the Adobe Dreamweaver's example, first we separate the whole message into 'chunks' or 'elements'.

Dreamweaver's page has sections for:

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• What's new: Develop Websites and applications; Reasons to Upgrade


• Product Overview: Whats Dreamweaver CS3?; Get the details


• Feature Tour: Spry framework for AJAX & details; Photoshop CS3 integration; Compatibility Check; CSS Advisor; CSS layouts; Manage CSS; Device Central CS3; Bridge CS3


• Product Selector: Design; Web; Photography; Video


• News: What's new in Dreamweaver CS3; What's new in Device Central CS3; Best Practices of CSS; Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox

Notice that the category (tab) divisions are fairly standard software terms. These are useful in the message of each tab's content. Using well understood and accepted terms is one trick of clarity in a message. 'What's New?' is a clear term and will not confuse most readers. Using tab sections also helps in focusing the message. When a writer wants to divide a message into sections, standard divisions, similarity in context and relevance help in making the message clear. Readers don't need to figure anything out, they know and understand the divisions, all they need to see in the content in each division.

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Once a reader is inside each 'tab' section, there are further sub-sections. This techniques of hierarchical division of text is standard in web content. In the "What's New?" section, we see: "Develop Websites and Applications" and "Reasons to Upgrade". Again these headings are simple and can also be considered industry standard. They are standard terms for software application communication, but not all users are completely familiar with them. But their simplicity helps in making the terms clear. The first section has one short paragraph explaining: '...components for building dynamic user interfaces, and intelligent integration...' with the terms of each feature clearly deliniated. In the next section we simply see a list of features. These are less clear without a full sentence, but are still clear because they highlight a few things. Notice also that each topic is by itself. This helps in not packing too many idead into one sentence, bullet or paragraph. When writing content for the web, people expect ideas in small increments of text. Since there is so much information, we don't want to have it slow... - this is clearly different than writing for a book or a printed brochure.

OK, let's recap a few points for clarity of a message:

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• Divide the message into sections.


• Use standard terms and concepts.


• Make the sections relevant to each other.


• Focus on one or two messages in each section.


• Give more information if needed further on, don't overstuff the sections.


• Use simple sturctures, paragraphs, lists, diagrams, images to quickly say something.

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Well, that's all for the Adobe Dreamweaver page for now. A good exercise will be to do the same analysis with other similar product. Dreamweaver is a product targeted at professional designers and web authors. Microsoft, Oracle, Intuit, Symantec, Borland and other companies have products which sell into this or similar space. It would be interesting to compare how each company gets their product message across. This could be in the case of an upgrade version (like this example) or in other situations.