Teardowns, Dynamic Content, Insane UX

"Welcome back to another Blog Roast. Today, I want to talk about a website, a series of content, an approach to content that I have just fallen head over heels in love with since discovering it. It's Built For Mars.

Now, a bit of an overview. Built For Mars is basically a UX and design consultancy/agency. The big challenge of being a consultant or an agency is proving to people that you know what you're doing, that your value and your expertise is actually worth paying for. Lots of agencies and consultants go the classic route to content where they do a bunch of SEO research, they rank for a bunch of keywords, and that gets people to the website. But it never convinces them that, hey, these people are experts, they know what they're doing.

Teardowns

That problem is solved by what Built For Mars have done. It's just pure case studies and tear downs and analysis. Check this out. You've got a Domino's tear down using dark patterns to overcharge for pizza. You've got Netflix, you've got Ticketmaster, Grammarly, all these big brands. There's so many clever things here.

For one, by writing about these big, established brands, you are choosing topics and companies that people already care about. Domino's. Who doesn't know Domino's? You know, you could do some kind of UX analysis of some tiny little startup, and maybe it'd be useful information, but nobody would care because they don't know what that company is. People care about Domino's.

By critically evaluating their marketing approach, you are implicitly saying, hey, there's this amazing big company. I am smart enough, and I almost know better than they do, that I am able to comment on the things they're doing and point out some of the secrets behind it, some of the flaws and mistakes that they're doing, so that you can learn from it. So there's this amazing process of association where you become more credible by commenting on big established brands.

Lastly, this is how you show expertise: doing tear downs, showing what is going on, evaluating their success, their marketing tactics, the UX tactics they use, and proving that you know how to do it and you can help other people do it. It is just pitch perfect content for this type of business, and you could not do better than that.

But that's not the thing that I really fell in love with. What I want to spend most of my time talking about is dynamic content.

Dynamic Content

A little bit of an aside. I have a side project called Ash Tales, and it started life as a collection of listicles, like the top 50 end of the world books, that kind of thing. When you write a bunch of listicles, you very quickly realize that you reference the same few books again and again in slightly different contexts. One book will appear in the list of best fantasy post-apocalyptic fiction and also in the best survival post-apocalyptic fiction. What gets really tedious for me, the writer, and also for the reader, is having to come up with the same definition every time but make it unique on each page, kind of rehashing the same information within every single context. Dynamic content solves that.

Dynamic content is basically, instead of having a static web page with static information on it and creating that afresh every time, you create a core set of information that usually lives in a database. Every time you want to reference that idea, that topic, that book, or whatever, you call upon that information and you bring it into the context of the new web page. It's fantastic because you only have to create that once, and you can call upon it in context every time you want to bring it up.

The entire Built For Mars website is built on dynamic content. This is a beautiful example. Read through this, it seems like a fairly conventional blog post. They reference some core UX concepts that they've no doubt referenced before. But instead of either rewriting the same basic description over and over again, or taking you back to some generic elaboration web page, you can bring up a definition within the context of the page you are currently on. And not only that, you can also see other instances within the website where this concept was referenced.

You can do that from all of these pages. It's all this beautiful interconnected web of information. This is just so useful. It's great for you, the creator, because you are not recreating the same information every time. It's great for the user because you are connecting together every related concept like a knowledge graph within your website.

I'm so in love with this. You can see the definition, you can learn about it, you can then also go back to the page you were on, or else you can find other contextual references and go check it out. Absolutely beautiful.

Multimedia Formats

One final thing I really enjoy is that they've built this for different media formats. This is a blog post, but it's also an audio experience. "Using dark patterns to overcharge for pizza" in a really fluid, seamless way, so you can engage with it on your phone, or while you're at work, or something like that. They've also led with this kind of visual media format as well, 91 slides that get across the core lessons. So, this could be embedded within a LinkedIn carousel, for example.

In many ways, this is almost like a different type of dynamic content. You have the same core information, which is the UX lessons, the UX dark patterns that Domino's uses, and they've built loads of different ways of accessing that information: written, audio, and visual.

I mean, it's no surprise that a UX consultancy has the best UX I've ever seen, but it is, oh man, there's so much to be learned from this. When I think about the kind of static blog posts that most companies publish today, they are awful compared to this. There is so much we could learn from, and so much we could do to emulate the experience here.