Presented at TESS 2024 by Lee Dale & Christine Zaza, with Chris Fernlund, the faculty guide to unlocking accessibility in eLearning presentation deck offers an overview of accessibility-related:

• Opportunities & Impact
• Untangling the Confusion
• Recommended Resources

The top resources selected to help educators and educational organizations confidently deliver more accessible eLearning include:

• Say Yeah’s Educator’s Guide to 
Delivering Accessible Online Courses
• University of Waterloo’s 
Postsecondary Course Accessibility Guide
• eCampusOntario’s
Digital Accessibility Hub

Download the deck PDF

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The post A faculty guide to unlocking accessibility in eLearning presentation deck. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

This event is dedicated exclusively to digital marketers in the financial services industry, the only one of its kind in Canada. As a proponent of digital excellence and customer experience, particularly in the financial services sector, we are excited to attend this unique summit and see how we can further connect the dots between marketing and digital product strategy.

Immerse yourself in two days of interactive sessions, keynotes, panels, and lots of networking opportunities. Here is your chance to build connections with 600+ financial marketing leaders and like-minded peers.

Discover what digital marketing strategies top financial companies are implementing, explore the latest industry trends, and learn best practices from 40+ senior FinServ marketers.

We can’t wait to hear these talks:

• Ready, Set, Digital: Accelerating Engagement for FSI Organizations with Jill Grozalsky, Wednesday at 9:40 AM
• Optimize Your Self-Service Customer Experience: Proactive, Seamless, Intelligent with Peter Tessier, Wednesday at 11:10 AM
• Building Organizational Agility to Minimize Roadblocks and Achieve Long-Term Digital Process Excellence Success with Annu Gulati and Julian Mills, Thursday at 9:30 AM
• Is Your Future Digital Marketing Strategy Robust Enough for the Next 5 years? with Nathan Gervais and Elizabeth Walford, Thursday at 3:15 PM

Full summit schedule

Don’t miss out

Get tickets for virtual and in-person access starting at $995. Limited availability. All attendees will have on-demand access to view sessions for 3 months post-event.

Save your seat

Ready to grow your business and excel in the connected age?

With our approach to digital transformation, we can help you improve organizational efficiency, drive customer engagement, and uncover new growth opportunities.

Get in touch

The post Digital Marketing for Financial Services Canada Summit, June 8-9, 2022 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Excellence in digital transformation comes from marrying organizational objectives and capabilities with user needs, objectives, and jobs-to-be-done, while leveraging technology to accelerate all facets of product and service development.

This necessitates identifying and intimately understanding the diverse markets your organization serves, defining outcomes over features, and defining technologies and processes that optimize your organization toward improved decision-making.

In short, your organization risks profound disruption if technology isn’t a core competency.

The facets of digital maturity

Digital transformation is difficult because it covers so many factors, from research to systems architecture to continuous improvement. In total, there are 7 primary factors your organization needs to develop as core competencies:

1. Research
2. Product strategy
3. Interaction design
4. System architecture
5. Build
6. Launch and promotion
7. Continuous improvement

A typical digital project will include this depth of requirements and the skillsets required to execute effectively across these standards of practice. Within each of these areas, there are a series of capabilities and requirements to consider, as detailed in our article, “Why digital excellence is so hard to achieve.”

If your technology decision-making and operational practice are not yet mature, you may find these common challenges familiar.

Typical challenges of achieving digital excellence

1. Having limited capability in any one of the 7 key areas, where it is difficult to execute well and project team expertise is not deep enough to achieve best practices. This can increase cost significantly upfront or over time and diminish the value of products and services.
2. Trusting a single vendor to have the capability of executive across all 7 of these multi-disciplined steps, each of which requires a high level of expertise.
3. Taking a technical or engineering-driven approach led by features-first and, at best, internal definitions of need instead of taking a human-centred design approach that identifies user jobs-to-be-done and outcomes to align organizational goals and user needs.
4. Transitioning from research and strategy to product. Bridging the gap between identifying an opportunity to improve customer experience or service delivery and how this is translated to service models and products requires a unique set of cross-functional capabilities.
5. Not aligning information architecture and interface design to user mental models rather than feature lists and organizational requirements.
6. Not effectively translating from design to code, with optimized and accessible front-end code that puts the user first, where typical engineering- team capabilities are most robust at the architecture and back-end, instead of at layers where users interact.
7. Minimal continuous improvement. Using the knowledge gathered from every click and communicating with users on an ongoing basis is essential to improve service and product.
8. Lacking effective, ongoing technology decision-making. The ability to track performance, effectively run user tests and experiments, learn from data and insights, and make the most effective decisions on spending ongoing resources to drive adoption and engineering improvements.

Ultimately, success in the connected age requires a breadth of expertise and a depth of digital maturity and capability to maintain market-leading product, service, and customer experience standards.

We’ll help you grow your digital maturity towards improved product, service, and organizational decision-making

Learn more about digital excellence and our organizational needs and digital maturity assessments service, or get in touch to discuss how we can help you optimize how you work towards reduced product and service development costs and improved customer experience.

Get in touch

The post The role of technology in building market leading organizations appeared first on Say Yeah!.

In celebration of Say Yeah’s 10-year anniversary, we gathered experts from our team and trusted service providers to answer your burning digital transformation questions.

Held at The Spoke Club in downtown Toronto, the event featured a cross-section of industry experts, from digital strategy to team building, public relations to research, content to building a culture of innovation.

The early evening started off with cocktails, hors d’ourves, and great conversation. Attendees and experts got to know each other over their favourite end of day drinks. Then, it was time for the ask-an-expert breakout sessions.

Our lineup of digital transformation questions were facilitated through the following topics:

• Challenges in bringing digital excellence to your team with Lee Dale, Say Yeah!
• Digital foresight with Janice de Jong, Say Yeah!
• Building your team with Trina Boos, Boost Agents
• PR for emerging products and services with Morgan Craig, Eighty-Eight
• From research to actionable insights with Nick Drew, Fuse Insights 
• Content in the digital age with Tara Hunt and Carlos Pacheco, Truly Social
• Coaching towards innovation with Mark Kuznicki, The Moment

Attendees alternated between breakout groups to get a dose of insight and ask their burning digital transformation questions across each topic. Others were comfy on the outdoor couches whilst in in-depth conversation.

Nearing the end of the event was a defining moment for the Say Yeah team. CEO Lee Dale shared his congratulations with Say Yeah President Matthew Rintoul and the rest of the team for reaching 10 years at Say Yeah! Hearty thanks to the clients who got us there and those who joined us for the evening followed.

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“The design industry has changed so much over the past 10 years and we’ve had three major arcs in our business over that time. I couldn’t be happier with where we’ve taken the business, both in being able to serve our local community through impactful work and helping our clients reach new heights by coaching them towards digital excellence.”

~Lee Dale, CEO 

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The sound of toasting champaign glasses filled the patio as everyone cheered with excitement.

To conclude the night, attendees relaxed beneath the setting sun and enjoyed the ongoing conversation with their peers.

Don’t miss out on our next Disrupting with Digital event.

Sign up to our mailing list to be among the first to hear about our next Disrupting with Digital event.

The post Say Yeah celebrates 10 years by answering your burning digital transformation questions, Sept. 19 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

From communications to product to organizational efficiency, operating online involves significant depth of expertise. Digital channels and customer touchpoints extend beyond online to in-person and at home, widening the scope of understanding required to engage with customers.

To succeed, methodology matters. Human-centred design and lean and agile processes are essential because, with digital, we have the ability to learn from data and adapt quickly to current and evolving customer needs, and increasingly savvy customers are expecting more of the organizations they engage with, regardless of device or channel.

The breadth and depth of expertise extend across a wide variety of requirements phases and deep into areas of expertise, as we explored in part 1 of this series on achieving digital excellence. These areas include:

1. Research
2. Product strategy
3. Interaction design
4. System architecture
5. Build
6. Launch and promotion
7. Continuous improvement

Considering the scope of complexity from digital channels to customer engagement and from methodologies to the variety of areas of expertise, let’s take a look at the 8 most common organizational challenges which typically undermine digital efforts.

8 common organizational challenges

1. Having limited competency in any one of these 7 key areas, where it is difficult to execute well and project team expertise is not deep enough to achieve best practices. This can increase cost significantly up front or over time and diminish value of products and services.
2. Trusting a single vendor to have the capability of executive across all 7 of these multi-disciplined steps, each of which requires a high level of expertise.
3. Taking a technical or engineering driven approach led by features-first and, at best, internal definitions of need, instead of taking a human-centred design approach which identifies user jobs-to-be-done and outcomes in order to align organizational goals and user needs.
4. Effectively transitioning from research and strategy to product, bridging the gap between identifying an opportunity to improve customer experience or service delivery and how this is translated to service models and products that need to be delivered to capture this opportunity.
5. Information architecture and interface design aligned to user mental models rather than feature lists and organizational requirements.
6. Translating from design to code, with optimized and accessible front-end code that puts the user first, where typical engineering-team capabilities are strongest at the architecture and back-end, rather at layers where users interact.
7. Continuous improvement, using the knowledge that can be gathered from every click and communicating with users on an ongoing basis to improve service and product.
8. The ability to track performance, effectively run user tests and experiments, and then make the most effective decisions on where to spend ongoing resources to drive adoption and engagement.

Determinants of organizational success

Ultimately, success is determined by your organization’s ability to:

1. Define an effective roadmap, meeting organizational and market needs.
2. Execute at a high level across all stages of product and service delivery.
3. Plan, scope, and evaluate systems that can make a measurable impact.
4. Continuously improve across customer experience and service delivery efforts.

More about digital excellence Get in touch

The post 8 common organizational challenges in achieving digital excellence appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Most organizations we meet encounter challenges across the wide breadth of skillsets and expertise that are required to successfully execute digital projects. Sometimes this can have a compounding effect that radically undermines team efforts, as teams move across a series of project phases that each require uniques skillsets to execute. In other cases, achieving digital excellence may just be a path to becoming more efficient and effective in meeting organizational goals and ensuring even greater success in your role.

Let’s take a look at where this complexity comes from and why we’ve designed our services around closing gaps between phases and enhancing your team’s processes and skills during each phase.

Knowledge and capability needs to run wide and deep

Digital is complicated. Many steps and many different levels of expertise are needed in order to execute effectively. Each failure or issue in process, methodology, or outcome across your efforts increasingly undermines every effort that follows.

Core areas of expertise required to successfully meet digital objectives include:

1. Research
2. Product strategy
3. Interaction design
4. System architecture
5. Build
6. Launch and promotion
7. Continuous improvement

Exploring these areas in more detail

A typical digital project will include this depth of requirements and the skillsets required to execute effectively across these standards of practice.

1. Research

• Internal (organizational)
• External (customers)

2. Product strategy

• Jobs-to-be-done and outcomes for personas
• Cohorts and behavioural groups
• Device and platform support (hardware vs software; mobile, desktop, other)
• Internal systems and staff interactions
• Content requirements
• Promotion and communications (including marketing, advertising, social, and SEO)
• Passive vs interactive
• KPI definition
• Resourcing
• Risks

3. Interaction design

• Information architecture
• Interface design
• Usability and accessibility
• Automation and interactions
• Context of use (adaptive and contextual IA and content)
• Onboarding, progress and frequency
• States

4. System architecture

• Privacy
• Security
• Data management
• Technology platform
• KPIs and Behavioural tracking

5. Build

• Backend
• APIs
• Front-end
• QA

6. Launch and promotion

• Awareness
• Growth
• Validation

7. Continuous improvement

• Behavioural tracking
• KPI tracking
• Review (KPI review, behavioural tracking review, user testing, etc)
• Iterate/Experiment
• Repeat (review, iterate, experiment)

It’s difficult for any one team to bring this level of expertise to the table. That’s why we’ve built our consulting practice on helping you learn and execute in these areas.

Determinants of organizational success

Ultimately, success is determined by your organization’s ability to:

1. Define an effective roadmap, meeting organizational and market needs.
2. Execute at a high level across all stages of product and service delivery.
3. Plan, scope, and evaluate systems that can make a measurable impact.
4. Continuously improve across customer experience and service delivery efforts.

Continue to part 2 Get in touch

The post Why digital excellence is so difficult to achieve appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Achieving Digital Excellence

With this guide, you’ll learn how to:

• Define an effective service delivery roadmap, meeting organizational and market needs
• Execute at a high level across all stages of product and service delivery
• Plan, scope, and evaluate systems that can make a measurable impact
• Continuously improve customer experience and service delivery efforts

Download the guide PDF

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