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Experience optimization | Personalization | Content operations

Welcome to what's next in your digital business evolution.

You’re in a digital transformation.

You have tough questions. How can you:

Use optimization, personalization, or automation technology to differentiate?

Become more user-centered?

Best leverage and measure the performance of content assets?

Simplify, yet innovate, the ways you serve your customers?

Beware the personalization gap.

Personalization software is immensely powerful, yet it requires poise to use effectively and safely at scale.

Strategy, design, and fast-track results from connected experiences.

Bucket Studio delivers strategy, execution, and analysis to make those digital business efforts a success.

We are a boutique UX and product practice dedicated to better personalization and connected experiences for digital professionals.

We believe in the beauty of design constraints.

We specialize in “shovel-ready” solutions that can be swiftly shipped, no matter your budget, technology, or resource level.

Connected UX is any digital touchpoint—from a product to a site to a contextual user flow—that requires orchestrating assets across multiple systems of record and, usually, multiple channels. CX here usually refers to the overall system, the UX to the particulars.

Popular examples of connected experience include Disney’s Magic Band and Sephora’s customer-to-customer messaging interface (credit: Bryan Malezsyk).

Personalization is a set of techniques and technologies for delivering a variety of connected experiences celebrated for their effectiveness.

An experience that uses customer data and understanding to frame, guide, extend, and enhance interactions based on that person’s history, preferences, context, and intent.

—James McCormick, Forrester (2017)

It includes everything from notifications to recommenders, dynamic content modules to bots, and test-and-learn practices.

Popular examples of personalized experiences includes Spotify’s algorithmically-generated music playlists, Amazon’s product recommendations, StitchFix, and Netflix’s user interface.

Personalization is hard, essential, and evolving fast. (Disagree?) It’s also part of a broader business trend.

Organizations today are seeking competitive advantage by becoming more user-centric and performance-focused across everything they do.

Part of that involves implementing robust, complex marketing technology. Another part involves finding new ways to measure, enhance, and systematize the value they bring their customers.

Bucket can accelerate your digital capabilities each way.

What clients say

Recommended kick-start solutions for connected experience

Ship better, sooner. We systematize key moments in your customer journey.

Test and learn

GUERRILLA TESTING focused on performance measurement and optimization: make key user interactions more data-driven to drive ROI.

Experience Optimization

User experience optimization

Smart user flows

Laser-focused PROOFS-OF-CONCEPT hatch personalization-driven programs, or launch products, features, or functionality.

Personalization and automation

Connected content

Deliver a CONTENT OPERATIONS "factory floor": Streamline metadata management. Automate content interactions. Remove cost, yet expand reach.

Content Operations

Content strategy and information sciences

Bucket Studio delivers high-performing, well-orchestrated customer experiences that users love and businesses envy—in every setting, at any scale, or any budget.

Our targeted solutions are designed to deliver resilient systems, yielding recurring business results across the customer journey in a flywheel effect.

Bucket provides a range of services key to realizing the connected CX business opportunity.

PRODUCTS, EXPERIENCES, and PROOFS OF CONCEPT: Bucket designs for a full array of digital touchpoints, from sites and apps to emerging content formats, channels, and user interfaces. We mobilize small squads to accelerate test-and-learn insights in your digital setting.

STRATEGY and MANAGEMENT CONSULTING: Personalization is a daunting area of marketing technology. We assess and evaluate the shape of your business opportunity with personalized experience. Combined with our community services, Bucket Studio provides niche expertise in driving measurable results, brand differentiation, and clear direction for connected experience—finding the right fit for you across customization, automation, and personalization in your customer touchpoints.

CONTENT OPERATIONS: Content is critical. All businesses have a stake in a more compelling customer experience, no matter the size, and content must perform. For content-focused clients, Bucket can tune and accelerate their business flywheel and their sales and marketing automation machines by focusing on making the most of content—and orchestrating high-performing user flows across the customer journey.

Bucket’s principal and teams have conducted countless projects across numerous sectors and in many challenging works settings, working for some of the more signature brands on the planet.

See our testimonials on this site, request more that are available only offline, and connect with Jeffrey MacIntyre on LinkedIn to see many more.

Bucket is genuinely independent and positioned to advise you judiciously.

Apart from that, here are 3 factors that distinguish us from competitors in our domain:

Content subject matter expertise, the x-factor in personalization work. We understand how design and context impacts content ROI.

Information sciences rigor. In short, AI needs IA. Algorithms rely on architecture. We deliver a “smart” UX that weaponizes structured data.

Product-centric savvy in Bucket’s own progressive personalization technique, closing the competitive gap and revealing incremental business opportunity, creating value even through modest efforts.

See our thought leadership below to get a fuller taste of Bucket’s unique POV and approach.

We’re veterans of large- and small-team projects (many times over).

We also thrive in working with tight-knit teams, doing guerrilla design.

Bucket regularly taps subject matter experts across major digital disciplines to form purpose-built teams for special assignments, from designers and developers to SEO and technology-specific specialists. Our network of fellow independents spans New York, the U.S., and abroad. We’d be happy to hear about your needs and work from there to assemble the key resources.

Project results

7-figure lifetime value from conversion rate optimization.

Experiment results were 3X lift of any prior test.

A conversion rate at 70% on a 35% open rate.

A SaaS client got a kickstart to their marketing automation.

Busy users loved notifications so much, they asked for more.

Delivering a widely praised POC on role-based personalization on time and under budget.

2+2=6 when unified content library nirvana is achieved.

New product features and a fresh revenue stream are realized by a taxonomy crosswalk.

A full capabilities deck is available upon request.

For more project highlights, see Predicate, from which Bucket Studio was hatched.

Clients

Clients of Bucket Studio and Predicate, LLC

Clients of Bucket Studio and Predicate, LLC

An independent content-focused strategy consultant, and avowed information sciences obsessive, Jeffrey works at the crossroads of product development, user experience, and information sciences.

His byline has appeared in WIRED, the New York Times, among many other publications. Jeffrey is also a founding member of the Consortium of Personalization Professionals. He has spoken and workshopped widely at conferences in North America and Europe.

His clients include the American Museum of Natural History, Best Buy, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Condé Nast, Consumer Reports, JP Morgan Chase, Mailchimp, Mastercard, NBCUniversal, News Corporation, Philips, Thomson Reuters, UNICEF, Universal Music, University of Michigan, Viacom, Vimeo, and Yahoo!

Predicate, his original consultancy, was founded in 2008; Bucket is new to late 2016.

Predicate’s focus is to define content offerings and product strategies. Bucket’s approach is to help organizations grapple with personalization, marketing automation, and content operations.

His consulting, speaking, and advisory work spans cultural institutions, startups, and the Fortune 50.

Selected thinking

Progressive Personalization: Designing a Better Personalized Experience
A framework to design for personalization today.

You Don’t Need Personalization 
So you say. A zoology of naysayers and naysaying.

Navigating the Personalization Gap: A Field Guide (Updated 2019) 
Success in a personalization initiative requires understanding the solutions landscape—and the true place of your needs within it. 

Notification Schemes are Raw or Cooked
There are two ways of looking at how to work with notifications. One is right.

Stay in the loop with Bucket’s efforts, and we’ll do our best to provide assistance—incorporating tips and techniques on ways to address challenges you share with us (anonymously, of course) through our existing speaking and publishing activities.

—How to uncover business opportunity in personalized experience

—How to design for personalized experience

—How to get started with personalization

—Where to get started with personalization or marketing automation

—How to master connected CX in a large organization

Feed us your best ideas.

Want to connect on something specific? Book a time to talk today or find us on Twitter.

Selected workshops & talks

KM Showcase 2020 | 4-5 March 2020
Knowledge Pros: Heroes to Personalization Programs Everywhere

Content Ops Summit | 9-10 December 2019
Orchestrating CX, Minus the Orchestra

Taxonomy Bootcamp 2019 | 5 November 2019
Taxonomy and Personalization

(with Salesforce and Tendo Communications)

Creating Connected Experiences 

MarTech Boston | 16 October 2018

Stop acquiring more marketing technology and start better connecting it to your digital customer experiences. This event will help you realize the full potential of your existing martech investment by better aligning it to your customer experience strategy and digital execution.

BUX | 25 October 2018
Design for Personalization, Or: Never Send a Marketer or Technologist to Do a UXer’s Job

UXPA DC | 12 April 2018
Putting Personalization in Your UX Playbook

JC-UX | 15 November 2017
Craft Your Personalization POV

What folks say. Bucket Studio in the conversation online.

CPP Boston | 12 February 2020

Proceedings from the semiannual meeting [PDF]


Follow Bucket.

🎯 Bucket List is a periodic newsletter of tales from the trenches of connected experience. ✨

These are the conversations I have with colleagues and clients, presented for a wider audience. Readers get a dash of:

  • đź›  Tactics and tools I use in serving my clients
  • đź“š Lessons learned and trends circulating in my network
  • 🎨 Examples, ideas, and teardowns of personalized, automated, or customized experiences

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    Bucket Studio and Bucket Brigade is based in New York, with offices in the bucolic Hudson Valley, about one hour from Manhattan's Grand Central Station.

    291 Main Street in Beacon, NY

    Bucket Studio, LLC

    291 Main Street

    Beacon, NY 12508

    We're in the lovely old post office building, a cherished local landmark.