Digital platforms have sprung up like mushrooms. Every company that deals with digitization and Industry 4.0, has at least already thought about the potential use of their digital platform. Many are already on the market. There are numerous providers. The technology is mature and has been tried and tested thousands of times.

It is becoming increasingly difficult as a developer or manufacturer of new technologies and an implementer of digital platforms. On the one hand, the market is becoming more complex, but on the other hand, it also seems saturated. But that shouldn’t shouldn’t generally discourage you from doing your own thing. All that is necessary is that it can generate economic added value.

For example, you need a digital platform that acts as a hub between data, systems, and customers if you want to sell digital data and services. Methods, storage media, functions, applications, user interfaces, and system connections play decisive roles.

If you want to implement, develop or use such a digital platform, the following questions necessarily arise:

• How is the system data generated and transmitted?
• Where does the content come from?
• How are the users involved?
• How are technologies such as artificial intelligence or deep learning integrated?
• How is the data stored?
• How is the digital platform managed?

However, these questions mainly focus on technology and implementation. It isn’t easy to make money with this digital platform if you stick to these aspects.

Customers of digital data and services are more interested in the properties, functions, and characteristics of the digital products themselves. With its technical implementation, the platform is just a tool for selling digital products, just like the supermarket is the tool for buying analog products.

A purchase decision depends much more on the “right” content than on the right technology in the background because the digital platform becomes a digital ecosystem.

Therefore, the crucial questions for the content of digital ecosystems are:

• How is the system integrated into the content?
• How is the content created?
• What content do users demand and use?
• What content is necessary?

What Is The “Right” Content?

Let’sLet’s Blunt: Any content that makes money is the “right” content.

But what exactly is content? According to the definition of meaning in the Duden, it is about “qualified content or information content.” The term “content” was primarily used in website development and spilled over with digitization to Industry 4.0, where the word takes on the meaning of “relevant data content.” The digitized world is about data with meaning and with specific data structures.

Examples

For “predictive maintenance, “a maintenance strategy famous in Industry 4.0, data and algorithms are required for monitoring, troubleshooting and troubleshooting. These algorithms and data are content. From our point of view, this content offers added value with which you can also earn money.

The same goes for:

• For commissioning algorithms for systems and products,
• for upgrades and optimizations for functions and algorithms and
• for data for the maintenance or inspection of plants and products.

Content can be created and used by the system, customers, and functions.

If you analyze the content of leading companies and products, you can identify unique characteristics of the “right” content. If successful, it is structured by experts, designed by professionals, connects the systems in terms of content, is used by functions, is used by customers, is affordable, and – above all – is paid for.

How Do You Get The 

“”right”” content for a digital ecosystem?

The following tasks are derived from the above characteristics:

• 1. Define and structure content
• 2. Design content methodically
• 3. Connect systems
• 4. Use content for functions
• 5. Make content usable
• 6. Develop a payment model

Task 1: Define And Structure The Content For The Digital Ecosystem

It is not the platform that decides what the content has to look like, but vice versa. It should be selected based on the content and how the digital medium must be implemented. Based on the customer’s requirements for the functions and data, the content must be developed to be used in the parts of the digital platform (see Task 4). It is imperative to ensure that the functions can be implemented appropriately with the data format. Therefore, it is necessary to deal in detail with the data to be sold, clearly define its digital structures, and decide on a suitable data format.

A popular data format is XML. The data can be well structured here. Also, this data format can be ideally used in digital projects. But any other data format is also suitable, as long as the system can handle it.

Task 2: Design Content Using Suitable Methods

After the content structure has been defined, the focus is on how it should be generated. The effort required for this should not be underestimated; it is a digital product. Since highly qualified programmers usually do not necessarily have the necessary content-related expertise, it is advisable to have the content created by experts. They can use simple and visual methods and follow suitable procedures and processes until specified quality standards are achieved.

Standardized steps for content creation have proven their worth, such as:

• visualize the system,
• defining the problem and
• designing the solution.

Task 3: Connect Systems For Content

In a world of digitization and Industry 4.0, the content is closely linked to the product’s production process and functionality. Therefore, interfaces between the system, development, production, and content must be precisely defined.

It is necessary to analyze how the technical system generates the data, how it gets into the content system, and finally, how it is connected to the content.

It’sIt’s not just about the physical layer like USB or Ethernet. But above all, about the data that is transmitted via these interfaces.

In the above example of “Predictive Maintenance,” this task must specify which information and measured values ​​are to be read out and stored cyclically from the system or product (monitoring) so that the following functions can process and use them.

Task 4: Use Content For Functions In The Digital Platform

The content cannot always be passed on in its original form. Processing often occurs in special functions of downstream systems, artificial intelligence, or databases. The content developed in other methods must be suitable for this processing (see task 1).

For “predictive maintenance,” the data is transferred to artificial intelligence, which then uses detailed data and algorithms to calculate and return the probability of error causes.

Task 5: Make Content Usable For Customers

The customers decide on the form and nature of the content. In this way, they become the decision-makers for digital products.

Similar to the supermarket, where the customer decides which products to buy.

It should be regularly observed and checked how customers use the content to derive improvements for the properties and structures of the content from the findings.

The development of a UX (User Experience) for the use of the data and algorithms by the customers can be the answer to:

• How should the customer receive data?
• How should he see, feel or hear the content?
• What should be the emotion that the content should trigger in the customer?

Task 6: Develop A Payment Model

The content is the digital product with which money is to be made. Content can lead to direct revenue because the customer pays for it directly. However, content can also lead to savings because a product or system can be produced more quickly, repaired, or more accessible to the market. The decision for a payment model should take both aspects into account.

For the example of “predictive maintenance,” the customer could pay for using the function in the form of a flat rate.

Conclusion

The content required and used by the customer forms the basis for business in digital ecosystems. The technology of the underlying digital platforms is of secondary importance as long as they fulfill their basic functionality.

The industry will only succeed in developing digital products based on data if the necessary content is created and used methodically. All characteristics for the “right” content should be taken into account.

Suppose the industry uses the existing experience, methods, and knowledge to create, market, and manage good content. In that case, it can be expected to master digitization, and success – especially economic success – will come quickly.

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The first wheelchair, then crutches – and continuing to study at a time, in a city and at a university where accessibility, or digital learning did not yet exist. Fortunately, however, it meant not being permanently restricted, being dependent on accessibility. How is today? Why is barrier-free so much more than stepless access to a public building? What needs to be considered for e-business, and what does a European directive have to do with it? Lots of questions, important questions. We are attempting an approximation – in five understandable points and five further reading tips.

Accessibility: Sooner Or Later, It Affects Everyone

What Is A Disability, And Who Does It Affect?

Not a week ago, we talked about Divers-IT, about diversity in the IT industry, at the Handelskraft Conference 2022. The assortment is very diverse. Nicola Baumgartner, the founder of the tea company Shuyao, showed in her conference contribution, for example, that the inclusion of people with disabilities ensures diversity in the everyday work of a digital business. But how can people with disabilities be included in the increasingly digital everyday life?

The figures on the subject of disability are astounding: although the universal symbol of disability is the wheelchair, only five percent of people with recognized disabilities worldwide use one – and this even though around 15 percent of the world’s population, i.e., around one billion people, have a disability! The number of unreported cases is far higher for many reasons.

And who now thinks, so what, I’m young, fit, hip, wait and see! Thirty-three percent of employees in their twenties today will have to learn to live with a permanent disability before they retire – and still have to master their job and everyday life: hearing loss, severe cognitive impairments, blindness, motor disabilities – the list is long.

Even many people who are not officially disabled have a congenital limitation that makes it difficult to find their way around in the online world: every tenth person is red-green-blind. Luminous red checkout buttons or green elements on websites that suggest sustainability are always inconspicuously greyish-brown to these people.

Definition Of Accessibility

Section 4 of the Act on Equal Opportunities for People with Disabilities states: »Constructional and other facilities, means of transport, technical items, information processing systems, acoustic and visual information sources, and communication facilities and other designed areas of life are barrier-free if they are accessible to people with disabilities, in general, can be found, accessed and used in the usual way, without particular difficulty, and in principle without outside help. The use of necessary aids due to the disability is permitted here.«

Ufftata, don’t be ashamed if you have to read this three times to understand the most important thing: Accessibility is defined here as a social dimension. It enables all people, regardless of age and almost regardless of the degree of disability, to live on an equal footing, be self-determined and independent and participate in society. Theoretically, in practice, this is not so easy to implement.

At the same time, the pressure to deal with the topic is increasing, especially for companies in digital business. A new EU directive will apply from June 28, 2025.

Accessibility Becomes Mandatory – Also Digitally

The New Binding EU Directive: The BFSG

It has been in force since August 2021 and will become binding on June 28, 2025, the Accessibility Strengthening Act (BFSG for short) based on an EU directive.

2025 – that sounds like a long way off. But three years to implement everything that the BFSG implies is not much. The law has an impact on our daily digital touchpoints in particular. Ultimately, however, all economic actors should look at accessibility in the run-up to the July 2025 deadline.

The law obliges private companies for the first time to offer barrier-free digital products and services in particular – this has an impact on e-commerce trade in specific and on web design in general. Far-sighted advice is particularly important to avoid expensive consequences – similar to the GDPR.

Accessibility In Digital Business

But how does that work, accessibility on the Internet? Where are the steps there that not everyone can climb? One thing in advance: it is not easy for real professionals to research this because there have been few concrete use cases so far – not to mention information in understandable language. Everything is very legal, complicated, detailed, and vague – no wonder: the Accessibility Strengthening Act is a barrier of words, 32 characters long.

We’re not going into what companies will generally have to consider to comply with the standard but rather concentrating on presenting what user experience design can already do to make the customer journey as inclusive as possible. Because when in doubt, this fulfills complicated standards and opens up new customer groups (we remember: one billion people, and the trend is rising).

Accessibility Improves Usability For Everyone

Inclusive User Experience Design

But when we talk about possibilities, we change the wording to inclusive instead of barrier-free here at the latest. Because the whole thing is a process, and it is wiser to speak a little defensively of inclusivity and concentrate on which target group you want to make more accessible for – for example, the visually impaired – than to talk of utopian-universal accessibility.

Suppose you want to become more inclusive with your digital business. In that case, you first have to ask yourself which usability poses which hurdles for which target group: These include complex page layouts, pixelated content that cannot cope with enlargement and becomes illegible, poor contrasts, annoying CAPTCHA images, who want to check whether the user is a human (and train AIs), complex or difficult forms, too many links or navigation elements, …. this list could also be continued.

A UX audit geared towards barrier-free design or modern usability can reveal many pain points here and help improve things sustainably. Incidentally, this also guarantees a lot of improvements for users without restrictions!

Together, you can design a strategy to meet the EU as mentioned above directive or the BFSG, meet the corresponding DIN ISO standards for inclusive design, implement the recommendations of the Web Accessibility Initiative, and, for example, enable screen readers to work optimally. Many measures in the code can be intelligently implemented in an already planned relaunch or migration – just like our customer frost did, our first reading tip!

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