Today on Radio Johnny Jeff Parks talks with independent content and UX consultant, who will be presenting at the upcoming edUi Conference in Richmond, Stephanie Hay. Steph shares insights about writing content that is both compelling and useful by shifting our perspective to that of the people for whom we are trying to communicate. Sharing insights about user happiness and working towards are greater understanding of the emotional response of the user, organizations can start speaking to the values of their clients resulting in a better user experience.

Quotes

“…people don’t try very hard to write content. They go to this formulaic approach of needing to fill in real estate that may have been ear marked by the designer, or constrained by the CMS of choice..there isn’t the kind of content that really speaks to a user that the user wants to read.”

“Users are now skeptical, and prone, to select whatever is at the top of a search result. Choosing who their friends recommend, that becomes and amazing opportunity to get your content front and centre. The way that you do that is by being different from the pack. In content, for example, maybe 5 or 10 years ago having a website was an asset. Today having a website is not an asset and neither is having a lot of content on your website if that content is not helpful or compelling.”

“The most important consideration from a UX perspective, I think, is about prioritizing user happiness…often UX folks like myself are so focused on the interaction and even getting user feedback, we inadvertently ignore a couple of things… for example the microcopy that encompasses an interaction…the second piece of this is the emotional response that the user can have, is often overlooked. “

Notes

* Follow Steph on Twitter
* Design for Emotion by Trevor van Gorp and Edie Adams
* Why Personas Are Critical for Content Strategy by Kris Mausser
* The Cast of Personas by Indi Young

Mobile websites and applications (apps) give travelers immediate access to:

• All of the content available on the Internet.
• Data and content that our phones can sense about the local environment.

Mobile apps, in particular, are turning confused tourists into knowledgeable “instant-locals,” providing content on the fly for decisions about where to stay, what to eat, and what to do.

That sounds great, right? Well, as somebody who oversees mobile apps for a global, multibrand hotel company, I can tell you that making sense out of all this content and data is HARD. I have overseen the design and delivery for mobile apps that have been downloaded more than 800,000 times across 6 different continents in 5 different languages and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in gross revenue. For any app, I can testify that the most difficult decision we face is: What content we should present to the user? We could potentially give users an incredible array of content about our hotels and the users’ stay. To make matters worse, on mobile phones we have the constraints of an impossibly small screen and lots of competing real-world distractions. Imagine a train or subway passenger trying to figure out whether a satisfactory hotel is available at the next stop. She needs our content to be easy to access and relevant to her decision.

So, how do we avoid overloading our mobile-wielding customers with content? How do we decide what content is most relevant, especially when a customer is using a mobile phone? That’s where situational awareness comes into play.

Introducing Situational Awareness

Situational Awareness is a field of research within cognitive science that Dr. Mica Endsley defines as “the perception of elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future,” (Endsley, 1995). In short, situational awareness is knowing what is going on around a user and what is most important to the user’s current goals.

You can imagine how handy this research would be for helping airline pilots, nuclear plant operators and emergency responders. These people regularly face more content and data than our limited human cognitive abilities can process and can quickly succumb to information overload. If not addressed, the result can be a wrong decision or even the inability to make a decision at all–and then disaster. Today, travelers looking for a hotel room in an unfamiliar city are at risk for being inundated with content so that it hinders, not helps, their decisions. So, I decided to apply research from situational awareness to travelers who are in need of hotel rooms. If we can provide our travelers with the highest level of situational awareness, then they can confidently make good decisions.

You may never need to define the content structure for a hotel-finding app, but Situational Awareness can help you define a content structure anytime you are building a mobile app to help your users make a decision or accomplish a goal.  Now, lets look at how you can structure and aggregate content to build Situational Awareness for users.

Understanding the Levels of Situational Awareness

Users can become aware of their context, or situation, at three levels. Each level builds on the previous one. Let’s walk through each of these levels and use finding a hotel as an example.

Level 1: Perception

At this level, a user might know where they currently are and where a hotel is. The user knows the basic facts but still doesn’t have a good picture of how long it will take them to get to the hotel. A study of airline pilots showed that 76% of Situation Awareness-related errors could be traced to the lack of this level of basic information (Jones and Endsley, 1996).

Level 2: Comprehension

At this level, users will comprehend how long it will take them to get to the hotel based on how far away they are from the hotel and what their transportation options are.

Level 3: Projection

At this level, a user can leverage information to make a prediction about how long it will take them to get the hotel at some future date. For example, they may know if they go to Boston during St. Patrick’s day and they have to cross a parade route then it is going to take longer.

You can see how these levels progressively build on each other. To project how long it will take a traveler to get to a hotel, there are multiple things that they must comprehend, including how far away the hotel is. To comprehend how far away a hotel is, they must know several basic facts about their location and the location of the hotel.

The higher the level of situational awareness that our users can achieve through the content we present to them, the easier it will be for them to quickly make confident decisions to accomplish their goals.

To understand HOW our pieces of content build on each other, we must visualize their hierarchical relationship. Fortunately, we have a tool to do just that.

Visualizing Situational Awareness with a Goal-Directed Task Analysis

We can tie all of this content and data together into a Goal-Directed Task Analysis (GDTA), a powerful artifact to visualize and measure situational awareness. I know what you’re thinking. User task flow analysis is nothing new. Why is GDTA different? GDTA helps you plan displaying the right content at the right time for the right situational awareness. GDTA maps the best way to combine content and data to help users comprehend quickly–and then make a decision.

What’s the first step in constructing a GDTA? Map the goals of our users and the decisions that our users must make to accomplish those goals. See Figure 1 as an example. (Note that this is just a mapping of a demonstrative subset and not a complete mapping of all potential goals.)

Fig 1. Goal and Decision Structure for Travelers, Partial Segment

The next step? Build a hierarchy of content that users will need to achieve maximum levels of situational awareness to make those decisions. See Figure 2 for a hierarchy of content for the decision “Is the hotel in a good location for me?”

Fig 2. Content Hierarchy for a Decision

Now that we have a hierarchy of content created in our GDTA, we can use it to ensure that we are presenting content to our users that will provide them with maximum situational awareness.

Tips for Applying Situational Awareness to a Mobile Phone Application

I have used GDTAs over the past six years to inform the content strategy for mobile websites, native smartphone apps, native tablet apps and tools designed to be used in the field by the US Army. With all this experience under my belt, I want to share some practical tips for applying the tenets of situational awareness to a GDTA and, ultimately, to a content strategy.

1. One Goal = One Screen
   Don’t make users dig through multiple places in the app to gather all the content they need for a single decision.  All key content for a decision should be shown on the same screen. For example, in all of the hotel details pages that I plan, I always include those key indicators for allowing a user to accomplish the goal of picking a hotel that is right for them: price, distance, photos and amenities.

2. Machines Should Consolidate Content, Humans Should Make Decisions
   The thing that I have found most useful about the GDTA is it keeps me focused on consolidating content into a unit of information that gives users at-a-glance situational awareness. It’s the only way to help users focus on making decisions and not waste their time trying to make sense out of the content. The higher level of situational awareness that we can achieve through a technical solution, then the better we will be able to aid the user. For example, consider the content piece “Projected time to get to to the hotel.” I would present the user with a single message: “It will take you 33 minutes to get to the hotel from the airport on the day your flight lands”. And the bonus? This “rolled-up” content provides not only provides maximum situational awareness, it is also ideal for a small screen.Unfortunately, an accurate system projection of this complexity is rare. I have yet to come across a technical system that can calculate this timing projection with any degree of accuracy. That would be borderline artificial intelligence. So, barring that, I try to present Level 2 pieces of data together so that users can more easily make the jump from Level 2 Situational Awareness provided by the content we have available to Level 3 Situational Awareness by applying human intelligence. In this case, I would display the distance to the hotel as well as basic traffic advisories.
3. Let Users Drill-down for If They Need More Confidence
   Users tend to have a lower level of confidence in a system’s Level 3 projections, so it is a best practice to let users drill down to see the underlying Level 2 and Level 1 content. Following our “time to the hotel” example, I would let the user tap on the system-projected time and give them a pop-up message with the Level 2 content presented:

• the hotel is 10 miles away by car.
• traffic is heavy.
• there are currently no special events.

If the Level 3 projections are accurate, then users will learn to trust them over time and not be as reliant on Level 2 content.

4. Prompt Users to Revisit Decisions Based on Changing Conditions
   Conditions will constantly be changing in an environment as dynamic as a large city with lots of hotels, so travelers may need to re-evaluate their hotel decisions based on certain critical triggers. For example, if there is heavy traffic congestion then a traveler may want to revisit their hotel decision and pick a new hotel that they can get to more quickly. Mobile apps are great, because they allow us to send out these critical real-time alerts and warnings through push notifications.
5. Be Aware of In-App Content vs. Environmental Content
   I always try to remember that we can’t present every bit of content or information to travelers in our apps. So, as I go through the content from the GDTA I try to think “Is this content they could easily get from their surrounding environment?” For example, we don’t include natural disaster information within our app, unless the disaster affects our hotels. It is relevant to users’ decisions, but users can perceive natural disasters easily from their surrounding environment. If a traveler is stranded because of a snowstorm, then he or she knows it is going to take longer to get to their hotel. However, if the hotel that the traveler is trying to reach is closed or damaged, we should notify the traveler.

The Bottom Line

Situational Awareness gives us a research-proven method and model for making sense out of the flood of real-time content that travelers access thanks to mobile devices. The GDTA gives us a powerful artifact that visualizes how we should structure content to make travelers fully aware of their situation–and quickly. I find GDTA tremendously helpful for deciding what content we need to gather and present to users. The GDTA also informs technical and design decisions to consolidate and present content so that users can accomplish their goals. I focused on travelers and hotel-finding in mobile apps here, but the problems of information overload on a mobile device are coming to life in almost every industry and domain. Fortunately, we don’t have to re-invent the wheel because GDTA is a robust model ready to help us.

Sure, you can search Pinterest, but what makes the site so much fun is the exploration and element of surprise, in large part enabled by categorization of content by both the Pinterest team and the site’s users. As user trends continue to shift from search to discovery, creating the structure and process to support that discovery requires a sophisticated content strategy.

Taxonomy is about so much more than categorizing content. When crafting a content strategy, we consider the people, processes and technologies that support the content throughout its lifecycle. The same goes for creating taxonomy. As content strategists, we have to think about taxonomy from the perspective of what terms and structure will help the content perform best and support the organization’s business goals. We also have to consider the longevity and flexibility of the taxonomy.

The Taxonomy of a Pin

On Pinterest, users can explore boards in one of 32 categories—31 specific categories plus the catchall “Other”—and uncategorized boards. But when users create a board, they’re not required to assign one of the 32 taxonomy terms to their board. For someone exploring Pinterest by topic, this leaves a gap between content that exists related to that topic and content that has been categorized as that topic. This means that pins on a food-related board named “Recipes” or “Vegetarian Dishes” may not appear under “Food & Drink,” preventing people from discovering them.

Pinterest could help close this gap by requiring users to categorize their boards at the time they create and name them. Instead of requiring users to categorize each board they create, however, Pinterest’s strategy is to involve other users. When someone comes across an uncategorized board, they’re asked to help by selecting one of the 32 categories from a dropdown.

 So while Pinterest gives its user community a lot of free reign when it comes to naming and organizing content, this strategy is supported by well-placed guidance to help the community improve the quality and reliability of the content. Pinterest strikes a balance between flexibility and structure by involving users in enhancing site categorization while lowering the barrier to entry for users who would rather not spend their time categorizing.

Wondering how to bring together taxonomy and content to form a strategic user experience—and how doing so benefits your organization? Read on.

Taxonomy & Content Strategy: a Match Made in Metadata Heaven

Taxonomy can help support an organization’s content strategy, and vice versa, by:

• Helping users discover and interact with content that’s interesting and relevant to them. Taxonomy enables us to use related content to tell a story and keep users engaged. Want to increase the time people are spending on your site or the number of pages they’re viewing? Make your first impression, “This is great, now give me more of it.” Then use taxonomy to serve up related articles, photo galleries, videos, product descriptions and other content. Paired with an interaction designer, a content strategist can make recommendations for calls to action, prompts, cues and other microcopy that guides users through related content.
• Promoting older but still relevant content. Creating and promoting new content is important, but leading users to older content may also be part of your content strategy. As content strategists, we can work with information architects and developers to find ways to give prominence to content that may otherwise be buried in an archive. For example, for a series of reports usually listed in chronological order and filtered by date, a content strategist may use supporting research to recommend that users also be able to interact with this content by subject.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project does a nice job balancing the latest content with relevant information from its archives. Within each topic page, the emphasis is on the latest research, but users can also filter reports by content type (e.g., report, data set, infographic) and by year. Then, on each report page, the Pew Research Center serves up “Related Research” on the same topic, even though some of the related items might be from a few years ago. In the sidebar, a data point from the report serves as another method of encouraging visitors to explore additional content.

Each of Pew’s reports is served up with related—but not always the most recent—research

• Elevating content from deeper sections of the site. Even if you’re not a strict adherent to the three-click rule, reducing the amount of time it takes your users to discover relevant content can’t be a bad thing. Taxonomy allows us to showcase content that, on a sitemap, appears to be many levels deep on the homepage or secondary pages.
• Relating and reusing content across multiple platforms and site installations. For example, part of your content strategy is to build a stronger connection between your website and your blog, which just happen to be driven by different content management systems. Taxonomy can help. Assuming you’re using the same taxonomy terms in both systems, you can still dynamically relate content using a tool like RSS, pulling relevant blog posts into web pages that are categorized with the same terms.
• Helping our clients manage content now and over time. Content strategists, information architects and developers should work together to determine how taxonomy plays into the content management system, from creating content types to establishing workflows. Using dynamic relationships to populate content in multiple places means less work for the content administrators, who no longer have to update multiple pages or sites with the same information. And presenting content administrators with term lists instead of relying on them to enter metadata reduces human errors and inconsistency.

Keep in mind that implementing or revising a taxonomy can require change management. Choosing well-researched and tested vocabularies can support an intuitive user experience, but may also require some guidance—instructional content on the administrative interface, for example—for content authors and managers. They may be used to using the organization’s internal terms, not the terms site visitors are using when looking for information, to define content.

• Providing context for tagging. You may decide that users, not your organization, are going to define how your content is classified and labeled. Take a look at Goodreads, a social network for readers. You start with the simplest of taxonomies: three default bookshelves called “read,” “currently-reading” and “to-read.” From there, you can create and name other bookshelves, or categories, from the basic “science fiction” to the clever “it-was-earth-all-along,” and place books on more than one shelf.

This approach empowers Goodreads to support discovery in many ways. For example, on each book’s page, you can see a “Genres” callout showing how readers most often classified the book. You can also follow the “See top shelves” link for the full list of shelf names. Whether you prefer to find popular books by broad category or dig into unique, quirky lists made by other users, Goodreads provides ample opportunity to do both.

Genres and bookshelves for The Hunger Games.

Whether you call it “folksonomy” or “social tagging,” your role as a content strategist is to provide the context to empower your users to make the best decisions about tagging your content. What information do they need to tag their content in a way that supports your business strategy, but with minimal effort on their part? And what information does your organization need to maintain, promote and otherwise take advantage of the content users have indexed? Going back to our Goodreads example, the site offers a set of “Bookshelf Tips” to help users get the most out of their categories.

• Empowering designers to create more engaging interactions. Taxonomy, together with other components of information architecture and data modeling, helps designers create the interactions that drive users find the content they need and want to share. Sorting, filtering and visualizing data wouldn’t be possible without the right content structure behind the scenes.

Because taxonomy can impact everything from interface design to content management system development, the best conversations about taxonomy and content strategy usually involve diverse members of your team. The information architect and content strategist should invite designers, writers, search engine optimization specialists, CMS developers, marketers and site administrators to contribute ideas and voice concerns. With input from your stakeholders, it’s time to get started.

Getting Started: If the Taxonomy Fits…

Tags or categories? Open taxonomy or closed vocabulary? How deep should your hierarchies go? Your content strategy should help drive which type of taxonomy to use when.

If your organization’s strategy is to build a collaborative community in which engaged users are creating content, then a closed taxonomy with a limited vocabulary may send the wrong message.

If you plan on creating content about the same subjects for the foreseeable future, then relating content through taxonomy can work well. But if the subjects will change often, then relating specific pieces or types of content to each other rather than linking them via taxonomy may work better.

You may also decide to limit your use of taxonomy, for example, if your organization is highly risk-averse and leaves nothing to chance. Relying on taxonomy-driven dynamic relationships, rather than manually creating the relationships between pieces of content, may not be the right content strategy for you, since you lose control over exactly what displays where. When a database, rather than a human being, is creating content relationships, the results may be humorous or even inappropriate.

When it comes to developing the list of terms you will use, a card sort can be a good starting point. Through this usability method, you can learn how users would organize your content and what labels they would assign to each category—information commonly used to inform sitemap development but just as useful when building out a taxonomy.

What Are You Waiting For?

Gather a multidisciplinary team and look for opportunities to integrate your taxonomy and content strategy. Get up close and personal with your content management system to see how you might be able to create more dynamic relationships between content. Review your archives and dig deeper into your sitemap to see what content deserves a promotion. Figure out where you’re still making updates manually, and see if introducing a taxonomy can help reduce the time you spend administering your content across channels.

Your rewards? Engaging interactions, consistent content and happy content managers, to name just a few.

Why Target Audience Segmentation Isn’t Enough

At an organizational level, content treatment, be it in print or online, has traditionally defaulted to the use of broader target audience segmentation to define messaging and distribution/dissemination. Speak to most content owners and creators within established departments – communications, marketing, policy – and you’ll hear how their messaging strategy aligns with the organization’s (or product/service’s) target audience. The challenge with digital content, however, is that the target audience segmentation approach of yesterday’s Industrial Revolution falls far short of the content requirements of today’s Information Age.

“A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design.” – Kim Goodwin

The Benefits Of Personas To Digital Content

Personas help to bring richness to otherwise statistical data. Unlike traditional target audience segmentation, they provide greater depth and context to generic target audience groups by focusing on one character who embodies the predominant qualities of the larger group.

When done right, personas bolster demographic, psychographic and technographic data with more qualitative information that is paramount to all content decisions:

All of the above have incredible effects on the types of content published, when it is published, how it is published and what happens to it after it has been published.

Because of this, those who undertake content strategy without doing their due diligence to create personas will miss critical information points that should be used to inform the planning, creation, management and measurement of digital content.

Target Audience vs. Personas: A Case Study

I recently worked on creating a bilingual (English/French) content strategy for a university publication that was transitioning from print-only to digital first. When I started, the information provided by the editorial team and the communications department was that the publication had two distinct primary target audience segments:

• alumni over the age of 40; and,
• alumni under the age of 40.

Their secondary target market was university staff and donors. As a starting point, these vague delineations didn’t provide enough information to help decide:

• What content needed to be created;
• How to digitally disseminate the content (Through email? Social? Web? Mobile?);
• Where visitors would be viewing the content (Locally? From around the world?);
• How they would access the content (From their desktop computer? From their iPhones? Not online at all?)

By bolstering the initial broad target audience segmentation with additional psychographic and technographic data, the university still didn’t have enough information to help properly create an effective digital content strategy for such a broad target audience group.

With so many critical questions left unanswered, and too many costly technology decisions to make, the university agreed to create personas from research undertaken for that express purpose.

Amazing results were uncovered once the personas were completed. A third target audience segment emerged (current students) and the university discovered that the technology assumptions they had made based on dividing their primary target audience segment into two groups – older and younger users – was erroneous. It turns out, their highly educated older demographic was just as inclined to read content on a tablet as their younger audience group. What’s more, the personas also helped to define an effective content strategy for user generated content in multiple languages. This helped to plan for a better user experience through an adaptive translation approach rather than a more traditional virtual English/French tumble approach.

Surprisingly, the most valuable effect the personas had on informing the content strategy was on the conversations they sparked with key stakeholders. Similar to most organizations, the university had content stakeholders scattered between a variety of different departments – web, communications, marketing, graphic design, alumni, public relations, development, and the magazine itself. While each could agree on the segments they were trying to target, none could agree on which department’s communications objectives and content were more important.

(c) All rights reserved by Follow The UX Leader

Borrowing from the fundamentals of user experience design, I printed the personas on 4×3 foot poster-size paper (as seen in the image above) and hung them up in the boardroom for all to see during critical content strategy meetings. Each time content strategy discussions derailed due to departmental agenda, I was able to re-direct the conversations to one of the personas hanging on the wall – how would this decision/requirement/objective/perspective help this particular user in obtaining the information that he/she wants or needs?

This approach helped all inter-disciplinary teams contribute to the overall content strategy by directing their expertise and efforts towards creating a sustainable model and governance structure that satisfied not only the needs of the department, but of their users as well.

With the foundational research completed for each target audience segment, the university now has a baseline upon which to continue to assess, measure and tweak the initial content strategy. In two years’ time they can update the personas with new research and continue to glean insights from the rapidly changing technological and social landscape that impacts the university’s messaging and delivery.

The Long Term Value of Personas To Content Strategy

Content strategy is more than just a discipline. It’s an approach to content that must be adopted at all levels of an organization to be effective. As it becomes ubiquitous to the way in which traditional disciplines create and manage content (marketing, communications, public relations, etc.) across digital channels, the tools that we use now to plan for content will need to evolve beyond the out-dated approach of target audience segmentation. With the demise of top down communications and a increasingly fractured digital channel landscape, organizations must continue to plan for and produce content that remains liquid and linked to engage users on their terms.

That’s why personas are such a critical component to an organization’s overall content strategy. You can’t provide the right content, at the right time, on the right device to every user without it. Over the long term, personas are the insurance policy that all organizations need to protect a key component of one of their largest digital assets – their content.

NC-BY-CC-2.0 by cannedtuna

Please, please, please could we stop talking about content strategy as if it only applies to the web design professional. The impact of content and user experience go far wider and should be at the heart of everyday marketing practice.

Reading Jonathan Kahn’s brilliant article on A LIST Apart, I couldn’t help being struck by how the debate around content strategy still seems firmly rooted in the realm of web design and development.   Now don’t get me wrong, you’ll find no bigger fan of content strategy as a discipline than me .  As a user experience practitioner I am fascinated by the way content strategy is driving the agenda for how we create and maintain compelling web experiences.

Perhaps it’s the wider perspective working for integrated agency affords, but I can’t help feeling that we are missing a trick. Surely we need to drag content strategy out of shadows and beyond the domain of the aloof web specialist (come on, we know we are!) and position it firmly into the core  of everyday, contemporary marketing practice.

In another article I once wrote I made the argument that content strategy goes beyond the constraints of the web site, to all digital touch points and all digital content. The rise of the social web and democratisation of content creation, calls for a new breed of content strategist, one that is dedicated to monitoring, aggregating, contributing and shaping content about the brand in all its digital guises. I believe we work toward a model for shaping content strategy as a means for understanding which conversations to invest in. This argument is being taken further to suggest that ‘user experience’ needs to extend not only to all media, but the gaps in between, Samantha Starmer starts this debate most eloquently.

In this context we see that content strategy goes beyond just the preserve of the digital specialist. We need  to call on the insight into consumer behaviour brought by the ‘traditional’ planner; the detailed understanding of connection and effect, through data;  the appreciation of consumer mental models and demands through search; and the subtleties of the social specialist to build a framework for interaction.

Perhaps, ironically, could the semantics be to blame for keeping content strategy niche? The strongest illustration being what we actually mean by the term content.  By most definitions a TV ad is content, words are content, YouTube video is content, comments and blog post are content – it’s hardly useful . Perhaps we should be thinking more at differentiating by what content does. Is it branded content that informs and compels? It is search content that attracts and directs? Is it conversational content that drives participation? In this way we can link content to its intended behavioural outcome, rather than its make-up or taxonomy.

So is there a wider view?

I think so. I think we need to see content strategy as being part of a wider content ecosystem.

Content strategy is concerned with the systems and processes for structuring, organising, managing and creating the content. As such it is closest to the traditional user experience professional.

Editorial strategy is then concerned with what to say and to whom. It covers messaging, themes , topics, points of view and how they are expressed. As such it is closest to the writers and search specialists.

Content marketing covers how to drive conversation around content. How to use it to attract attention, engagement and participation. And as such closer is to the traditional communication and   marketing professional.

In conclusion brands and their agencies should no longer dismiss content strategy as something the web guys do. It’s at the very heart of modern marketing practice and should be embraced.

Something that’s fascinated me about online metrics since I started working in online (quite a long time ago in internet terms) is their immediacy. In fact, it’s their instancy… this real-time sense you get from actually watching people move in and out of a website or email or mobile platform—that really mesmerises. The numbers create a kind of certainty about the clicks, impressions, traffic volume… and based on those numbers we believe we can know what worked (or didn’t work). On the basis of these metrics we do more or less of the same.

As fascinating and addictive as these numbers are, it bothers me that these are the kind of metrics clients and agencies use to back-up ideas and shore up budget planning. Where’s the context? What do the numbers mean?

There’s a clear correlation between the media metrics that took hold of the advertising world in the 1980s, and the kind of metrics used to demonstrate online currency during efficacy during the 1990s. Media metrics, essentially measuring ‘eyeballs,’ or audience volumes, was the established bedrock of media-buying principles. Cost-per-thousand and audience testing entirely centred on brands asking “What do you think of me?”

In those days, when volume and mass ruled, the loudest, most ubiquitous voices were majestic, and the creatives that delivered ‘me-to-you’ messages were governed and controlled by the number crunchers on Madison Avenue and Charlotte Street. Audiences weren’t people – they were traded commodities. Come the turn of the millennium, the sheer cacophony of branded messages started to repel those same audiences, who began to zone out the noise and make their own media and brand choices. Audiences, markets—people!—got message-weary just around the time the internet got domestic.

Unfortunately, early players in the Internet business essentially copied the same kind of media metrics approach but applied it to an entirely different kind of media. You can see the logic… audience volume became the easiest way to describe effectiveness to budget-carrying agencies and a client demographic that felt technologically remote from this new media platform. Anyway – in comparison to the audience mega-transport ships of traditional broadcast and print media, all the Internet had to offer was little more than a landing-raft, in those days!

So, back to the metrics and why they bother me. Online you can measure everything. In fact, you can measure so much, you may drown in numbers before you get a chance to ask what any of them mean.

For instance, I can know how many people come to my website, where they come from, and which and how many of my pages they visit; I can know if they’re unique visitors or returners, and if they dwell for short or long periods; I know what they click on my page—I can even find out if they’re clicking in places that aren’t links. I can know if they’ve started to do something and then stopped, if they complete it, how long it took, and where they go next. I can measure when traffic numbers go up or down, and identify sad and lonely corners where no-one ever goes. I can see which search terms bring people to my site, and I can optimise the content and metadata to capture more of those people. And I can create the most detailed and beautiful charts that carry all these pieces of information back to my colleagues and clients and their bosses. Job done?

No. Traffic numbers are just that. Summaries of individual measures. Anyone can sit alongside a motorway and count cars, know if they’re travelling North or South, what models they are, how fast they’re going… Finding out why they’re on the road, what their journey’s for, and whether the route works? Well, that’s a bit harder, and such is the problem with online metrics and analytics. The appetite to invest in getting to know audiences / users – actually asking people what they want and then verifying their answers—is still pretty small.

CDA are content strategists, and we’ve been trying to figure out what makes good online content for a few years now. Aside from the rules around structure, language, and tone, and how to manage these aspects in the creation and publishing processes we’ve established, increasingly our conclusion is it’s all about context. At its simplest level, the question we want answered is: Is this content relevant and useful for the purpose of someone’s visit?

The plethora of metrics at the end of a mouse click, and more lately, Google Analytic’s richer analysis capabilities, make it possible (with expert input) to correlate different number sets and make experienced guesses at what traffic figures mean. Other bespoke systems such as WebTrends and ComScore let us run specific reports, but there’s still the sense we’re measuring the direction and colour of the traffic—not finding out why it’s on the road so we can build a better route.

The missing factor is a real-life user experience woven into the mix. I want to know if the content a site owner invests in is the content someone wants or needs to complete a task.

I want to know if the content we’re being asked to create is the content people have any interest in at all, or if it’s wasting my client’s budget. I want reliable evidence—from my audience or users—that the content we recommend to a client is worth his money. I want my client to be able to plan and budget his content requirements in the same way he plans and budgets all his business resources and expenditure.

And most of all, I want to understand the different contexts of a user visit, so we can recommend and create flexible content that meets each user’s context of interest.

Tall order?

Well, some while ago we developed the idea of CUT (Content Usefulness Toolkit). In outline, it’s a methodology of common sense.

First of all, CUT makes a big assumption. CUT assumes people respond positively to useful online content. But what’s useful for you may not be useful for me. What’s useful to users in a grocery ecommerce environment may not be useful to users on a recruitment website, or to a corporate site building an international brand. Getting the latest news may be useful on an investment site. Signing up for a daily tip via mobile may be useful for someone on a dieting site. So usefulness itself has to be understood, which is why the starting point with CUT is to find out what’s useful in the broadest context of the property.

And here’s a note: usefulness is not usability. Usability tests whether people can complete tasks within a planned or built structure. Usefulness is about understanding a need and targeting it with content that delivers. I’m seeing evidence the two are often confused.

Step 1: In our scoping model you can see that understanding usefulness within the context of a specific proposition is the critical driver for everything else. And understanding is achieved by talking to people—not by looking at traffic metrics (as beautiful as they can be made to look). Their role is later in the process. This concept is not new. We conceive and design virtually any new product to meet needs and solve problems. Ask any NPD professional.

CDA’s CUT (content Usefulness Toolkit) | identifies content for development or culling - CDA Ltd © 2008

Step 2: Now that we possess a greater understanding of what people find useful, we can plan or audit the content with an informed critical capacity.

Step3: Now we can begin to get smart with our metrics. With much greater insight into our audience, we can set a metrics plan that measures whether or not user traffic responds well to the content planned around our audience’s stated expectations of something useful.

Another note: be very careful with metrics, for example, how you consider ‘bounce’ numbers. There’s a school of thought that supports the negative interpretation that you’ve not engaged a bounced visitor. But consider how a bounce could record a very satisfied user: He had a question that was perfectly answered by the content of the page and immediately bounced off happy. It’s all in the context. If that page was a clear ‘how-to’ explanation of how to fix a leaky tap, for example, then you could well have a very satisfied visitor very quickly. If the page was the first of a 5-step registration, then it could indicate the process was unclear or not what your visitor was seeking.

So, understand what you’re measuring. This means setting your analytics goals to measure traffic behaviours based on what people have said they do or don’t expect to find useful. These goals are your indicators of content success or failure—but they’re only indicators.

Step 4: During Step 4, we ask the audience again. We use an online questionnaire to find out if people got what they wanted or not, based on their reason for being on the site in the first place. We ask why they were there, and ask them to rate their experience.

These quantitative responses, combined with our traffic metrics, pattern out to give clear targets for content development or even culling. The responses drive the strategic content direction and, critically, indicate budget allocation. They give content—the stuff that people come to access, the stuff that doesn’t just happen but which takes considerable planning and skill to get right—an operational and measurable foundation.

CDA are already working the methodology with several live sites. It’s helping make sense of existing metrics. It’s providing a framework that’s informing our recommendations and helping clients take a fresh view of the metrics they capture and use to make decisions about where to make investments.

Early, but exciting days—this is a nascent development but one we’re building into an essential business tool.

The process of publishing content, particularly when it includes content destined for the web, continues to be a mysterious process for corporate stakeholders, and sometimes for those involved in the process of publishing.

The simplest of project plans I’ve ever been given came from a program coordinator, circa 1995, and looked like this:

This was woefully inadequate from a production perspective. But from her perspective, the writing, which happened in her department, and the publishing, which to her meant getting the content before the eyeballs of her audience, were the only two important aspects to the publishing process, and the only two steps on her radar.

When the publishing team adjusted the process, it looked something like this:

Their process focuses on a set of production tasks, with the assumption that the process began with writing and ended with publishing. And in a way, it did—the published content remained static when print was the primary medium.

In 2010, the process looks quite different. Publishing content is a cyclical, iterative process that looks more like this:

Publishing to print is no longer the default setting for content. The Web is the main medium. Content gets converged, integrated, componentized, recombined, and syndicated. The content visible to users is the tip of the iceberg. A complex system supports the delivery of content, from infrastructure through user experience, and a host of post-publishing decisions close the loop, either to a new iteration or a content sunset.

The term “closing the loop” generally refers to a step in a cycle or process, used to assess effectiveness. It is not a final step, but rather a step that bridges the end of a process and the beginning of the next iteration. For content, closing the loop means considering content at every step through the conception, creation, management, and distribution of content – in other words, throughout the entire lifecycle of content.

Enter the Content Lifecycle

Recognizing a content lifecycle means recognizing that the business of creating and publishing content follows a recognizable, predictable, repeatable process. While the sub-processes may be subject to variations between content genres, as well as situation-specific variations, the overall process is consistent and stable. The content lifecycle describes an organic system, and is system-agnostic.

As the process of developing, managing, and publishing content becomes more complex, the descriptions of the various lifecycle stages include aspects of managing content through a CMS (content management system).

The saying “if you don’t know where you’re going, any path will take you there” is definitely a caution that applies to the management of content throughout its lifecycle. The success of a lifecycle is directly related to the effort put into planning the content strategy.  The various components and intersections of content have become too complicated to begin implementing, and hoping to connect the dots later on. When constructing a house, a builder works from a set of plans that specifies not only the structural dimensions, but also the heating, ventilation, and plumbing. By comparison, a content strategist creates the blueprint by which designers, writers, and developers can build a successful model for delivering content.

After all, the content lifecycle exists whether content is managed manually, with some assistance of technology, or highly automated through technology. The definition of a content lifecycle is about content, front and center. The definition assumes content is recognized as a corporate information asset, and requires the same level of custodial care as other corporate assets. The content lifecycle is about more than getting content to work within a content management system; in the bigger picture, the content lifecycle is about implementing a strategy to follow a repeatable system that governs the management of the content, throughout its lifecycle.

The content lifecycle covers four macro stages: the strategic analysis, the content collection, management of the content, and publishing, which includes publication and post-publication activities. The lifecycle is in effect whether the content is controlled within a management system or not, whether it gets translated or not, whether it gets deleted at the end of its life or revised and re-used.  The analysis quadrant comprises the content strategy. The other three quadrants are more tactical in nature, focusing on the implementation of the content strategy. Assigning the activities and decisions throughout the lifecycle would create an iterative process that looks something like this:

Analysis

In the analysis phase, the content lifecycle is concerned with the strategic aspects of content. A content strategist (or business analyst or information architect or writer) examines the need for various types of content within the context of both the business and the content consumers.

The analysis has a bearing on how the content strategy is implemented in the other quadrants of the content lifecycle.

Typical artifacts for this phase

• User research:
  > Personas – Identify major groups of content consumers and the content they would consume
  > Scenarios – Elaborate on when and how content is used
• Requirements:
  > Gap analysis – Determines content readiness and editorial and technical gaps
  > Requirements matrix – Organizes business and technical requirements in summary form
  > Process models – Express future-state content-related business processes during the content lifecycle
• Governance:
  > Governance chart – Establishes responsibility for content types and processes throughout the content lifecycle
  > Budget – Establishes budget authority and delineates budget sources for areas such as technology implementation and upgrades, content operations, and translations within the organization
• Content analysis:
  > Content inventory – Determines the on-hand inventory of content
  > Content audit – Analyzes the state of content quality and content deficiencies including missing or inaccurate content
  > Metadata taxonomy – Categorizes content by subject and creates an index
  > Content models – Codify content structure and components for each content type, and include conformance to any applicable standards
  > Content architecture – Organizes use of content types across all output platforms, such as publications, websites, handheld devices, or other systems
  > Wireframes – Organize display of content types for each output platform
  > Delivery design – Establishes the publishing pipeline for each output platform

Collection

Content collection includes garnering content for use within the framework set out in the analysis phase. Collection may be through

• Content development, which is creating content or editing other people’s content.
• Content ingestion, which is syndicating content from other sources or incorporating localized content.
• A hybrid of content ingestion and content convergence, such as
  > Integrating product descriptions from an outside organization with prices from a costing system.
  > Bringing together editorial content and user-generated content together in one display.

Typical artifacts for this phase

• Content design:
  > Topic maps – Create a “table of contents” that maps out content relationships
  > Localization plan – Establishes how and when localized content is produced and delivered, and examines the ramifications of localization on display and delivery methods
  > Customization and personalization maps – Determine derivation of content components and rules for inclusion or exclusion of components to create contextualized content
• Content development:
  > Style Guide – Establishes editorial rules for vocabulary, grammar, brand management, and language during content development
  > Standards – Ensure that content conforms to international standards that affect content delivery and reusability
  > Layout templates – Determine where various content and content types are displayed within a print page or electronic screen display
  > Content – Text, audio, graphic, video, or other human-usable media, including the metadata to render it findable

Management

The management quadrant is concerned with the efficient and effective use of content. In organizations using technology to automate the management of content, the management aspect assumes use of a CMS of some sort. In organizations with smaller amounts of content, little need for workflow control, and virtually no single-sourcing requirements, manual management is possible. However, in large enterprises, there is too much content, and there are too many variations of content output, to manage the content without some sort of system to automate whatever functions can be automated.

The content configuration potential is enormous, and builds on the information gathered during the analysis and collection phases. The solutions will be highly situational, and revolve around the inputs and outputs, required content variables, complexity of the publishing pipeline, and technologies in play. The most basic questions are around adoption of standards and technologies, and determining components, content granularity, and how far up or down the publishing pipeline to implement specific techniques.

Typical artifacts for this phase

• Production workflow:
  > Content business rules – Determine content workflow according to business requirements
  > Content workflow maps – Document content production processes
  > Data models – Plan data structure

Publish

The publishing quadrant deals with aspects of content that happen when content is delivered to its output platform and used in a variety of ways. Publishing the content is only a point in the first lifecycle iteration; there are post-publishing considerations such as re-use and retention policies that require attention.

Typical artifacts for this phase

• Publishing workflow:
  > Publishing pipeline models – Document the inclusions of content components for publishing automation
  > Transformation guidelines – Set out the transformation scripts that migrate content between formats, such as XSLTs
  > Review policies – Govern the workflow and responsibility for content review and the mechanism for re-use, as-is or revisions
  > Retention policies – Govern the sunsetting, archiving, and deletion of content.

Feel the Content Lifecycle Excitement

The notion of a content lifecycle is comforting to anyone involved in content. It creates order from chaos, predictability for content production and maintenance, and a mental model to explain content to others.

Not only is it comforting, it’s exciting for design, development, and business stakeholders. Business runs on predictable, repeatable processes, and content lifecycle adds content to the roster of replicable models. For designers and developers, content lifecycle is a tool and an extension of the user-centered design process. For businesses, a content lifecycle is a model in which content can be quantified and ROI measured—exciting stuff, indeed.

Most exciting of all, the content lifecycle helps users get the content they need, when and how they need it—the holy grail of their content search.

Apply the Content Lifecycle

While all content has a lifecycle, not all lifecycles are created equal. A given site may present several content genres—marketing, technical, legal, and so on—each with its own lifecycle, and variations on those lifecycle within content types. Some content, such as a privacy disclaimer, is used once and gets reviewed on a regular schedule. Other content gets aggregated from multiple databases for presentation as an integrated unit—for example, product descriptions sent by vendors, pricing from an ERP system, and a publishing cycle with multiple dependencies, from promotional schedules to geo-boundaries. In the world of technical content, an entirely different set of tensions inform the content lifecycle. Conditional processing, re-use maps, and publishing pipelines are of paramount importance. Nevertheless, in whichever camp the content fits, recognizing a content lifecycle exists is the first step to making the lifecycle clear—and to making the most of your content.

Many a scientific study has been commissioned and conducted exploring the fascinatingly complex cognitive process we go through when we read. One long-standing theory, first proposed in 1886, centered around the idea of rapid pattern recognition and recall—known as the word shape recognition model[1]. It was believed that repeatedly exposing our eyes to the pattern or shape a single word would form enabled us to quickly recognise and recall it from memory. Further weight was lent to this theory when it was proved that letters could be more accurately recognised in the context of a word than in isolation—known as the word superiority effect[1].

Figure 1 – Parallel letter recognition model | Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Word_superiority_effect.svg

For example, we’re more adept at recognising the letter C in the context of the word “content” than in the context of something unfathomable as “ncotetn”[2]. This was successfully counter-argued when, in 1977, it was demonstrated that even a word that, by way of a recognisable structure and phonetics, appears to be an actual word in a certain language “pread” could be recognised faster than its jumbled counterpart “erpda”. This proved that the word superiority effect wasn’t caused by the shape of the word, but rather the existence of regular and familiar letter combinations[2]. In fact, it’s this model of parallel letter recognition (see Figure 1) that most psychologists now widely accept as the most accurate.[2] Rather than recognising patterns we’ll simultaneously decode the features (lines and curves) of a word’s individual letters before rapidly matching the exact position and order of each letter against words we already recognise.

The use of increasingly sophisticated eye-tacking software has greatly improved our understanding of the short, rapid movements, or saccades, our eyes make as we read. Imagine one such step as a pseudo-Venn diagram (Figure 2), with two blurred sets overlapping with one another to create a third crystal-clear central area. It’s this center-most point, called the fovea, where our intensified attempts at word recognition take place, with the blurred area immediately to the right beginning the process of gathering information about upcoming words.

Figure 2 – One step in the series of short, rapid movements our eyes make when changing focus from one word to another

Create comfortable reading conditions

Of course, not everyone approaches reading in the same way. Plenty of methods exist, from subvocalization, when an all-too-familiar voice in our head helpfully relays what we’ve decoded[3]; to speed reading, when our ability to fill in the missing information using context and identify words without having to focus on every letter, is tested to the extreme[3]. But no matter which method we use for decoding text on a printed page, computer screen, or handheld device, we’ll spend much of our mental energy capacity trying to comprehend what we’ve read[4]. Whether we’re successful—or, more accurately, satisfied —with our interpretation will largely depend on our:

• grasp of the content’s language and cultural origin
• familiarity with the subject matter
• ability to retain information, which can be adversely affected by factors such as location, lighting, and fatigue
• motivation to scale the learning curve.

To encourage user comprehension of our own written web content we’ll try to create conditions conducive to comfortable reading. We’ll ensure there’s sufficient contrast between foreground and background colors, try not to marry too many different styles on individual pages, and avoid centrally aligned and fully justified text for consistent word spacing. Where applicable, we’ll also make use of visual aids to enhance contextual understanding. Those visual aids may include images, illustrations, charts, audio, and video, and can be used in a supporting role or as a direct alternative to text.

Of course, the conditions we create will not always be suitable for everyone. Users with certain requirements may need, or choose, to wrestle back control over the way text content is rendered. Font substitutions along with alterations to the size, space, alignment, and color can all be achieved with visual reading assistants, such as screen magnifiers[5], personal style sheets, or more recent innovations such as arc90’s readability bookmarklet (Figure 3) and the new Safari Reader.

Figure 3 – The Readability bookmarklet allows users to remove the clutter around the content they’re reading

Define or avoid industry-specific terminology

As well as readability prepares the ground for comprehension, readability can’t necessarily guarantee comprehension. If our web content requires a successful marriage between the text’s readability and the user’s prior knowledge of and interest in the subject matter, then what if the content’s language is strongly associated with a particular discipline or technology area? Such content, while perfectly readable and comprehensible to those with close ties to that subject area, can prove problematic, with attempts to deduce meaning potentially compromised by a series of unrecognisable words, phrases, and acronyms.

One solution is a website-specific glossary of terms. A glossary can provide not only a comprehensive definition of each term or phrase, but also sufficient additional material to enable the user to understand that term’s contextual importance. Safe within the confines of our own particular profession or technical field, we often rely on a short-handed vocabulary of uncommon or specialised terms in a bid to save time, space, and energy when communicating with similarly experienced and informed individuals. But while this colloquial lexicon may be appropriate for most members of our intended audience, the use of such terms on a public-facing website or system may present obstacles for non-specialist readers, beloved first-time visitors, or people with learning disabilities.

Clearly mindful of this, the online shoe and clothing shop Zappos.com has provided a glossary page (Figure 4) that lists expansions for the commonly used terms, acronyms, and abbreviations used throughout the Zappos.com website. For the people entrenched in this industry – including those tasked with planning, creating, delivering, and maintaining content for the website and other media channels – the use of such terms and their precise meaning could be taken for granted when, to a cross section of your users, the terms may mean a multitude of different things entirely. As much as it effectively lifts the lid on the language of the industry, Zappos.com’s glossary of terms gives the user the added confidence that the sum result of his interactions, which may be ordering and receiving a new pair of shoes, will meet his now “educated” preconceptions. The glossary also allows Zappos.com a certain degree of freedom to use the terms on the website instead of having to find an alternative, and possibly longer, way of clarification – or trust that the user will carry out his own investigations whilst at the critical point of purchase.

Figure 4 – Zappos.com’s glossary helps the user learn industry-specific terms and phrases

Offer pronunciations where meaning depends on it

Certain learning disabilities, such as Dyslexia, can make it more difficult to understand figurative language: where the departure from literal meaning cannot always be interpreted without familiarity with the overall context or until acquiring more information about it. This challenge is never more evident than when attempting to cross into unfamiliar cultural and linguistic boundaries. Let’s face it; the English language is rather unforgiving at times. We have several heteronyms (words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations and meanings), such as the words lead (to guide/dense metal) and wound (injury/to encircle). Oftentimes, the meaning of such words or characters can be confidently determined from the context of the sentence or from the subject matter itself. However, for more complex or ambiguous sentences, or for some languages, the meaning behind a word or phrase cannot be easily determined, or determined at all, without first knowing the pronunciation[6].

Glossaries can also provide users with the information required to pronounce certain terms. Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (Gathering of Musicians of Ireland) is a non-profit group involved in the preservation and promotion of traditional Irish music. As the group’s website and organisation frequently use Irish language terms, the group has made the pronunciation of each word, with text and audio delivery, available via a separate glossary page (Figure 5). It’s this auditory approach to aiding comprehension that would also greatly benefit some people with Dyslexia, who don’t always attribute the main cause or factor to vision but rather to phonology (how the person converts what he sees into the sound units that make up a single word)[7]. To understand pronunciations, some people with Dyslexia benefit from the synthesised voice output from a screen reader, which they use whilst decoding text content on the web, or when using a software application.

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann's glossary includes the ability to listen to pronunciations

But on occasions when a sentence is read aloud and the screen reader reads a word using the wrong pronunciation, the result may be a greater number of different interpretations and conclusions for a partially sighted or blind user who relies on this assistive technology for reading on the web. Depending on a website’s audience, and in particular for non-native English speakers, there may need to be additional information on the pronunciation of certain words or phrases. In such cases, a separate glossary page,  like the example shown on Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann’s website, or an inline pronunciation applied to the first occurrence within a single web page make for ideal supporting material.

Don’t leave some of your audience behind

If simplicity, as Plain English advocate Alan Siegel defines it, is a means to achieve clarity, transparency, and empathy[8], then in addition to employing the clearest and simplest written language appropriate for the type of content we’re delivering and the audience to whom we’re delivering it, we should also:

• explain procedures with step-by-step guides and flow charts
• provide definitions and expansions when the subject-matter, language, or culture warrants them
• summarise visual information such as the data, trends, and implications of charts and graphs.

Does providing this supporting material mean a web content strategy is flawed? No, quite the opposite. Even a technically sound website that allows its users to access its content by way of sight, sound, and touch (via assistive technology such as a refreshable Braille device[9]) cannot be considered usable let alone accessible if no one is able to accurately judge the functionality, purpose, and, to an extent, limitations of its content.

Never before have we had so much control and choice over how our web content is delivered and displayed. One minute we could be using a mobile device while sat in a noisy, crowded train carriage and the next we’re using a desktop computer in the more tranquil surroundings of our own home; two reading conditions that call for different levels of concentration and yet we’re often trying to consume the same written web content in order to complete the same interactions. The challenge we’re increasingly faced with is providing an experience befitting of these different conditions. We need to design interactions that respond to context; thinking as carefully about where our users will be when they need us and their likely state of mind just as much as we ever have about who they are. But regardless of ambient conditions any successful web-based interactions will always hinge on the user’s comprehension and interpretation of what, why, and how.

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_superiority_effect
2. http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/wordrecognition.aspx
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process)#Methods
4. http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20-20081103/meaning-supplements.html
5. http://www.doit.wisc.edu/accessibility/video/screen_magnification.asp
6. http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/meaning-pronunciation.html
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia
8. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/alan_siegel_let_s_simplify_legal_jargon.html
9. http://www.dingoaccess.com/accessibility/refreshable-braille-and-the-web/

You’ve probably heard the saying “too many cooks spoil the broth.”  It implies that having lots of people involved in the production of any one outcome isn’t a good thing. The same can be said for managing large websites. In fact, “too many authors spoil the content” is a much more pertinent issue in today’s digital world. Unfortunately it’s one that’s hard to escape.

Think about where you work

In your organization, who writes your web content? Do you have a dedicated team of authors? Are they centralized, or are they spread out everywhere?

Regardless of where they sit, if you have a large website, you more than likely have many people writing content for it. You may have divisions or departments managing different sections—such as the corporate blog, product information, customer service, knowledge base, or promotional pages. Or it may take a lot of input from different subject matter experts to develop content in the first place. In either case, it can be challenging to continually produce quality content.

So what do you do?

Here are three practical ways to make things easier:

1. Create a usable style guide

In the same way site content must be useful and relevant to your visitors, so should a style guide be useful and relevant to your authors.

Don’t turn into a boring ogre who jealously guards a monolithic style guide that no one wants to use.

The bigger the style guide, the more daunting and confusing it becomes. Don’t get caught up including every possible style consideration you can think of. Instead, keep it smart, keep it simple, and include things like:

• The site’s personality and subsequent tone. Is it funny, cheeky, conservative or social?
• The correct way to spell and punctuate your organization’s name (give examples).
• The spelling and correct titles of your management team.
• How you punctuate headings and titles (choose either sentence case or title case and stick with it).
• Your stand on capitals—when it’s OK to use them for (names, divisions, headings, project names, and products).
• Other punctuation tips such as the use of apostrophes, bullets, and acronyms.
• How to write descriptive links with anchor text.
• How to link to documents or downloads, and abbreviations for common downloads.
• Clear links to other resources like the CMS user guide, metadata standards, and governance model.

Stop the bickering about style and punctuation preferences by getting the guide signed off by senior management. There will always be different opinions—don’t waste energy being the referee if you don’t have to.

There are also some fantastic (existing!) style guides available online or in bookstores. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel—choose a guide that closely reflects your organization’s style, and use it in conjunction with a cheat sheet that can be pinned to the wall of every contributor for easy reference.

2. Encourage learning and collaboration

Whether you’ve got a team sitting together or contributors scattered across the country—it’s important to unify authors so they are motivated to develop quality content.

When you have multiple authors, you also have multiple backgrounds, multiple strengths, and multiple weaknesses. The key challenge is to ensure that the strengths are shared and the weaknesses overcome:

• Get authors excited about why they are developing content in the first place. Connect the dots between business goals, website goals, and authors’ personal content goals. People learn best with examples so develop case studies to showcase success stories.
• Create a collaboration space on the intranet so authors have easy access to each other and any documentation they need to do their job—such as the latest style guide, CMS documentation, processes and forms. The space shouldn’t be closed off from others in the organization. Give it high visibility to help promote web content style and standards for everyone.
• Use the collaboration space as a learning centre, too. Add webinars, podcasts and links to content forums. If someone attends training, ask him to present or provide feedback to the group so that everyone benefits.
• Any new author who joins the organization must be trained not only in how to use the CMS, but also in writing for the web, usability, and metrics. Buddy him up with another author so he has a mentor to guide him through the process.
• Promote the notion of why instead of what. Why should the content go here, rather than what content should go here. This approach improves quality and encourages authors to be accountable for what is produced.
• Show how web content fits in with the overall communication material of the organization. If the web team sits within a dedicated web or IT area, ensure there is some sort of liaison or relationship built with the marketing area so that key messages are reflected across all communication activities.

3. Use an author-friendly CMS

It sounds obvious, but a content management system (CMS) should actively enable quality content to be produced.

Don’t get me wrong; using a CMS to manage your website is smart. You just have to understand that it won’t solve all your content worries. You have to put thought into what you want your CMS to do, and how you want it to do it.

You want a system that is easy to use from the authors’ point of view. Here are some things to consider:

• The greatest web writer isn’t necessarily the greatest information architect, so as a rule don’t let authors make structural changes to the site.
• Make it simple to keep content up-to-date by avoiding complex approval workflows for your content. It’s much better to have a simple process that everyone uses well, than a complex beast that authors do their best to avoid. Also, be wary of creating bottlenecks in your approval processes. Yes, you may need a senior manager to approve content at some point along the way—but if that requirement is going to clog up her inbox with requests, think of a better way to do it.
• Keep it easy for authors to stick with the style guide when entering content. Enforce mandatory components where you can.
• And finally…include a spell check. Sounds crazy, but I once worked on a project where a spell check in the CMS was an optional extra!

With a little planning, it is possible to have great content on a site with many contributors. Dust off your style guide, keep everyone connected, and make sure your CMS is working for you and not against you.

What have your experiences been?

I get this question a lot: How do content strategists work with IAs/designers/writers? Truthfully, they often don’t. But, they can and they should.

Not only should they work together, they should do away with the typical web project process that leaves content until last, resulting in a mad scramble. People don’t muck up web projects. Bad processes do.

Right? We define the problems, design something we think will fix them, and start building what we designed. Just before we launch the sucker, we populate the CMS with one of three types of content:

• Existing content from brochures and fact sheets haphazardly mapped to pages and components;
• Existing content from the old website that hasn’t been reviewed or edited;
• Brand new content from a copywriter who doesn’t know the purpose of the site, the audience, or whether the source content is reliable.

Boo. At that point it’s too late. And that’s when the wheels come off. But, a process that includes content strategy can help.

Here’s how:

PROBLEM #1: Great ideas, no content

I think it’s fair to say those of us who work on websites are idealistic types. We want to create the best websites ever known to the internet-using public. But, that trips us up sometimes.

As a former web writer, this scenario happened to me more than once: I got a site map and a link to the old website and an in-box full of brochures, fact sheets, and PowerPoint presentations, and was asked to write all the pages on the site. Everything was dandy, for a while. I wasn’t quite sure what source content applied to what pages, but I could deal with that.

But then, I got to some pages with no existing source content. I called my client, who said, “Oh, well, yeah, we don’t have anything for that. So, just do some research, and come up with something.”

Wrong answer. For a couple reasons:

• It takes longer and costs more to research and write content from scratch.  Most project budgets don’t make room for the additional time or cost.
• Writers can’t be expected to know which random online sources they find are credible, current, or appropriate.

A Content Strategy Solution
We’re fortunate at Brain Traffic. Our IAs are content strategists. So, we think about IA a little differently, perhaps. Here are a few content strategeristic solutions that can help with problem no. 1:

• Think hard about whether the pages you include on your site map contribute to meeting user and business goals. One way is to create a core purpose statement that guides your content choices.
• Once you’ve determined that the pages you want to include actually do “fit”, make sure writers have the source content they need to create new content. If they don’t, make sure the people who control the budget know that no source content means more time and money.
• Help your writers out by telling them what source content applies to what pages. If there’s no source content , provide possible sources they can use to write content that supports the site strategy (Those sources might be people).

PROBLEM #2: The content broke my design

I can imagine few things more frustrating than designing the perfect business-goal-driven, user-need-focused, aesthetically pleasing website and having the content make it look like crap. Yet, that kind of thing happens all the time.

Why? Because designers don’t usually know what kind and how much content their design needs to support. So, they have to guess. Or, they ask their client, who says, “We’ll plug the content in once you finish the design.”

That approach leads to oohs and ahs when the design is presented, and hisses and moans when the content is “plugged in” a day or so before launch. One of two things happen next:

• The site launches with crappy content that makes an awesome design look like vomit
• The launch is delayed to re-work the design to support the content or re-work the content to fit the design

A Content Strategy Solution
During the time I was writing this article, a client’s website launched. Client websites launch all the time. But on this particular website, the designer and content strategist worked nose-to-nose. And, the site was awesome. Here’s how it went down:

1. At the very beginning, when asking the really important questions—like what are the business objectives, who is this site for, what do those people need, and what political landmines should we be aware of—we were both in the room. Listening. Asking. Conferring. Together.
2. As my colleagues and I worked together to organize the content and surface the repeatable patterns that would make up the site, we kept the designer in the loop and asked her what she thought.
3. Before the designer started concepting, we asked our client to sign off on the information architecture, wireframes, and page outlines, to make sure all content had been accounted for and all design template needs were documented
4. While the designer was concepting based on wireframes, with specific content priorities noted and estimates of content length, the content strategist and writer wrote copy to show in the designs.
5. The designer presented concepts with content that realistically represented how the site would look live.
6. Not once did the client come back to me and say anything resembling, “This page kinda broke the design.”

PROBLEM #3: We thought you were creating the content

A few weeks ago, I was having drinks with a fellow content strategy enthusiast who works for an agency that specializes in web development. She told me about a project that had raised some red flags related to the content. When she’d brought up her concern—that the client thought the agency was creating the content—the project team brushed her aside, saying “Why would the client think we create the content? That’s their job.”

I’ll tell you why. Denial. No one wants to take responsibility for the content. People don’t know how much time writing content will take, so they have no idea how to plan accordingly.

So, what happened next? To be honest, I’m not sure. I bought her a drink and we changed the subject. But, there was probably a long discussion about why “content is not my job,” followed by a scrambling for resources, a revised project plan that pushed the launch out weeks, if not months, and a resulting website that looked and functioned great, but contained content that didn’t meet user needs or support business goals.

A Content Strategy Solution
I won’t comment on the fact that a website was being built before anyone knew what content it needed to support. What I will comment on is the simple idea that no matter whose job it is to create the content, all of us who work on the interwebs bear some responsibility for it.

Here are some things a content strategy does to help:

• Tells you how many people and how long it will take to create content to launch your website—based on things like page counts, a content creation workflow, and staff time.
• Helps you prioritize your content efforts so you focus resources on the stuff that will influence your most important audiences and help you achieve your business goals
• Gives you a plan for maintaining your content after launch so your website doesn’t become an overgrown graveyard of irrelevant content.

And here are some things developers and programmers can do. Okay. It’s only one thing: Demand actual content before you start building a website. Tell your clients that’s your process. It’ll force them to get granular about content early on. If they look scared, send them to a content strategist.

PROBLEM 4: Underpants on the outside

I like to say underpants in a professional setting. It makes me giggle. Ok, back to business. I tend to use the underpants analogy to talk about two scenarios:

1. A company’s website is organized the way the company is organized, but not the way the site’s users think about the content.
2. It’s apparent from a quick glance at a homepage that departments and executives are fighting with the web team for prime space on the home page, without considering users’ needs or what will drive business results.

Imma talk about the second one. When that happens, you end up with a lot of junk nobody cares about—or, if they do care about it, they’ll never know because they don’t know it’s for them. That’s when they hit the back button and make their way to the next link in Google’s search results. Lost opportunities abound—sales not made, relationships not built, brand not recognized. Dang.

A Content Strategy Solution
Here’s the cool thing about content strategy. It doesn’t just tell you what content should go on your site, but it answers a whole bunch of other important questions:

• Why should it go there? Or, how will it help you achieve your business goals?
• Where should it go? Or, how should it be organized so people can find it?
• What format should it be in? Or, what’s the most effective way to communicate it?
• How will it get there? Or, what are the people resources, tools, and workflow needed to make it all happen?
• How much should there be? Or, what can we realistically produce and maintain?
• How do we decide? Or, who is involved in content decisions and what are the guidelines we use to make them?

These questions get answered through a bunch of combinations of content strategy deliverables—ranging from editorial specifications and calendars to sitemaps and wireframes to web content style guidelines to messaging hierarchies to full blown governance plans and policies.

Why do you need them? So that you can direct content efforts rather than take orders from whomever thinks their content is most important that week. They give you the power to say no.

The moral of the story: if it’s broken, fix it

Have you heard of my friend Jonathan Kahn’s blog Lucid Plot? It’s  smart. One of my favorite smart things it has said is this:

“If your lack of content strategy is hurting the user experience, it’s time to throw out your design process and start over.”
(From Embrace Content Strategy: Throw Out Your Design Process)

It’s nobody’s fault that the people building websites back in the 1990s borrowed from the only processes they were familiar with. Print. Advertising. Software Development. But, it is our responsibility to acknowledge that those processes don’t work and come up with something better.

In almost every situation, a good process starts with content.