Content Skeletons in Your Redesign Closet
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This is a great time to be a web designer: so many of our public institutions are redesigning whether it be for mobile responsiveness or accessibility compliance. What is emerging, however, is that the move to a mobile, accessible website is only the tip of a very big iceberg: we are finding that there are lots of content skeletons in the closets in our hospitals, public media organizations, educational institutions, and municipalities. The skeletons are things like governance models that have gone astray, siloed publishing models, little or no authoring structures, and meta data completely out of control. The information age came upon us so quickly that staff are still lacking in training to be able to easily and effectively manage knowledge. The answer: content strategy! We'll walk you through the steps necessary to audit, analyse, and then prepare your content (and your employees) for a redesign, and help you deal with those skeletons.
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Content Skeletons in Your Redesign Closet
- 1. The Content Skeletons in Your Closet
- 3. Who is this for?
- 8. Productivity “The enterprise technology that employees have to do their jobs is mostly appalling… Most intranets are an absolute and utter joke. Enterprise search is pathetic. Why? Because…management practice often heaps more complexity and awful, unusable systems on top of frustrated, overwhelmed employees.” http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/internet-hurting-productivity:
- 9. Content Strategy "Connecting the content components and people components is one of the most important roles that content strategy plays in your organization." – from Content Strategy for the Web second edition, Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach
- 10. The Dreaded....
- 16. Skeleton 1: too. much. content. Symptoms: • Website navigation = org chart
- 17. Why Is This A Problem? • Content costs $$ • More ≠ More. Less = More • Does it support a key business objective? • Does it fulfill a key user need?
- 18. How Do We Fix It? • Governance • Measurement • Collaboration
- 19. Skeleton 2: no micro authoring structures Symptoms: • Content “blobs”
- 20. Why is This a Problem?
- 21. Why is This a Problem?
- 24. How Does This Happen? "I come across many websites where there is a well- designed top level with quality content. However, when you click down a few levels, everything changes-it's like walking out of a plush hotel straight into a rubbish dump” – Gerry McGovern “Killer Web Content”
- 25. How do we Fix it? • Make the backend better • Design from Content type, up
- 26. Skeleton 3: Lost Control of IA. Symptoms: • Author-driven information architecture: wiki-like (too broad, circular) or library-like (too deep)
- 27. Why This is a Problem “Mobile was the final front in the access revolution. It has erased the digital divide. A mobile device is the internet for many people” – Susannah Fox, Pew Research centre
- 28. How do we Fix it? • Controlled vocabularies • IA needs to work on mobile FIRST
- 29. "if your organizations information is not available on a small screen, its not available at all to people who rely on their mobile phones for access. That's likely to be young people, people with lower household incomes, and recent immigrants-arguable important target audiences for important health messages” – Susannah Fox, Pew Research Centre
Notas do Editor
- We'll walk you through the steps necessary to audit, analyse, and then prepare your content (and your employees) for a redesign, and help you deal with those skeletons. why is this a problem? Is there a golden rule of content strategy we can quote here? these skeletons usually present themselves as ux design problems but they are often symptomatic of deeper problems, here is where gerry mcgovern article comes in. what is the solution? what can managers do? what can designers do? what is the positive outcome for the user and for the org? things about 2 pm is when people are most angry from captivology
- there is a deck with speaker's notes and more meat on the website, that I’ll upload later tonight. FIRST THINGS FIRST: this isn;t a session about development or drupal dev tools, we won;t talk about code or modules or even themeing. I'm not a developer. I manage website builds, I'm a user experience designer, and I refer to myself as a content strategist because I usually work in that space in between the site build, or the site structure and the people who end up managing the site and the site structure This session is about content strategy and what, as a content strategist, I have seen in some of the mostly public service orgs I've worked with, when we embarked on a redesign. I see a lot of broken telephone that can happen in between site building and content management or operationalizing the site
- So if you're a PM, or BA this will be good for you. If you're a dev, there are the things you need to watch out for because some can be solved with code but some cannot, and same goes for front e end dev, designers. how many people are business side people? Content side? design, development?
- Why should you care? responsive and adaptive design is driving most organizations to redesign right about now. why is it important? any user. any device. same content.
- user expectations are really high user-focused platforms like Facebook et al are setting the bar very high. great Content alone isn't enough, nor is the excuse that people can only find it in one place Transparency & clarity as with Mint.com, we will surrender a lot of information to make sense of difficult topics as with nest, we like systems that learn about us and act intelligently as with Nike we like to game our own performance convenience and speed as with southwest airlines we're willing to give things up for lower cost and less hassle as with amazon we want choice and we want to see what we've chosen quickly we are willing to pay more for qualitatively different experiences ubiquitous access and control because of google we expect web services to work seamlessly because of netflix we seek access to content and media regardless of device because of dropbox and the concept of the cloud we expect all of our stuff to be available to us at all times
- user expectations are really high user-focused platforms like Facebook et al are setting the bar very high. great Content alone isn't enough, nor is the excuse that people can only find it in one place Transparency & clarity as with Mint.com, we will surrender a lot of information to make sense of difficult topics as with nest, we like systems that learn about us and act intelligently as with Nike we like to game our own performance convenience and speed as with southwest airlines we're willing to give things up for lower cost and less hassle as with amazon we want choice and we want to see what we've chosen quickly we are willing to pay more for qualitatively different experiences ubiquitous access and control because of google we expect web services to work seamlessly because of netflix we seek access to content and media regardless of device because of dropbox and the concept of the cloud we expect all of our stuff to be available to us at all times
- user expectations are really high user-focused platforms like Facebook et al are setting the bar very high. great Content alone isn't enough, nor is the excuse that people can only find it in one place Transparency & clarity as with Mint.com, we will surrender a lot of information to make sense of difficult topics as with nest, we like systems that learn about us and act intelligently as with Nike we like to game our own performance convenience and speed as with southwest airlines we're willing to give things up for lower cost and less hassle as with amazon we want choice and we want to see what we've chosen quickly we are willing to pay more for qualitatively different experiences ubiquitous access and control because of google we expect web services to work seamlessly because of netflix we seek access to content and media regardless of device because of dropbox and the concept of the cloud we expect all of our stuff to be available to us at all times
- finally, we should care because there is a problem inside the enterprise. every time we redesign a website we’re redesigning a system for people who need to manage it. and while many organizations think they have been building up their "bank" of content over the last 5-10 years since they designed their website, what they have actually been building is content management debt. is this a new digital divide? inside and outside the enterprise? what?? I thought doing a redesign is kind of like calling in that debt
- what is content strategy and why is it important? what do we tend to uncover again and again as we embark on redesign projects? how do we address these issues so we don't repeat history? this is a good definition of content strategy: in other words its not just about the content: it about who creates it , how they create it, and who its for, and what it should do.
- before we talk about what we uncover, let’s take a brief look at how we uncover it it’s super simple: we do a content audit here's a typical phone call I get. "we're launching a new version of sharepoint for our new fiscal, in one month. It will be able to serve all of our content responsively. Can you look at our site and tell us what we need to do to be ready?" why do we do this? most people think their websites look like a school or library
- before we talk about what we uncover, let’s take a brief look at how we uncover it it’s super simple: we do a content audit here's a typical phone call I get. "we're launching a new version of sharepoint for our new fiscal, in one month. It will be able to serve all of our content responsively. Can you look at our site and tell us what we need to do to be ready?" why do we do this? most people think their websites look like a school or library
- really they look like ron weasley's house, especially after a few years.
- these things take time. if time is tight we might do a sample audit, using analytics to tell us where to dig deep. there are tech tools that can speed this up but nothing replaces human eyes. the issue right now is that most of our sites are built on a page model: each page has an url, and we catalogue what's on the page. but often we get a better sense of where the skeletons are hiding by auditing the backend, usually in Drupal, and looking at what content types have been created and what fields are associated with those content types. we will also sometimes only do the first three levels in, and then consult the analytics to see if there are deeper pages getting traffic
- these things take time. if time is tight we might do a sample audit, using analytics to tell us where to dig deep. there are tech tools that can speed this up but nothing replaces human eyes. the issue right now is that most of our sites are built on a page model: each page has an url, and we catalogue what's on the page. but often we get a better sense of where the skeletons are hiding by auditing the backend, usually in Drupal, and looking at what content types have been created and what fields are associated with those content types. we will also sometimes only do the first three levels in, and then consult the analytics to see if there are deeper pages getting traffic
- these things take time. if time is tight we might do a sample audit, using analytics to tell us where to dig deep. there are tech tools that can speed this up but nothing replaces human eyes. the issue right now is that most of our sites are built on a page model: each page has an url, and we catalogue what's on the page. but often we get a better sense of where the skeletons are hiding by auditing the backend, usually in Drupal, and looking at what content types have been created and what fields are associated with those content types. we will also sometimes only do the first three levels in, and then consult the analytics to see if there are deeper pages getting traffic
- Symptom to look for: structures based on org chart. publishing according to deaprtment and not use case/user. no metrics attached to content, no understanding that less is more.
- Why is this a problem: content management debt: this is where content tips over from being an asset to being a liability that has to be managed, supported etc. this is a reframing: from thinking that more is better, to less is more: how content, badly managed, can turn into a deficit that costs the org money rather than making it more relevant to users. Most orgs generate way too much Content. It’s not true that more content = more relevance More ≠ More. Less = More. It hapoens when these questions aren’t asked: 2 questions to ask: Does it support a key business objective? Does it fulfill a key user need? recall what Gerry McGovern said: more activity doesn;t mean more prodcutivity
- governance. connect content people to their readers with performance-based metrics. Give them decent tools and a structure within which to do their jobs well. collaboration: the people on the ground always tell me stories about their best work being times when they collaborated, were given lead time, were proactive and not reactive. bringing content people into the dev process, influencers, not managers. I worked at a big public service broadcaster and the political thing to do would have been to have my colleagues, ie other managers on the CMS committee, but I made sure I picked only people actually doing the work on the ground and also tried to pick influencers from among them: union leaders, people with street cred and Klout
- often what this looks like in the backend is only one post type, on content type, or content types with only a title field and a body field.
- Content blobs are a problem for display in responsive, you don’t want your content authors putting alot of formatting html into their body copy for example. But it’s also a problem for consistency: having standard authorijg structures for different content types helps the user experience to stay consistent. So if you are posting, say, recipes, you want there to be consistency across the site in terms of where the ingredient list goes: before or after the instructions? and finally it’s a problem when discreet pieces of content of different types are mashed together. so for example on our recipe page I need an overriding reframing diagram. something that shows how we traditionally thought of the web as pages but how it is a database, and show how the data (content) in the data base might be displayed on different devices, for different user "platforms" or contexts (i.e. I'm searching by ingredient, I want a shopping list, I want to pin my favourite food photos, I want to save a recipe in my recipe box. if there is one thing to take away from this talk: the web is no longer a collection of pages. this idea that it is a magazine has to get purged from our minds. It's not a magazine. it's a database, a matrix.
- Content blobs are a problem for display in responsive, you don’t want your content authors putting alot of formatting html into their body copy for example. But it’s also a problem for consistency: having standard authorijg structures for different content types helps the user experience to stay consistent. So if you are posting, say, recipes, you want there to be consistency across the site in terms of where the ingredient list goes: before or after the instructions? and finally it’s a problem when discreet pieces of content of different types are mashed together. so for example on our recipe page there is a big blob of content here. there is more than one recipe on the page, so the image doesn;t match the first recipe, which would be very confusing if I searched for any one of the myriad of tags they have used here. Having the ingredients as part of the blog also means they aren;t available to be able to use them for other useful things, like generating a shopping list for example. if there is one thing to take away from this talk: the web is no longer a collection of pages. this idea that it is a magazine has to get purged from our minds. It's not a magazine. it's a database, a matrix.
- How Does This Happen? developers understand content as data, and it has to be treated as such if it is to retain and grow in value. so the best case scenario is there is a field in the backend for every content piece. but authors think of content like this typewriter: they still think in pages, books, stories. we need standard authoring structures that give structure to the content but without making the authors feel like they are just filling in forms.
- How Does This Happen? developers understand content as data, and it has to be treated as such if it is to retain and grow in value. so the best case scenario is there is a field in the backend for every content piece. but authors think of content like this typewriter: they still think in pages, books, stories. we need standard authoring structures that give structure to the content but without making the authors feel like they are just filling in forms.
- Gerry McGovern quote from Killer Web Content "I come across many websites where there is a well-designed top level with quality content. However, when you click down a few levels, everything changes-it's like walking out of a plush hotel straight into a rubbish dump" this is a problem because the top level pages are usually adminned either thru automation or by people like the public affairs people or web content managers. the deep pages are where the folks on the ground do their actual work. and maybe they've never gotten decent templates they can work with for what their stuff needs to look like or decent governance in terms of knowing when to publish and when not to. it happens when the site organization does;t start with the bottom level pages and actually with the bottom level content types. you have to start everything at the bottom: designs, wireframes. this can be tricky because generally what people in business units want to see is the homepage, major landing pages.
- how do we fix it? make the backend better design from the bottom up and pay attention to individual content types first we always really really want to design the home page first but resist that temptation! Always reminding my team to start at content types, then post/page types, widgets/modules. landing and homepage should be last. this is where standard authoring structure really come into play, preventing content blobs. recipes is a great example.
- no macrostructures: information design patterns author-driven navigation, wiki-like (too broad) or library-like (too deep) ciricular navigation, clicking thru dozens of links only to find a phone number, that is actually in a text field and not in a "phone number" field
- the mobile site that is somehow different, or contains a subset of the desktop site, is a thing of the past. This is especially true for hospital websites, and in fact municipal services sites your mobile site can’t be a subset of your desktop site. Mobile doesn’t accomodate really deep OR really broad IA. I’ve mostly been talking about responsive design but all of this applies equally well to accessibility, I’ve seen some very circular architectures that would make a screen reader user crazy need to also reframe this idea that mobile users want to do different things. Recall Thomas Watson, 1943, IBM: "there is a world market for maybe five computers”
- COPE as the backbone of your content strategy. this will address the seletons by ensuring the content is structured, as data. It will force a governance model and avoid duplication of content and effort. take the time to structure the content types and IA for mobile and with a cope governance model but remember the productivity problem let's try to make the admin of our websites as beautiful and easy to use as the front end of our websites
- COPE as the backbone of your content strategy. this will address the seletons by ensuring the content is structured, as data. It will force a governance model and avoid duplication of content and effort. take the time to structure the content types and IA for mobile and with a cope governance model but remember the productivity problem let's try to make the admin of our websites as beautiful and easy to use as the front end of our websites
- there is a deck with speaker's notes and more meat on the website, that I’ll upload later tonight. FIRST THINGS FIRST: this isn;t a session about development or drupal dev tools, we won;t talk about code or modules or even themeing. I'm not a developer. I manage website builds, I'm a user experience designer, and I refer to myself as a content strategist because I usually work in that space in between the site build, or the site structure and the people who end up managing the site and the site structure This session is about content strategy and what, as a content strategist, I have seen in some of the mostly public service orgs I've worked with, when we embarked on a redesign. I see a lot of broken telephone that can happen in between site building and content management or operationalizing the site