The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [11]
As a designer, the only way to ensure that the page makes for good reading is to read it yourself; to relinquish the design sensibility that is inclined to look at text and take the time to actually read it. It’s not an easy task, but then, neither is reading on the web, and making the effort may help you empathize with the reader’s plight. The web is still a noisy, crowded place—but it’s also limitless, and surely we can find space enough for reading—a space where the text speaks to the reader and the reader does not strain to hear.
In addition to attending to design considerations like whitespace and typesetting, we can act as user advocates by advising our clients and employers to reduce distractions in sidebars, fight ads that obstruct content, and give readers the equivalent of good light and a quiet room. This is one of the reasons that a multidisciplinary approach can potentially produce better results than content-only gigs for some kinds of projects—when content specialists can weigh in on presentation and design, readers benefit.
Users are people, too
Much of the design and planning work done in major museums and galleries is not theoretical, or even particularly curatorial. Curators and other museum workers deal with physical objects and corporeal humans in real spaces. And those humans, being mammals, need things like places to sit, reasonable ambient temperatures, wheelchair ramps and other accessibility aids, drinking water, and bathrooms. In larger museums, they also need security guards to protect them from each other, friendly staff members who can provide information in several languages, well designed maps, and someplace to get a sandwich and a coffee.
On the web, we deal with each other in heavily mediated ways, but we’re all still primates. We need accommodations for the thousand disabilities that we experience; ways of marking and saving information for later so we can take breaks; ways of skipping through content when we’re in a hurry; friendly orientation and navigation aids; access to real human assistance, via live help, telephone, email, or any other reasonable channel; and the ability to consume content on the devices and in the locations of our choice.
But aren’t these user experience concerns? They are indeed. And as content advocates, we should be ready to contribute to the design of user experiences that involve our content.
In short, we should strive to create and present content in ways that respect the fact that even when they’re using the web, people need to pee.
“Painstaking” isn’t an insult
Museum and gallery curators often handle priceless, irreplaceable objects. Accordingly, they use formalized and meticulous processes for accepting, describing, and tracking the items they care for. Similar processes, applied to content, can significantly reduce the chaos of large-scale content projects, but they need not stop there.
Most content specialists who lead large projects have learned to institute orderly content-documentation processes well before a new site launch, largely because the alternative is so painful. But although taxonomies and metadata matter quite a lot, it’s easy to accidentally omit other potentially important information:
What information about content sources and types should we record to ease future display, reuse, revision, and expansion?
When content is added or revised, how can we usefully document the reasons for the change? And how can we ensure that ongoing, distributed revisions fit within a larger communication strategy?
What processes might let us track and reuse our content resources over time? What kind of reporting, analysis, and publishing tools would such tracking and reuse require? How can we structure our content to promote reuse in interesting ways?
How might we use analytics and other tools to understand which assets we’re under-using?
We’ll return to some of these notions in a few pages, but for now,