The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [22]
Interviews, then proxies
Interviews are usually the first step, and as with stakeholder interviews, there is an art to selecting and interviewing participants. The finesse with which you approach this work can dramatically affect the usefulness of the information you receive.
Once you or your team have completed your initial user interviews, you can develop user proxies. These stand-ins for individual users synthesize the information you’ve learned and give your team a set of likely user needs and actions they can use to validate their ideas. User proxies include personas, user scenarios, use cases, and activity flows, all of which have been discussed extensively elsewhere. In the end, it matters less whether you create fancy, formal documents or draw stick figures on a whiteboard. What matters is that someone gets it done.
Around the time you’re conducting user research, you can begin a review of the project’s existing content. Doing these two quite different kinds of research at the same time may feel a bit daunting, but it’s a great way to make sure that you’re thoroughly immersed in your client’s world—and that of their users.
Welcome to the spreadsheet: content inventories
Before we go much further, we need to discover what content already exists; this step is often called a quantitative audit or content inventory. The web is full of useful advice on conducting content audits, so I’ll stick to a brief summary. Essentially, you’re going to create an extremely detailed site map that represents every page and other piece of content on the website you are working with, along with every other piece of existing content that may end up on the site, but that currently lives elsewhere.
For each piece of content, an inventory generally lists a:
title,
format (standard text, video, PDF, etc.),
URL or other location,
content type (landing page, article, support page, contact page, etc.), and
“owner” (person responsible for upkeep).
In my office, big inventories involve a lot of black coffee, a few late nights, and a playlist of questionable but cheering music prominently featuring the soundtrack of object-collection video game Katamari Damacy. It takes quite awhile to exhaustively inventory a large site, but it’s the only way to really understand what you have to work with.
Culling the herd: qualitative audits
At some point during or after your inventory, you’ll want to conduct a qualitative audit of some or all of your existing content. As you’ve doubtless gathered, that involves assessing the quality of the content. This may sound straightforward, but there is one major challenge: how do you evaluate content when you don’t know what you’re looking for? Sure, you can tell if content is badly written, but until you know more about your users’ needs, how will you know if the content is working?
You can’t. And that’s the main thing that affects the timing of a qualitative audit. Unless the audit timing is entirely out of your control, plan to have your user research complete and a few personas or other proxies on hand before you begin evaluating quality. Doing so will allow you to assess your content based on the basic principles outlined in the first section of this book: Is it appropriate? Useful and user-centered? Clear, consistent, and concise? Has it been properly supported, or is it outdated or inaccurate?
How you measure those qualities is up to you, and you’ll also have to decide whether or not you have the time and resources to complete a full audit of all the content you’ve inventoried, or if you need to focus on representative sections alone.
Later on, when you begin recommending changes, you’ll need to be able to tell your client or manager how much work it will take to implement your recommendations. Audits are how you find that out. (If you’re working internally or doing maintenance, they’re also a brilliant foundation for ongoing quality checks and content updates.)
Other resources
There’s more to resource assessment than content audits. For