Blogging UX Week - Understanding Your Content, Chiara Fox
[This was more of an IA review session. I heartily recommend The Polar Bear Book, aka Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, by Rosenfeld and Morville. Here are some of the interesting points.]
- Content is not limited to that served through the web. Services, etc., are also part of content.
- Content analysis is about patterns (relationships between individual items).
- When doing content analysis, one must build know the organizational structure to gear the analysis toward timeline and audience
- The content inventory (think of combing a site, and finding and noting everything. Yes, including that) should not be limited to what you can find on the site: things like ancient press releases, and orphaned pages must be included.
- The content owner and person responsible for updating the content are not always the same person. Find them both.
- ROT status - Redundant, Outdated, Trivial.
- When trying to work out task analysis, interview your users while trying to figure out which content supports what task.
From the Q&A session:
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How do you map things like affilate sites or search engine marketing?
Use keywords as datafields and treat them as smaller chunks of content. -
How do you find things you’re missing?
Spider site (to find orphaned pages). -
How do you define tasks?
Task analysis with users. -
What if you’re missing dynamic content or linear content (content that progresses through stages; press release -> event -> wrap up)
Dynamic content - if it’s in a database, it’s already structured, making it easy to figure out what’s there.
Linear content - Capture examples. What is the delta (change between steps)? Start event -> event -> post-event. Capture the event’s lifecycle. -
What’s the best way to create a hierarchy or taxonomy?
Go from spreadsheet to Visio. Building a hierarchy can be done by looking at your content map.
