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No more stork babies: Integrating UX research & content creation
- 1. Matt Fenwick - True North Content No more stork babies UX research and content creation
- 2. The problem
- 3. ‘Content last’ approach Downsides • Designs break • Timeframes stretch • Users lose
- 7. What are content models? “A content model documents all the different types of content you will have for a given project. It contains detailed definitions of each content type’s elements and their relationships to each other.” – Rachel Lovinger
- 11. The problem The problem Unwanted content
- 14. “I’m just about to leave the military. Can I access my super now?” “Can I transfer super from another scheme into ADF Super?”” “How does ADF Super work?”
- 15. User stories Personas User questions
- 16. Making it work (and war stories)Dig in
- 17. Consultant side Client side Deeper research Building capability
Editor's Notes
- Back when I was a kid and asked where babies come from, I was sometimes told they were delivered by storks, who held the babies in baskets tied to their beaks. The stork deposited the baby at the homes of the loving parents, who up to this point hadn’t been involved in the process. Recently, I was talking to a manager of a largeish digital agency. “We tend to build the website and then hand it over to the client to do the content.” This is a stork baby website – one that’s wrapped up beautifully and delivered to the expectant client. But there’s very little forward planning or ongoing support for how they’re actually going to feed this new baby – ie create content. What we need is a way of bringing content into UX practice, and UX practice into content. A layer that connects the two. I’ll share some tools and approaches with you coming out of my experiences as a UX researcher, content strategist, and working content creator.
- Why care about content? Well all this stuff about babies is very real for me right now. I have a five week old baby, so I’m spending a lot of time with baby bottles like this. But does it work? We can look at the design and think that it looks okay. It seems to have all the right parts. We’ve seen bottles like it before being used. But it’s empty. There’s no content. Until we fill it with content – in this case milk – we can’t answer questions that are fundamental to the experience our users – in this case – my five week old daughter. Does it hold enough milk to satisfy her? Does the milk flow out at the right rate? As UX researchers, we’re not out to create deliverables. We are responsible for delivering an experience. And that means we can’t operate at a level of abstraction. We must factor in what happens when the bottle is filled with milk
- What happens when we take stork baby approach and leave the content till the last minute? 1. Designs break. Not enough room for content. You realise that the wireframes only allowed for three lines of text, and the content needs five. Or too much room. What does that mean? It means that there are elements specified in the wireframe where we just don’t have anything to say. OR we commit the client to channels that they’re just not resourced for creating content for. 3. Finally users lose. We know that people don’t come to websites to appreciate a pretty visual design. But nor do they come to appreciate a clean user interface or an intuitive navigation. They come to get stuff done. That’s going to mean using information, and whether it’s three words or 3 pages, that’s content.
- What we see on this page is that the important dates are right up front on this page… and nowhere in sight for the first page. This poses the same problems that you see with any inconsistent user experience. Users don’t have a pattern that they can detect and follow from one page for the next. They have to work even harder to get the information – and harder still to compare information across two sources (INSERT QUOTE). But there are elements that ARE Consistent
- Let’s look at what a content last approach website might look like. This is the current state website for one of my clients – NHMRC. They’re the gold standard for funding health and medical research in Australia. I’m going to show you two different pages. I want you to imagine that you’re a dementia researcher at University of Sydney, and you’re hoping to get a grant to fund the next stage of your research. You land on this page. You want to see what else is out there, and that takes you too.. INSERT QUOTE FROM LEISA REICHELT (REF STEVEN COLLINS)
- The problems with content come about when we treat content as one big blob. What we can do instead is find a way of treating it as chunks http://www.aboutkidshealth.ca/en/Assets/Asian_girl_puzzle_BRAND_PHO_EN.jpg
- It allows me to represent content in a way that translates the intention, stakeholder needs, and functional requirements from the user experience design into something that can be built by developers implementing a CMS. The content model helps me make sure that the content vision becomes a reality. - https://alistapart.com/article/content-modelling-a-master-skill
- This is a mock-up of what a content model could look like for the NHMRC. It shows the format we’re creating – in this case a grants page. It shows the content types that the thing is made of, and their priority order. It shows what each component is made of. And it shows how that format links to other pages. There are more than one ways of cutting this – how granular you go in deciding how fine a detail you want to define – is totally driven by what you want to achieve. This is enormously useful in CMS specifications, but you can also use content modelling tools like GatherContent or Masterdocs.
- Content models let you do some cool stuff. Firstly, content models are presentation neutral, and device neutral. You can slice and dice the content types and serve them up differently for different channels. Here we see how a web page and a print prospectus differ – you can see that some content types are shared across the two formats, but others are different – and some are not displayed at all. And this can all be automated via a CMS with publishing output, or via content modelling tools such as GatherContent and Masterdocs. This lets us have intelligent conversations about the content without locking in any design elements.
- And from the author perspective, it lets us direct business area authors with whatever level of prescription we need. Here I’ve pulled out one content type – a researcher profile, and shown its elements. You can see that some things are locked down – such as specialisation wording. Others we have set limits – such as the word limit for institution. And others where the guidance is only suggested. Again, this can be done either from within the CMS, a content modelling tool. I’ve even done this in MS Word for some not for profit clients who still wanted consistency, but didn’t need a full CMS.
- Many users are like this child – drowning in content that they didn’t ask for and can’t use. And this isn’t just a problem for users. It’s a huge problem for organisations. I work with Government Departments who feel oppressed by the need to churn out content, but no sense of why they’re doing it, or who for. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tXfIOhjiAEA/UruRcXMov2I/AAAAAAAAEPc/Q4Y4OmnO50o/s1600/blog078.jpg.
- http://www.kindynews.com/uploads/1/0/6/6/10668492/9569885_orig.jpg
- http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1492467/images/o-BABY-FOOD-MESS-facebook.jpg
- In our research, we can’t just create new channels – if we want to hand over a we – otherwise we’re handing over a baby that’s going to need to be fed and changed every 15 minutes for the next three years. Is it sustainable?