Best practices for building effective, clutter-free, and scalable Confluence content: Part 1
This is a two-part blog written by Good Software and Adaptavist. To read Adaptavist’s blog on content maintenance, head over to their blog for Part 2.
Confluence users know it doesn’t take long for a small, well-organized Confluence instance to become an unmanageable stale mess of content. As a user for over 7 years, I’ve learned some keys ways of controlling content chaos and creating effective content. One the most effective strategies is making data-informed decisions.
“As more and more people around the globe work together, sharing information–accurate information is critical.”
– Atlassian’s Guide to Enterprise Content Management
In this blog we’ll explore 5 best practices for creating content that works and ensuring it falls into the right hands.
Tip 1: Create simple, clear and engaging space home pages
“There’s no space like home ;)”
— Tim Clipsham
In Confluence, all it can take for your best work to go unnoticed is a key missing term in a page title, or a page buried too deep within a large space. The worst part is we often don’t even know when this happens.
Your space home page is likely the first page people will see, yet they’re often the most neglected. Great space home pages set your content and audience up for success. Below are some tips to help you design a home page your colleagues will copy.
The best layout will depend on the type of space, however, all the best space home pages I’ve seen include 5 key ingredients:
- The team or project Why, How and What
- The space owner name and team
- Quick links to the most useful content
- A picture or logo to make the space unique and memorable
- The project status or team health monitor
(e.g. Atlassian Team Playbook Health Monitors)
Your space home page sets context, the scope of the space, identifies who is responsible, and provides an easy way to surface the most useful information. Great home pages save countless hours of people’s time finding the content they need and finding where new content belongs.
Tip 2: Understand your audience using hallway testing and user research
Relevance is key to creating engaging content, and understanding the reader is key to developing relevant content. Hallway testing is a lightweight tool to learn more about your audience and how they look for information they need. Armed with just a laptop and a common area (near your company “water-cooler”) you have everything you need to get started.
Firstly, identify the content you would like to test and define a task e.g. “Learn how to submit a request for a new laptop”. Secondly, open a conversation with your internal target audience, explain your goal and let them complete the task. Finally, capture the results and any feedback they have.
After just a few conversations, you will begin to discover:
- Was it easy to find the information?
- Do they search first or browse?
- What search terms or space did they expect would provide the right information?
These learnings scale because they not only help you with your immediate goal but also help shape new content you create going forward.
Tip 3: Make data informed decisions with analytics
“In God we trust. All others must bring data.”
— W. Edwards Deming
Qualitative insights from hallway testing are great at revealing what might happen but won’t reveal what is happening in your spaces. Pairing these insights with quantitative analytics completes the picture.
Confluence only captures basic engagement metrics e.g. likes and the number of comments. By using apps like Analytics for Confluence, you can know if your content is reaching the right people with page view statistics.
These metrics make it safe to experiment and easy to learn if changes have a positive impact. It can also reveal if your latest changes have been seen — particularly useful if they’re important to read before your next team meeting.
Over time, you can begin to tailor your content based on usage data. Analytics for Confluence reveals who your primary contributors and readers are so you can ensure the most relevant content is presented on each page.
You may also discover useful content isn’t being discovered. Using your space home page and analytics, you can surface content more prominently and measure if your changes have an impact.
Tip 4: Identify and action stale content to keep spaces lean and mean
“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.”
— Mark Twain
Large spaces cause more problems than you’d think and go against the grain of Confluence. Lean focused spaces with a clear purpose make it easier to:
- Find the right information and the best place to put new content
- Archive old and stale content
- Give clear ownership and manage permissions
Deleting content can feel too permanent, leading to procrastination and worries of “what if we need this one day.” This leads to clutter and ultimately ineffective content. Instead, archive and archive often — it’s easy to unarchive if a mistake it made.
Check out Adaptavist’s Part 2 blog for tips on tackling stale content head on using ScriptRunner for Confluence and Analytics for Confluence.
Tip 5: Take an agile approach and start with your largest spaces first
Trying to clean up all of Confluence is like trying to boil the ocean. Large spaces are typically the most used and often cause the most problems, which makes them the best place to start.
Out-of-the-box in Confluence it can be difficult to identify and compare spaces. If you’re using Confluence Server or Data Center you can use the built-in “Space Statistics” script in ScriptRunner for Confluence to easily identify and keep a watch on your largest spaces.
This is particularly useful for system administrators to find and keep an eye on which spaces are contributing the most large attachments. See the Adaptavist Part 2 blog for details on automated tools for keeping on top of large attachments.
Check out Analytics for Confluence and ScriptRunner for Confluence on the Atlassian Marketplace.
