Building content clarity, piece by piece
Laying the content strategy foundations for xero.com
The time had arrived to renovate xero.com. It didn’t just need a fresh lick of paint — it needed new foundations, re-plumbing and re-roofing. There was no defined content strategy, and sections of the site were disjointed. We didn’t have a way to create consistent, dependable content across pages and our growing set of regions.
To set the scene, xero.com had weathered years of massive company growth. And as a result, it needed a bit of a Grand Designs-style overhaul.
Looking back, I think it’s important to reflect on our core objectives and why we were trying to achieve them. We wanted to ensure that information and structure were clearly defined and ordered. We wanted to cut down unnecessary bespoke content and duplication. And we wanted to increase writing efficiency and collaboration through the use of planning tools.
How mapping information and structure delivered order and clarity
Kevin McCloud, of Grand Designs fame, was on point here when he said: “Clarity and order give human beings a good deal of pleasure.”
And to have clarity and order, we needed a content strategy. But you might be asking, what’s a content strategy? To quote Kristina Halvorson, one of the queens on this topic:
“Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.”
As part of our strategy, we leveraged the pillars of the NISR framework (Needs, Information, Representation and Structure). This was a concept introduced to us by Today, the design agency we hired to support our work.
- Needs: the target audience’s needs (who our audience is, and the tasks they need to complete)
- Information: what we communicate to our audiences (how we answer questions from our audience)
- Structure: the hierarchy and layout of information (how we prioritise information)
- Representation: the aesthetic elements of information (how we show our audience information)
We needed to separate out information and structure, and use this to inform how we could reuse information and establish better hierarchy and narrative. For example, a piece of information could appear in a few places on the website, but be represented in varying layouts.
By separating information and representation from one another, we’ve found it easier to make changes to the site quickly — and with more confidence. Creating layout-agnostic content not only means we have more order and clarity — but it means we are much more efficient too.
To quote Today: “When you understand what users need, you can decide what information to show them, in what structure, using which representation. A great experience is the sum of these parts: engaging, well-structured information that meets genuine needs.”
Leveraging technology, in order to just publish once
Our goal was to create a way to reuse content and manage it across the site, from just one location. We wanted to be confident that information was accurate and up to date. Instead of copying and pasting, duplication, and bespoke work, we wanted to just publish once, so that we could be more efficient and have better control about what we were publishing.
This is where Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) content fragments, experience fragments and content variables came in.
These AEM elements (fragments and variables) are essentially a way to bring efficiency and order to content. Forget the old, time-consuming way of identifying and updating countless instances of copy when statistics change, or a feature is updated.
- Content fragments are like a packaged-up piece of content that lives in one place. If you update the fragment, that content is updated everywhere else it appears on the site — automatically. Content fragments are also layout agnostic, so the same content can appear in multiple formats, while still being managed in the same place.
- Experience fragments are less layout agnostic, and instead are more about a fixed format that needs to be replicated across the site, with the core information held in one place. For example, our sign-up block.
- Content variables are a clever way to have a single source for key information. This meant we didn’t have to edit pages just to replace specific words such as GST to VAT or dollars to pounds. Instead, pricing and key customer numbers can now be updated with a single change.
Content variables are a way to ensure wherever we mention a number or piece of information that regularly changes on the site, we can update it in one place and it will change everywhere. My colleague Sarah was part of the team on this, doing some great work to create massive efficiencies.
Here are some stats with a ‘before and after’ snapshot of time saved with variable fragments. In this example, there were several price changes that needed to be made, before a campaign could go live.
Before: multiple updates, in multiple places
- 1 script created to find all references of the old plan details
- 162 pages manually updated for the individual references of the plan detail
- 13 pricing pages updated
- 13 pricing detail pages updated
- 13 home pages updated
- 201 pages manually scheduled for activation
Roughly 35 hours of work to do a plan change across the regions.
After: one update, in one place
- 1 pricing page template updated and rolled out
- 1 content fragment updated and activated
- 13 pricing pages activated
Roughly 1 hour of work.
Content planners for purpose, transparency and collaboration
We had already explored structure and structural consistency in content design. But we needed a way to help people use those structures. That’s where our templates and planners came into play. Content planners are a handy tool we’ve been using to map out content. Before we had them, we spent a lot of time going back and forth on the details of the words on a page, getting stuck in the weeds too soon.
Planning tools mean people don’t go down a bespoke design or writing route and then have to backtrack. People can now use the structure we’ve provided, and roughly plan pages early.
It also means that writers are more involved — the subject matter experts provide the general talking points of a web page, and the writers refine this with crafted copy.
By asking stakeholders to plan an outline (3–4 bullet points) of what they need covered on a page, writers have a strong foundation for the actual writing. Starting with bullet points and low-fidelity content enables us to collaborate and make scope calls early on, before committing to too much on the page.
Additionally, a content planner is completed in collaboration with the briefer. This means the general points are established collectively from the get go.
Previously, writers didn’t have a process or place for deciding on and documenting the general points of the page first. And this meant they had to rework content if it wasn’t quite what the briefer wanted them to cover. The planners for feature and product pages contain sections for ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ points on the page. This means we are asking stakeholders to define what’s most and least important on the page.
This has been a vital aspect of the planning tool, as it means we avoid ‘page bloat’ where everything is deemed important — and then nothing is.
Here are some areas our content planners cover:
- Purpose: What is this content’s job? What is the intended outcome for users and Xero?
- Audience and tasks: Choose from a task framework
- Primary points: These should tell a story. In terms of hierarchy on the page, these are the points that a reader ‘must know’.
- Secondary points: These should complement, not overlap, primary points. These are the points that are ‘nice for a reader to know’ but not a necessity.
- Findability: How will this content be found? Plus what links to or from this content?
Background information:
- Supporting data and insights: Any other information, such as customer queries, that might inform the content.
- Keywords: What search terms ought to lead people to this content?
The beauty of the content planner is that it serves to really focus on what the point of the page is and prioritise the information. Having primary and secondary points means that writers must have an immediate hierarchy on the page — and this information becomes part of the content design. For example, feature pages have primary points with their own highlight and images, while secondary points are in an ‘expand/collapse’ format.
Rather than content at Xero becoming a production line, the goal here is to always create content that serves a strong purpose. By encouraging a collaborative process between the information owner (or briefer) and writers, we can create better outcomes for content.
Writers being more involved in what we’re saying and why, is a pivotal shift in the way we work. Planning content means more effort upfront — but in the end, it saves time, and makes it easier to boil the talking points down to the actual words. This makes content less complicated, hopefully less expensive, and definitely less messy.
Foundations to withstand the test of time
Just like a house needs solid foundations in order to go the distance, a website does too. We’ve created a strategy that’s provided some solid structure for the Xero website, using the NISR model to solve the concepts of needs, information, structure and representation. As a result, we now have a blueprint for content that is well structured and meets genuine user needs.
We’ve also changed the way we leverage technology for our content and how we plan, collaborate and go about writing it. These aspects are now able to be used company wide and leveraged across content types, introducing vital efficiency to our processes.
Now that xero.com has been renovated from the ground up, our goal is for it to weather many more years of change — no matter what new ideas are thrown at it. And we’re dedicated to ensuring that the strategies we’ve implemented serve our customers, prospects and fellow Xeros, long into the future.
