Content Monster
How cultural shifts in media mirrors the content problem in tech
When you’ve worked at enough places, you start to realize there are certain problems that persist everywhere you go. And one of those big ol’ honkin’ persistent problems for tech writers is how to effectively manage content when it grows into an overwhelming junk drawer that overfloweth with utility, sure, but mainly disorder and chaos.
In my head I’ve started referring to it as the content monster.
When a business is large enough and it has enough content generated, one of the problems is usually that there’s too much content, or not enough of the right content.
It becomes hard for people to find what they need when they need it, or in corporate bizspeak — you need to JIT the JTBD.
Content monsters happen when the content repository starts to look like my 9 year old’s bedroom — just stuff piled chaotically everywhere, and every now and then you find something that you thought you threw away. All taxonomies and ontologies become this Labyrinthian maze that only like one person on the team can talk to the Goblin King about and Dance the Magic Dance so it’s nested appropriately. The whole content ecosystem becomes as hostile an environment as MS Word when you try and shift an image a millimeter to the left — one tiny change throws everything off.
In the distance… sirens.
Hard segue, but bear with me…
I heard this really interesting Offline podcast with Kyle Chayka, like, several months ago, because that’s how long it takes for me to write things for fun these days.
Chayka is a writer for the New York Times, and he wrote a book recently called Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. When I heard the podcast I couldn’t stop thinking about how these content monsters we have in the tech world (there’s too much content, it’s not easily discoverable, there’s low signal to noise, curation is missing) mirror everything going on with streaming subscription services, which are basically rebuilding the cable model as fast as they can.
Take Max, for example. HBO seems to keep reinventing themselves into something that is undeniably worse with every iteration. The user experience on that app is one of my least favorite things to interact with, because I can’t find anything, because they’ve added too much content, because I guess they want to be the junk drawer of subscription streaming services. My dear HBO, it is cool and good that you have Succession and Game of Thrones! Where is that stuff? Do I love that you have basketball now? Absolutely. But why am I seeing Guy Fieri on my home page and how do I make that stop? I do not want the mayor of Flavortown to appear before me unsummoned. It is jarring and unwelcome.
I have to think that there’s a lot of the same kinds of customer frustration involved when dealing with a similar tech docs type of content monster. As a customer, I don’t necessarily know about, or care if you merged with another company and now you have to shoehorn all their stuff into your stuff. I don’t care how hard your backend management system is to deal with, or if you have technical debt you’re trying to adjust for. I just want to be able to find the information I’m looking for, and I have yet to run across a single platform in the wild that actually does this well.
So how do you wrangle a content monster?
Look, I’m no expert. I’ve only been a tech writer for several to many years at this point. But I have my thoughts and opinions about the best way to go about solving for the content monster puzzle, which I will now detail for the niche audience of probably just technical writers who are reading this.
Find out what the consumers of your content want
Job zero is to figure out where and what your customers’ pain points are, and start asking what you can do to make their experience better. Do some research. It’s important to understand not just how users are getting to your content, and what their experience with it is, but also what they want to use it for, or what they’re trying to accomplish. Just as a warning to my fellow millennial introverts, I know we don’t usually like to do this, but this may involve some amount of talking to people. I know. 🥲 I’m sorry.
I think we all tend to think that the way we do things is the way everyone else does things, and the stuff we like is what everyone else likes. It’s not. Might I remind you of that time Apple gave everyone with an iPhone some U2 album that a lot of people (me/I) did not want. I was very dramatic about that, and it didn’t even affect me all that much. But the mere suggestion that I was into arena rock when I am solidly emo with a dash of R&B and a sprinkle of stomp & holler was beyond the pale, and I was insufferable about it for a good long while. Same thing goes for tech docs, UX, UIs — that’s why there are entire teams dedicated to these business segments.
When you’re trying to come up with a solution for what consumers want at an enterprise-level scale it is WAY hard to come up with something that meets all the needs and edge-cases you’re going to run up against in a broad user-base, and you probably won’t, but you can come up with something better than not good. And you can get closer to where you want to be incrementally.
Reduce the amount of content you have
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say most people thinking strategically about their content monster don’t want to further complicate the user experience. You probably want to simplify the user experience, or maybe burn it all down and start over — both good options. The prevalence and adoption of AI chatbots as a sort of lightweight search engine will probably eventually do this far more effectively than we currently seem to be able to pull off, but until that day arrives, you better KISS those docs. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Refine your content base.
Do you really need 50 different docs that say basically the same thing in slightly different ways? No. No you don’t. Maybe toss a few things in the ol’ archive bin and then interrogate how you got into that situation in the first place. No one has hours to waste sifting through a Labyrinthian maze except 1986 Jennifer Connelly, and we’re in 2024 now friends. Look, everything about David Bowie in that film was distracting and we all know what I’m talking about. Turn away from the Bowie, and run towards the warm Marie Kondo light of a decluttered and minimalist space.
Maybe that’s a good method... Ask yourself if each piece of content sparks joy and if the answer is no, throw it away.
Help people find the content they want to see
In the interview I listened to on Offline, a couple of things Chayka said really stood out to me.
One of them was that some element of human curation is needed because popularity can’t be the only metric we use to judge what is good. I agree with that. Sometimes I’ve rolled the dice and gone with a solid 53% choice on Rotten Tomatoes and been pleasantly surprised with the results of my viewing experience.
Now, Chayka said this in the context of being dragged through algorithmic feeds on Instagram and Tik Tok compared to going to an art museum and being guided through an experience by a curator. You don’t necessarily want to look at the art in a museum that’s the “most liked” or has gotten the most views.
Have you been to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa? I have. She tiny! She behind glass. And it’s almost not worth being crushed by the huge throng of people around her. There is so much more worth seeing in the Louvre, and if you just focus on the Mona Lisa, you’re missing out on seeing a lot of other really extraordinary works of art.
You can apply the same principle to technical documentation. But again, you should use what you find out from customers in your research phase to tailor your curation efforts.
The most liked things can tell you what people are focused on, and the content that is popular or important in the zeitgeist at the time, but it can’t really tell you what people want or what they’re missing. AI/ML content for instance probably wasn’t as popular a couple of years ago as it is today, and I can take a stab at guessing that someone looking at AI/ML docs may also want to look at something in Analytics or IoT, but the night is dark and full of terrors. Who knows what kinds of strange combos people are interested in?
You should ask people what they want, and then you should figure out how to surface things so there is less of a burden on the consumer of your content to do Google sorcery in order to summon the things they want to see. Otherwise you wind up with Guy Fieri in places he’s definitely not supposed to be, and no one wants that.
Vibe check your content
One of the other things Chayka and Favreau were talking about in this podcast is the idea of Lean in and Lean back content. Lean back content would be something like what he talks about in “Emily in Paris” and the rise of ambient TV. It’s something comforting you put on that you’re not really paying attention to while you’re doing other stuff, whereas Lean in content is something you’re actually paying attention to.
Spotify makes it easy to lean in or lean back with its “mood” playlists. It’s just surfacing the same content in a slightly different way. Sometimes you want to zone out to Lo-fi beats and other times you want to sift through example code on the Internet in complete silence until you see the Matrix. Hey, I get it.
There are a lot of applications for breaking out content into Lean in or Lean back chunks in technical documentation. Tutorials, onboarding, study guides, certain parts of user guides or API references, and even whitepapers with very specific use cases — these are all Lean in content types. Whereas your more long-form or background information-y types of content like extremely long frameworks, case studies, product manuals, or even that one security training you have to take every year over and over — these are very Lean back and tune out types of content. If they were audio books it’s the type of thing you’d listen to on double speed.
Not every part of every content type is going to have value to people. When people look at technical documentation, they’re usually trying to solve a problem that they have, or get an idea of where to start. No one usually reads technical documentation end-to-end except the people that wrote it, like yours truly. So keep those expectations low, and maybe experiment with chunking up content into more digestible tidbits for your audience.
Routinely review whether your content is doing what it should be doing
This one should be a no-brainer but it is usually the hardest one to instill at scale. People get complacent with the status quo and they don’t like to clean up after themselves.
Especially when there’s a high degree of chaos in your tech docs you should make sure that the content is providing value to the consumer of it, and if it’s not, tweak it or get rid of it. Customers also need to be able to find your content, and you should have mechanisms in place for feedback so they can tell you when something sucks. It’s highly unlikely they will tell you when things are good.
You should be reviewing the whole docs ecosystem regularly to determine if anything needs to be swapped, upgraded, fixed, removed, or what have you. Not just the content of your content, but also how it’s displayed to consumers, and whether your feedback mechanisms are still appropriate.
This is getting really long so I’m gonna wrap up now
Content monsters arise out of content mess, and when there’s a mess, you should probably clean it up, or the people that have to use your content mess will be unhappy with you to the point where they may even put a bunch of random Guy Fieri memes in a blog post, HBO. Content messes can be anywhere there’s too much content, whether that’s in tech docs or on a subscription streaming service, and there are ways to fix them and clean them up.
The point is — creators and consumers experience the content (monster) in different ways. I think too often creators get focused on metrics that signal whether they did well, when they should focus on metrics that signal whether consumers got what they needed, because people remember how you make them feel. Platforms, apps, websites — these things don’t always stand the test of time. Guy Fieri on the other hand, is eternal.
Jen Jarnefeldt currently does technical writing for AWS. Jen loves climbing rocks, indoor plant jungles, and paintings that make people uncomfortable. She also has a dog named Sausage.
