Responsive content modelling
Steve Fisher takes a look at how to nail down the core piece of content around which your whole site orbits
Without content, a website is a black hole. Finding that core piece of content from which all the rest of the pages and elements hang saves us from being sucked into the black hole of building fancy buckets to hold Lorem Ipsum. Finding the core content of your website means the entire team (vendors, stakeholders, audiences) will walk away with a common understanding and vision. Every time you write or revise, you’ll think about that core piece of content and refocus. The content authoring experience will become what it was always meant to be: dreamy.
To find this core content, we use something called a content modelling workshop. In this article, I’ll take a closer look at our process.
Team talk
First off, you need people in the room who have the right passion and information. A team might include a UX lead, content strategist, developer, client project sponsor, client IT lead and client content specialist. You may not have all these specialists for every project, but there are probably people with these general responsibilities in their job descriptions. The goal is to involve people who understand the problem, are passionate about solving it, and have the authority to make decisions.
Responsive content modelling is a team-building exercise, but with fewer trust falls and more Post-It notes. Trust is crucial; everyone needs to feel safe to speak freely. For this, getting everyone together is key. This means being locked in a room together for anything from a couple of days to the better part of a week. Take breaks as a group, and get lunch delivered.
Be prepared
In preparation for your workshop, you need to inventory everything you currently have. You have to know what exists to know its purpose and to see patterns.
Next you need to set some high-level goals for the site. So you don’t fall into the trap of letting opinions guide your decisions, it’s important you know your audience and its needs. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, it’s pretty damn hard to write for them.
You then need to work out the UX vision. Fire off a quick draft to get it out there and ensure it is pointing the group towards the right target. Finally, establish the project’s design principles. These are the guideposts for all decision-making during the project. They’re the values or ‘why’ statements that will keep you moving towards the vision. Think of them as the guiding principles of the project.
Nailing down the ‘who, why and what’ is crucial. You need to know your purpose because you can’t know what your central content type is without knowing who you’re communicating with and why.
In a multi-device world, content should adapt to all platforms and be represented consistently. You can do this by making sure that your core content type is the first thing users see on any device
Content templates
With this framework established, you can dig into the content modelling phase of your workshop. You’re going to prioritise every content type. Here you look at all the content views you’ll need: the homepage, landing page, standard content page, news releases, application templates, advanced search and so on. Often there will be an established list, based on an earlier contract.
You want to begin to prioritise all these content views by comparing content templates with the vision and goals. You need to consider questions like: Where will the content live? Where will the most important content to the primary audiences be found? Will it live on the homepage or a landing page? Is this a page where search is dominant?
In this phase, you must agree on everything; no compromise. This is a must. Focus on audience needs and toss opinions aside. This is the secret to delighting audiences and giving them what they need. It will be important to know how to argue well and speak your mind, so you need a strong facilitator. This can be anyone who understands a project’s process and purpose. The best facilitators are often the experience architect or the content strategist.
Remember, there is no such thing as the client team and the vendor team: there is only the project team. You can’t successfully find that thing that bonds the team and the content by working separately.
Looking for the core
Go you! You found and prioritised the core content templates. Now you need to get more granular and find the unique content type everything orbits around. To do this, you list the discrete content types of your content templates: page title, contact module, featured image, teaser copy, main body copy, related items, and so on. At this point, this may include items that you’re not sure you want included. We’ll sort these out later.
Attach a priority level of one, two, or three to each content type or item on the list:
- Essential: This view wouldn’t be able to function or communicate the core message without this item
- Great to have: These items fully support the core purpose of this view
- Nice to have: If these items didn’t exist it wouldn’t have a huge impact on the view
If you start to label items with a four, they’re probably pointless. Everything should point people towards the core purpose of this content. Some priority three elements might reveal themselves as necessary and some priority ones could get demoted. Things will shift as the team progresses.
Narrowing down
You’re not done yet! Now you go back through the three priority groups and assign a priority order to each element within each group. Be prepared to duke it out, laugh, cry, and sweat through this. It’s not about compromise, it’s about focusing on what’s best for the audience. This is why you established a framework through our UX vision, design principles and high-level goals. Return to those guideposts for every decision.
Something must be the very first priority and something must be the last. Take it seriously and resist the urge to quit — I promise it will be worth it. This is a less technical, but more human-centred method of content modelling. When you’re done, every content type will have a unique priority, and content type 1–1 is the most important. This is your core content type.
Priority 1–1
In a multi-device world where content can live anywhere, this is one of the most important things you can do to make your content successful. Content should adapt to all platforms and be represented consistently. You can do this by making sure that priority 1–1 content is the first thing users see on any device.
Regardless of content being accessed on a Pebble watch or a billboard, the key message remains clear. And for the 90 per cent of people who juggle between devices, they’re seeing the congruence of the content.
Finding the core piece of content really is the key to every web project, big or small. It will make your projects more successful and help you build a better, more thoughtful web, one content type at a time.
Steve is the founder at The Republic of Quality and the co-founder of The Design & Content Conference
This article originally appeared in issue 273 of net magazine.
