Web Content & UX
A review of Content Everywhere
A could of years ago I was working on a project for the government where we were creating a health information dashboard and news aggregator. The idea was that if there was an outbreak of a flu or virus that governments could intercede earlier and at a global scale look for a spreading pandemic. I was just so excited about this project. But there was a problem… I knew nothing about the usability of displaying news stories. I had little experience with content, or the text that goes into an interface.
In this blog we’ve reviewed the Yahoo! Style Guide, which was a manual for how to write content for forms and buttons, but for this project I wanted something less in the weeds. I needed something that could talk about how and why people put content in websites and how it was used. I picked up Content Everywhere by Sarah Wachter-Boettcher, a Rosenfeld book, to see if it could help.
This book is a very quick read, like most Rosenfeld books. It is beautiful printed and filled with graphics (which seems hard since the book is about content). And, the chapters are easy to digest and stay on topic. The author does a great job of covering the basics of Information Architecture and then discussing why that is important for helping users get to the content they need. This is covered in the first third of the book
What this book does really well is discuss how websites can move from basic static sites to websites that have to display a whole lot of content. This is the second third of the book. When I was reading this book I couldn’t help but think about author websites where there is static content, new reviews and press, and perhaps a blog. That is a whole lot of content to be managed. If you want to see what I’m talking about, check out the website of Patrick Rothfuss’s, an author I really love.
(Side-note: WHEN IS THE LAST KINGKILLER BOOK GOING TO BE RELEASED?!?!)
I mean we want Patrick to stay focused on writing his next novel, not trying to manage all of the content for his website. And we want people like me who are checking for updates to be able to find that content quickly.
The answer to good content, as it turns out, is one that isn’t surprising to any of us that deal with data all day: what every website needs is well structured data. You don’t want people cutting and pasting text into html pages. You want them to do some really quick structured data queries and for all that beautiful content to be rendered in the UI. Wachter-Boettcher does a good job of arguing why this is necessary even for small to medium-sized websites and how to do it. She even gives you a quick tutorial in mark-up (which might not be every UX person’s cuppa tea, but it is useful none-the less).
The last third of the book talks about then using your structured data and putting it in new places, new formats, and personalizing content. These are all things that are possible if your data is well structured and can make for a powerful and usable experience with your content.
When I finished the book, I’m not sure I was feeling any better about my project with aggregating and visualizing news websites. But, I did have a good idea of the kinds of tasks that users are going to want to do with the content. The kinds of problems that Wachter-Boettcher discusses in the books are going to be the same problems that my users are going to face: data from multiple places that are not going to all have the same format, needing to see that data personalized for the kinds of tasks that they do, and modeling the data so that it can display in locations that users are going to look for it. With this knowledge in hand I felt more capable to start tackling the design problems I was facing and was able to structure some ad hoc paper prototyping tasks to set me on the right path.
I think the most useful nugget I took from this book was that you can’t ignore content. I currently work on a project where some users enter a small amount of free form text and some users enter paragraphs of free form text. Understanding the reasons why users create this much content and then how to structure the data model so that users can find what they entered has been critical in making that project successful. This book helped shift my perspective about content. I no longer use dummy text in my wireframes and try to get realistic content to grapple with space, clickable locations, and how much information to display before clicking through. It has helped up my design game considerably. And, if that wasn’t enough, it has helped with the gap between UX and developing a production system.
Book Club Questions
- What do you think is the relationship between content and UX?
- How do you structure your data? Do you use a data model?
- Do you use the same content in multiple places? How do you use content differently depending on the user’s task?
