Managing content: content design training (6 of 7)
This is the sixth in a series of 7 blogs about Scroll’s new content design training modules. It covers managing content as a strategic asset once it’s been published: auditing, measuring and content lifecycle management.
By Andrew Charlesworth
Andrew Charlesworth is a content strategist and Scroll consultant. He specialises in helping organisations measure and improve the impact of their content and efficiently manage its life cycle. He's trained content designers from public and private sector, journalists, and PR execs.
Why measure and manage content?
Too many publishing workflows stop at ‘Live!’.
However, no matter how thoroughly user-researched your content is, how well structured, how clearly written, how carefully edited and double-checked, if you don’t maintain it, user experience will diminish over time.
There has to be as much activity after publishing as before.
So these 3 modules introduce the idea that content has a lifecycle, that it needs managing, and that measuring the right thing is key to managing content. They help content teams shift their focus from the frenetic treadmill of reactive publishing to actively managing the content estate. Inevitably, they overlap with the module about content process.
How to measure content?
The first part of the measuring content module is spent establishing the need for measurement.
As the old adage says: what gets measured gets managed. The reverse corollary also applies: what doesn’t get measured can’t be managed. And what isn’t managed decays. The law of the universe is entropy. Why should your content be exempt?
The thing you want to know from measurement is: is the content doing its job? Not unique visits per month. Not ‘engagement’. Not stickiness. Not bounce rate. This implies the content has a job, but that’s dealt with in modules that cover basics and user needs.
One metric is rarely enough. All measurements require interpretation. No matter how good a measurement, it only tells you what is happening, not why. No measurement should become a target lest it be gamed (Goodhart’s Law - opens in new tab).
The module looks at different types of content published by your organisation to establish:
what purpose it serves
what a suitable measure of success might be - that is, measuring from a user’s point of view, not the organisation’s
practical tips on how to make and interpret the required measurements.
Start with audit
Audit is the beginning of measurement. Inventory is the beginning of audit. These two are often conflated.
Inventory is a list of all content assets, where they are located, and who ‘owns’ them. Inventory is mostly passive.
Audit is active, a quality judgement on the current state of those assets and what is required to make them effective and keep them that way.
The audit training module looks at:
the ways audits can be undertaken, particularly for large sites (1,000+ ‘pages’) where a whole-site one-off audit isn’t feasible
how to scale audit to user and business needs, and content team resources
estimating the costs of audit
estimating the effort, resources and costs required to overhaul content.
Content lifecycle maintenance
Estimating the costs and resources required to overhaul and maintain content is a vital part of the training. The content lifecycle module looks at what content teams should be attending to and methods for streamlining maintenance with repeatable processes.
Again, the focus is on managing content, not producing ever more of it.
This often leads to an inescapable conclusion: that the organisation has already published more content than it can afford to maintain, and that plans for yet more content will only make matters worse.
That content volume far outstrips the capability to maintain it is a risk. In the 21st century content is infrastructure. The organisation depends on content: to drive efficiency through self-service, for both external and internal users, and for reputation.
If infrastructure isn’t maintained it fails. But most organisations think of maintaining their digital infrastructure in terms of network uptime, not content accuracy and efficacy.
To mitigate the risk, an organisation has to either reduce the scale of their bloated digital estate to match the resource they are prepared to fund, or increase resources to maintain the current estate.
This may sound more like management consultancy than content training. It is. But few want to hear management advice from a content designer.
Organisations often choose to live with the risk, and hope the content team can cope, rather than make hard decisions about content volumes and resources. Nevertheless, it’s important to put the truth into the hands of the content team.
To improve user experience, you have to start somewhere. And where better than with the content team?
Scroll’s new modular training
The focus of Scroll’s new modular training is on developing skills that content teams struggle to acquire:
Content design basics
The role of user research
Content process design
Stakeholder management
Taking a brief
Thinking like a user
Accessibility
Discussion, review, and 2i
Co-developing content
Measuring content and audit
Content lifecycle management
Read more about Scroll’s content design training.
Talk to us about improving user experience by upskilling your content team.