Content-first design: how to make sure your site lives up to expectations

ADRIENNE SMITH:
Hey, can everyone hear me OK? I know we're a smaller group. I'm going to try to project, but the mic is there too. How's everyone doing? Amazing. We'll let (INAUDIBLE) it's just my team coming in. But hey, thanks for being here. My name is Adrienne Smith and I'm here with Evolving Web. We're super happy to be a co-sponsors this year at Mid Camp and personally it's my first time here, so it's really nice to connect with all of you and see what everyone else is doing. Yeah, so let's get into it. A bit about me. So I'm currently a senior digital strategist again with Evolving Web. We're a full service agency for web design development, maintenance, hosting. We pretty much do it all and more personally, I am actually a librarian by training, so anything that's around information retrieval and classification. The talk before was amazing also. Yep. That's sort of in my wheelhouse. And I have spent the last ten years working really on the digital side of things. So designing websites, intranets, optimizing search engines internally.

I was with the Yellow Pages in Canada for a little bit, as well as building out things like social networks, employee profiles, anything that's really around focusing on enterprise content management and knowledge management. So again, today we're going to focus a bit more on some of the stuff that's back of house. So information architecture, taxonomies, metadata and the stuff that's a little more visible too, in terms of content management and governance style, voice and tone. So yeah, and again, if you haven't had a chance, please do so before the break, check out Evolving web. I see some people grab some stickers. We're happy to represent Montreal, go Habs go and yeah. Anyways, let's do it. Yeah. So my talk today, it's essentially to do the opposite of this. So putting the content strategy horse behind the cart. And again, I know in web design, we all have our expertise. We like to sort of stay in our domain. I'm a developer, I'm a designer, I do UX. At the same time, I think it's really, really important to try to move away as much as we can.

And again, there's been a big movement in project management moving away from waterfall into more agile, iterative, and it's something that at Evolving World we take really seriously to and that our different expertise teams try to work closely together, do a lot of knowledge transfer. Again, the worst case scenario for our client services agency is being able to design something amazing that our developers have no idea, have no time, have no money to actually build. So by trying to bring content strategy as well as UX and visual and tech a bit closer together, we really are trying to make the process more efficient, more effective and yeah, building the best experiences we can at the end of the day. So the goal is really to talk about a bit more concretely what content strategy is and how we can really save time and money and lots of headaches doing it a bit more hand in hand. So a bit of the agenda, I'll sort of set the context with a bit of a the design process overall, at least how we do it.

But obviously there are many flavors of that. And then really trying to be a bit more practical about what are we talking about when we say content strategy and yeah. And then wrap up with doing a bit more of the complementary aspect of everything and really killing, sometimes more than two birds, but hopefully a one stone making that stone a little bigger. Yes. So the context. So at Evolving Web, we're really sort of working with you for larger phases when we tackle these big web design projects, whether it's a brand new site or we're working with redesigning something that's sort of a yeah, been past its expiration date. So I'm just going to walk through the big phases and talk about what types of questions are we actually trying to answer and sort of setting up how we have UX and visual content and tech development collaborate. None of these exist in a vacuum, so obviously we shouldn't be creating them in one either. First up, so the discovery phase. This is really where we're trying to gather all the information that we can.

Particularly, I don't know if any of you are coming from a client based agencies. There's what the client says that they want, think that they want, what the users are saying, what other sources are saying. So again, we've really all been there. But again, the goal is really to try to be as objective as possible and quantitative and really infuse that with a sort of 360 view of what's actually happening. What problems are we trying to solve? What needs the users have? Sometimes we'll have people come up and say, everything's bad, we have to fix it, but at the same time we often cover things that are working quite well. Sometimes we see some workarounds that people are very attached to. So that's a whole other game of change management. But overall, the idea is really just sort of understand the gap between where we are today and where we're trying to go. So some of the questions, what are users actually trying to do? Where are the business goals? How far away are those things or close together?

Again, what's working? What's not? What types of journeys are users going on? Who are users and do they have similar journeys? Where are they overlapping? And yeah, essentially what pain points do we have? What opportunities can we identify along the way? And finally, and this is really critical in terms of the strategy aspect of all of this, how are we measuring success? So again, if we're not aligned on that, first of all, and I'll shout out to our great project managers here who keep us honest, yeah, we really don't have too much of a basis for evaluating what we're doing. Next up. So designing and testing, so really taking all the different discovery artifacts outcomes. It's really the time where we're sort of able to let our imagination run wild. And that's really across the board, whether it's working from, again, new modules. We want to implement new functionalities, we want to create new ways of displaying content. Really what's important is to test, to go pretty fast, try not to break too many things, but yeah, and really make sure that we're really at this more conceptual designing phase.

We're testing, we're getting multiple rounds of feedback also just to make sure that further down the road we're avoiding any of those surprises that we hope move. And yeah, so some of the questions and again, I'll focus a bit more specifically on the content stuff. How could we organize or optimize our information structures to improve how people are finding information, are they actually completing the test they're supposed to be? Are we actually hitting those objectives that we set for ourselves? Are there ways we can really enhance the experience, whether it's a placement of elements? What the text of this call to action is really named? How the labels on our navigation are called? So, yeah, better support the overall objectives and what type of visual design elements. Obviously, and we know accessibility is super important now. Otherwise, in terms of retrieval, there's all the work we do around optimizing for search engine and other things that are maybe a bit more, let's say, relegated to really sometimes the end of the line.

But the editorial, the voice and tone, how are we really sort of manifesting who we are, what our brand is? It's very easy to say, OK, we have a documentation, I want the user to know how to do this and you can sort of go step one, step two, step three at the same time, is that going to make the difference between an experience that's like, OK, or something that's going to really make sure that users are coming to your site, come to know you, expect something, have a certain level of quality and even go further, make them more than just a casual user but somebody that's going to keep coming back again. So that's all the different types of elements we can really infuse best practices and content strategy to, yeah, move our things to the next level. Very quickly, operationalizing, just do it. So now that we've sort of fleshed out all the different parts of the concepts to make our strategy, we want to sort of see how they all really work together. So we're moving away from the low fidelity, the wireframes, the maybe interactive prototyping into more of a build phase and seeing what's what.

And lastly, yeah, so again, what is the status of everything we have to do and what's left to do? Making sure that again and we're not in a race against the timeline to get it all done when we need to. And lastly, the governance stuff. So again, I think this is one that again, I don't want to say it too loud because we might not be in business, but if everyone really, really governed their websites super well, we probably have a little less business in terms of website redesign projects, but that's neither here nor there. So obviously what types of processes, tools and people obviously are there to make sure that, yeah, our product is being maintained, not just technically with security and patches and migration, everyone going into Drupal 10, but also making sure that our content is being updated. If I have a blog and the last entry is from two years ago, how is that really going to support my reputation and sort of build that level of credibility, reliability and whatever sort of performance outcomes or objectives we set in terms of our indicators back in the strategy, how are we stepping up?

Yeah. So really post-launch. Who is going to do what? When are they going to do it? And again, making sure that what's really important, I think, is governance should never be a document that someone writes and then puts it away but something that's really living, which is why it's so great to see, obviously CMS, including Drupal, have really advanced in granular permissions, workflows, triggers, automatic stuff. There are so many things we can do to make it happen, but at the end of the day it really comes down to people and their desire to do so. So obviously we're looking at different context to if it's, let's say, a higher ed or government, do they have the same incentive to keep everything up to date as someone who's in e-commerce? So again, the case can always be different, but what's important is to make sure that you find people who believe in it and that they take these jobs seriously. So adding in content strategy, this is now the interactive portion of the presentation. I'm going to throw it to you.

If anyone is a brave volunteer, we're among friends. How do you define content strategy? What does content strategy mean to you? Or is that why you're all here today? Anyway, No, I won't put anyone in this spot. I know it's a...

SPEAKER:
I think content strategy is an intentional and deliberate kind of scaffolding for the content management system. And you're really planning for scalability and flexibility. And that's what produces a longer living website, if you will. Yeah. And just like, you know, planning for all types of contents, we often go into projects where we see an information architecture that did not map to what their content needs are, and you just start seeing that little closet over here, the top level math that everything's been stuffed under. And so it's just solving for problems like that.

ADRIENNE SMITH:
Exactly. And again, I love it. You said the planning, the creation, it can be dynamic, It can be flexible. Again, it's going to actually make the site what it is, because quite frankly, unless you're you know, I can't really think of any use case in terms of a website where content is not involved, whether it's text or images or multimedia, however you're going to call it. At the same time, it has to have already a game plan in mind and then the actual way to put it into practice that's going to support it. And I'm really big on saying sometimes we get caught up in the user experience, the UX designers coming in, we're doing research at the same time, the experience is everything. And I find in a certain point, if the content is not there, as you say, if you're designing something with Lorem ipsum text everywhere, you're going to have problems at the end. If you're, I'm really sorry to hear, building information architecture without thinking about your content, obviously that's a whole other level of, anyways, we'll talk later.

Yeah. So I'm going to put up some, and again, I'm personally a big fan of Kristina Halvorson if you haven't read about her. She's one of the sort of pioneers of the content strategy discipline. And again, she's done really a lot for the actual expertise to run in conferences. But again, they're really simple definitions. And when we think about it, I like the idea that it's also across the lifecycle. So we're talking about, we're planning about the creation, how we're going to publish it, how we're going to manage or govern it and make sure that it's useful and usable because one without the other, it's just again, you're sort of selling yourself short in terms of what your experience could actually be. It's important also to see how it's actually connecting with what we're trying to do or achieve our goals or objectives, but also understanding of who our users are and what do they actually need from us. And again, you're sort of going to hit that sweet spot where everything sort of comes together.

And lastly, again, as we talked about the experience, it's really how we're leveraging words, data or any other types of content. I like how she says unambiguous. I would also add, it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, but it should be clear and we should be able to build flexible structures where we can cross reference. We can really double down on the created ones and publish everywhere and again start to exercise our muscles, whether it's again Drupal, WordPress or whatever it is to support these interactive experiences that we're trying to generate. So it's very foundational. All the more reason not to leave it till the end and to be a bit more, let's say, practical and less conceptual. I like these sort of three main areas of what kind of training can do. So obviously there's the nice, the storytelling aspect, creating a really compelling experience, maybe connecting a user to the content in a way that they're going to want to engage with, stay long on your site, sign up, apply what have you.

So there's the marketing. So ensuring that we're communicating our messaging, who we are, what we want you to do, what we can actually do for you is a bit better also versus the other way around. And then lastly, it's about wayfinding. I think we've all had the experience. You just want to go to a restaurant, what are the hours of operation? Are they actually still open? Very simple information that as a regular user, that's the first thing I want to know about you. I do not want to see your parallax scroll of all the pictures of every single dish that your restaurant has ever produced. Now, by that time, I'm ready to pull itand call it a day. So making information accessible to all users and also at the right time, the right place and in the right format. And again, we're really going to see the power of being able to build things out, personalization, recommendation, being able to adapt. There's so many cool things going on, but at the end of the day, if you haven't put in the work to do the foundational stuff, it's going to be nice features and functionalities that are not actually going to get you anywhere in terms of achieving your goals and making your users happy.

So in terms of how, again, as I said, we have sort of the backstage in the front of house. So I just wanted to highlight some of the main artifacts or deliverables that we're tending to work with. Obviously, some are a bit more invisible. We're doing them more on the planning, discovery and design phases, and some are obviously going to be really up front and center, but we'll take a look at them in the following slides. But I just wanted to sort of give a bit of an overview of what we have going on. And the why. So I feel like you guys are already pretty much convinced. I'm not going to belabor the point, but obviously I think these questions are not unique to content strategy either. But again, making sure that we're talking about them at the very beginning can always help us when we're sort of caught up with this feature. We should do this, we could do this, why don't we do this? We always connecting it back to the why? Why do we exist, who we're trying to reach? And again, what does success actually look like which can really help us calm the waters?

Say that's phase two, is that priority. And again, ensuring that content strategy is really treated the same way. So as I said before, it can be quite counterproductive. It can wind up redoing a lot of work, wasting obviously time, energy, money. If you're trying to reverse engineer your content to fit your beautiful design rather than designing it much more hand-in-hand. So again, two birds, one stone, a complimentary process. I want to again put it a bit more in action and dive a bit deeper too into the different deliverables that we saw before. So just as a quick recap, I'll use the same phase sort of approach to highlight what comes when. In terms of discovery, what can we really use to guide these activities. So again, obviously you need to first start by discovering what content do we actually have. And it really is going to start obviously with the inventory and then take it one step further to not just what we have, but is what we have any good? Should we keep it? Should we throw it out?

And depending on how many years of legacy you've been storing up or how, let's say amazing your governance is, obviously these documents can be shorter or longer. We'll also talk about a holistic evaluation, any research analysis or auditing. Essentially, we're trying to get back to that current state, what's going on now and map it against the target. User journey mapping. I'll talk a bit more too, but essentially it's very complimentary with content, which is why I'm super happy where we are at Evolving Web. We run this in parallel. So as a content strategist, I'm involved with our UX researchers. We're asking the stakeholders the same questions so there's no reason to do each one in our corner to sort of run the show. And it's very interesting to just sort of see how things can start to pop up that maybe we didn't know that this should be content, let's throw it in versus again, the content is there, but it really just wasn't optimized in a way that it was placed on the journey of a user.

People weren't finding it for whatever reason. But we often find working together that we can almost answer these questions. And it's really amazing to sort of see users and stakeholders almost come up with the answer on their own. And lastly, with discovery wrapping up, I really want to be able to sort of hone in on what strategy are we actually going to use in order to accomplish the goals, the measures of success that we've actually set out? So fundamental is the inventory and the audit. Yeah, it sucks. It's really, really, really long. There are tools you can use to make it go a bit faster. We can use some indexing if you have a sitemap already. We're a bit ahead of the game. At the same time, I find it makes building the information architecture way, way, way easier because for me this is really a sort of, let's say a three, four and one. You build the inventory and then you can actually just add on all the different contextual descriptive information we can use the RT, is it redundant, outdated or trivial content?

Who's actually the owner? Do I have to have a subject matter expert to review it and any other type of sort of information that's going to push us into a decision making mode. And then afterwards it can really form the basis for the content that we decide it made the cut or we're just going to do some updating to then start moving into the more, cancel any exercises. We'll see in terms of developing the first draft of the information architecture and then actually mapping it back when we have the new architecture all set up, we can really just add on columns. My clients hate me, but Excel, you can hide the columns, so it's not so bad. But really it gives a really clear blueprint and document that we can easily pass off to developers. So no one is asking questions about where is the navigation this in it. So consider this the Bible. Analytics. Again, I won't belabor the point here, but obviously if you have users saying I can't do this, it's always going to sort of back it up with some more quantitative data.

See where in the journey are they falling off? One that we really come across with a lot of higher education clients is, we're working for a specific faculty or a department and the university says, Hey, our logo has to be in the top left hand corner of every single site. OK, I've seen them. And so what do they have to do? OK, we'll get back to my home page, If I'm the faculty of Arts, I'm putting it right in the center. And how many analytics assessments. I think my analytics guy is just like, you don't have to ask me the question. It's always the same answer. When people click back, they're trying to go to the homepage because they wind up at the university site and then immediately have to bounce back to the faculty that they were looking at. So again, I don't know where in higher ed and we didn't decide to follow industry best practices. It's a super simple fix, but luckily we have analytics to start over again help reinforce or make the pill a bit easier to swallow and know we're doing one university at a time, so you guys have to join in.

Next up, just a bit of a snapshot of a couple of heuristic evaluations we've done. So again, we're a big fan and Evolving Web of using the Nielsen Norman Group. So UX usability heuristics, so everything around recognition versus recall, making sure that we're putting in the wayfinding cues again, making sure that our system is intelligent enough to make sure that our users can easily adapt to it. We're not putting additional barriers in their way. What's really nice about this, though, is that we've been able to adapt it to add additional heuristics, whether they relate more specifically to the architecture, to the navigation, to even the content. And it can be anything from are we using PDFs for really important content? Maybe that's not so great to a more classic stuff. Our tone is a bit dry. Is our content really compelling? Do I want to use your service, go to university or buy your product? This is a good example of the user journey mapping. So we're using mostly neuro in terms of collaborative whiteboarding.

But again, the concept is quite simple. You sort of develop your personas and here in this case we have a prospective student trying to compare different programs at a university. And what we'll do is we'll sort of look at the journey and again, there can be journeys that overlap for different personas, content that can be useful for more than one audience. So the goal is not to silo them off, but rather that to of understand where are the different questions, needs, touch points, pain points to reach sort of phase of the journey until I get to where I'm ideally going. So in this case, I'm probably going to start out with an example of awareness, which universities, which programs are right for me. I want to move more into an information seeking state where I'm sort of comparing what could this look like? And it could be anything from what are the career options if I attend this school, what's going to happen afterwards to the very practical information, Is there a place to live? How much is it going to cost me?

So again, so many different things that are going through the minds of a user. And again, with attention spans being what they are, we really don't have so much time to waste in making users dig for information. So this is really a nice way to sort of see where are the touch points. Oftentimes people say, Yeah, you're right, it's on the website, but people usually call me or email me because they can't find it and it's quicker that way. So obviously it's a really a simple issue to solve. So while the journey mapping often brings up a lot of pain points, it also does often also have those opportunities to actually address them. And at the end of discovery, hopefully we've done a good job of diagnosing and sort of summarizing the biggest pain points here. It's also helpful, especially when we go heuristic evaluation. It can go super detailed, but not all issues are created equally. So we can sort of help prioritize and say, OK, what are we actually going to tackle? What is actually going to again map back to the different goals that we have?

And lastly, really consolidate all those different opportunities that we came across during the research and yeah, try to work it into our new redesign strategy. And something else that's sort of closer to my heart is, what is a strategy? Because I think oftentimes we tend to use it as a bit of a catchall and it's true. It can also sort of expand or contract depending on who's using it. But I really like to frame it as, again, what are the goals and how we're actually going to accomplish them. That's the end of it. So in this case, if we're looking at, I think it's the case of a higher ed client, the goal is to have a better cost to action because you want more conversions, more people applying. And we want to reduce phone calls to the admissions office because no one can actually apply online. So in this case, I think we are in a situation where there are way too many calls to action. They didn't have a consistent styling look and feel, they weren't placed optimally there and we didn't really have a good distinction between what are the primary ones.

So I'm ready to go, where do I sign up, make sure that they can really find those versus the lower priority ones for those who are sort of I'm not sure if I want to make a commitment, I can still manifest my interest. We're collecting an email address, they're downloading one of our brochures. So the recommendations are simply how we're going to achieve it. That is the strategy. And a similar example for the program selector. And again, this one is also a bit close because it's, I think it also illustrates a big issue with a lot of organizations, institutions that tend to say, we're organized like this, this is my hierarchy, this is my department, this is what it's called. Just put that on the website, which again, as we know is, you are not your user and specifically with higher ed, the different programs that we have, no one is necessarily going to know the difference between. A recent one we had was for a faculty of a media and design and then really cool programs. I want to be a video game designer, I want to work in cinema production but they were all sort of classified in these departments that didn't have any real connection.

Even if I was searching for movies or film or cinema, I really had to navigate, I have to know it's in this department to get to the program. So it's really about sort of flipping that on its head and saying, Look, how are people actually searching? What do they want to do? Is it by a career? Is it by a topic? Is it by an interest? And again, I love the recommendations that went up here. Just show everything by default, give the users the lay of the land and maybe put in some filters or some different ways to slice and dice the data that are going to be a bit more aligned with their actual mental models. And again, it's important for universities obviously, to say this is our department, these are our faculties, this is how we run things. But it shouldn't be incompatible with the way that again, your priority user audiences are actually going to get to the information they need. And yeah, take the next step.

SPEAKER:
Hey, can I have a pet example of this? The Montreal parking app. If you want to look for it in the app store, you can't type in Montreal Parking. You can type in (UNKNOWN), which is the name of the organization that is in charge of that. You have to type in Service Mobile. Why? Because inside of the organizations (UNKNOWN), they have a team that's in the charge of their mobile app. And so their parking app is called Service Mobile. Everybody knows that, right? But at least the icon is (UNKNOWN). So that's how you know that.

ADRIENNE SMITH:
Are we pitching them soon? OK, moving into designing and testing. So again, to go a bit quicker, but obviously the main deliverables here are really going to be that content model, which again, if you guys are Drupal, I think you know exactly what I'm talking about. What structure do we need, which metadata, which taxonomies for which content types and what's shared or what's distinct? Obviously the IA and the navigation. So again, really making sure we're distinguishing between the architecture itself, which is supposed to comprise everything versus navigation, which are really those the user interface elements that are actually going to appear, which elements should be shown where and really make sure that it's coherent, it's supporting the target user journeys. We'll look at some wireframes too, which is again, we get to the fun part where the designers are happy and then obviously the style, the voice, the tone. So all our copywriters, our copy editors are getting involved too. So the content model, obviously, I think we sometimes take for granted how dynamic web content is.

For example, on a home page, it's very easy to pull in, Hey, the upcoming events, the most recent news, filter all the blog posts that are by this author on this topic. And so again, it's a very simple way and a template that we use is a super adaptable, but we're just going to say what are the content types? What do they call these sort of entities? And then do the sort of again, very back end work of saying, what are the attributes? Are they mandatory or are they optional? Is it a taxonomy value? Is it free text? OK, what's the taxonomy? I like it also, it takes me back to the sort of the library focus thing where, again, it's just moving from a very physical context to digital, but obviously digital opens up so many more opportunities. So it's great. So whereas the content model is just documenting the content types with their components, metadata as we know data, about data attributes that describe your content and taxonomies closed list of values that only superpower admins have the opportunity to change.

Taxonomy should definitely be dynamic and growing with your organization, but again, keep some governance on there and you're not going to have issues down the way. And again, moving from an information architecture, current to a future, a lot of fun. But again, this is where you sort of bring your content inventory and your audit to life. So all the content that made the cut, you can just go crazy. I spent a lot of time in here and yeah, it's not for the faint of heart, but essentially we really want to distinguish between the entire, the big picture, the overall structure, everything. And again, what elements are going to be visible, whether it's in the primary navigation, my secondary navigation, utility footer header, left hand, right hand and more. But anyways, I think it's a really nice opportunity too because the possibilities really multiply in terms of trying to serve multiple audiences. So again, higher ed, if we have future prospective students that are willing to be the main target, but we don't want to neglect current students who still have stuff to do on the website, our faculty, our staff and even obviously community members, potential donors, alumni.

There are multiple ways to sort of adapt your navigation so it can be either contextual based on a user type, based on a topic, etcetera. And yeah, I wanted to just quickly go over our two methods that we use. This phase is called design and test and really want to emphasize the testing because even if you build something, you think it's amazing, it's great, if at the end of the day it's not actually working the way it intended, you go back to the drawing board. So I don't know if anyone knows the optimal workshop suite of tools, but yeah, but we're big fans of doing their online card sorting and tree testing. So essentially here is really just a way to sort of all that content that we so studiously mapped out and honored, everything that makes the cut goes on a Post-it or on a virtual card. And then we're going to ask all our different users to sort of put it side by side and really try to understand who organizes what and how. So a really easy example is if we have a bunch of different policies and procedures and forms and resources, well, some people will go right away.

We're like, OK, we're going by format. I'm putting all my policies here and you have to know if there's a security policy or an email policy or whatever it is, start with policy and then go down versus others who are much more subject based, which again makes sense. You want to say, look, I want everything about security, I want everything about health and safety. So essentially these tools are just going to let you understand the different similarities or the affinities between two pieces of content and help you make the right decisions for, should these be grouped together, these two have nothing to do with each other, these two have something to do with each other, but only for that really, really small percentage of user, do they matter? And also, obviously, because we're in the hyperlinked world, can we make it work both ways? Why not? And next up is tree testing. Once we're sort of aligned on a pretty good structure that we want to propose to users. Again, it's just a really simple way to link it back to your objectives.

What tasks are my users trying to actually complete and can they do so with this representation in the menu? So say I need to figure out, find me on the classroom and essentially you'll give the user a task and sort of measure how efficiently or directly and even confidently are they selecting the node where we place that content? So essentially you can sort of say, did someone click a one two, I'm here. Very easy, very clear, unambiguous. Or were they sort of going up and down in the tree looking for the right answer and taking a bit more time so we can have either direct success, indirect success in which you made it, but not before a lot of searching as well as failures. And again, all this data is going to help us really refine the final information architecture and the navigation elements that will display. Yeah. And so once you've done all that nice backstage work, we're ready to move into a bit more of the front stage stuff with our wireframes. So we're going to really look at stuff, how components are going to be laid out, what the page structure looks like, we can see navigation calls to action and really get a sort of sense of moving through the site as this user.

Where am I going to go from step one to step two and step three and moving back a little bit. So again, the important thing is to make sure there's fidelity and to really educate people you're showing it to. This isn't what it's going to look like, don't worry. But at the same time, it's a pretty good way to sort of get the pieces of the skeleton in there. And obviously with a more representative content, the better, because otherwise the experience is not going to really ring true. And a couple of examples more for reference in terms of style, voice and tone. So I like the example of MailChimp a lot just because I think it's a really great way to sort of see how a brand is sort of creating who they are and then communicating their message through every sort of touchpoint, whether it's on their website, on emails or sending you any types of digital touchpoints there. So in the case of MailChimp, we're going with human, which is usually better than a non sentient but familiar, friendly, straightforward.

And again, what's really nice is to sort of go back to a very fundamental principle in knowledge management, which is called concept analysis. So what it is and what isn't it, which is sometimes you can sort of say, I know it when I see it, but it's always nice to try to build in the sort of barometers or guidelines to sort of make sure that we're all on the same playing field. So when we say, OK, we're helpful but not overbearing, I love the expert but not bossy. And all of these are going to sort of inform the word choice, the style, essentially all the different elements of language that you'll inject into your content to make sure that it's reinforcing and supporting the overall experience. Again, a simple example also of the sort of concept analysis, but more in a table. So per attribute, you can actually go in and say, what do we mean by this to ensure, again, this professional means the same thing in a context of MailChimp versus the context of higher education. Probably not. So with the dos and don'ts, you can really help those people who are going to, at the end of the day, be responsible for your governance, know exactly where to go.

And another useful tool also that we find is super helpful in workshops with stakeholders is to sort of again situate ourselves in terms of these different dimensions. You can play around with the different opposites as you wish, but again, it sort of helps us sort of identify where are we trying to be, where are we today? Do these two people not agree at all and sort of see if we can meet in the middle or again, throw that attribute out and say we'll start with something else that makes sense for us. And lastly, just a couple of examples of style guides. And again, I think we're past the days of sort of that big branding package that you can download as a big zip file on websites and to do something a bit more interactive. Your content editors will thank you if they can at least use control+F to find out what they're looking for. Hyperlink is always better and again, everything from, are we doing the American English or Canadian British? Are we putting dots in our acronyms and use of the Oxford comma, all those are highly contested topics that our content creators love to talk about.

Everything is going to go in our style guide. And yeah, to keep things going, operationalize. It's very simple in terms of content strategy. It just needs to be organized. And as we saw, if you've done a good job already, from your inventory to your audit to your mapping, it should go pretty fast. You'll already know who's responsible for what, who needs to write it, who needs to get it approved, which is the subject matter expert? What's missing and how are we going to measure compliance? Which standards are we actually measuring against whether their accessibility optimizing with our meta tags for search and yeah, essentially measuring the gap in the sense of getting it done. So yeah, we use so many examples, but I'm sure you guys can figure out the ones that work best for you. Simpler is always best, but make sure it's something that's not going to be, again, if it's a burden to keep up to date, it's not going to happen. So as much as we can try to keep it in the workflow of the project and something that our users are not going to fight against.

And lastly for governance. So again, the people, processes and tools, who's responsible for managing content across the lifecycle? How often? And again, this could really vary by type of content. Obviously there's evergreen stuff that maybe needs a review every six months versus the more timely stuff that we want to make sure is continually updated to keep things fresh, depending on what your goals are. What tools? Yeah. And what workflows are we going to build in to our Drupal? I put two examples there of a centralized, decentralized. Obviously we can also have hybrid models, but essentially how much power do you want to give how many people? How much time do you want between a creation approval and actual publication? And how, let's say, flexible or dynamic are the people actually participating? And again, sometimes are we asking for a forgiveness or permission, depending on where we are? But in any case, there's many different varieties. But the best is to find one that actually will work for you and ideally, as we said, can be automated and make it as easy as possible to actually adhere to it.

And lastly, just a bit of an example document in terms of the different roles, who's responsible for it in terms of governance. It can go beyond the content itself in terms of the real day to day and really talk about who's responsible for whole sections, the website itself? And this is also something we can look back to and say, OK, your website hasn't really been looked at in five, six or seven years. Whose fault is that? We can go right up to the chain of command and say, OK, sponsor was not doing this work. Again, I know it's glib to say, you blew it and put it in a drawer. But again, the reality is we all have so much going on at the same time. It depends to what extent are we prioritizing your website, your digital property as a key part of your strategy? And again, if it's working for you, I think that's always the best incentive to keep it working for you. If it never was working that great in the first place or you weren't really satisfied, obviously, and you have a much less motivation to keep things going.

So a couple of key takeaways. Obviously, in the content strategy horse, there needs to be a bit more in lockstep. Not in parallel, not in silos, not throwing things over the other side. But ideally we want to get the two horse carriage going on, three horse, five horse. And the second one is really focused on, again, the user. I think for me at least, it's the first real context in sort of a more agency setting. So I'm really learning about what does it mean to say is the client always right and make sure I trust but verify. But again, taking a very user centered approach backing yourself up with as much data and a more quantitative or objective analysis that you can. And again, not being afraid to say, look, the first time it probably won't be right, iterate, don't get too attached to what you're doing because chances are it will change. And most of these deliverables also are meant to be dynamic in a sense it wouldn't be very logical to say, OK, our taxonomy is now set in stone. These things evolve and they change and you have to make sure that you're designing your experiences to be able to keep up.

And lastly, we're not going to kill two birds with one stone as we heard last night from the Peters trying to rebrand with some don't kill the birds, but feed two birds with a stone. So I'll let you take your pick for us. And then we're going to stay, in terms of a content strategy, we're going to stay at the level of a, it's a metaphor. But in any case, that's a couple of the takeaways you've had today. I hope I've done my job. And again, if you want to know more, if you want to collaborate, tell us all about the content challenges that are keeping you up at night. We are here, we're Evolving Web again, we're a Drupal focused full service agency. So strategy, UX content strategy, architecture to design, development and maintenance. We do it all, but come by and check us out at the booth in the back and I can take some questions or I can let you go to get lunch. As you wish. But anyways, thank you for your attention.

SPEAKER:
I have a question.

ADRIENNE SMITH:
Go ahead.

SPEAKER:
You mentioned in your big spreadsheet of the contents inventory, you mentioned some tools, what are your favorite tools for (INAUDIBLE).

ADRIENNE SMITH:
Yeah. So the question was, any favorite tools for generating the content inventory? To be super honest, I'm super manual. I find that it gets me in the zone. I know the content that way versus if I'm generating it, but the tool that we are using is called Screaming Frog, and I think it's quite affordable, but there must be other tools on the market. But at the same time I see it as an investment at the beginning. If I know front and back the content, I'm going to be much faster in terms of building out the next architectures and everything. Yes.

SPEAKER:
For a decentralized content governance model, do you have any suggestions for processes or tools for nudging responsible people into actually maintaining and reviewing their content?

ADRIENNE SMITH:
So the question was, any suggestions for encouraging people in a decentralized governance model to actually update their content? I would honestly say apply a centralized model and see what they say. No, at a certain point also, it's the carrot or the stick. And again, I'm not a fan of cajoling or trying to again, if they don't want to do it, they're not going to do it. When they see that there's a problem, when their content looks super out of date again, when it's going to actually affect their lives, then you're going to be able to bring them along a bit more. And, so again, that's just me, but I'm sure there are ways to be a bit more diplomatic about it. And again, you could also go through some more in-depth training. There could be other issues at play, they're not sure, they're not comfortable, they're not getting notifications. So trying to troubleshoot again, taking my own advice and putting myself in the shoes of a user as well. Maybe it's a time issue. Maybe you want to think about, Yes, it's decentralized, but we have a backup or we have a certain grace period if you haven't done it here.

So again, trying to be a bit more flexible with some of the things and trying to meet them a bit more where they are. Yeah.

SPEAKER:
Do you want the higher ed question or are you in a specific question?

ADRIENNE SMITH:
I think we've got time for both.

SPEAKER:
OK. So higher ed one. Higher ed clients, I work with a number of them in my current role, they are famously attached to the way that things are. What obstacles have you run into with higher ed clients who are too attached to the way things were or worked on their present side? And how did you get past them?

ADRIENNE SMITH:
Yeah, well, so the question is for particularly higher ed clients who are super attached to the way things are, the way they want things to be, how do you sort of work on the change management, breaking down some of the resistance. I can always sort of bring it back to why did you hire us? Again, I've actually have had a client say, you know what, you presented it's not revolutionary enough. We were expecting something a bit more, which was great. You know, when you don't know how large the playing field is, you don't know how far you're actually going to get to go. But at the same time, I think it's always good to sort of go back to what are we trying to accomplish, that sort of current state. Are you happy with the way things are? And again, trying to say are there other of these underlying reasons for why these things should be the way they are? And again, given that we're in a bit more of a flexible environment, I find there are often ways to make some compromises. We've been doing it a lot with some clients to just sort of say, look, you need to get a prospective students into the programs and move them a bit further along the funnel so that if they're not clicking apply at least they're asking for information, we're not going to destroy your department or organization structure, you're still going to have your stuff over here, but just separate it into separate nodes.

Let them move back and forth. And again, it's a great way to sort of apply the principle of orienting, making people comfortable and getting to know you. And at the same time, I think it's something that, as you say, they're always going to be the sort of immovable rocks and you can't go through over, under, around. And again, they're usually things that we can either find a compromise on. But again, if you're in a more client focused agency role, sometimes it's going to be up to the consultant to say, look, this is the conflict we have, who is supposed to arbitrate? And that's where, again, my project managers will get out of their recess and take a decision.

SPEAKER:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Drupal is powerful at relenting content, reusing content, etcetera. At what point do you bring your ideas to your technical team and vet your concept against what they're capable or comfortable with implementing?

ADRIENNE SMITH:
Yeah. So right out of the gate, we always include a technical discovery in the first phase also so we can really sort of compare notes, see what are they working with? And again, it helps also to cross-check it with the actual project manager to say, OK, this is what their environment is today. These things are off the table. We can't build these modules, they don't have the bandwidth to create more than X number of content types. So at the very least out of the gate we sort of have the constraints in line. And then otherwise we always schedule in like dedicate either knowledge transfer sessions. And again we try to, our offices are next to each other. So physically also between a UX design content and tech there, just sort of a knock on the door way to figure it out. But again, we're not perfect in it, but it's something that I think again, as long as you're aware of it, you can try to do it more and more. What's helped us also in a more agent setting is doing a lot of retrospectives and knowledge sharing.

Yeah, what could we do better next time? And obviously one of the biggest fears is that either, OK, we have to start development now because the developers are running, we have no more design hours, but we're not ready and it's a constant adjustment. But again, we're in it together and sort of focusing on our core values, our collaboration, transparency. And the reason why we're with Drupal is really to ensure that we're not doing proprietary stuff. We want our clients to be partners and we are their partners in terms of yeah, bringing their vision, their story to life. So it's super important that we also model that behavior internally.

SPEAKER:
Can you elaborate a little on your, you just mentioned the scheduled knowledge transfer at the end of discovery. Do you have a process for that? What does that look like?

ADRIENNE SMITH:
To be honestly, it really will depend. But we sort of use the agile development with the scrum. So obviously we're doing scrums all along the lifecycle of the project. So it's quite sort of easy for even if the developer is just sort of listening in on the call, they sort of have a sense of what's going on. And again, really just ensuring that our other side projects we have internally is working on our own governance and content management. So is the wiki up to date, are all the final deliverables linked from the Google Drive folder? And again, ensuring that if a developer does have a question when it's not actually the formal knowledge transfer, they can at least try to figure it out on their own. And then, yeah, it's really just a sit down when we're sort of preparing the handoff and we just budget it into the sort of the schedule. So it's on the timeline of the project. And again, even if it's a smaller thing, it's just one or two hours. It's always helpful to say, hey, it's sort of that item that I want to check off before I can actually move into the next phase.

Yeah.

SPEAKER:
That was great. It was so thoughtful and thorough across the board. So wonderful. Thank you. Content, I think, is the Achilles heel of what projects. And it's always been a pain point when working with clients to get what you need for content and you spoke to some great approaches. This is a couple facets to this question, but. I think how do you work with clients to one, budget a true content art exercise in architecture, because I think, like Halvorson said herself, (INAUDIBLE) to pay for it with the real cost of addressing content on big sites. If you break it down to eight hours a page and you get hundreds or thousands of pages, you know you're talking about big bucks when the project budget is only so much. So I'd like to understand that. But then also you go in and clients I find are very explaining because they know their business and I don't mean explaining in a good way as users actually need it to be explained, but just too technical and too dry. How do you work with clients when there is no brand voice to help suss that out with them?

If that budget or the project is not, you're not doing the branding exercise. So we work through kind of the budget and taking clients through that kind of thing.

ADRIENNE SMITH:
Sure. Sorry, I haven't been repeating them, but part one. So how do you deal with clients who don't actually have the budget or the desire to pay for a copywriter, a copy editor to actually address content, which, as you said so correctly, is often the Achilles heel, really, yeah, the sort of the cornerstone there. Again, in most of the projects that we're on. As you said, it wouldn't be effective as an agency necessarily in terms of time. We don't actually have a horde of content strategist at the ready to sort of say, OK, give me the brand, the style guide, and I'm going to go for it. Nor the budget on the client side either. At the same time, I think what's important is to go back to the values of work partners. And as you said, also clients know their content the best. And I think it's really sort of being able to sort of take them along, show them what's possible. And again, if they can invest for, as you say, a limited budget and we can actually show them sort of the teaser or the preview what you can get and also follow that up really quickly with training.

So making sure that we're talking to their SMEs and that they have not just the technical ,I can actually use the interface in this and that, but we're doing exercises with them, we'll generally build in a couple of deliverables into the sort of discovery or the design which is really around again involving them in more interactive workshops, making sure they feel empowered and they feel the owners. The last thing you want to sort of come in and say, Hey, we're building this for you. We'll see you in three months. That's not the way it goes. And at the same time, make them sort of again, stakeholders in the process and that, hey, look, we're building out of these wireframes. We don't want to show you Lorem ipsum, can you get these SMEs to produce a paragraph and I'll sort of help them again get in the mindset training them. And obviously it's always helpful when internally you have a group of stakeholders, you can try to hit your start to a champion, someone who gets it, who wants to do it, who has maybe been saying this internally for years, but has never actually been listened to or this and that.

And again, try to do a bit of a snowball effect and get some nice influence in there, too. And part two. I'm sorry. Remind me.

SPEAKER:
What was part two? Dry content. Two in the weeds of your own business?

ADRIENNE SMITH:
The explaining. The explaining.

SPEAKER:
The explaining part.

ADRIENNE SMITH:
Yeah. So for clients who have a really no real basis or foundation, it's something again, we're offering it, but it's a bit of a newer service because we're not fully staffed internally, but we are working. The slides I showed are coming from actual workshops that we do run to sort of help get people started. It doesn't have to be a style guide of 150 pages with this and that. It could be as simple as saying, what do we actually need? What content do we have and who are we as a brand? So we work pretty closely too with our visual design team who are experts in really sort of evoking what are the elements that are going to really convey who we are, our personality. And again, they're going to take it and translate it into the typography, the colours, maybe a logo refresh. And on the content side, we work really hand in hand to use all those insights for again, a different outcome, but really trying to focus on what are the attributes of our personality, what do those attributes actually mean for this organisation and how are they going to be manifested, whether it's through the image choices we use, the labels, the text and all the different content language aspects.

SPEAKER:
(INAUDIBLE) How do you get clients to think about content as more than just the words on the page? Because one of the problems is you turn over to CMS and they're not thinking about graphs, data tables, the responsiveness nature of all of your content. Either in the way of building parameters or bumpers on their content, what's your approach to that?

ADRIENNE SMITH:
Yeah, I think the best approach is to really always start with real content as much as possible. Sample to what's going to most closely actually approximate it because you know, if you get one word is wrong in what you're showing them, it's a game over and you're going to spend the next 25 minutes of the presentation, this was just an example meant to. So, yeah, in any case, I think that's a way to sort of you want them to build, feel that they have actual skin in the game. And as you say, you can really sort of turn it back when they start saying this was wrong and this was wrong. So you're absolutely right. This is a fundamental pillar that, again, you are the experts. You have the knowledge for this and we need you to make it happen. There are limits to how far you can go in the client agency or relationship. And that's the way it should be, too. Otherwise, again, you're going to get in a situation where they're poaching your employees from the agency to come work in-house, which again, is maybe testament to the value that you convince them of the content itself.

But again, make sure they feel like they have skin in the game. And again, then it's going to be important. It's really the basis of something that's again, useful and usable. And as you said, it's going to turn around the content. Three minutes or two minutes and you guys are ready for lunch, I hope?

SPEAKER:
Yeah.

ADRIENNE SMITH:
Amazing. Thank you so much. And again, we'll be at the booth in the back. We hope you'll stop by and say, hi.