Business: Content Development

How do we know whether content is any good? This simple question does not have a simple answer. Yet, I think having a good answer would help us show our employers and clients why their content needs to improve and how their content compares to the competition’s. As a start toward an answer to this question, I offer a set of content quality checklists for seven different lenses through which we can view content. I see these checklists as the groundwork for content heuristics, which would enable us to do heuristic evaluations and competitive analyses efficiently. With good content heuristics, we could make a case for better content without painstakingly doing an analysis of all of the content up front. Imagine, making a case for better content quality in a few hours instead of a few weeks.

Many interactive projects address content quality only through a style guide. A style guide is helpful, but it isn’t enough. One problem is that a style guide often emerges at the end of an interactive project, capturing how a team handled certain content issues and how they intend to handle them moving forward. That doesn’t help much during the project. Another problem that often occurs is a company neglects maintenance of the style guide going forward. (For information about living style guides, read Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish. [1]) Finally, many Web style guides I’ve encountered address word choice, brand voice—and that’s about it. The scope of content quality is much broader. Read More

If you frequently read UX articles online, I’m sure you’ve noticed the trend to use analogies in describing user experience. In writing about user experience, people have drawn analogies to pizza, yoga, fishing, parenting, riding a bike, home renovation, crossword puzzles, professional wrestling, talk shows, road trips, fitness classes, and ghost hunting?

UX professionals have also written articles describing valuable lessons they’ve learned about user experience from Seth Rogen, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Martha Stewart, Don Draper, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, the Terminator, the Avengers, the Blues Brothers, One Direction, Super Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the Berenstain Bears?

I’m guilty of writing two of those articles myself: “The Ghost Hunter’s Guide to User Research” and “What I Bring to UX from James Bond.” Read More

An intranet has the potential to unify a corporate culture, emphasize core company values, and develop a sense of community among employees, in addition to its basic function of providing access to documents and procedural information. Unfortunately, some intranets have simply grown organically, as collections of disjointed Web sites for different departments or document repositories for particular workgroups.

The key to intranet success is to provide value to employees and give them a reason to visit the site repeatedly. One of the primary ways to achieve this is to connect employees with the people and groups with whom they need to collaborate. Workgroups, or communities of practice, provide the basis for a living, growing, vibrant space in which people can access the information they need, share best practices, and contribute to a shared knowledge base. This article discusses the role of communities of practice within organizations and provides a framework for planning research and design activities to maximize their effectiveness. Read More