Point:Counterpoint

Point: The Importance of Content

By Rahel Bailie, Fellow

Since the emergence of content strategy as a discipline complimentary to information architecture, I've watched a chicken-and-egg debate start up—and continue—about the relative importance of each practice area. The debate has yielded much speculation but few useful results. Information architects (IAs) remain clear in their perspective: their work is to create the framework—most often for a website or application of some flavor—which can then be populated with content. Content strategists remain secure in their knowledge: without content, the IA framework remains incomplete.

The biggest divide is around the importance of content. Without content, the information architecture is simply an empty shell. It is the content that users come for—in fact, they should be called “content consumers”—and without it, the navigation merely provides the clues to the treasure at the end of the hunt. An example would be consumers looking to buy a particular product, such as a tablet. If they get to the page where the tablets are supposed to be, and there are no tablets, or there are none of the tablets that they want, or the description doesn't explain the particular feature that they want to know, the best IA in the world won't make the sale. I'd put my neck on the line to predict that content consumers aren't going to pause to admire the categorization scheme or admire the color palette of the site. They are on the site to consume content, likely a particular piece of content, and then leave.

This positioning of content as the treasure at the end of a treasure hunt connects content to the activities or tasks that users undertake. As well, those tasks are the flip side to a coin: user objectives on one side, business objectives on the other. A successful interaction involves the mutual goal of the organization: to help the consumer complete a specific set of tasks—whether that means finding information or completing a transaction—by providing them with compelling content. An organization wants consumers to do something, like read about a product and then buy it, or read about their service and sign up for it. Consumers, not coincidentally, want the same thing, like to read about a product and then buy it. The difference is that consumers want to buy a product; organizations want you to buy their product. This is a critical difference, and what puts the onus on organizations to provide the content that consumers want.

This content, the content that helps make the sale, has become recognized as a business asset. In the spirit of caring for it with forethought, content is becoming subject to the care and scrutiny of other business assets. Now, content must not only work within an information architecture framework, but also inform the framework. At the risk of stating the obvious, content is only as good as the framework on which it is built. That framework has changed over time to support the delivery of tangible value from the content, and IAs have had to learn to look past the quality of the framework to the quality of the content that the framework supports.

In the early days of brochure-ware, it was not uncommon for content to be published in silos by department. In the world of technical communication, the framework for content was the user guide. Once hypertext became more common, online help became a derivative of the user guide; it was a secondary version of what was destined for print. The framework for software was feature-based menus, where writers explained each menu item in a separate topic, and miscellaneous items ended up under the “Tools” menu. The Nurnberg Funnel, with minimalist, task-based instructions, hadn't quite made the technical communication hit parade yet.

Measuring Content Value

Today, corporate publishing is far more complex, and the understanding of how content both drives and supports the bottom line has developed exponentially. A key principle of management theory is that any efforts must be measurable, or those efforts are worthless. This principle is applies to content in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. Measurements are situational, but fall into three general areas of customer engagement, as described here.

Inform. The most basic level of value is to provide information, often in the form of static web pages. The quality of information affects the perceived value, which lies in the quality of the message. The volume of this content tends to be the greatest. The challenge of an IA here is to ensure that the content is organized in a way that allows a user to make an informed decision, no matter what that decision entails. The ability to make an informed decision is the business value. An example could be to allow consumers to easily compare products across product lines, to choose which one best suits their needs.

Transact. The value of content supporting transactions is likely obvious; for example, monetary transactions generate revenue. The content that creates successful transactions is a mix of persuasive messaging and instructional content that guides users through the transaction process. The measure of this content is the ability to complete transactions successfully; the definition of a successful transaction may include upsell or cross-channel opportunities. IAs don't simply design efficient interactions; they develop interactions that inspire trust and allow consumers to act with confidence. There is likely less content to support transactions, but a far higher ratio of transactions per content, so that content needs to be crafted with a lot of care.

Engage. Engaged customers are more likely to be brand-loyal. The numbers of engaged customers are sure to be smaller, though because the engagement factor creates evangelists, this content brings the most value. Calculating value is trickier here; we know that counting clicks or social media “likes” does not equate to value. Here, the IA can play a pivotal role, as the IA knows the built-in trigger points. Organizations are still figuring out meaningful ways of measuring engagement, but the bottom line is a meaningful call to action—one that leads to a change in profitability somewhere along the line. The IA can guide this conversation and build in opportunity points along the way.

Content and Context

For content to deliver value, it needs to be effective. To be effective, content needs to be presented in context. Whether a user finds the content through search or navigation, their comprehension of the content improves when they understand why they are being shown that specific piece of content at that particular time. An IA may test an information architecture with a tool such as TreeJack, but all that does is let the test subject reach a particular page.

For example, being told that an application has “an API” is effective only when the reader knows what an API is and what an API does. The average user has no idea what this means, or if and why they would care. This piece of information is only meaningful to a particular audience and needs to be presented in the right context so that audience can find that information when they need it.

If content is human-usable, contextualized data, then creating context is key to comprehension. Yet creating context can mean many things. Context means delivering the right content:

• to the right audience
• at the right time
• on the right platform
• in the right format
• in the right version
• through the right channel
• in the right language
• in the right medium

Any one of these factors affects comprehension, but it all revolves around starting with the right content. How we know which content and conditions make up the right is the outcome of the analysis stage of a content strategy. It's no longer enough to create content without thinking of what your content is meant to achieve. This means that IAs need to spend more time in the planning stage—requirements-gathering and analysis—before actually starting to wireframe.

Connecting Value and Context to Content

Content needs to achieve particular goals, so we need to ensure that the content we keep is the right content. A common issue is to create quantity at the expense of quality. Content tends to proliferate, whether it's in the context of pages on a website or PDF attachments, entries in a content database, or help topics for a software application.

Deciding what to keep and what to toss can become a painful exercise, particularly when stakeholders want to hang onto their content, like a scene from the TV series Hoarders. A recent conversation with a stakeholder went something like this:

Stakeholder: We really need to keep those reports from 2005 on the website; people refer to that stuff all the time.

Content strategist: Really? According to our Web stats, there were fewer than ten hits in the last two years.

Stakeholder: Well, we use it.

Content strategist: But this isn't an intranet, it's a public-facing website.

The responsibility for structuring the content in ways that benefit the users falls squarely within the purview of the IA. Creating an informed structure is an important first step toward a strong user experience, but it's not the whole story. Mapping the content to the Relevance Analysis pyramid ensures that the content—the text, audio, and images—serves to support the operational objectives and ultimately the business goals of the organization.

Some practitioners would insist that the only people qualified to do information architecture are IAs and content strategy should be done by content strategists. I'm less concerned with titles—I've been hired as a business analyst, writer, content management consultant, and, yes, information architect—and in each case, content strategy was part of what I delivered. In many cases, IAs and other user experience professionals do content strategy off the side of their desks. In other cases, there is collaboration between the two professions that create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It's not as important who does the content strategy, as long as the content strategy gets done, and gets done well.

Rahel Anne Bailie is a content strategist with a skill set encompassing content management, business analysis, information architecture, and communications. She operates Intentional Design, helping clients analyze their business requirements and spectrum of content to get the right fit for their content development and management needs, and facilitates transitions to new business processes, content models, and technology implementations.

Her experience gives her an intimate understanding of end-to-end processes, from requirements-gathering to implementation. She is an STC Fellow and holds memberships in various associations to stay current in pertinent practice areas. She presents on the topic of content strategy at conferences across North America and Europe, and was recently cited as one of the top ten most influential content strategists.

Counterpoint: What's in a Name?

By Andrea Ames, Fellow and Alyson Riley, Member

For the most part, we are in violent agreement with our esteemed colleague from Vancouver. We agree that content is key, and that an excellent user experience with content is the ultimate goal. Although Rahel doesn't word it in exactly that way, when we read her words, we hear a description of what we call the “information experience.” And in the IA world, information experience is king.

Where we respectfully disagree is with the idea that there is, or needs to be, a divide between content and structure. We believe that this is a construct created by us—all of us, the practitioners—and we'd like to expose our own, personal “naked emperor.” We'd also like to propose a more unified way to think about ourselves—and more importantly, describe and promote ourselves—as practitioners.

The Name Game

We in the information architecture world have been playing the name game for a long time. Are we journalists? Technical writers? Information designers? Library scientists? Visual designers? Interaction designers? User experience architects? Cognitive psychologists? Web designers? Web developers? All of the above? Some of each? None of these? And now, are we content strategists? Or are content strategists really IAs with a nifty new title?

Depending on your “home” discipline (few of us sprung fully formed into the professional world with an information architecture role), you might bring different skills to the table than we do. In the STC IA community, our backgrounds are often in technical writing (as ours are, although Alyson has some serious visual design genes and Andrea has an uncanny bent toward user experience design). Whatever your professional “birthplace,” you probably look at information architecture through that lens.

In 2007, Michelle Corbin and Andrea guest-edited a special issue on information architecture of STC's Technical Communication journal. In the introduction to that special issue, they describe the difference between information architecture and information design—one dimension of the name game that was “hot” at the time. It's been almost five years, and while we thought the name game was finally over, we see that there's still a bit of identity crisis going on—who are we?

Proposal: United We Stand

We must leverage the fact that we have common and unified goals. There is strength in numbers. Rather than divide ourselves—and it seems likely that there will always be people outside of our discipline who are hell-bent on doing that—why not leverage one another, our common goals, focus, skills, and knowledge to define and promote what we do?

We believe that our commonality is what can bring us together as practitioners to focus on strengthening our profession to the benefit of us all—commonality, such as:

• Focusing on users, content, and context as the core of our work
• Leveraging intelligence about users, their environment, the subject of the content, and context, and applying techniques, such as minimalism, to ensure appropriate choice of information to present and when and how to present it
• Acquiring and maintaining a deep understanding of users, their business and task domains, and the products and solutions in those domains
• Researching and analyzing users and experiences to drive decisions about delivering information, such as answers to questions about “where” and “how”
• Analyzing and expressing complex information relationships through modeling
• Organizing, structuring, and revealing the relationships between thoughts and ideas that enable users to build mental models of information within specific contexts
• Classifying content and applying metadata to enable searching and customization
• Designing organizing structures (such as navigation) and signposts (such as labels) that guide users to browse content and improve retrievability across chunks of information
• Applying appropriate information design methods to improve scanning within a chunk of information
• Synthesizing competing requirements to deliver innovation and excellence to users and readers
• Communicating through all of the various dimensions of the information experience, such as content, context, interaction, algorithm (code), organization and structure, format, and visual design
• And just generally making the complex clear, again through all of the various dimensions of the information experience

The list goes on and on. These are the tasks, characteristics, skills, and values that bring us together as a profession. Let's leverage them!

Resolving the Identity Crisis (Sort of)

The question remains: Who are we? Have we answered this question by coming together and leveraging our common strengths? Sadly, no, but we do have an opinion on how to address this question for ourselves.

First, we think of our title, or the description of our role or “discipline,” in the same light as any communication challenge. We periodically consider these questions: Who is your audience? What language do they speak? What is their context? What do they value? What is the environment in which they are operating?

The answers to those questions enable us to describe ourselves in the way (or even ways) that get us:

• The right level of influence with our employers and clients
• The best angle to help us advocate for the user
• The biggest possible bucks

Information architect, content strategist, strategic IA, information experience architect, total information experience strategist, user assistance architect, information user experience architect—whatever! The goal is to speak in terms that resonate with the people who pay us.

Even this “name game” cloud has a silver lining. The upside of this often wearisome discussion is our ability to grow, evolve, and reinvent ourselves to remain relevant. As Bogo writes in his article in the print version of this special edition (channeling Bob Dylan), we do need to give a name to all these animals—a name specifically chosen to speak to the target audience with language they understand. However, maybe we're at a point where we can agree that one name or one title, doesn't always serve our purposes. Maybe we can agree that we need to be flexible. Whatever we choose to call ourselves, let's agree to stand united, and not let our attention be taken away from what really matters: increasing respect for our skills out in the business world, raising the water level so that all of our boats float a little higher.

Andrea Ames is an information experience strategist/architect at IBM, and she designed, coordinates, and teaches for University of California, Santa Cruz in Silicon Valley's Technical Writing and Communication program. Her mantras are “I don't write doc; I solve user and business problems;” “installation is not a user goal;” and “think more, write less!” She is Fellow and past president (2004–2005) of STC and a distinguished engineer of ACM (the first technical communicator to achieve this distinction). She has published two award-winning technical books and more than 50 papers and articles and speaks regularly at conferences and professional meetings around the world. Follow her on Twitter (@aames) and check out her blog (http://thinkmorewriteless.wordpress.com/).

Alyson Riley's mother swears that her first word was actually a complete sentence, and she began her career as an information architect shortly thereafter by developing various organization schemes for her plastic dinosaurs. She now works as a senior information architect and strategist on IBM's corporate strategy team and has over 17 years experience in technical communication. Alyson serves as the corporate lead for IBM's information architecture council, drives IBM's corporate-level efforts to define the next generation of user experiences with technical content, and consults with IBM content teams worldwide to develop effective information strategies. Alyson has BS and MS degrees in Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota.