The following samples are pulled from a combination of different projects. Some information is obscured or redacted out of respect for client confidentiality. The embedded visualizations are from a single AirTable base I’ve been using as an amalgam of different content and project types. Our current content leadership team is working to define scaffolding that can be used across multiple project types and verticals.
I am happy to provide additional work samples as needed.
Strategy & Research
A project that lacks strategic alignment with the client will have issues that grow in consequence and number across project phases. I think “content first” includes “research first,” wherein qualitative research provides our insights with data providing our truths.
Current State Inventory and Audit
Content Inventory
A subset of pages from a recent inventory for a large medical organization. Inventorying content can feel like herding cats, but it’s critical to take a structured and strategic approach to ensure the end result feels like more than a tedious, unordered list. By answering “what content do we really have?,” I’m able to move beyond quantitative foundations and being auditing content collaboratively with my project team and the client.
First-Pass KDEA Audit Output
KDEA results from an initial audit. A first-pass audit has clients identify low-hanging fruit that can be easily categorized; e.g—keep, delete, edit, or archive (KDEA). ROT analyses can serve the same purpose. Starting with low-hanging fruit engages content stakeholders (owners, editors, authors) early in the project. Earlier engagement allows these stakeholders to take an iterative approach to the often laborious task of content migration while feeling like their voices and needs are being heard.
A breakdown of first-pass-audit-approved content, grouped by respective owner or business unit. Collecting metadata on content is always an iterative process. By understanding ownership early in this specific project, we were able to better estimate migration-related efforts further downstream.
Current State Architecture
A visual presentation of a client’s current-state site architecture. Sometimes this information isn’t readily intuited as part of more flattened content inventories (e.g. in a spreadsheet). I like to start content mapping exercises during initial research phases. Visually presenting content as structured data allows clients to follow the experience as it’s transformed through the full lifecycle of the project.
Qualitative Assessment
Brand, Quality, and Best Practice Assessment
Qualitative assessment is a deep-dive review of a cross-section of content. In this use case, I worked with the client to collaboratively define a “representative” content sample that I could measure against current brand, project, and business goals.
Architectural Assessment
Qualitative assessment often includes looking at current-state site architecture and navigation from the vantage of targeted end-users.
Business Goals
Core Modeling Exercise
An example of a Core Modeling worksheet used during content strategy workshops. There are multiple approaches to glean the same information—and this isn’t designed replace any robust, extant analytics—but core modeling forces project stakeholders to put themselves in the shoes of the end-user and answer the question of what content will best meet user needs first and only then business needs second.
Collaboratively Defining Project Goals
Depending on the client’s needs, initial research and strategic definition can include either project goals or business goals. The former shoulder always ladder up to the latter.
Messaging
Audience Hierarchy
Once qualitative research is well under way, I’ll work with a client to define audience hierarchy and map audiences to business objective. As a general rule, content shouldn’t be produced, disseminated, or updated unless it can be mapped to a business, organizational, or project-level goals.
Messaging
In this example, we took a hierarchical approach to defining messaging, with the above representing the global messaging framework for the new experience. Subsequent build out of site sections, subsections, and detail pages included development of page-level strategies.
Voice and Tone
The above shows how voice and tone should effectively dovetail with messaging.
Information Architecture
Page-level messaging, voice and tone, and editorial style are needed for effective execution of content strategies. However, content that is poorly structured, lacks metadata, or fails to organize intuitively within a larger site or application can’t scale and will negate the more granular efforts of content authors, editors, and approvers.
Site Architecture
A strategic sitemap for a public-facing marketing and communications site. Showing clients just the first few levels makes it easier for them to picture the new experience in their mind’s eye. Strategic IA such as the above sitemap usually includes section and subsection-level content strategy statements. Such statements can act as the first pass–fail criteria for content fitness, which overlaps with subsequent governance modeling.
An example of member experience model for a client that needed a multichannel content strategy. Note that this “sitemap” was less of an architectural direction and more of a framework to help the client understand the features we would need to include for a logged-in experience.
Content Modeling
Speaking holistically, a content model is the manifestation of all strategic inputs and research combined with the sort of data modeling that allows content to scale. The following samples show the more IA-centric elements of content modeling. When working with clients, I make explain the interdependency of all elements of the model.
Content types, including attributes that point to relationships between types as well taxonomies (i.e. controlled vocabularies).A sampling of page type definitions from an R1 institution’s site. The combination of types, templates, and page-level strategies empowers collaboration with UX and Visual Design.Content is at the heart of information architecture. Modeling content types and attributes isn’t enough to make a content-driven experience truly scale. Mapping out content cardinality (i.e. the complexity of content relationships) allowed for the scaling of this 500k+ page R1 university website.
Taxonomy & Metadata
Communicating Purpose to the Client
Taxonomy and metadata are at the heart of content lifecycle management, personalization, headless, architecture, and so much more. Most clients don’t realize the significant role that content structure—via modeling and metadata—helps reduce overhead and costs around content operations.
Taxonomy & Metadata Strategy
I think of taxonomy as more than just organization of site architecture, although the two are certainly related. Taxonomy is the common language of an organization. It’s the LEGO pieces that, when strung together, tell a company’s story. Taxonomy feeds metadata strategy, which feeds everything from creating a pleasant authoring experience to enabling machine learning for personalized digital experiences and greater insights into end-user behaviors.
Design
Priority Guides
When a project is especially rich in content, wireframes can often prove too restrictive for subsequent visual design, especially when clients have difficulty separating content prioritization and user interaction from final presentation and layout. Priority Guides force content stakeholders to focus on content priority and, in the example above, page-level strategy rather than content’s visual placement. An added benefit is the ability for Content Strategy and UX to collaborate and connect future pages or screens with existing business goals, metadata strategy, and interaction annotations, as well as start planning for the key elements of components.
Migration & Governance
Migration Planning
Non-programmatic content migration is often one of the biggest threats to timely launch. This stands to reason since content creation, curation, and entry can be time-intensive and intellectually exhausting. I’ve found it’s best to treat migration a project-wide activity, with multiple matrices and exercises along the way to help distribute the effort and more accurately adjust timeline. This proved especially productive for the above content matrices screenshot for a telecommunications company with a website numbering in the tens of thousands of pages.
Governance Modeling
A single tab of a much larger strategic governance model I developed for a major airline’s digital workspace. Governance is more than the sum of workflow and permissions. Workflow is the only the standardization of process with the hopes of automation, whereas permissions is a matter of access control. Truly strategic governance modeling aims to define who the right people are for getting the right content to the right people at the right time and for the right business reasons.
