I recently attended the Webstock conference in Wellington in February 2010. One of the talks I liked was by Kristina Halvorson, a content consultant from the States. Her company is Brain Traffic (http://blog.braintraffic.com)
The talk rang a lot of bells for me; guilty bells mostly. She described the ‘deer in the headlights’ feeling of being given all the content to write for a new website in the last 2 weeks of development from some marketing materials. What is actually needed is a content strategy; the vision and lifecycle of content on a site. Questioning what kind of content is needed, what is its structure and who will do it and make decisions on it. She argued that too much content is treated as ‘launch and leave’ creating over time a morass of outdated and unuseful content. A strategy to plan how to create and govern content would avoid this.
As a user experience person I have usually commented on or advocated content at the level of ‘this is the kind of content people want’ or ‘this content isn’t working’. When clients have said they have the content in hand, usually something to do with marketing materials, I haven’t demurred terribly. Next time I’ll push harder for it to be considered up-front as part of ensuring a good experience. Though this sounds like common-sense, it does seem to get neglected. Hopefully this will avoid testing piles of dense text unsuitable for the web, or users getting lost in labyrinthine piles of content or, my favourite, search throwing up board minute meetings because the relevant content has not been tagged correctly.
I would also think that user experience conferences should definitely include a few more content people speaking. Very useful.
What are other people’s experiences?
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