Think Info
Exploring the information space
Your taxonomy is brokned
I was in a meeting with a client discussing how to store material they produce for their end clients. While I advocated one pattern, a colleague proposed the more common format: a first node is the end client the content is for, and beneath that, sub-divide based on date, probably using a year-and-month approach.
“If that doesn’t work,” he said, “your taxonomy is broken.”
I paused a moment, for effect (as one does), and replied flatly: “Your taxonomy is fundamentally broken.”
Let me explain this raw statement. How can I be so certain this structure – this approach – is not suitable? There are several practicalities relating to the client and the content being produced, which are symptomatic of a greater taxonomical malaise. These arguments apply to just about any typed content.
Who is our structure for?
From my perspective, the most important question to be asked – and answered – pertains to the audience. We have thousands of documents; what information does our audience need to see in the URL? Do they really need their own organisation to be named? Do they need to know that this piece of content is syndicated? Do they need to know the date the article was written? Or when it was published? Do they perhaps want the name of the author? Or any combination of the categorisation axes applied to the piece of content? Read more of this post
Bridging Content
A short while ago, I attended a Content Strategy event: nine people each gave a five minute talk – an intense format that can throw up some real gems. On this occasion, the gem came from Chris Atherton (@finiteattention), and is a concept I can only describe as the principle of Bridging Content.
The background to Chris’ presentation: design agency Numiko was selected by the UK government’s Time to Change initiative to build a digital engagement strategy aimed at younger people. Considerable research was done with the target audience: both with and without direct exposure to mental illness and its impact. According to Chris, this resulted in thirteen – yes, 13 – personae. Read more of this post
What does your CMS actually do?
You’ve shelled out the money – six figures very likely. You have the license. The wonderful CMS they sold you is yours to use. So, what are you going to do?
In other terms
I am no musician. My fingers do not obey my instructions when it comes to evoking the melody. But, I wanted to learn. The piano is supposed to be a fairly basic instrument; maybe not the easiest, but the notes are all laid out in front of one is a fairly obvious way.
I went into a music store and asked a salesman which piano I should buy. I was honest about not having a clue; not knowing how to play. But I have a good ear for sound. I know if I like the tone of something. All smiles, he took me to one special piano he had; I closed my eyes and listened while he played. The piece was hauntingly beautiful – a minute and a half of lively bounce. Chopin, he told me; Étude Op. 10 n. 5. A piece that demonstrated no lack of skill.
Sold. I handed over my money and awaited delivery.
Was I ever in for a shock? A week later, the very piano the salesman had played me that demo piece on arrived and was set up in my living room. I lifted the lid to see what my new toy sounded like in my home – and discovered that half the keys were missing! On the right half of the keyboard, there was only the single white key; an F. Read more of this post
A side order of biscuits
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UK law now required that you, as a user of this site, be notified that there are small pieces of data distributed with the pages of this site, that can track you. And you must be presented with the opportunity to opt in to receiving them. If you don’t want them, skip to the instructions at the end.
What’s a cookie?
Cookies are small elements of information – an identifier and a value. In themselves, they are gibberish. It is what is done with them is potentially problematic. Web site owners like to build up profiles of their visitors, to better serve them. During a single visit, there are many ways to do this. Placing a cookie on your machine allows a site to identify you across visits. Read more of this post
The content testing ground
At CS Applied last month, Rahel Bailie held a workshop where she explained the work she has been doing on the City of Vancouver’s web site. She outlined a triage approach to content auditing: what to keep, what to discard, and what needed reworking.
The model is beautifully simple. And if done right – with sign-off from the powers – it provides a perfect tool with which to test new content people come up with. Anything that fails the test would not have survived the original triage, so should not make it onto the site.
The four levels of the value proposition
Goals
What is the goal of your site? What are its goals? This is described in lofty terms; it is board-speak. It may be to sell more product, to service a community or to provide thought leadership. This is the answer to the Why of your site’s existence. It is not interested in implementation or approach; it cares only for concepts. Read more of this post
Separating content from presentation
Just about every CMS vendor claims to separate content from presentation. While I cannot claim to know every CMS out there, I have yet to encounter one that truly divides these aspects of communication.
What is content?
Content is a somewhat vague catch-all term. It refers to the information available to be presented. It may be words, images, video. Any granular element of communication is content; it is in this definition that the problem so often occurs: how granular is a granular element?
Is this post an element of content, or is it an aggregation of content elements? It contains both text and image; it has a defined order to the flow of headings and paragraphs. One content? Two content? More?
What is presentation?
Presentation is the wrapper around content: the structure that holds the elements in place so their sequence makes sense to the audience. Presentation is the container. But how deep should our definition of what is a container go? How pedantic should we be about what is presentation layer, and what elements are part of the content? That line above that asks “What is presentation?” – should the fact that it is a heading, that renders as an <h3>, be a part of the content, or is that the presentation layer?
Read more of this post
Content Strategy Applied 2012 in review
The two days (1-2 March 2012) are wrapped – it is time to take stock of the learnings that came of them.
If I had to choose one word to sum up CSApplied2012, it would be intense: pretty much a non-stop roller-coaster of information and ideas; inspiration and levity. We managed such a flow of real-time tweeting that the event hashtag - #CSA12 – peaked into the top ten Twitter trending topics world-wide and draw the attention of the spam-bots. A quad-stream format meant there was more than enough content to keep anyone busy, and sometimes too many choices to make: does one go for the technical stream, or the localisation? It’s a hard life trying to take it all in.
As with my CS Forum write-up, I will go for recurring themes rather then a blow-by-blow account of the sessions I attended. Read more of this post
KISS and the black box
I have been told, over and over, to keep the systems I design simple. The mantra is familiar; we all know it well: KISS – keep it simple, stupid.
Everyone and his half-brother is quoted saying something of the sort:
“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Steve Jobs
Now, I have a big problem with how many people choose to interpret this concept of simplicity. There are several ways in which KISS can be applied.
KISSing the system
This is the aspect of KISS that people like Jobs have referred to: it is about reducing the set of requirements; eliminating second-tier functionality.
KISSing the system is about identifying the tasks that really need to be supported, and eliminating the rest. If you can halve the number of tasks the system supports, thereby halving the overall complexity, while maintaining 90% of the user-task needs (i.e. the retained tasks are used more than the discarded), your return on effort will increase.
Of course, just because a task is not frequently performed does not mean it is not critical (e.g. a purchasing process involves putting items in a cart, and a check-out; just because the average shopper selects five items before checking out does not mean we can do without the less-used step). Read more of this post
Dependency awareness (content’s identity crisis)
Is your content having an identity crisis? Does it know what it is?
When elements of content become individual entities, separate from the environment in which they are presented (which is the whole point of a CMS, but that’s another story), the need for awareness of these dependencies becomes critical to the “management” part of the CMS.
Most vendors will tell you that their systems are aware of content dependencies: if you create a new page, with an image in it, publishing the page will also publish the image. Hey, the page is aware of what its dependencies are; what more could you want? Read more of this post
Double standards in the Google Empire
Google is big. Google can do pretty much anything it likes; with a code change – justified by its vision of what the web should be – Google can change the fortunes of companies of all sizes. As such, it sets the rules everyone else must operate by. It is accountable to no one but outdated laws. Google hates contextualisation of the internet; a practice it refers to with the shady term of “cloaking.”
What, though, are we to make of Google employing double standards?
While this post is about cloaking, the thought process was triggered by Google’s announcement that, in the name of security, search query data will no longer be included in referrer strings for logged-in users; this information being critical contextualisation (as well as SEO) data for site owners.
Read more of this post
Rick Yagodich
Michael Sadler
