Colleen Jones (@leenjones), one of my colleagues from the Content Strategy Consortium (#csconsortium) recently published, “Toward Content Quality” on UXMatters.com. In it, she presents her cool checklists to use as heuristics when evaluating content quality. She’s invited feedback on the checklists, and so I am writing partly for that purpose, but also to put forth a complementary technique.

Colleen’s checklists cover the most important aspects of evaluation, but they imply (to me, at least) that a whole lot of background is already understood, such as the users’ needs, the overall strategy of the site, and most importantly, the measures against which one might gauge the success of the content under review. I don’t mean any criticism at all; I think she’s just more generous than I am, presuming someone has given these issues at least a little thought.

I’d like to propose a parallel activity to a heuristic evaluation of content, which I’m going to call a heuristic description of the content. Instead of saying whether the content meets specific success factors (e.g., does the content do this effectively?), infer from the content itself what its goal is and describe it as fully as possible.

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On UXMatters, as a comment to Colleen Jones′s (@leenjones) excellent piece on the heuristics for assessing the quality of content, Fred Brenton issued this challenge:

It would really help everyone concerned if any kind of article concerning content and usability was written in a way that everyone could understand.

I agree with him completely, and I′d like to give it a shot. Please, everyone, help me out because this is just the noob leading the noobs…

What is content?

Content is the substance of a website.

Content is the words, the pictures, the music, and the video.

Content is the descriptions, the pitches, the offers, the listings, the links, and the references.

Content is the instructions, the cues, the forms, the buttons, and the confirmations.

Content is the reviews, the ratings, the questions, the advice, the warnings, the praise, and the complaints.

Content is the reason that people visit a website.

Content:

• Tells them what they need to know.
• Shows them what they need to see.
• Helps them solve their problems.
• Offers them choices.
• Leads them through tasks.
• Builds relationships with them and among them.

In one way and another, content conveys all the value that a visitor gets out of a website.

So when someone asks you to define content, just say, ″It′s all the stuff on your website.″

Rachel Lovinger (@rlovinger) just published a great piece on categorizing, called “Splitting Tigers, Lumping Rabbits,” on Scatter/Gather. I love her simple, elegant advice: “You just need to find the right balance between lumping and splitting.”

Since I read it, I’ve been wondering: How do you find that balance? Is it just some feeling that comes upon you when you have all the pieces in the proper order? Is it like sorting male and female chicks?—something that is learned unconsciously through experience? Is there some way to work it out systematically?

I believe that finding the balance lies in discovering which distinctions make the most difference for the users of your content. If you can articulate what makes this thing different from that one, and why that difference matters to your users, then you will have identified the dimensions of difference. You will also have created a test for your categories, your labels, your navigation, and perhaps even the whole content strategy for your website.

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Since I’ve started reading articles and listening to presentations about content strategy, I’ve got the impression that people are talking about a lot of related parts, but I haven’t got my brain around it as an organic whole. For example, part of content strategy has to do with branding, and another addresses production and delivery of content, while yet another is about workflow.

I think it’s a tendency—at least in Western cultures—to build a whole by first defining the component parts. When we have no sense of something as an integrated whole, we start with the pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle, expecting that the picture will emerge if we get all the pieces right, in their proper place. When we take this approach, we strive endlessly to distinguish more precisely what’s “in” the field and what’s “out.”

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Professor Trelawney is among my favorite characters in the Harry Potter saga. She’s the professor of the art of “divination,” the ability to view the invisible and discern the indiscernible. At one point in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, at least in the cinematic version, Hermione Granger denounces divination as a “woolly discipline,” preferring ancient runes, but perhaps she dismisses it too quickly.

I am convinced that every website has a content strategy behind it—whether intentional or not. With a little investigation, inference, and imagination, therefore, we ought to be able to “read” the strategy—without trances, tea leaves, or even a gazing crystal. What better way for content strategy noobs like us to learn what makes a really good content strategy, than learning to recognize them at work in others’ sites?
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