I recently had to convince a client to pause their redesign efforts and work on their content first. This is how I did it. I tried to stay away from UX jargon and overly technical arguments. There is obviously much more to say about Content Strategy and related disciplines, but this was an exercise in trying to make a succinct argument by only focusing on information that’s most relevant to the client. I’m posting it here in the event that it might be useful to those who have to make similar arguments to non-UX audiences.

Introduction

Since this is primarily an informational site with the goal of converting readers into customers, it is imperative that we start the design process by developing the core content first. This will ensure that we design a web site purposefully to help users find the information they need, and guide them towards desired actions, as opposed to designing the interface first without knowing what content will be displayed. For a more detailed overview of this strategy, see A Richer Canvas.

In this brief overview I will summarize the primary reasons for following this approach, and how I propose we go about it on a practical level.

What happens if we don’t follow a “content first” strategy?

Let’s look at an example of starting the wireframe process before content is available. Let’s say we provide some wireframes of what the site might look like:

Now let’s say you love this approach and we proceed with graphic design, and eventually, towards the end, we finalize the content. We plug the content into the design, and then we discover we have a problem. Suddenly our design doesn’t work so well any more:

If we design before we have content, we effectively create the packaging before we know what’s going to go in it. And if the content doesn’t fit the package, there are only two options: start from scratch, or try to jam the content into the existing package. We don’t want that.

But it’s not just about making the design work. Developing the content first allows us to be much more strategic about the words we put on the page. It gives us the opportunity to start with user and business goals, and make sure our content meets those goals. Ahava Leibtag puts it as follows:

We need to start urging our clients to think about their content not just as a commodity, but as the starting point, the building blocks of a website. It’s time to stop building the house without knowing how many bedrooms it may need. It’s a paradigm shift in the way we think about building websites. But, it has to be done. Because you know what they call things that are beautiful, but have no function? Useless.

So how do we design with a “content first” approach?

The basic process of putting content at the core of a design (specifically a redesign such as this) is as follows:

• Audit. This is also referred to as a Content Inventory. We collect and document all our pages (like a site map), and we extract all the content from each page.
• Analysis. In the next step we work on context and goals. We look at our audit and document how the content on each page relates to other pages. We look at the goals of our site, and figure out what type of content we need to ensure we meet those goals. We look at the process for writing content and if there are areas for improvement. We evaluate our brand promise and define exactly how we want to communicate to our visitors to deliver on that promise.
• Content creation. Once we’ve laid down the guidelines for our content and agree on what we’re trying to achieve, we start writing. This involves rewriting existing content as well as writing new content if the audit and analysis showed us that we have some gaps.

For more on this process, see Getting to Grips with Content.

Who does this work?

The title of the person doing this type of work isn’t that important. The most important thing is that they have a thorough understanding of writing for the web, and how to connect users with the right content. In the web design industry this is often done by Information Architects or Content Strategists.

• Information Architects “categorize information into a coherent structure, preferably one that most people can understand quickly, if not inherently” (see Wikipedia). Another way of saying it is that they build bridges between users and the content and services they need (see Information Architect).
• Content Strategists “plan for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content” (see The Discipline of Content Strategy).

So as I’ve said, the title isn’t important, only the outcome is. And the outcome is web content that meets user and business goals, and allows us to design an experience centred on guiding users along the desired path.

For the reasons outlined above, our strong recommendation is to engage a person with Information Architecture/Content Strategy skills to help us develop our core content before we proceed to the design stage.

End note: Of course, the argument is not always as simple as this. It is often impossible to have the majority of the content available before commencing design. That’s why I like the idea of Structure First. Content Always. But in this particular case, we needed content before we could do anything, so we had to put on the brakes until we had something useful to work with.

By now most people have read Paul Miller’s I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet. The article is certainly deserving of all the attention it received back in May. I’m not sure what I expected — perhaps a gloating, holier-than-thou account of the virtues of going on an internet sabbatical to “find yourself”. But that’s not what this is. It’s a raw, often sad, always authentic account of a year that didn’t go at all as expected.

There is much to discuss and analyze in Paul’s experience, but I’d like to focus on this particular paragraph:

What I do know is that I can’t blame the internet, or any circumstance, for my problems. I have many of the same priorities I had before I left the internet: family, friends, work, learning. And I have no guarantee I’ll stick with them when I get back on the internet — I probably won’t, to be honest. But at least I’ll know that it’s not the internet’s fault. I’ll know who’s responsible, and who can fix it.

Paul touches on a really important point here. Over the past few years we’ve increasingly started to blame the internet or technology whenever we feel like we’re failing at being human beings. It all started with Nicholas Carr’s famous 2008 article Is Google Making Us Stupid?, a theme that is carried through in Kevin Kelly’s excellent book What Technology Wants.

These (and other) authors make great arguments, and I don’t doubt the validity of their assertions. But I do think the pendulum has swung too far away from the importance of personal responsibility. It has just become too easy to play the victim and blame technology for our own inability to resist it. Some people feel so powerless against the relentless pull of technology that they pay hundreds of dollars to go to what is essentially rehab for technology addicts. NPR tells the story in the article At Tech-Free Camps, People Pay Hundreds To Unplug:

Digital Detox co-founder Levi Felix attributes the high demand for tech-free retreats to a growing awareness of the pervasiveness of technology in our everyday lives. “People are feeling like something’s not right here,” he says.

With no iPhones or computers to distract them, campers at Camp Grounded participated in “playshops,” featuring yoga, laughing contests and writing sessions.

What the hell? “Laughing contests”? Isn’t that just called “going out to dinner with friends”? Sure, many of us find it hard to unplug, and we end up spending a lot of our time alone together¹, but we can’t throw our hands in the air and blame inanimate objects for our woes. We have to take responsibility for our actions and realize that we have nothing to fear: our devices won’t become self-aware and attack us if we turn them off every once in a while.

I think Theodore Rooseveldt said it best:

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.

Image source: Jean Jullien

Graeme Wood takes a fascinating look at The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management for New York Magazine:

Whoever he was, it seemed that “Xander Fields” had built a whole Potemkin universe of positive-press websites that amplified made-up praise, often by made-up people, for a handful of rich folks with messy online reputations. I was now deep down in a ­rabbit hole but hadn’t yet landed with a ­satisfying thud. Who was “Xander Fields”?

I love reading stories like this. Consider this your required weekend reading.

Mark McGurl wrote a fascinating essay on the recent Zombie Renaissance in literature:

We are living in a time when what counts as “life” is in significant scientific dispute, and in the heyday of zombie computers and zombie banks, zombie this and zombie that. Why wouldn’t we also be living in a time of zombie literary forms? Whatever their specific emphases and intricacies, all these zombies represent a plague of suspended agency, a sense that the human world is no longer (if it ever was) commanded by individuals making rational decisions. Instead we are witnessing a slow, compulsive, collective movement toward Malthusian self-destruction. Of course all monsters are projections of human fears, but only zombies make this fundamentally social and self-accusatory charge: we the people are the problem we cannot solve. We outnumber ourselves.

It really is a very thought-provoking piece. I just finished reading Justin Cronin’s The Passage and I kid you not — it is the best book I’ve read in a long time. Cronin is a literary author who takes on the zombie/post-apocalyptic genre in such a compelling and beautifully-written way. And as I read those words in McGurl’s article — “we the people are the problem we cannot solve” — I realised that’s exactly what makes The Passage so hard to put down. It is a story about surviving ourselves. If you’re looking for something to read this summer/winter, I highly recommend it.

I’ve long been fascinated by the Steampunk movement, and Nick Harkaway’s The Steampunk Movement Is Good And Important is another great essay on the topic. Nick starts by explaining why Steampunk appeals to people (“it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale,” and “it is an ethos of design and creativity which acknowledges the humanly physical, that which we can understand with our fingers”). He then goes on to explain how different this is from modern technologies like cell phones:

The ethos admits of failure: Steampunk devices almost are not working properly if they don’t have leaks, if they don’t require maintenance and the occasional thump. That’s where they get character and animation, identities of their own which reflect their owners, while every iPhone can be seen as Apple’s endlessly replicated identity given passage into your every waking moment, a tiny and instantly replaceable cloned shopfront: what role is conferred or imposed by such a device on the person carrying it? It’s not that Jonathan Ive’s designs are poor, it’s that they are profoundly truthful: an iPhone is a vector, not an object, valued by its creator for its purpose and interchangeability, not individuality.

Steampunk, on the other hand, repurposes, scavenges, remakes and embellishes in an arena where embellishment is seen as decadence, never mind the inherent decadence of creating the sheer amount of computing power our society now possesses in order that most of it should sit idle or be used for email and occasional games of Plants vs Zombies.

Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.

There have been quite a few posts over the past few months about what to do once Google Reader shuts down this weekend. I’ve been sticking my head in the sand, hoping that Silvio Rizzi will come to the rescue at the last minute and let me keep using my current setup, which is to use Reeder across all my devices (Mac, iPhone, and iPad). But alas, it looks like that’s not going to happen. So after much weeping and gnashing of teeth, here’s the setup I’ll go with for now.

• Feedbin as RSS sync backend. I tried Feed Wrangler, but the lack of tags/folder structure is a deal breaker for me. I also set up Feedly, and it works nicely, but I’m just a bit worried about the service in general. There doesn’t appear to be a business model, and there’s currently no way to get your feeds out of the service. So, for now, $2/month for Feedbin is what I’m settling on. I really hope they add the ability to reorder and edit tags soon (come on, give the feature request some love!), but that’s the only major problem I currently have with it.
• ReadKit on Mac. ReadKit just got a major update to support Feedbin, and it also lets me see and read all my Instapaper and Pinboard links in one place. This will be my desktop replacement for Reeder.
• Reeder on iPhone. I don’t know how much longer Reeder will be around, but the iPhone client does support Feedbin, and it’s still my favorite RSS client ever, so I’ll stick with it for now.
• Mr. Reader on iPad. Mr. Reader also just got a major update to support Feedbin. I used Mr. Reader before, but switched to Reeder when the iPad app became available. But since the Reeder iPad app is now very old (and still only supports Google Reader sync), I’ll move to Mr. Reader for the time being.

This is obviously quite a disjointed setup, and I’m not going to give up hope that there will be One Client To Rule Them All in the coming months. But this setup will hold me over until then. Like having to listen to Owl City while you wait for a new Death Cab for Cutie album to come out.

But I do feel like I now know way too much about the RSS reader landscape than I every wanted to. Thanks, Google.

James Fallows interviewed Linda Stone on Maintaining Focus in a Maddeningly Distractive World. This part, in particular, reminded me how destructive our technology use can be:

We may think that kids have a natural fascination with phones. Really, children have a fascination with whatever Mom and Dad find fascinating. If Mom and Dad can’t put down the device with the screen, the child is going to think, That’s where it’s all at, that’s where I need to be! I interviewed kids between the ages of 7 and 12 about this. They said things like “My mom should make eye contact with me when she talks to me” and “I used to watch TV with my dad, but now he has his iPad, and I watch by myself.”

There are many reasons why it’s important for kids to grow up around technology, but we should never forget how important it is for our kids to have our undivided attention when we’re with them.

Thanks to Tokens for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week.

Tokens is a Mac app for managing App Store promo codes

Tokens gets promo codes from iTunes Connect, creates shareable URLs for each code and notifies you once they’re redeemed.

The first step to getting your app noticed is inviting bloggers to try it. Promo codes let you give away free copies of your app, but unfortunately they’re laborious to create, awkward to redeem and impossible to track.

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Tokens is available now at usetokens.com/syndicate. Elezea readers get a special 20% discount until July using this link.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.