Somewhere in the world a design project starts: Requirements are gathered…stakeholders interviewed…audiences identified. Depending on your organization, there might even be interactive workshops to tease out useful information in the phase we call Discovery.

Content, Oh Right

During this period, there’s usually some effort put into discussing, or at the least, acknowledging that, yes, indeed, along with everything else, including visual design, code, audiences, structure, we need…content. This moment of acknowledgment can be fleeting, and before you know it, the discovery process has wrapped up. Then the project moves into the next phase where design, development, and testing weave in and out of each other, headed towards a finish line that is often a moving target.

At some point during this tempest of design, development, and testing, content returns to the forefront and decisions are forced: decisions about relationships to other content, fields within content types, appropriate labels, and even the very “aboutness” of the content. Thus begins the often haphazard process of modeling structured content that will eventually make its way into the bowels of your CMS.

Perhaps we can bring a semblance of order to this process. Before we set off structuring content, let’s step back and do some prep work.

Forget about the content, I need some structure

Often in life, the doing of something is not half as hard as the planning. Take cooking, for instance. I have no problem putting food to flame, but it’s the planning, shopping, and prep work that keep food delivery services in business. In other words, I don’t do it, but I might if I had a plan or a roadmap. Notice I’m making a distinction between verbs and nouns – planning takes time and energy, while having a plan saves all that.

So, having a plan makes everything easier, but with an effective plan, you need to understand a few basic things about whatever it is you’re doing.

Let’s create a plan for modeling structured content.

Before moving ahead, I should note that while I’ve been in the trenches of content modeling for some time, I owe much thanks to Mike Atherton and Cleve Gibbon for helping clarifying and organizing the concepts and process of content modeling. Much of the following flows from articles written and workshops presented by these fine fellows.

What is structured content?

It’s often helpful to reflect and remind yourself what we mean by “structured content” and what it is we’re essentially doing by modeling it.

Basically structured content is information or content that has been drilled down and classified using metadata. So you get:

• Information that is broken down into discrete concepts (chunks)

• Classified as real-world things and relationships (meaningful links)

• Metadata is added, which is a structure readable by robots and people (relationships have to exist in a database)

What are we essentially doing?

Conceptual content model, the nouns are the content chunks and the verbs show how they are related. The process of creating a content model includes:

1. Identifying similar groups of content (content types)

2. Naming them (“news,” “episode,” etc.)

3. Challenging their validity (are they needed?)

4. Validating them (i.e., ask: “hey client/users, does this seem right?”)

5. Describing them (you and your team need a shared understanding; it’s easy to assume the wrong things)

6. Structuring them (fields & metadata!)

7. Refining them (make them better with what you’ve learned)

8. Modeling them (showing relationships between content types; lines, verbs, rules)

Who informs your model?

Talk to the experts first

Get an overall picture of the clients or subject matter experts’ world first. Find where the borders are and demystify any jargon. Ask lots of questions. The goal is to understand:

• What are the important concepts / things

• What they’re called

• How they relate

Talk to users next

Discover their priorities. Which things do they care most about? Does their terminology differ? The goal is to understand:

• Their priorities

• Things they care about

• Their terminology

Find the best fit

Experts map the world, users mark points of interest. Your content model should find a balance between authoritative and accessible. A good content-model based design has complexity behind the scenes and simplicity up front, meaning it is understandable to users and acceptable to experts. Try to get the model right, even if it’s too complex to fully use, then worry about how to represent it.

In a nutshell, a model is an imperfect, subjective, iterative take on a subject that is understandable to users and acceptable to experts.

When to start

Start early, at the beginning of a project, then keep challenging, validating, and refining.

Why create a content model?

There’s lots of reasons to model structured content, some of which are it allows you to:

• Manage content at scale (need automation and rules when you have lots of content, can’t manually do it all)

• Provide meaningful navigation, based on content and relationshipsReuse content assets

• Note connections across subjects (this topic relates to that topic)Improve findabilityImprove SEO (relevance & link density)

• Design for all devices (content and fields are modular, flexible)

• Make it machine-friendly

Putting it all together

This list is intended as a starting point, providing a high-level plan to keep the process straight in your head. Many things within each step can be discussed at length.

Step 1: Initial research

• Review any existing content

• Identify initial broad types of content

Step 2: Conceptual model

Before talking to experts and users, take a first stab at a model (see the example above). Keep it simple, capturing the names and high-level relationships between content types. Think of this as the conversation starter and concentrate on

• High-level

• Shapes (content, nouns)

• Lines (relationships, verbs)

• Focus on noun-verb relationship. Finding the nouns is the relatively easy part, the real challenge is figuring out the relationships

Step 3: Talk to experts and users

Go forth and learn about the subject domain by talking to real people. When talking with either experts or users, lots of words will flow; concentrate on the nouns and the verbs, which are the building blocks of your model. Ask lots of questions but keep in mind: experts paint an overall picture, users tell you what they need and want.

Step 4: Refine model

This is where we begin to add detail to our content types and figure out the best ways to structure our content types to meet the needs of users. It involves ongoing conversations with stakeholders, developers, and the rest of your team. Spreadsheets help to organize names, fields, and relationships, and everything starts to become concrete. It’s where the rubber meets the road and prepares your content for prime time.

Step 5: Implement technical model

Part of this happens in the previous step, but essentially this step brings whatever technologies you’re using into the equation. Different systems have different ways of doing things. You want to make sure you are working closely with your tech team to ensure the technology is making everything do what was intended.

Parting Thoughts

We’ve only scratched the surface, but hopefully this roadmap gets you started. The process of modeling structured content can be meandering, complex, and confusing, but the end result should be clarity – an understanding of what the content is, how it all relates, what’s important, and what terms should be used.

Keep in mind, the model maps the subject domain; it’s not the navigation, website structure, or content inventory. It’s a way of understanding the inherent connections between things and exposing natural pathways between content. In a nutshell, it’s simply list of things and their relationships.

#contentstrategy #informationarchitecture #userexperience