Home | Yahoo! Style Guide. Content Analysis: Know Thy Content. Content Analysis: A Practical Approach. By Colleen Jones Published: August 3, 2009 “Content analysis is an essential part of many UX design projects that involve existing content.” To know your content is to love it. Content analysis is an essential part of many UX design projects that involve existing content. Content analysis results in a clear, tangible description of your content—which clients and stakeholders can perceive as nebulous—whether expressed in text or visually.
In this column, I’ll walk you through a content analysis—and offer tips and tricks along the way that will help make your next content analysis more effective. Start with the Roots: A Content Inventory Before you can analyze your content, you must identify what content there is. Ultimately, a content inventory results in a detailed spreadsheet that, at a minimum, lists the existing content. Weed Out the ROT “A common method of analyzing content uses the ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) set of heuristics.”
The problem? Expand Your Tool Set, Then Work Away. Toward Content Quality. By Colleen Jones Published: April 13, 2009 “With good content heuristics, we could make a case for better content without painstakingly doing an analysis of all of the content up front.” How do we know whether content is any good? This simple question does not have a simple answer. Yet, I think having a good answer would help us show our employers and clients why their content needs to improve and how their content compares to the competition’s. As a start toward an answer to this question, I offer a set of content quality checklists for seven different lenses through which we can view content.
Many interactive projects address content quality only through a style guide. Recently, at IA Summit 2009, I had the opportunity to share several of these content quality checklists with some conference attendees who participated in the Content Strategy Consortium that Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic and Karen McGrane of Bond Art+Science [2] coordinated. Content Quality Checklists A Few Caveats. Make Your Content Make a Difference. Advertisement Content, content, content. It’s an obvious part of any interactive experience. In fact, you’ve probably heard content is king, or queen, or some sort of royalty.
Yet, content is elusive. Often, you don’t realize your content isn’t cutting it until it’s too late. Does any of this sound familiar? Delayed projects.Broken designs.Uneven voice.Low-performing landing pages.Dead social media channels.Customer confusion and service calls. These problems and more are documented extensively,[1] so I won’t dwell on them. Beware Of False Solutions Just because someone articulates a problem well does not mean someone knows the solution. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Snake Oil Oh, poor JC Penney. Now, besides avoiding embarrassment, I suggest that you avoid SEO snake oil because it will not bring you results. And, now, a big caveat: I don’t think all SEO is bad. Andy Budd recently discussed a closely related point of view in his recent article.
Overpromised Technology The Real Solution 1. Content Marketing: How to Build an Audience that Builds Your Business. Interview.