Nathan Wall — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:43:21 GMT

Your content matrix deliverable sounds similar to a project Ive been working on for a little while now for a government agency. I started working on the matrix approach as a means of assembling fragments of a larger design and development process into a framework that could be reused to rewrite about ten thousand pages of content.

At first glance I am following a process that is fairly similar to what you outline, but with perhaps one major difference – my step 3 extends the use of audience segment and site objectives and maps content back to customer tasks and goals while still accounting for desired business outcomes. Maybe the difference is in the detail?

Either way – I’d love to hear more.

Nathan Wall

Nathan Wall — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:44:47 GMT

Having just completed a project that involved a major content and design refresh this article sums it up perfectly. The initial concepts were OK, but it wasn’t until we got the copy owners involved and showed them prototypes with real content did they embrace the opportunity the project presented.

Using real content helped us refine the early draft of the new IA, and helped my team challenge the content owners. “You really want to use a label that long? OK, well here’s how that would look in the current design.” Needless to say the labels got trimmed pretty quick when it didn’t fit the pretty picture they liked so much.

We took the collaboration 1 step further though. I had a copy owner in the room observing the user testing, and several watching via remote video stream. We were really only testing the design and the IA, their labels came into question really early on, and some users couldn’t help themselves but comment on the content.

When a test participants face gets all scrunched up because they can’t understand your content, and you’ve got the writer seeing the results first hand, the outcome can be pretty powerful. The incentive for the copy owner to do better was immense. Oh and they also managed to reduce the amount of content they “thought” they needed by about 40%.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Nathan Wall