Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Richard Marsh

Richard Marsh — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 06:53:14 GMT

Well said Masood, this is a key stage in most aspects of business analysis – lifting the Businesses eyes from looking at technology as the solution, to communicating the issues. Your take on this from a content publishing perspective is nicely presented.

Another aspect which should part of the strategic process is the definition of a communications plan. This should also help the information architecture by defining the nature of the communications, i.e. the dialogues between Author and Reader and some the properties that define what is considered global or local news when dealing with large enterprise projects.

I look forward to your follow up article, in addition to the lifecycle, will you also be mentioning meta data considerations or internationalisation / localisation considerations?

Thanks for a good article.

Richard Marsh
http://www.creative-resonance.com

Richard Marsh — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:27:41 GMT

Thanks Fred. Your article does a nice job of discussing qualitative Content Auditing. Can I confirm that you would do both heuristic (qualitative) and the quantitative auditing mentioned at the start of the article? As I feel that both obviously provide very different types information both of which are very important, what is your take on this?

When auditing I would suggest preparing your approach, data capture templates and methods well in advance to assist the speed and coverage of the audit. A simple test of your audit templates can be done – Ask yourself what are trying to achieve with the audit, i.e. what questions are trying to answer – Fill in your template with dummy data – See if you can answer your questions set in step 1.

I like to run the heuristic audit in a way follows a natural browsing pace as far as possible, stopping to notate every couple of minutes or at the end of natural paths (feel the user experience).

The quantitiative content audit is very useful for working out content migration plans or content focusing as part of on going or new developments.

Having started on a long term auditing plan I also ran a couple of additional exercises to get a complete view of the site, when applicable auditing the content administration tools side – often an area of low quality user experience, caused by a lack of focus on the system that will provide the actual engine to the site.

I think the heuristic term of Accessibility that you use may be better termed as Findability, courtesy of Peter Morville, as Accessibility infers that you may have been evaluating the sites Accessibility compliance, which from your discussion definately appears to be more in keeping with Findability.

Thanks for the article.

Richard Marsh
http://www.creative-resonance.com

Richard Marsh — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 14:22:48 GMT

Really nice article Jorge, this is a really nice example of where brand experience and user experience touch.

Dealing with taxonomies is difficult and delicate subject, finding the balance between embracing corporate terms and culture to support brand experience, whilst making the labels used provide clear meaning and context can be a real challange.

An area of collaboration between IA’s, Copywriters and Brand Managers, Marketeers, Corporate Communications perhaps.

Look forward to more articles on this subject.

Richard Marsh
http://www.creative-resonance.com

Richard Marsh — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 21:25:08 GMT

Hi Rachel, thank you for your article. I have to admit my first reaction wasn’t positive due to a couple of key points that you have made but there is a but at the end of my response:

a) the analogy which you have provided has probably been met with some surprise too many IA’s as we have to consider content very carefully, as this is absolutely key to the sites that we architect, and often covers all of the content considerations that you mention, which doesn’t seem to be your experience of IA’s which seems odd.

b) I also think your statement that the primary factor of relevant content is relationships isn’t clear and perhaps incorrect as relationships do not make the content Relevant to the User per say. I could have a single article that is very relevant providing the User arrives at content item through accurate and clear selection, through clear content navigation or perhaps Search engine, which is generally made possible through well structured taxonomies, meta data and the actual content. The concept of accurate, timely and well structured content an interesting subject.

However on a much more positive note, and I finally get there, content always requires great effort and can easily be a cause for site delays even after providing site maps, wireframes, editorial tone guidelines, and web writing guidelines and using key word systems to assist and or automate meta tagging and relationship building, as often keeping content aligned with these can be be difficult for content authors and very time consuming so to have a practice group focused on this may help on projects and raise best practice standards on the web.

I hope we can get more articles for discussion on the topic of good content. There are also some nice articles on Bianca’s site.

I think that we should be careful not to flame the role of Content Strategists as IA’s as I’m sure many of us if we think back have met the same kind of resistance in the past when establishing the IA role :)

Best regards,

Richard

Richard Marsh — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 07:31:42 GMT

Sorry if my point b) is slightly unclear my fault for trying to write standing up on train, I hope the gist of this point is understood.

As a small extension to point b): Relationships can provide a very effective way of exposing further content which the user may also be interested and in that we see this mechanism used massively on blogs and many of the web2.0 tagged apps. Which can assist massively with making sites sticky. (Sticky still seems odd phrase.. ah well)

best regards,

Richard Marsh
http://www.creative-resonance.com

Richard Marsh — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 07:47:48 GMT

Honestly my last point :P

In terms of content there is a high level artifact which I forgot to mention which is a communications strategy. This is typically started at the beginning of a project with stakeholders and content focused experts (not mentioning specific titles such as Content Strategists, Creative Directors, Copywriters, IA’s) and is meant to provide a living definition of editorial with regard what is to be said where, by whom, when.

best regards,

Richard Marsh
http://www.creative-resonance.com