Content Strategy and IA: what the Hell?
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In 2007 Rachel Lovinger said, “Content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.” But today, the fields of both content strategy and IA have grown, and practitioners face a new challenge: discovering where one leaves off and the other begins. As content strategists we need to understand our role, but we also need to listen to IAs so that we can move from frustrations to mutual respect and communication.
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Content Strategy and IA: what the Hell?
- 1. Content Strategy and Information Architecture: What the Hell?! @marsinthestars #LavaCon Marli Mesibov
- 2. @marsinthestars #LavaCon About the Speaker • Boston-based content strategist • UX specialist • What does that mean?
- 3. @marsinthestars #LavaCon An Evolving Field
- 4. @marsinthestars #LavaCon An Evolving Field The first content strategy conference The first information architecture book The first Masters in user experience The first content The first user research strategy class department
- 5. @marsinthestars #LavaCon An Evolving Field “Content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.” – Rachel Lovinger, 2007 (Boxes and Arrows)
- 6. @marsinthestars #LavaCon An Evolving Field • Both CS and IA deal with the design and management of information • Both CS and IA examine experiences from the user’s perspective • Both CS and IA incorporate ongoing governance tactics
- 7. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Whose Job Is It? Enhances information architecture team accomplishments and competence by planning delivery of solutions; answering technical and procedural questions for less experienced team members; teaching improved processes; mentoring team members.
- 8. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Whose Job Is It? Identifies user requirements by researching and analyzing user needs, preferences, objectives, and working methods; studying how users consume content, including data categorization and labeling; meeting with focus groups.
- 9. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Whose Job Is It? Candidate is expected to have at least seven years related business experience (marketing, advertising, publishing, business consulting, business communications, etc.)
- 10. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Whose Job Is It? Validates content delivery by developing and completing usability test plans; evaluating user flows traffic patterns; studying user feedback; coordinating with Usability Specialists.
- 11. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Whose Job Is It? Candidate will develop content and data information attributes and classification schemes.
- 12. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Whose Job Is It? Understanding of relational databases is desirable.
- 13. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Whose Job Is It? Candidate must develop and maintain sitemap and wireframe mockups, usage scenarios, prototypes, content specifications and other design documents to communicate design ideas.
- 14. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Whose Job Is It? Create wireframes that illustrate site layout, navigation, controls, and content prioritization.
- 15. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Whose Job Is It? Competitive site analysis and benchmarking in content breadth, organization and presentation.
- 16. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Whose Job Is It? Responsible for defining research requirements for web strategy.
- 17. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Came From How did IA evolve?
- 18. • Information architecture was first defined in 1976 • Coined by Richard Saul Wurman, co-founder of TED • Wurman was an architect and graphic designer @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Came From
- 19. “The presentation of information can be more important than the information itself.” – Gary Wolf, 2000 (Wired) @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Came From
- 20. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Came From
- 21. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Came From
- 22. “Information architecture is the stuff that is never rendered in pixels and it’s never rendered in code.” – Dan Klyn, 2013 (Adaptive Path) @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Came From
- 23. How did CS evolve? @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Came From
- 24. “Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” (obligatory Kristina Halvorson shout out) @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Came From
- 25. “Content is king.” – Bill Gates, 1996 (Microsoft Site) “Content is king!!!” – Every Content Strategist, 2011 (Everywhere) @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Came From
- 26. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Are Where are we now?
- 27. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Are We can’t live in silos
- 28. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Are What’s wrong with silos? • Silos duplicate work • Silos waste time and money • Silos prevent learning from others • Silos increase the likelihood of flawed ideas coming to fruition
- 29. Where We Are Complementary skillsets @marsinthestars #LavaCon
- 30. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Are The Teamwork Checklist: • Do you trust your teammates? • Are you overwhelmed by your workload? • Do you have time for your highest priorities? • Have you communicated your expectations?
- 31. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Are True Collaboration
- 32. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We Are Collaboration requires: • Setting meeting goals. • Pre-collaboration preparation. • Listening to others – and hearing. • Asking questions instead of making assumptions. • Involving a facilitator or final decision maker.
- 33. Where We’re Headed What will the future hold? @marsinthestars #LavaCon
- 34. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We’re Headed Our similarities… • We separate personal preferences from our decision making. • We start every project with user research. • We ask: What does the user need? • We seek the intersection of user needs and business goals. • We maintain consistency.
- 35. Where We’re Headed No one can be an expert in everything. We have to pick and choose our specializations. @marsinthestars #LavaCon
- 36. Where We’re Headed Our different backgrounds… architecture user research site mapping @marsinthestars #LavaCon functional design voice and tone persona creation wireframes business analysis visual design interaction design content audits content hierarchies empathy mapping
- 37. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We’re Headed 1. Identify the overlap early on
- 38. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We’re Headed 2. Agree on an end product
- 39. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We’re Headed 3. Err on the side of too much context
- 40. @marsinthestars #LavaCon Where We’re Headed 4. Beware the dreaded cliques © Homestar Runner 2010
- 41. @marsinthestars #LavaCon An Evolving Field
- 42. Thank you! Marli Mesibov @marsinthestars www.marli.us
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Everyone in this room has a blessing and a curse thrust upon them. This blessing, this curse, is the double edged sword that is working in an “evolving” industry. Content strategy is an evolving industry, and side by side with it is Information Architecture, another evolving field. It’s an amazing, incredibly exciting time to be working in either field. We are (some of us literally) writing the book(s) and creating the best practices for how to work in our fields. If you have an idea about why something about content strategy seems confusing, you can change it, and write a blog post about why you think it needs changing, and people may rally to your cause! You can have a huge impact, because we are rapidly evolving.
- In fact, what makes our fields so unique is that we are the first of our kind, and we are the last. We are the first generation of information architects, content strategist, content marketers, content managers, UX designers, UX professionals to make careers out of these fields and professionalize the industry. We are the first to have conferences like LavaCon and Confab and (one of our first – 15hrs old) IA Summit. We are the first to publish books and analyze differences and put together resources. And we are the last people who will ever major in theater, and journalism, and business, and music, and economics and sociology and end up working in web design. Twenty years from now, I guarantee you, a student majoring in theater will be way too far behind the content strategy majors to have a chance at landing a job just out of college. Of course, we’ll have replaced universities with space ship educational experiences by then, but the point is that we as a field become less inclusive simply by becoming more structured. Once we are a structured industry as most others are, we will have far fewer outsiders stumbling in, and we will have far less confusion over what these job titles “mean.”
- But right now, as we are still wide open, this constant change can be confusing, particularly when we have a few different fields that have very similar goals and values. For example content strategy and information architecture. Back in 2007, Rachel Lovinger famously wrote “content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.” She was referencing, of course, the many similarities between our two fields, such as:
- Both fields deal with information management Both fields look at projects from the user’s perspective Both fields incorporate ongoing governance In fact, there are so many similarities between our fields, that we occasionally butt heads over whose job is whose. Let’s play a quick game of “whose job description is this?
- This is an easy one - Information architect
- Information architect
- Content strategist
- Information architect
- Content strategist
- Content strategist
- Information architect
- Information architect
- Content strategist
- Last one, content strategist. There’s a surprising amount of overlap. So let’s look at first, where they came from, second where they stand now, and third, what the future holds.
- It’s rare that we consider where our fields originated. To some extent, it’s irrelevant – we are a culture looking to the future, and with that in mind we needn’t worry ourselves about the past. But the past informs the future, and by looking at the first intentions of those who created information architecture and content strategy, we can remind ourselves of why they originated as two separate jobs.
- The term “IA” was first heard in 1976, coined by a man named Richard Saul Wurman. If you’re familiar with that name, it’s likely because, eight years later Wurman co-founded the first TED talk, and he then chaired the TED conference until 2002. Richard Saul Wurman was born in 1935, and graduated from University of Pennsylvania in 1959 with both a bachelor’s and a master’s of architecture. He was an artist, an architect, an urban planner and worked as a graphic designer. You can picture him as one of the guys in Mad Men in the 1960s, on the cutting edge of whatever new trend was coming up. He, quite literally, put the “architecture” in information architecture. As a graphic designer, he looked at the structure of data and design (before websites!) and said “why don’t we view this in the same way we view buildings?”
- When he later co-founded the TED conferences, it’s unsurprising that he approached that too as a way of organizing information into a successful structure: “TED itself is a triumph of information design. The meticulously tended social dynamic of the conference is the crowning achievement of a talented man—one who realized long ago that the presentation of information can be more important than the information itself.” —Gary Wolf, journalist and editor at Wired, wrote in “The Wurminizer” in February 2000
- When I began working in the UX world, I was introduced to IA as one of the many pieces under UX – many people who do user experience think that IA (and content strategy) are just parts of what they already do, and I’ve also noticed content strategists agreeing, and saying that IA is part of what they do. But in reality, UX focuses on learning about the end user and providing a well-rounded, user-centric experience. Content strategy focuses on those same elements, and providing that experience specifically through the creation and governance of appropriate content. Information architecture, on the other hand, is the process of looking at large amounts of complex data or content or design – such as a website or application – and finding a structure for it that provides a strong foundation to build off. IA can be made even better when that structure is created with an eye for the end user’s experience, and people who care about and work in UX can certainly make use of IA, but learning about UX and content strategy does not automatically mean you know information architecture. And I think we do IA a disservice when we pretend that it does.
- If we want to view IA as a subset of UX, we’re better off recognizing it as a possible tool in the UX professional’s toolkit. We can study information architecture and learn exercises and best practices, and then we can do IA as a step in creating an overall experience. But my main point here, and what I realized as I looked at the roots of information architecture, is that we can’t simply go about doing content strategy and think we are taking care of IA.
- “Information architecture is the stuff that is never rendered in pixels and it’s never rendered in code.” –Dan Klyn, in an interview with Adaptive Path IA has its roots in architecture and structure. The tools of an information architect are intended to connect meaning to form, and identify relationships between content and design types. The deliverables for IA are blueprints for a website: that is, sitemaps and navigation, and it’s here, in the deliverables, that we begin to overlap abundantly with content strategy.
- Content strategy is not nearly as old as IA. The earliest known references are circa 1997 (a full 20 years after the phrase “information architecture” was coined). In 1998 Razorfish began a content strategy department, but the term didn’t gain momentum until A List Apart’s 2008 “Content Strategy” issue, which included the article in which Kristina Halvorson defined it – the definition is now the first line of Wikipedia’s page on content strategy, which is how you really know you’ve made it big.
- From the very start of content strategy we were using bits and pieces of information architecture to inform our work – or at least, the lucky few were. But I think it’s only recently that content strategists have really stepped out of the copywriter role that many companies thought to put us in. Copy is an easily understood deliverable – just as a website design can come out of the IA’s work with sitemaps and content hierarchies, copy can come out of content creation, and in the tough economy of the early 2000s, companies just weren’t interested in hiring for new and strange-sounding process-filled positions. So they hired content strategists as copywriters – as though the positions were interchangeable.
- Now, in 1996, Bill Gates wrote an article entitled “Content is King.” But in 2010 and 2011, suddenly content strategists picked up on the phrase. It became a battle cry. The timing was right – Google’s Panda Update in February of 2011 increased the likelihood of good content getting to the top of the search engines, and the economy was starting to pick up. In my mind content strategists essentially took off their copywriter camouflage and started to request access to design meeting and strategy discussions. It’s just over the past five years that the field of content strategy has really exploded, and I think that’s causing some confusion in other fields, where people like information architects and user experience designers are suddenly being told that they need to take a step back and let the content strategists have a say, because content is king, content first, etc etc. That pretty much brings us up to today – our employers and clients and business partners know that content is important, they know that content strategy is a thing, but they’re still not always sure how to fit us in. Leah Buley wrote an excellent book, “The User Experience Team of One,” which identifies the struggles of a single person trying to do everything, but there are just as many of us who are struggling to work with a team.
- What makes content strategy truly unique is that, where information architects seem to have evolved out of graphic designers, architects, and urban planners like Richard Saul Wurman, and UX designers come from development or graphic design or web design, content strategists come from arts backgrounds. Sure, some studied to be journalists or marketers, but many more were creative writers, or (like me) part time software copywriters working in theater. The empathy came naturally to many content strategists, and so the whole concept of creating a full, usable experience for an end user just made sense. Over time, we’ve developed best practices and techniques for creating those experiences. Some of the content strategy techniques that we use are IA techniques – we look at sitemaps and navigation. We build out content audits and consider the hierarchy of information. We do card sorts and build user personas. So how do we define who does what? There are a few options.
- I’ll start with what not to do. In a siloed process, as a content strategist, you can go through the content strategy process on your own, as you always have. If the information architect does some of the same things, that’s fine. You’ll find out when you each bring your separate deliverables to the table. It’s being taken for granted by many that this is a poor plan, but I think it’s worth identifying why, specifically. Silos are unsuccessful because:
- 1. The business wastes time and money by having you both create personas and both do user research and both put together site maps 2. Since you are two different people, it’s unlikely that your personas or your site maps or any other duplicated deliverables will be the same, which means one of you wasted work or will need to redo work 3. One of the benefits to not being a User Experience Team of One is that you’re able to draw on more than one type of expertise. Working in a silo removes that benefit. 4. It’s incredibly frustrating to work on an idea and then be told that it has flaws. That said, it’s dangerous to work on an idea in isolation, avoiding the possibility of hearing about the flaws. Working in a silo means never hearing that your work might need improvement, and unfortunately that’s not the same as work not needing improvement. This is about more than having someone double check your work though. If I have an idea, and it’s a great idea, but it has a small flaw, then if we catch it early I can fix it and improve my idea. But if I work in isolation and never see or fix the flaw, then I may put so much time and effort into my project that there is no recovering the idea. So what can we do?
- There’s a trend right now to hire for the team, rather than for the position. It’s a very cool idea, but it takes a lot of work, and the right manager, to make it successful. Information architecture and content strategy and user experience are all fairly broad fields, which is why they have overlap, but it also means that two content strategists might apply for the same position with totally different qualifications. As a manager, I might choose to hire a content strategist with great user research skills, who focuses on building personas and voice and tone guides, and an information architect who specializes in creating content hierarchies and site maps. Their skills complement one another, and they each have expertise in an area where the other is less strong.
- As a content strategist though, I don’t have a lot of say in who gets hired or put on my team. I can’t make sure that the information architect I’m working with will complement my skills. But we can sit down together and learn about one another’s’ skillsets, and make a plan accordingly. I recently worked with an information architect who built out wireframes for every project he worked on. I can also build wireframes, but why should I, when he excels at it? When building the wireframes he paid special attention to how the structure of the page reflected the meaning and hierarchy of the work – a very smart use of his time. I took on most of the site map work though, because although he often creates site maps, he had less time to do so when he was focusing on the wireframes. Working on the site map was a good opportunity for me to explore what content I wanted users to encounter at what points in the user flow, as well as how our individual pages related to the bigger picture. There are pros and cons to this approach. If you’re considering a separate-but-equal division of labor, ask yourself: Do you trust your information architect to do the work that you (also) know how to do? Are you able to divide the overlapping work such that neither of you are overwhelmed? Do you still have time scheduled for content strategy-specific work? Have you communicated what deliverables and information you expect from one another, and when you will need it in order to proceed? (dependencies) This is the only way to ensure that separate-but-equal work is actually equal, and won’t result in blocking one another or overloading either of you.
- It’s the cool new term. Everyone’s talking about it. In the words of Sesame Street, “cooperation makes it happen.” I’d like to stop pretending collaboration is all fluffy puppies and rainbows though. Collaboration is a lot like world peace – a lot of people fight about how to make it happen, and no one seems to be happy unless it happens on their terms. To work collaboratively on a project means that there are more meetings – and they have to be productive meetings, or else they’re just a waste of time when people could be back in their silos getting “real work” done.
- Let’s talk about what makes a meeting or a collaborative work session successful and productive. - Setting an agenda with goals, so that everyone comes with shared expectations - Alerting attendees to what, if anything, they should prepare in advance - Listening. This gets at the heart of collaboration, and how it differs from working in a separate-but-equal process. Working collaboratively means sitting down together and talking about how to structure the site map and then working through an exercise together that will result in having the site map. It means discussing the meanings of various terms and planning to test them out together, agreeing on the questions, and then after running usability testing, breaking down the notes together. Of course one person may choose to write the report, but the report should be based out of the notes of each person collaborating together. The benefits here are that each decision or deliverable will have the input of multiple specialties. - Asking questions instead of making assumptions. - Inviting in a facilitator or project manager who can make final decisions and watch the clock. Someone on the team – the content strategist for example, can be the facilitator, decision maker and time keeper, as long as the rest of the team understands and agrees to that. The problem comes when collaborative teams decide they don’t need a final decision maker and instead let questions go unanswered. Ultimately, the project will suffer from indirection, and will become unnecessarily confusing. Collaboration isn’t the right choice for every team either. It’s best in teams that have a facilitator, and are comfortable being process-heavy. The results will likely be richer and by the end of a project that is created collaboratively, the team will be able to move through meetings quickly and efficiently, but it is definitely a process.
- When I first began working on this talk, I had a theory that perhaps content strategy, information architecture, and user experience would all be one and the same job. But after quite a bit of research I no longer believe that we could – and I most certainly don’t believe that we should.
- - The more I’ve learned about the best practices of the three fields, the more I see our similarities: - Don’t base decisions off personal preferences - Start with user research - Constantly ask what the user needs - Find the place where the user needs and the business goals connect Be consistent But that’s not enough to mean we are all the same.
- But what separates us is where we come from, and what information we bring to the table. One of the major difficulties facing American schools at present is that we’ve spent the last century adding to the school curriculum, and as a result there is simply too much to try and cram into 12 years of school. Information that at one time was taught to 2nd graders is now being crammed into kindergarten, so that students can learn even more by high school. Instead of replacing algebra or cursive writing with spreadsheet courses or application development, we’ve just added spreadsheets and development to the curriculum, and schools (and students) across the nation are struggling to keep up. I’m not saying cursive writing isn’t important, but I do know that you cannot expect people to learn all of the things all of the time – you can’t expect people to be specialists in everything.
- Let’s not let this happen to UX and related fields I think that trying to teach people working in the UX/IA/CS field to understand the basics of graphic design, user research, architecture, journalism, voice and tone, strategic thinking, business analysis, design thinking, wireframing, functional design, interaction design, visual design, persona creation, content audits, content hierarchies, site mapping, empathy mapping, all at once is too much for any one person. Our fields overlap because they haven’t yet fallen into clear divisions. I’m not convinced that the current divisions are permanent. Maybe in the future UX designers will all do user research, and content strategists will all do visual design. Who knows – but I do know we’ll need more than one person to make up a UX team, more than one person to specialize in all of these diverse areas. And information architect and a content strategist may have the same goal in mind, but they have different areas of expertise. For now, we can embrace our differences, and learn from one another, and value the information our colleagues can contribute.
- So I will leave you with four pieces of advice, for the moments when your IA has you thinking “What the Hell?!” Identify the overlap early on. As a freelancer, I am frequently working with teams who (I assume) already know one another and know the process that I am just barely working out. THIS IS A TERRIBLE ASSUMPTION TO MAKE. If you aren’t sure what the process will be, it’s likely that others are uncertain – or at least are uncertain of how you’ll fit in. Even with a team that has worked together for ages, they don’t know who you are or what you specialize in. We’ve been talking a bit about how every content strategist is different, and that means we need to get a fresh understanding of what our role is for each new project. Spending twenty minutes learning what everyone else does, and how they believe it will fit into the big picture will save hours of frustration down the road. When I work with enterprise teams, they often seem to have a way of working together that is tough for me to jump into. They’re used to how long it takes to get feedback from the stakeholders, they have a meeting format that they seem comfortable with, and they know what it means when someone says “we need to finish that up by next week” even though I didn’t hear a specific task, a person responsible, or a date in there. Generally speaking though, their silence is not because they all know secrets that you don’t know. More often, their silence is a sign that they are also confused, and no one wants to be the first person to speak up. That’s your opportunity to learn.
- Agree on an end product. Although each individual team member may have different personal goals for the project, the whole team needs to agree on an overarching goal, as well as metrics by which to measure that goal. Learning what each individual’s personal goal is as well can help to smooth the way for later work. It will provide insight Into why that designer or IA is focusing on certain areas, and how your content strategy work will complement it. It’s tough when you’re fighting with someone else on your team and feeling that they are preventing you from doing your job, and from finishing the project. When the user researcher on my project says that he already planned on doing all of the ethnographic interviews, yeah, I had been planning on doing them myself. But it’s not worth fighting about, because our goal is the same: we want to learn about our users. As long as I keep that goal in mind, and I remember that the project will go more smoothly if we work together, I’ll more likely just ask the user researcher if I can sit in and listen to the interviews. It’s unlikely he’ll say no, and if it turns out he really isn’t any good at his job, and asks terrible questions, then I can pass him notes adding questions of my own.
- Err on the side of too much. Freelancers tend to assume no one will understand the context of their work, and provide notes and explanations to go along with their deliverables. In-house teams tend to assume everyone understands their work, and hand off copy decks and designs with nothing called out or explained. Notate notate notate. Copy decks should have numbers by each line of copy, and designs attached and annotated with the same numbers. User flows should have functional buttons and links called out and messaging instead of lorem ipsum. When I was just out of college, I worked as a stage manager in a theater, and my mentor taught me what she called the “hit by a bus” theory. In other words, my binder with the lighting cues, sound cues, list of props and timing, needed to be so complete that if I were hit by a bus tomorrow, a stranger could use my binder and continue the show. I follow the same rule of thumb as a content strategist. If I leave the project tomorrow, my IA or my designers, or my developers should be able to pick up where I left off without needing additional explanations. Assuming I’m not hit by a bus, this also means that when I give the team my finished deliverables, they won’t need me to spend time walking them through the details.
- Beware the dreaded cliques. I often describe silos as feeling “safe” and surrounded by people who understand us. Once we leave our silos and work with other team members, we risk pairing off with the first friendly designer, thus excluding the rest of the team from really working with us. It feels like we’re working collaboratively, but really we’re becoming a clique, which means we may end up with two different work products. To create one deliverable that feels unified, we need to be one unified team.
- In short, we are the first apes on hind legs. We’re the beginning of the evolution. But that doesn’t mean we need to wait a 100,000 years to learn to work together.