About Michael Andrews

Much of our lives is structured around time. When we think about time, we often think about events or schedules. When does something happen? Time provides structure for experience.

In our lives online, content shapes our experience. How then can time bring structure to content we consume online?

Content strategists generally think about structuring content in terms of sequences, or logical arrangement. I’d like to introduce another way to think about structuring content: in terms of time. But instead of focusing on timing — when something happens — we can focus on how much time something requires. The focus on the dimension of duration has developed into a discipline known as timeboxing.

Timeboxing and Content

Timeboxing is a concept used in agile planning and delivery. Despite its geeky name, all of us use timeboxes everyday, even if we don’t use the term. We schedule 15 minute conversations, or half-hour meetings, and then decide what’s the most important material to cover in that block of time, and what material needs to wait to be dealt with elsewhere. Despite our best wishes, circumstances commonly dictate our available time to discuss or consider an issue, rather than the reverse.

With roots in project management, timeboxing is most often applied to the production of content, rather than its consumption. But timeboxing can be used for any kind of task or issue.

“Timeboxing allocates a fixed time period, called a timebox, within which planned activity takes place”
Wikipedia

The consumption of content can also be timeboxed. Content that is consumed on a schedule is often timeboxed. Some examples of timeboxing content experience include:

The BBC offers a “Prayer for the day” lasting two minutes
Many broadcasters offer timed 15 or 30 second updates on markets, weather and traffic
The PechaKucha format for presentations of 20 slides for 20 seconds each, for a total of 6 minutes, 40 seconds, to maximize the number of speakers and keep presentations interesting
Time-limited conversations in “speed networking” in order to maximize the number of conversations had

Producers (those who offer content) decide how much content to make available in order to synchronize when it can be consumed. There’s a close association between fixing the duration of content, and scheduling it at a fixed time. The timing of content availability to users can help to timebox it.

Limits without schedules

But timeboxing doesn’t require having a schedule. In an agile methods context, timeboxing inverts the customary process of planning around a schedule. Instead of deciding when to do something, and then figuring out how long can be allotted to a task, the timeboxing approach first considers how long a task requires, and then schedules it based on when it can be addressed. How long something takes to express is many cases more important than when something happens.

This is a radical idea. For many people, timeboxing — limiting the time allowed for content — is not our natural tendency. Many of us don’t like restricting what we can say, or how long we can talk about something.

Timeboxing tends to happen when there’s a master schedule that must be followed. But when access to content doesn’t depend on a schedule, timeboxing is ignored. Even audio content loses the discipline of having a fixed duration when it is delivered asynchronously. A weekly podcast will often vary considerably in length, because it is not anchored to a schedule forcing it to fit in a slot that is followed by another slot.

Authors, concerned about guarding their independence, often resist imposing limits on how much they can say. Their yardstick seems to be: the duration of the content should match whatever they as authors think is necessary to convey a message. The author decides the appropriate duration — not an editor, a schedule, or the audience.

Without question, the web liberates content producers from the fixed timetable of broadcast media. The delivery of digital content doesn’t have to follow a fixed schedule, so the duration of content doesn’t have to be fixed either. The web transcends the past tyranny of physical limitations. Content can be consumed anytime. Online content has none of the limits on space, or duration, that physical media imposed.

Schedules can be thought of as contracts. The issue is not only whether or not the availability of content follows a schedule, but who decides that schedule.

Online content doesn’t need to be available according to a set schedule, unlike broadcasters who indicate that you can listen to certain content at 9 am each day.

A schedule may seem like tyranny, forcing authors to conform to artificial limitations about duration, and restricting audiences to content of a limited duration. But schedules have hidden benefits.

Setting expectations for audiences

When content follows a schedule, and imposes a duration, the audience knows what to expect. They tacitly accept the duration they are willing to commit to the content. They know ahead of time what that commitment will be, and decided it is worth doing.

The more important question is how consumers of content can benefit from timeboxing, not how producers of content can benefit. Timeboxing content can measure the value of content in terms of the scarcest commodity audiences have: their time.

How should one measure the time it takes to consume content? A simple standard would be listening duration: the amount of time it would take for the content to be read aloud to you in a normal speaking pace.

We read faster than we talk. We are used to hearing words more slowly than we would read them. If we are a “typical” person, we read 250 words/minute. We speak and listen at 150 words/minute.

Listening can’t be sped-up, unlike reading. And having to have something repeated is annoying for a listener. For content presented on a screen, there is generally no physical limits to how much content can be displayed. Content creators rely on the audience’s ability to scan the content, and to backtrack, to locate and process information of interest to them. Content read aloud doesn’t offer that freedom. Listening duration provides a more honest measurement of how long content takes to consume.

The duration of content is important for three reasons. It influences:

The commitment audiences will make to trying out the content
The attention they may be able to offer the content
The interest they find the content offers

Audience commitments

Most of us have seen websites that provide a “time to read” indicator. Videos and podcasts also indicate how many minutes the content lasts. These signals help audiences choose content that matches their needs — do they have enough time now, or do they wait until later? This is content the right level of detail, or it is too detailed?

Screenshot from Christian Science Monitor — A news article from the Christian Science Monitor gives readers a choice of a long and short version.

Content varies widely in length and the amount of time required to consume it. One-size does not fit all content. Imagine if publishers made more of an effort to standardize the length of their content, so that specific content types were associated with a specific length of time to read or listen.

Timeboxing recognizes that tasks should fit time allotments. Timeboxing can encourage content designers to consider the amount of time they expect audiences will give to the content.

Audiences have limited time to consume content. That means they can’t commit to looking or listening to content unless it fits their situation.

And when they consume content, they have limited attention to offer any specific message.

Audience attention

Currently, some publishers provide authors with guidelines about how many words or characters to use for different content elements. Most often, these guidelines are driven by the internal needs of the publisher, rather than being led by audience needs. For example, error messages may be restricted to a certain size, because they need to fit within the boundaries of a certain screen. The field for a title can only be of a certain length, as that’s what is specified in the database. These limits do control some verbosity. But they aren’t specifically designed around how long it would take audiences to read the message. And limiting characters or words by itself doesn’t mean the content will receive attention from audiences.

Time-to-read is difficult to calculate. Instead of counting words or characters, publishers try to guess the time those words and characters consume. That is not a simple calculation, since it will partly depend on the familiarity of the content, and how easily it can be processed by audiences. Tight prose may be harder comprehend, even if it is shorter.

Since much text is accompanied by visuals, the number of words on a screen may not be a reliable indication of how long it takes to consume the content. Apple notes:

“Remember that people may perform your app’s actions from their HomePod, using ‘Hey Siri’ with their AirPods, or through CarPlay without looking at a screen. In these cases, the voice response should convey the same key information that the visual elements display to ensure that people can get what they need no matter how they interact with Siri.”
Apple Human Interface Guidelines

The value of structuring content by length of time, rather than number of characters or words, is easiest to appreciate when it comes to voice interaction. Voice user interfaces rely on a series of questions and answers, each of which needs to be short enough to maintain the attention of both the user and the bot processing the questions. Both people and bots have limited buffers to hold inbound information. The voice bot may always be listening for a hot word that wakes it up — so that it really starts to pay attention to what’s being said. Conversely, the user may be listening to their home speaker’s content in a distracted, half-hearted way, until they hear a specific word or voice that triggers their attention.

Matching the audience’s capacity to absorb information

Attention is closely related to retention. Long, unfamiliar content is hard to remember. Many people know about a famous study done in the 1950s by a Professor Miller about the “magical number seven” relating to memory spans. The study was path breaking because it focused on how well people can remember “contents”, and proposed creating chunks of content to help people remember. It is likely the beginning of all discussion of about chunks of content. Discussing this study, Wikipedia notes: a memory “span is lower for long words than it is for short words. In general, memory span for verbal contents (digits, letters, words, etc.) strongly depends on the time it takes to speak the contents aloud.” The famous Miller experiment introduced time (duration) as a factor in retention. It is easier to recall shorter duration content than longer duration.

We can extend this insight when considering how different units of content can influence audiences in other ways, beyond what they remember. Duration influences what audiences understand, what they find useful, and what they find interesting.

Exceeding the expected time is impolite. When audience believe content takes “too long” to get through, they are annoyed, and will often stop paying attention. They may even abandon the content altogether.

The amount of attention people are willing to give to content will vary with the content type. For example, few people want to read long entries in a dictionary, much less listen to a definition read aloud.

Some content creators use timeboxing as their core approach, as is evident in the titles of many articles, books and apps. For example, we see books promising that we can “Master the Science of Machine Learning in Just 15 Minutes a Day.” Even when such promises may seem unrealistic, they feel appealing. As readers, we want to tell publishers how much time we are able and willing to offer.

The publisher should work around our time needs, and deliver the optimal package of material that can be understood in a given amount of time. It doesn’t help us to know the book on machine learning is less than 100 pages, if we can’t be sure how difficult the material is to grasp. The number of pages, words, and characters, is an imperfect guide to how much time is involved.

Audience interest

Another facet of structuring content by time is that it signals the level of complexity, which is an important factor in how interesting audiences will find the content. If a book promises to explain machine learning in 15 minutes a day, that may sound more interesting to a reader without an engineering background than a book entitled “The Definitive Guide to Machine Learning” which sounds both complicated and long.

What is the ideal length of a content type, from an audience perspective? How long would people want to listen to (or read attentively) different content types, if they had a choice? For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume the audience is only moderately motivated. They would like to stop as soon as their need for information is satisfied.

Time-delimited content types can offer two benefits to audiences:

Pithiness
Predictable regularity

Content types define what information to include, but they don’t necessarily indicate how much information to include. The level of detail is left to individual authors, who may have different standards of completeness.

When content becomes bloated, people stop paying attention. There’s more information than they wanted.

Making content more even

Another problem is when content is “lumpy”: some content relating to a certain purpose is long-winded, while other content is short. A glossary has short definitions for some words but other definitions are several paragraphs. We find this phenomenon in different places. On the same website, people move between short web pages that say very little and long pages that scroll forever.

Paradoxically, the process of structuring content into discrete independent units can have the effect of creating units of uneven duration. The topic gets logically carved up. But the content wasn’t planned for consistency in length. Each element of content is independent, and acts differently, requiring more or less time to read or hear.

Audiences may give up if they encounter a long explanation when they were expecting a short one. It only takes one or two explanations that are abnormally long for audiences to lose confidence in what to expect. A predictable experience is broken.

Timeboxing content messages encourages content designers to squeeze in as much impact in the shortest possible time.

Message units, according to duration

If people have limited free time, have limited attention to offer, and have lukewarm interest, the content needs to be short — often shorter than one might like to create.

We can thus think about content duration in terms of “stretch goals” for different types of content. Many people will be happy if the content offered can be successful communicating a message while sticking to these durations.

While no absolute guidelines can be given for how long different content should be, it is nonetheless useful to make some educated guesses, and see how reliable they are. We can divide durations into chunks that increase by multiples of three, to give different duration levels. We can then consider what kinds of information can reasonably be conveyed within such a duration.

3-5 seconds: Concisely answer “What is?” or “Who is?” with a brief definition or analogy (“Jaws in outer space”)
10-15 seconds: Provide a short answer or tip, make a suggestion, provide a short list of options.
30 seconds: Suggest a new idea, explain a concept, offer an “elevator pitch”
1-3 minutes: To discuss several things, explain the context or progression of something — an episode or explainer

For writers accustomed to thinking about the number of words, thinking how long it would take to listen to a message involves a shift. Yet messages must match an expected pattern. Their duration is a function of how much new material is being introduced.

Creating messaged based on their duration helps to counterbalance a desire for completeness. Messages don’t have to be complete. They do have to be heard, and understood. There’s always the opportunity for follow up. And while less common, if a message is too short, it is also disappointing.

Testing the duration

For short chunks of content addressing routine purposes, content designers should craft their messages to be appealing to the distracted content consumer. They can ask:

How easy is the message to follow when read aloud?
Does the message stand on its own, without exhausting the audience?
Can people ask a question, and get back an answer that matches how much time they are willing and able to offer?

I expect that the growing body of research relating to voice user interaction (VUI) will add to our understanding of the role of duration in content structure. Feel free to reach out to me on social or community channels if you’d like to share experience or research relating to this theme. It’s an evolving area that deserves more discussion.

— Michael Andrews

Content doesn’t organize itself. That’s why we have content models.

A lot of advice about creating content models misses an important dimension: how the user fits in. Many content models are good at describing content. But not many are very user centric. I want to suggest some simple steps to help make content models more centered on user needs.

Two popular ways of thinking about content models are (1) that the content model is like a database for content (the technical approach), or (2) that the content model is a structural representation of a massive document (the structured authoring approach). When combined, these approaches transform a content model into a picture of documents-as-a-database.

Content models generally focus on showing what information is relevant to various topics. Some models can be very sophisticated at representing the publisher’s perspective, and all the details it might want to manage. But even in sophistical models, the needs and motivations of audiences are hard to see.

Content models show numerous fields and values. Each topic could become a screen that could be configured in various ways. One CMS vendor says of content modeling: “it’s very similar to database modeling.”

But actually, designing content to support user goals very different from designing database to store records. Databases are a bad analogy for how to model content.

Audiences don’t want to read a database. Even if they are interested in the topic. A database is fine for scanning for short bits of information to get quick answers. It’s less good for integrating different fragments of information together into a meaningful whole. People need support bridging different fragments of information.

A content model should aim to do more than show a picture of how topics can be broken into chunks.

Neither are content models about navigation paths, as if they were a site map. True, different chunks, when linked together, can allow users click between them. It’s nice when users can jump between topics. But it’s not clear why users are looking at this content to begin with. Many models may look like a collection of linked Wikipedia articles about baseball teams, baseball players, and pennant races. It’s a model of what we could call brochure-ware. It’s a database of different articles that reference one another. The connections between chunks are just hyperlinks. There’s no obvious task associated with the content.

What Users need to Know

Most explanations of content models advise publishers to model stuff that people might want to know about. I call this the stuff-to-know-about perspective. It’s a good starting point. But it should not be the end point of the content model, as it often is.

When we look at stuff people might want to know about we start with topics. We identify topics of interest and then look at how these topics are connected to each other.

Suppose you and I are going to take a trip to a place we have never visited. Let’s imagine we are going to Yerevan in Armenia. We’d want to consult a website that presents content about the city. What might the content model look like? As a thought experiment, we are going to simultaneously think about this situation both as content modeler and as a prospective tourist. We’ll see if we can blend both these perspectives together. (This technique is known as wearing two hats: switching roles, just like we do all the time in real life.)

As content modelers, we will start with stuff we as tourists will need to know about. We’ve never been to Yerevan and so we need to know some very basic information.

If we are going to travel there, we will want to:

Find a place to stay, probably a hotel
Take transport within the city
Find restaurants to eat at
Visit tourist sites
Check out local entertainment

These user needs provide the basis for the content model. We can see five different topics that need to be covered. There needs to be profiles of:

Hotels
Transport options
Tourist sites
Restaurants
Entertainment venues

Each profile will break out specific aspects of the topic that are of most interest to readers. Someone will need to figure out if each hotel profile will mention whether or not a pillow menu is available. But for the moment, we will assume each profile for each topic covers important information users are looking for, such as opening times.

We have some topics to make into content types. But the relationship between them isn’t yet clear.

As modelers, we have identified a bunch of stuff that tourists want to know about. But it’s not obvious how these topics are connected to one another. It’s like we have several piles of tourism brochures: a pile on hotels, a pile on tourist sites, and so on, each stacked side by side, but separate from each other. If you’ve ever walked into the tourist information center in a city you are visiting, and walked out with a pile of brochures, you know that this experience is not completely ideal. There’s loads of material to sort through, and decisions to coordinate.

Modeling to Help Users Make Decisions

If we only adopt a topic perspective, we don’t always see how topics relate to one another from the users’ perspective. It’s important for the model not only to represent stuff people need to know about. We also need the model to account for how audiences will use the content. To do this we need to dig a little deeper.

As modelers, we need to look at the choices that users will be making when consulting the content. What decisions will users make? On what basis will users make these decisions? We need to account for our decision criteria in the content model.

As a prospective tourist, I’ve decided that three factors influence my choices. I want to do things that are the best value, the best experience, and the most convenient. This translates into three criteria: price, ratings, and location.

It turns out that these factors are dimensions of most all of the topics. As a result, information about these dimensions can connect the topics together.

I want to go to places that are convenient to where I am staying or spending time. All the different venues have a location. Different venues are related to one another through their location. But we don’t have any content that talks about locations in general. This suggests to new content type: one on neighborhoods. This content type can help to integrate content about different topics, revealing what they have in common. People both want to know what’s nearby and get a sense of what a neighborhood feels like based on what’s there.

The user’s decision criteria helps to identify additional content types, and to form connections

Many venues also so have ratings and prices. This information also presents an opportunity to connect different types of content. We can create a new content type profile for the “best of” highlights in the city. It can show the top rated restaurants according to price category. And they can show the top rated attractions. This could be a list that links to the more detailed profiles. We now have a way to decide how to prioritize things to do. This content type helps users compare information about different items.

Modeling to Help Users Act

As tourists, we now know what we want to do. But are we able to do it?

Remember, we’ll be in Armenia. We don’t know if the familiar apps on our phones will work there. Neither of us speak Armenian, so making phone calls seems intimidating. We need a way to make sure we can actually do the things we’ve decided we want to do.

For the content to really support our visit, we want the content to give us peace of mind about the risks and disappointments we worry about. We don’t want to waste our time unnecessarily — or worse, find that we can’t do things that we had planned on doing. We want to avoid a long queue at the museum. We want to make sure that we can get a table at a well-known restaurant. We went to go to a show, without having to visit the venue before hand to buy the ticket.

When we consider the actions users want to take after consulting the content, we can find additional points of integration.

These needs suggest additional features that can be added to the content model. We want the ability to buy tickets after we decide to visit a museum or club. We want to be able to make reservations for a restaurant. We want a booking widget. A tourist website can create a widget that connects to outside services that enable these actions. In some cases, the website can pull content from other sources to give readers the ability to see whether or not and option is available at a particular point in time.

Helping people act sometimes entails thinking about content beyond the content you’ve created yourself. It can involve integrating with partners.

The Three Steps of Content Modeling

This post is necessarily a very high-level and incomplete overview of content modeling. There are many more possibilities that could be added, such as including a calendar of events and special offers. But my goal here has been to provide some simple guidance about how to model content.

The three steps to creating a user centric content model are:

Identify the topics that users need to know about, and what specifically about those topics matter to users
Identify the criteria that users have when making decisions while consulting this content
Identify what actions users want to take after consulting the content, and what additional information or features can be added to help them

This process can surface connections between different chunks of information, and help to ensure that the content model supports the customer’s journey.

— Michael Andrews