About 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

Many useful approaches are available to support the structuring of content. It’s important to understand their differences, and how they complement each other. I want to consider content structuring in terms of a spectrum of approaches that address different priorities.

Only a few years ago most discussion about structuring content focused on the desirability of doing it. Now we are now seeing more written about how to do it, spawning discussion around topics such as content models, design patterns, templates, message hierarchies, vocabulary lists, and other approaches. All these approaches contribute to structuring content. Structuring content involves a combination of human decisions, design methods, and automated systems.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to unlock the editorial benefits of content models, which are generally considered a technical topic. I realized that discussing this angle could be challenging because I would need to separate general ideas about structuring content from concepts that are specific to content models. While content models provide content with structure, so do other activities and artifacts. If the goal is to structure content, what’s unique about content models? We need to unpack the concept of structuring content to clarify what it means in practice.

Yet structuring content is not the true end goal. Structuring content is simply a means to an end. It’s the benefits of structuring content that are the real goal. The expected benefits include improved consistency, flexibility, scaleability, and efficiency. Ultimately, the goal should be to deliver more unique and distinctive content: tailored and targeted to user needs, and reflecting the brand’s strategic priorities.

In reality, content structuring is not a thing. It’s an umbrella term that covers a range of things that promote benefits, such as content consistency and so on. Many approaches contribute. But no single can approach claim “mission accomplished.”

What are we talking about, exactly?

People with different roles and responsibilities talk about structuring content. It sometimes seems like they are talking about different surface features of a giant pachyderm.

The Guardian newspaper earlier this month published an article on how they use “a content model to create structured content”.

“Structured content works well for a media company like The Guardian, but the same approach can work for any organization that publishes large amounts of data on multiple platforms. Whether you’re a government department, art gallery, retailer or university.”
The Guardian

I applaud these sentiments, and endorse them enthusiastically. Helpfully, the article provided tangible examples of how structuring content can make publishing content easier. But the article unintentionally highlighted how terminology on this topic can be used in different ways. The article mentions content reuse as a benefit of content structuring. But the examples related more to republishing finished articles with slight modification, rather than reusing discrete components of content to build new content. When the writer, a solutions architect, refers to a content type, he identifies video as an example. Most content strategists would consider video a content format, not a content type. Similarly, when the article illustrates the Guardian’s content model, it looks very limited in its focus (a generic article) — much more like a content type than a full content model.

Mike Atherton commented on twitter that the article, like many discussions of content structuring, didn’t address distinctions between “presentation structure vs semantic structure, how the two are compatible or, indeed, different, and whether they can or should be captured in the same model.”

Mike raises a fair point: we often talk about different aspects of structure, without being explicit about what aspect is being addressed.

I think about structure as a spectrum. As yet there’s no Good Housekeeping Seal Of Approval on the one right way to structure content. Even people who are united in enthusiasm for content structure can diverge in how they discuss it — as the Guardian article shows. I know other people use different terminology, define the same terminology in different ways, and follow slightly different processes. That doesn’t imply others are wrong. It merely suggests that practices are still far from settled. How an organization uses content structuring will partly depend on the kind of content they publish, and their specific goals. The Guardian’s approach makes sense for their needs, but may not serve the needs of other publishers.

For me, it helps to keep the focus on the value of each distinct kind of decision offers. For those who write simple articles, or write copy for small apps that don’t need to be coordinated with other content, some of these distinctions won’t be as important. Structure becomes increasingly important for enterprises trying to coordinate different web-related tasks. The essence of structure is repeatability.

The Spectrum of content structuring

The structuring of content needs to support different decisions.

Structure brings greater precision to content. It can influence five dimensions:

How content is presented
What content is presented
Where content is presented
What content is required
What content is available

Some of these issues involve audience-facing aspects, and others involve aspects handled by backend systems.

Content doesn’t acquire its structure at one position along this spectrum. The structuring of content happens in many places. Each decision on the spectrum has a specific activity or artifact associated with it. The issues addressed by each decision can be inter-related. But they shouldn’t become entangled, where it is difficult to understand how each influences another.

UI Design or Interaction Design

UI design is not just visual styling. Interaction design shapes the experience by structuring micro-tasks and the staging of information. From a content perspective, it’s not so much about surface behaviors such as animated transitions, but how to break up the presentation of content into meaningful moments. For example, progressive disclosure, which can be done using CSS, both paces the delivery of content and directs attention to specific elements within the content. Increasingly, UX writers are designing content within the context of a UI design or prototype. They need understand the cross-dependences between the behavior of content and how it is understood and perceived.

The design of behavior involves the creation of structure. Content needs to behave predictably to be understandable. UI design leverages structure by utilizing design patterns and design libraries.

Content Design

Content design encompasses the creation and arrangement of different long and short messages into meaningful experiences. It defines what is said.

Content design is not just about styling words. It involves all textual and visual elements that influence the understanding and perception of messages, including the interaction between different messages over time and in different scenarios. Words are central to content design; some professionals involved with content design refer to themselves as UX writers. Terminology is finely tuned and controlled to be consistent, clear, and on-brand.

Writers commonly break content into blocks of text. They may use a simple tool like Dropbox paper to provide a “distraction free” view of different text elements that’s unencumbered by the visual design. It may look a bit like a template (and is sometimes referred to as one), but it’s purpose is to help writers to plan their text, rather than to define how the text is managed. The design of content relies heavily on the application of implicit structure. Audiences understand better when they are comfortable knowing what they can expect. The design may utilize a message hierarchy (identifying major and minor messages), or voice and tone guidelines that depend on the scenario in which the writing appears. For the most part these implicit structures are managed offline through guidelines for writers, rather than through explicit formal online systems. But some writers are looking to operationalize these guidelines into more formal design systems that are easier and more reliable to use.

Content design involves delivering a mix of the fresh and the familiar. The content that’s fresh, that talks about novel issues or delivers unique or distinctive messages, is unstructured — it doesn’t rely on pre-existing elements. Messages that are familiar (recycled in some way) have the possibility of becoming structured elements. Content design thus involves both the creation of elements that will be reused (such as feedback messaging), and ad hoc content that will be specific to given screen. But even ad hoc elements present the opportunity reuse certain phrases and terminology so that it is consistent with the content’s tone of voice guidelines. Some publishers are even managing strings of phrases to reuse across different content.

Page Templates

Templates provide organizational structure for the content — for example, prioritizing the order of content, and creating a hierarchy between primary and secondary content. The template defines the elements will be consistent for any content using the template, in contrast to the interaction design, which defines the elments that will be fluid and will change and respond to users as they consume the content.

Templates provide slots to fill with content. Page templates specify HTML structure, in contrast to the drafting templates writers use to design specific content elements. Page templates express organizational structure, such as where an image should be placed, or where a heading is needed. The template doesn’t indicate what each heading says, which will vary according to the specifics of the content. Templates can sometimes incorporate fixed text elements, such as copyright notice in the footer of the page, if they are specific to that page and are unlikely to change. The critical role that templates play is that they define what’s fixed about a page that the audience will see. Templates provides the framework for the layout of the content, allowing other aspects of the content to adjust.

Layout has a subtle effect on how content is delivered and is accessed across different screens. Elements that are obvious on some screen sizes may not be so on other screen sizes — for example, a list of related articles, or a cross-promotion. Page templates must address how to make core information consistently available.

Content Types

Content types indicate what kinds of information and messages audiences need to see to satisfy their goals. The more specific the audience goal, the most specific the content type is likely to be. For example, many websites have an “article” content type that has only a few basic attributes, such as title, author and body. Such types aren’t associated with any specific goal. But a product profile on an e-commerce website will be much more specific, since different elements are important to satisfying user needs for them to decide to buy the product. The more specific a content type, the more similar each screen of content based on it will seem, even though the specific messages and information will vary. Content types provide consistency in the kinds of information presented for a given scenario.

Content types are designed for a specific audience who has a specific goal. It specifies: to support this purpose, this information must be presented. It answers: what elements of content needs to be delivered here for this scenario? One of the benefits of a content type is that it can provide options to show more details, fewer details, or different details, according to the audience and scenario.

Content types also encode business rules about the display of content. In doing so, they provide the logical structure of content. If the content model already has defined the specifics of required information, it can pre-populate the information — enabling the reuse of content elements.

Content Models

Content models indicate the elements of content that are available to support different audiences and scenarios. They specify the specific kinds of messages the publisher has planned to use across different content. They specify the semantic structure of the content — or put more simply, how different content elements are related to each other in their meaning.

Content is built from various kinds of messages associated with different topics and having different roles, such as extended descriptions, instructions, calls-to-action, value propositions, admonitions, and illustrations. The content model provides a overview of the different kinds of essential messages that are available to build different versions and variations of content.

In some respects, a content model is analogous to a site map. A site map provides external audiences and systems a picture of the content published on a website. A content model provides a map of the internal content resources that are available for publication. But instead of representing a tree of web pages like a site map, the content model presents constellation of “nodes” that indicate available information resources. A node is a basic unit of content that part of and connected to the larger structure of content. They correspond to a content elements within published content — the units of content described within a pair of HTML tags.

Each node in a content model represents a distinct unit of content covering a discrete message or statement of information. Nodes are connected to other nodes elsewhere. A node may be empty (authors can supply any message provided it relates to the expected meaning), or a node may be pre-populated with one or more values (indicating that the meaning will have a certain predefined message).

Content models connect nodes by identifying the relationships between them — how one element relates to another. It can show how different nodes are associated, such as what role one node has to another. For example, one node could be part of another node because is a detail relating to a larger topic. The relationships provide pathways between different nodes of content.

Content models are more abstract than other approaches to structuring content, and can therefore be open to wider interpretation about what they do. The content model represents perhaps the deepest level of content structure, capturing all reusable and variable content elements.

No single model, template or design system

No single representation of content structure can effectively depict all its different aspects. I haven’t seen any single view representation that supports the different kinds of design decisions required. For example, wireframes mix together fixed structures defined by templates with dynamic structures associated with UI design. When content is embedded within screen comps, it is hard to see which elements are fixed and which are fluid. Single views promote a tunnel focus on a specific decision, but block visibility into larger considerations that may be involved. I’ve seen various attempts to improve wireframes to make them more interactive and content-friendly, but the basic limitations remain.

Consider a simple content element: an alert that tells a customer that their subscription is expiring and that they need to submit new payment details. UI design needs to consider how the alert is delivered where it is noticed but not annoying. Content design needs to decide on whether to use an existing alert, or write a new one. The template must decide where within a page or screen the alert appears. The content type will specify the rules triggering delivery of the alert: who gets it, and when. And the content model may hold variations of the alert, and their mappings to different content types that use them. You need a better alert, but what do you need to change? What should stay the same, so you don’t mess up other things you’ve worked hard to get right?

Such decisions require coordination; different people may be responsible for different aspects. Not only must decisions and tasks be coordinated across people, they must be coordinated across time. Those involved need to be aware of past decisions, easily reuse these when appropriate, and be able to modify them when not. Agility is important, but so is governance.

A benefit of content structure is that it can accelerate the creation and delivery of content. The challenge of content structure is that it’s not one thing. There are different approaches, and each has its own value to offer. Web publishers have more tools than ever to solve specific problems. But they still need truly integrated platforms that help web teams coordinate different kinds of decisions relating to specifying and choosing content elements.

— Michael Andrews