 Excellent. So you have a diverse crowd, obviously people who work with content quite a bit. Perfect, thank you. So, you know, as we know, there are, you know, at this point over a billion websites, each one of them with a goal, some sort of conversion goal, a user driven goal, some purpose for being on the web. And as we know, a lot of these sites that we encounter as agencies, as freelancers, whatever it might be, are redesigns. So with the redesign, there's constantly this question of I have a site, you know, I built it, maybe spent some money, but it's not performing in the way that I was hoping it would. It's not meeting those goals that, you know, that I set out in the original effort to achieve. So on that note, a lot of projects focus on visual design, sort of how the aesthetics of the site will sort of achieve the engagement, the user experience, and they also focus a lot on the UX. You know, potentially there's even focus on user testing, focus on sort of some form of persona work. But as we all know, content is really where the data is at, right? So when you talk about, with a billion websites that are out there right now, a majority of the time when we get a new client or we get a new project, it's not going to be some new website. Unless you go to angel.co and it's this new idea. A lot of times we are all interacting with websites that have a redesigned project. With that comes one innate thing that I think a lot of us hear time and time again. It's, oh my gosh, my site's not performing. You get into things like Legion, you get into things like conversions. You have to really focus on these efforts. If we ask ourselves as practitioners, really what can we do to offer our clients that will help to actually drive meaningful results, meaningful solutions? Well, it's not really about the visual design. Can you do the next one? Absolutely. Visual design, I'm going to kind of give you guys a little bit of an analogy. A website's sort of like a house. So just like a house, it has an address that we can all go to and navigate and find. Just like a house, there are individual rooms. And every one of these rooms serves a very specific deal. You're not going to put a toilet in the middle of your living room or you're going to put it in the middle of your room. Unless you're this guy. There's nothing wrong with that per se. Much like a house, you've got your paint on the walls, you've got your tiling. This is sort of analogous to kind of the visual component, right? When we come home from a hard day's work, at the end of the day, it's not a really comfy couch that we all want to go home to. It's our bed. It's those comfy PJs and those really great slivers. Those things are like content. That stuff in your home is like content. That's the stuff that makes it a home from that house to a home. So the idea of content-driven UX is sort of the same principle. It says visual design is really, really important. But at the end of the day, that's really kind of the wraparound content, right? Content is the one that is the one thing that everybody, including everybody in here, when we go to a website, we don't go to a website to look at pretty pictures at all. We go to a website to achieve our own certain goals, our own tasks to get answers to questions. Those answers to those questions, those things that will help you get to your task oriented goal, comes from content. So the principle of content-driven UX says, let's put content at the center. And if we're dealing with so many projects that are about web redesign, and we have to really kind of mitigate and figure out how we're going to drive performance, how we're going to bring in lead gen, how we're going to achieve optimal conversions, how do we take a step back from our normal workflow going into wire framing and all of that stuff, and how do we plug in that most important thing, which is content at the center of it? So the house is like a website, and stuff inside is like content. That's what makes it a home. Great. Thanks, June. How's that? Are we talking loud enough for the folks in the back? Even higher? Okay, sure. Perfect. So, like June said, nobody goes to a site to look at pretty pictures. And for brands to excel in this content sort of battleground, we need a scalable framework that's going to help us, kind of a lens, a way we can look at a website or a web page in order to ask ourselves a right set of questions to get us to the point where we're looking at content first, rather than design first or UX first. So how many folks here, I'm going to ask some very obvious questions. How many folks here sort of do some form of prototyping? Sort of. Yeah, right, very common. That's awesome. How many folks here do some sort of user testing? Of course, naturally. So obviously making a lot of progress, so saw some sort of tentative hands going up there, and a lot of enthusiastic ones. We're making a lot of progress in terms of web development and web design in terms of taking the user into account, making sure the user is at the center of the efforts, making sure the user has a privileged position in the web development and web design workflow. But I think one of the challenges sometimes is stepping back even further and starting with content. So content is sort of this requisite element that helps us shape those wireframes, shape those prototypes, and sort of come to the UX and UI phase, having already built something scaffolded to content. Okay, so I wanted to kind of share a work frame that, you know, work frames A need to really be adaptable and agile. We need to make sure that we have a work frame that can be as flexible and, you know, as needed so we can adjust it to different projects. So when I am working on a new project for a client, I usually engage into a work frame that's very similar to this. This particular work frame comes out of a lot of different authorities within this space. Christina Halverson, I'm sure a lot of the content people here know of her name. And it also comes from a lot of different other places. For my own personal and the way that I go about a project, I really do need something that can scale. I might be on a small blog project or I might be on a huge university site where you're talking about multiple schools, multiple departments, courses, and things like that. So I need to be able to scale something back. This particular framework works really well for me and I'll kind of take you guys through it. The first one really is about audience. This is the most important thing, right, because I'm an audience even though I'm the practitioner, the service provider, but I myself also go to a website so I'm trying to achieve something else. It's really important for us as practitioners to really know and I know that most of us, can you not hear me? Do you have a question? Do not think that I can. Is this better? Okay, so the first one is audience. For a lot of us that have practiced in UX, we all know that users are at the center of our world. It's so important in a content-driven framework as well. You have to know who your audience is so you know the kind of messages that you need to craft for your audience. You have to understand the kind of content that compels and moves them, that drives them further to commit to an action. So know your audience. It helps you to ideate on the best solutions when it comes to content and your delivery of that content. So the next one is messaging. Messaging is really important. You know, messaging comes through voice. It comes through tone. A lot of times with my clients, I really try to encourage them to use an active voice. And then the brand personality comes out in the messaging as well. Do we have something that's really staunch and professional? Like maybe you would for a law firm. Or if you're servicing clients who may be college students, you may want to dial that back a little bit and want to have something a bit more approachable. So messaging is really important. You have to know your audience. Then you've got to know how to communicate to them in the most effective way. This part right here really helps you to drive performance. Most of us and every one of you here in this room are scammers or scanners. Rarely do we ever, excuse me, scammers. I so apologize for that. Yeah, sorry. We're skimmers and scanners. That means that we engage in scroll behaviors and we don't read line by line. We look for headings. We look for what's called front-loaded content. Front-loaded content means you give people the most important information upfront because you know they're just going to scroll and they're just going to look for what they want. So messaging is really, really important. It also builds that brand relationship that you need. When you talk about this, we mentioned earlier that content-driven UX is kind of the new paradigm or the emerging paradigm. Most of us have kind of heard this trend where you build brand loyalty and get those logos out there and get that tagline out there. It's really not about that anymore. It's about content loyalty. We all go to our favorite sites to go get content because we trust that. Part of that trust is born from the messaging. They've achieved the right voice. They've achieved the right tone. And they know how to chunk their content up appropriately and serve it right up to you as you being the target user. So the next one is interaction. So when I first started in this space, I started as a visual interaction designer. It says, how do I take content and what kind of UI do I wrap it around? If I have huge lists and huge paragraphs of text, I don't necessarily want to just lay it out on the page like a novel and hope that people have a really awesome time just sitting there for five minutes reading what I wrote. I might choose to break that up in maybe an accordion or I might choose to break that up into a tab, whatever. So the interaction piece is really important because this comes into content consumption. What UI will help to get your target users to engage that content best? The next one is optimization. This one's a really careful one. We work with a lot with SEO specialists, keyword specialists and things like that. I am of the belief and I certainly hope that folks here are too that we must as content people write and serve up content that feeds the needs of users first and then text second. But it's important, this optimization piece is super important because you need tech to bring in that foot traffic. So as you're starting to craft your content and produce your content, it is really important and it is helpful, I found for myself as a practitioner to really understand some of the best practices for optimization to make sure that all this content that I'm writing for the human beings have an opportunity by search engines to be found and help me to make that marriage happen. So that's really important. The next one is distribution. So a lot of times when I'm talking to my clients at ImageX we don't just talk and limit the subject to, okay, this is your content as it exists on the website. That's it. We need to help these clients understand that content needs to be served through many different avenues. Not every avenue is going to work the same. It will be up to you as that practitioner to really understand the nature of the project, where the audiences live outside of that website and that project that you're working on and to make sure that you've created a bridge for your client to be able to distribute that content through a bunch of different arms. So like social media is a traditional one. Another one, Drupal.org. We've got so many things that we pump out through Drupal.org all the time. So distribution is key. The assumption is you've got really important content, really important messages. At the end of that is a goal. And so distribution will help you. It's like many arms, like an octopus, to make sure that that goal is met. And the last one is measurement. So this is really important. This also speaks on a UCD type framework. So user-centered design. Measurement is really important. I will never claim that I know, off the bat, the very best solution that will work for any of my clients. Part of being in this world means that you have the luxury of having so many other expert minds around you. And so for me, I can't go to a client and say, yep, this is the one all in one solution and you'll get all the performance that you need. You'll get your lead gen. We'll start converting off the bat and all of a sudden you're going to be top dog in your space. That's not true. What measurement is, it's making sure that I arm myself, but I also arm the client, right? Because we want to make sure that our clients are also very responsible and engaged with their own website. So give them the best foundation to work off of, but make sure they have access. Make sure that they have data. They know how to leverage that data. If you want to recommend to a client to use Google Analytics that you're not just saying, look at the dashboard and make sure you monitor the numbers. You need to look at user pathways. All this measurement stuff will tell you as a practitioner, have you done your job? Have you helped the client achieve the performance that's needed? Are they actually moving forward to get to that goal? So the measurement piece is really important. So this framework I kind of engage in almost every time I start a new project at ImageX. I want to know who my audience is. A lot of times you'll find that you've got a bunch of different audience members. I want to know what kind of brand voice, brand personality needs to come through and the messaging that compels those users. Then I want to know what kind of UI I need to wrap this content around so they can digest it the best without overwhelming them. Then making sure that you meet the needs of the tech side in the back so you can actually get that foot traffic right into the door. And then distribution. Don't limit yourself just to the website that you're working on. Make sure that you're mindful of all the properties that are in existence within that particular ecosystem for that project you're working on. And then the last one is measurement. Again, one of the most critical pieces we talk about iteration and we talk about refinement and polishing and getting better rather than taking wild guesses. Content is one of those things just like with design where you need to have measurements, you need to have data, you need to arm yourself with that because that's going to be the best way to inform you in what direction you need to go next. Thanks, Jim. That's such a great sort of framework for the high level things that you need to consider in a content project in a web redesign project. But of course, as with every framework, it's like when you go to the hairdresser and you get your hair cut and then you go home and you're like, well how do I look like that again? At least I have trouble. I don't know if you do. For me it's actually not so hard but maybe for others. So with that in mind knowing that this is a framework, this is kind of a high level lens that we can view a content project through a kind of a derivative or a child of that framework is these criteria which kind of help us to sort of ask them some key questions that guide us through how do we approach a given page, a given section, a given site? Now at the back, can you folks read that subtext? Not too much. I will tell you all about it. Can you read the headlines at least? Excellent. Okay. That's the main thing. These are the content-driven criteria which emerge from the framework that June just talked about. The first one is message quality. Does the content personality match the target user? Do you know what is working and what's not? So something like a content audit can really sort of help. I assume, I'll probably, knowing what we've seen from the audience when we ask the first question, who are you? Here I've done some form of content audit. Okay, so about half. The most important piece is in a content-driven UX framework is that audit. That's your best weapon. Yeah. I don't want to get too side-directed on audits, but what kinds of things do you put in audits? Do you put sort of content quality scores? Sort of some form of relevancy? Yeah. Great. Okay. So I think some nods, some non-nods. So we'll walk through an example of one of the content audits that we've used. But we'll show you a snapshot of it. So that's message quality. Does the content personality match the target user? Is this the right content for that user in that position in their journey? Front-loading. So you kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier. So is the most important content served up front kind of the, you know, reverse pyramid in the world of journalism? Do we have we, I guess there was a great sort of copywriter who said, the goal of the headline is to get you to read the first sentence. The goal of the first sentence is to get you to read the second sentence. So front-loading content is really critical. We have such a short time frame to get people engaged. The third one is chunking. Our headlines list of UI patterns use well. So have we arranged the content in a page in a way that's engaging, in a way that sort of brings people to the next sort of step, in a way that's readable and supports the scanning behavior we know from that all users employ, or virtually do. UI patterns are the best UIs leveraged to help users engage in digest content. And June kind of talked about that a little bit earlier. How do we actually arrange the page itself or the interface, maybe pages too old in a term, interface in order to sort of facilitate that user journey. And then finally, I guess, you know, pathways is kind of such an easy to neglect sort of thing in a content initiative. I mean, how many times you go to a website and you read this great page, all this great content, you're like, what's next? There's no sort of next plausible step to kind of take it to the next point in what you know to be the user journey. So does the content provide users access to complete goals and tasks? And then finally, this will be a bit of an eye test for me too. Access. Is the content easily available across multiple devices and platforms? And June, you kind of alluded to that, and this is kind of the practical step of how you might look at a page with that question in mind. Great. Okay, so you don't have to memorize this. I believe the slides get uploaded to Drupal, the Drupal site. And we'll also come back to the slide a couple of times during the presentation. So we've got a framework. We've got criteria. How's my voice, by the way? Okay. All right, I'm getting the thumbs up. Great. Now, we want to kind of walk through maybe the slightly the next level of kind of, you know, how we might approach a project. What kind of deliver rules might we employ? Starting with the scariest one, of course, the content audit. I've actually literally had clients tell me I don't want to look at spreadsheets. Don't tell me to spreadsheet. So I said, there's content audit happening, and I would sort of draw it out. So this is an example of a content audit. And June, you actually did create this content audit. You want to speak a little bit about it? Sure. So I mentioned earlier that the content audit is one of the most pivotal things to kind of launch off to this framework. It's hugely important, especially, you know, earlier we mentioned that there's over a billion websites, and, you know, low and behold, you will likely do a redesign project. You, more often than not, I hardly ever come across clients that ever say, we are not going to use one thing from our existing website and put it into the new one. There is always going to be something that will come into the new environment. So part of the content audit says, you know, we want to make the best decisions for our client. We want to do the best work that we can for this new environment that's about to go to the world. So a content audit is an assessment on the current health of the site. It gets you face to face with so many different facets. A content audit, I do a ton of different ones. Some of them are really lightweight, some of them are SEO audits, some of them are hybrid, so I will go and deploy a few different tools on a website, and then while those tools are crawling these pages, I go into manual audit mode and I actually sit there face to face and I'm looking for very specific things so I can ultimately score almost every single page. Now some pages, some sites, and I'm sure many of us have been a part of them, I've worked on web projects where there are thousands and thousands and thousands of web pages. So how do you be mindful of budget and time? You focus on what I like to call mission critical pages. So if you know the business goals, go into those pages that are most important. Service pages are, product pages are, about pages are just as important. But I go through and every time it kind of depends on what the actual scope of the project is, but my attributes will change from project to project. Now when I do a content audit, there are usual suspects that folks can see across any of my audit deliverables. At the end of what I usually go look for is, is how the site is performing on the front side of things. So user engagement, when I can just go on there and look at it. How's the quality of the images? How's the voice and the tone on there? And then I also audit the back end of things because I want to make sure again it's that engine stuff, right? All of our work hinges on two very important audiences. It's the physical beings and then it's the mechanical ones. So I need to make sure that before we start tearing a site down that I'm not going to tear something down or redo something that already works well. Maybe there's some room for me to refine it and make it a little bit better. But I don't want to disrupt something that's already meeting performance. I want to find the stuff that's not meeting performance. But I also want to make sure that if I've got something that's performing really well here, the pathway to get there could be broken somewhere. So I want to make sure that that pathway is healthy and viable too. So the other part of the content audit, usually when I'm doing an audit I always dive into it's best friend in my opinion which is some sort of analytics platform. So I will usually have GA open for example and I dive in a little bit deeper. So this is kind of the superficial one just to show you guys we're talking about Google analytics right here. When I'm working on a client site I usually go in and I need to know what the click pathways are that their users are taking right now. My time frames will be a little bit different client to client. I may benchmark something about a month and just kind of see how user flows are happening. It'll help me to identify any gaps, any broken holes that need to be fixed. But I also pair it with the content audit and all the findings from there. So when I mention the content audit having a lot of the technical stuff, are they doing meta tags? Are they optimizing appropriately in the back end? Simple things even like not having a tag on your image you're losing juice right there. So I just make sure that every time I do a content audit that I have Google analytics open at the same time and I'm really getting face to face with this website before I do anything at all. And it makes me more informed as that service provider. I can speak on my clients website. I know what insight in and out. We can go back as a team and we can really start to ideate on solutions from a more meaningful platform without having to play any kind of guest games whatsoever. That's great. Thanks, Jim. That's such a great point about analytics and such a natural step. You've gathered some actual knowledge about where is your content at? What kind of quality issues are there? What kind of blockages are there for users? What kind of effort is involved in this content redevelopment effort? I like Google analytics. I think it's a great tool. It's a great visualization tool. It's a great stakeholder reporting tool. It's got a lot of value. I also like to combine it with other tools. Does anyone here use any sort of voice of customer tools? Call it a various thing. I think those two things together will be a very powerful way of triangulating qualitative and quantitative data to really get to move the needle, get the stakeholders kind of motivated. I find the combination of the statistics that they see from Google analytics and the actual words from the users make a huge difference in kind of giving you some ideas on what's going wrong and also catalyzing your how many people have bosses, anyone in the room? Okay, a couple. Right, right. Catalyzing sort of upper level stakeholders to do something, to make a move and to prioritize content as well. You can get a project going. Prioritizing content is another challenge. That's right. The content audit piece, I just one last thing about that. It is so important. When you guys go in, I'm sure each one of you guys do a different sort of content audit for your clients. If you're not doing it now I would stress to go and consider if you're doing it, you're probably likely doing it in a spreadsheet just like I am. But make sure that you give yourself some columns so you can actually do some quality scoring. It'll help you to really quickly like for our clients that we do I let them know right up front is this content good? Now this is under the assumption that I am face-to-face and I know inside and out what their requirements are. I already know who those users are. I know what their brand is and I know what kind of personality that brand should be in the digital space. So after I've gone through and I've audit all kinds of stuff and I start doing a series of quality scoring so does this content actually meet this particular need? Is the brand personality actually being projected? Does it really meet the marketing department and all that great work that they've been doing? Part of the technical stuff goes in here too some of those optimization things. I provide my clients with a few scores on quality so accuracy and relevancy. Time and again you come across client websites that have typos like crazy. Those things really do kind of add up. There's other kinds of accuracy right? Short question here. Some of them I will actually split up so it kind of depends on the project and the scope itself. For this particular one they wanted to make sure that they had their key messages. Was it relevant to the culture today and the culture that was needed for their target audience as teenagers graduating from school? Is the message relevant to this particular target audience and that demographic? Is it accurate? Are we actually building out messages that are appropriate for 16 and 18 year olds versus an adult who wants to go back and you know, so it depends I've certainly had audits where I split them out and that's a beautiful thing is there's no Bible that says it has to be this way. You know, you guys as the experts and the practitioners have got to make sure that you arm yourself to be able to break this type of data up so it works for you because you're the one that has to deliver to that client. So yet you can break it up. This one I put it together and then content quality. So some of the attributes that kind of go or some of the things that I think about that go into content quality is it front loaded? So you already mentioned the whole idea when we were in high school is, okay, you write an essay and you come up with a great headline and then you lead to this awesome killer conclusion at the end. Web users don't want that. We all don't want that. We want to know what the meat is up front and because we're skimmers and scanners headlines are really important. That adds into content quality. You've got people who are just scrolling and we've got these one page full scroll sites now. It takes half your life to get through some of them. It's unreal. So things like headlines are so important. It seems like such a minuscule little thing, but it helps. In those headlines what you want to do is a content person or for me as a digital strategist if I'm mindful that my users are scrolling through a site and I don't want to tell them a story right through the headlines right there. I want to start building that right there. And then even with the sub headlines everything's just got to make sense. It's got to be that on page story. A bunch of different attributes go into content quality. Front loading I look for things like that. I look to see if the content is actually chunked appropriately. I look for simple things like grammar. Are they actually leveraging an accurate brand voice and tone? Versus something that's a little bit passive? Something like that is so important especially when you're dealing with a brochure site. You've got a company that has this really great big platform and they use their website as a portal and a means to get new business. So as a prospect the confidence comes from an active voice. I am great. This is me. This is what we can do. Not that passive one. Over here. Being that Drupal is a content management system and often we create sites that we hand off to people to destroy by filling. Is this process an education process? Are you trying to teach your client how best to use the site that you're giving them when they're tweaking their content and moving forward after you've split away from the site? With the content audit and the framework it's more for me as the practitioner. If I am looked upon to provide a solution for a website and then I have to step back and go guide all these teams to go make it happen. I want to make sure that I am coming from a place where I don't spend a majority of my time in the guessing game world that I have been up front and that I have actual data that I actually know the quality of the existing content before I make any decisions. Now for a lot of times because I do believe in empowering clients I've been in your boat too where you get clients that are just you deliver something beautiful and all of a sudden you give it a month and it's something totally different. So any of my deliverables I try to make sure that I give it to them in a workable kind of platform. I'll hand them over to Google Doc and say this is you know it is unsexy it's scary for most clients but this is a tool that will really help them to make sure that you know any content that we end up migrating to a brand new site they can still have the opportunity to know what's failing what's not working maybe we have an issue with time and budget and we can't get through all of this and help clean it up but I want to make sure that I provide clients with a venue or somewhere to go so they have the opportunity to continue that cleanup and continue polishing it up even thereafter. It's always about putting the best solutions out there for your client but I also believe as a practitioner sorry okay great Lost Phone but part of being the expert part of being the subject matter expert part of being that you know that expert that service provides a bunch of different clients is really empowering them making sure that they get to a place that they can continue this work for themselves otherwise you know you're going to get an upset client you know maybe you're managing their site later on you're going to get an upset client who has no idea what's going on so even with the content audit it's a wonderful tool that you can pass on to your clients to help prevent that type of a situation and it's more for me as a practitioner to make sure that whatever solution I come up with is the most informed validated and data driven that I don't spend a lot of time in the guessing game world Thanks Yes yes yes so I usually what I end up doing is after a content audit after I've performed a content audit I'll have you know my delivery meeting with a client a lot of times I ask for them to invite any producers any creators anybody on their team it doesn't matter if it comes from multiple departments anybody that touches content on their website I try to get them into the delivery because these are first the folks that have probably created the initial content so they should know that they're putting out things that probably could be a little bit better but they should know how they can also do things better right so in here they'll end up seeing some recommendations you won't see it on this obviously it's a screenshot but a lot of times I'll even put in recommendations on there so I do try to involve as many of the players as I can it makes it better kill two birds with one stone sort of thing no no no so this often times this is a solo effort if you have a big content team you can break the audit into if you're doing a hybrid which is one that I traditionally do so I'll deploy tools and then I go in and I do an audit one or a manual one excuse me so when you have a big content team you can kind of compartmentalize pages and say okay team A you're going to focus on this team B you're going to focus on these pages and then you guys come together and then put that entire audit together but generally doing a content audit is usually left up to one person or two people I've traditionally found in agencies it's a content strategist that does it so I think that's one of the things that's really important for that ends up doing an audit great thank you so lots of questions about audits that's a great subject we could clearly spend the whole time talking audits I think quite productively my mic's a lot louder all right so we talked about sort of what an audit is got into that working down what content is performing well and what's not how we can validate that audit and then the next sort of step in this framework typically is the temptation and probably the dominant workflow in many web projects is to get into some form of sketching or ideation of the interface as soon as possible and there's nothing wrong with doing that even when you're on maybe a project onsite whether you're your client or you are the person creating that site starting to think about how users are going to encounter that interface is very sensible and the thing you can start doing right away but it's very helpful and very productive and you get great ROI from stepping back and thinking about okay how are we going to architect the content before we put we create rectangles so no rectangles yet maybe a square or circle potentially but we highly have we found tremendous value in kind of getting the content chunked and shaped in a state of strong architecture before even thinking about how it's going to look on the page so content architecture it's it's pretty much you know what's that content going to look like on page before you as Bjorn mentioned I think you know I even come from this from this realm you go right into wire framing right away you know you've got your placeholders here there and everywhere else in between if we dial it back to the beginning of this presentation we look at how many websites are out there and that a majority of them really are focused on lead gen and they're focused on you know conversions and all this other stuff that's performance at the end of the day what we do at Imagex is we say okay hold on before we start spending a bunch of time wire framing let's really take something so simple as a google doc and really start architecting this content generally when you've kind of been in your field for a while you can kind of visualize in your head how things may end up go thank you Brent Wilter we may you know you can kind of visualize what the page may end up looking like but this says that you are going to put content at the center so what I end up doing is okay if I've talked with a client I know that let's say for example their homepage oh they want to have some product features or some services features on their homepage they want to highlight some of their sponsors they want to highlight this that and the other so I kind of start to break things down write in google drive into different little boxes and I put in very specific things like okay if I know that I need to have a product feature saying well what sort of subtext am I going to start writing about that will actually get people to start digesting this so if you have a product feature on a homepage you want them to actually dig in a little bit deeper in that site maybe go to that products page and they can start seeing a little bit more content like text specs or something so I just start breaking things down right on page and it's a total copy kind of activity for me I start writing out headlines I start thinking about you know the whole chunking thing and the front loading thing and then what I do is I kind of zoom out the document and usually what I do is I look at my headings and I'll kind of scroll through or my headings communicating a story from top to bottom or are they just kind of random that stuff is really important the other thing you know if you have at Imagex we have a really great tool it's called Aksher we end up working through that too so content architecture can happen through whatever medium makes you guys most happy but there's one that says you are going to focus on content first and you understand that the visual design is what wraps around that content focus on the brain and the meat first that drives that performance and then worry about you know the wall paper you're going to throw up later so you know like I said we use kind of Aksher so Aksher is really nice a lot of times you know once you start from this kind of base then what we'll do is we'll go to the design team and say okay now it's time to wireframe oh and by the way it's a killer copy that you can drop right into your wireframe so a lot of times when we produce something for our clients we try so hard to stay away from lorem ipsum text again it's clients they're worried about lead gen and they're worried about performance how you can't expect to have a conversation with your client about these very important things when they're just sitting there staring at lorem ipsum text or button that says button you know just so important it compels us it moves us and it's really important to make sure that you provide your clients those opportunities at the onset so if you get content architecture in before you actually start wireframing it helps you to do that then you can just pass it off to the design team and they can start dropping in now if you've got a tool like Aksher you know what we do is we have our teams work in one file in real time so they wireframe we've got our design team that ends up wireframing something and then we've got our content team that goes in and they you know a lot of times even when you start here it doesn't mean you have it perfect at the onset they're still going to be refinements they're still going to be iterations right so they can work in tandem through that kind of program and they can start working together and we still have one great solution to provide a client at the onset it's not just oh here's a wireframe for you it's here's a wireframe here's some of the text that's starting to come out here's some of the content that's starting to come out and it's not that we think that a carousel is really really fun but it actually chunks up this content in a way that will really help you meet your goal that's such a great point at Junit and I mean so much of this too is beneficial to more than just the process of collaboration and coming up with dynamic great content that serves the user need for the PMs in the room I think I saw a few of you this is also a risk mitigation tool that helps you kind of start thinking about content early start planning for content early so when you actually have a site launch or when you're ready to start some form of testing your site is in a much more complete state you've thought about this in an early stage and you're really just starting to get ready to get your site in shape for launch so all of this effort you know so at some point this happens right I assume at some point an interface is created potentially on paper or actually however that might happen but our experience has been that deferring that can be valuable it can be valuable to do it at the beginning as well maybe you do something prototypical this is very cheap in every sense to create something simple like a five minute sketch but then to validate that sketch with the actual content is really the sort of the key so lots of talking from us hopefully relatively interesting talking now we're going to move into quick activities we've got about 13 minutes but I think we can do this so anyone here from Drupal.org we're going to just walk through one of the pages on Drupal.org just as an example just a way of thinking about how can we take this framework, these criteria and apply them to a real word example again to give you a bit of an image or a takeaway from what's been talked about so far and we're not going to the site is a good site it's one everybody knows alright everyone has an opinion about websites right okay there we go good okay can everybody see that in the back, can everyone see that yeah okay I'll blow up just a little more maybe there we go so this is Drupal.org it is a level one link there get started so this page right here if let's say you're doing a CMS migration or you're deciding to scale up from D7 and D8 or whatever the assumption is you'll go to this site to get started the assumption is probably that you're likely new to the Drupal scene and you want to get some information about what this CMS can do so we thought this would be a great kind of page to take this concept of content driven UX and kind of look at this so at the we'll start with this page and then we're going to flip it back to the audience and I'm going to look to you guys to kind of just give me some of your feedback so on Drupal.org you have I'll wait till there we go so on Drupal.org you have four steps there are four steps before you can get this darn thing now under these four steps there's a whole bunch of stuff right so when I first looked at this site I had no idea about the four steps and it actually took me a while to realize that every one of these things listed under are the actual content that's associated per step I didn't realize that I looked at I didn't even see the top part at all so I just sat here and I looked oh my goodness there are 50 million links going on right blue and then there's two buttons find a distribution I have no idea what that means I had no idea that this was intended to be a UI that's a pathway for me I had no idea that this was a UI that was intended to take me from point one or a all the way to point z and boom I get to have something awesome to work from I had no idea so content driven UX would say okay there's a lot going on here we've got a lot of clickable area it is hard for anybody I'm assuming even you guys probably looking at this that there's four steps to get through with a million links underneath what I would do for this particular one is go in and assess all the copy itself is it actually saying what it needs to say in a get started page and then is the UI even appropriate for this content to be engaged by a user in my opinion perhaps we could do it a little bit better something so simple is even just a tab or an accordion or something like that right those little UI elements are so important because it's this thing it's called micro experiences if you've got a tab situation or if you've got a step situation here you really want to kind of provide them a micro experience and maybe you can do that through like an accordion you get them to focus on just the step one and the content here and here's the one thing you need to do to complete step one before you go to step two that's it and then in the next micro experience then you focus on the extended Drupal so if this was my client I would ask him what's the most important here how many times are people actually clicking on these links where are the clicks actually going what questions are actually being asked by those clients and you start to help your client break it down a little bit and then you just go through each one but you can play with different UIs in this situation to see how they present but then you would go back to that measurement get your data and you can kind of benchmark and even do an A-B test if you want to see if does this UI represent and chunk this out much better than just simply laying this out or should we do a different kind of UI does this language help these people out or should we just remove the links and convert it to a button so content driven UX says here's some really great content this is pivotal for Drupal to get their CMS downloaded but how do we make it more content driven how do we look at all those different things those different criteria that we had up there front loading, chunking the interaction piece of it how do we make sure that all those are represented on that page alone the other one that we had on here before I am a huge fan of non-competing actions I find it very remiss a lot of times when you go onto a website you've got three CTA buttons right next to each other you're asking instead of you coming from the place of power and saying this is what I think you need to click on it's most important now you're leaving it up to the user to self define what the next best path is so if you think about a user journey you've got always at the end of it is the goal what needs to be accomplished at the end of the day so the place of power says I'm going to limit that call to action maybe just one or two items instead of putting millions of things side by side and hoping to whoever that they actually click on the right one that meets the goal faster so now they're starting to go all in zig-zags because they have to eventually at some point get back on that route so hopefully that gives you some sort of sense of how this framework, how these criteria might get applied in a real page in a real world scenario now we have six minutes left so we're going to quickly move on to the next link I think maybe it would make a mobile devs life easier but I would still challenge and say that there are certainly mobile UIs that can help to break this up a bit more we really have a call to action on that page either, you know, the most dominant one was where we are, New Orleans on a get started page so we had a group activity plan but I think we're good to sort of move into the questions at this point because we got about five minutes to go so yeah, questions comments, thoughts, yep, in the back you have to think about it as collaborative, right? the assumption is that you're the expert you are the one that's providing that solution so if that was my client, if I was in a situation like that I would show them how it's done the right way I would make it my job to craft that content that copy, give them a benchmark to work from and then in the content strategy world you've got so many different things that you can help and arm the client thereafter a web editorial style guide this is how you continue to write and continue that brand voice and that active voice and all of that stuff so as a practitioner I do believe it should be your job to blaze that trail and then the other part of that is to make sure that you help empower your client and make sure they have the tools that they need to be my clients two important deliverables I end up giving them a web editorial style guide this says how your copy and everything should be written on your site this shares web writing best practices so people know about front loading and chunking and all of that and then the other pieces that optimization piece so they'll get some sort of keyword matrix so they can meet that technical side in the back that would be kind of the surface the easy easy one that I can give kind of depending on scope you might need to come up with some other things that will help them to do their job much easier after you hand over the site but again I would blaze that trail for them and show them how it's done because they're coming to you to learn there's a question right at the very back there and maybe if we could repeat the question to you because I guess this will be recorded just to make sure everybody can hear that so the question was she heard one of the only scientific tools that was mentioned was Google Analytics so she was wondering what other tools that we used to deploy on a website when we're doing the audit piece so it really kind of depends a lot of times people are interested in the SEO component so when it's an SEO type or just really I guess any type I end up deploying a tool that's called Raven Tools I would advise you guys to go look it up it's really awesome the deliverable there puts you in a place to look really professional you can give your client a link and it just breaks it down in a really nice report the other one that I end up doing is SCM Rush that's a really great tool or content insights is really nice too all these tools you can just deploy on a site it'll go and crawl every single page every tool will give you something a little bit different every time so I do deploy multiple tools on multiple sites I take what I need so it matches scope but I also take what I need to help me get over this hump and deliver the right solution and I always always always do a manual audit if and when I can so I shouldn't say always but I always try to do a manual audit as well it forces me as the practitioner to get face to face with their content you know tech is tech it's not something's always going to happen same thing with human error but I do believe that folks should be getting more you know face to face with their own content through a hybrid so deploy tools do raven do SCM Rush or content insights and then do a little bit of manual auditing yourself yes question here if it's something like that what's the question? so the question was what do you do about slang terms or competing terms like obama care or affordable care right the assumption there for something that new that you can even just go into Google keywords and say like oh I'll just use the one that like ranks the highest right you don't want to miss one market because now you're choosing to go obama care and you're going to miss out on all these people who are going affordable care act so as a content strategist how do you take both of them how do you weave it in throughout the site without over keyword stuffing right we all I don't know if you guys know about Google Penguin but you want to make sure that you use really important as long as that slang is universal to that market and to that industry if it's just a few one off people doing it well you know you need to go where the majority is you need to find out which metrics what's performing well so if obama care happens to perform better than the affordable care act for me that would be my front runner right I would use that word more but I don't want to miss any opportunity to capture the people who are going on to Google or being and typing in affordable care act I still need to have that somewhere so and then you have to be mindful if you're going to use multiple keywords like that that you don't get in a keyword stuffing or anything like that and a lot of times you can take those kinds of instances you know you might have affordable care act you know represented in a great image right and so you just title tag the back of it you've got your juice right there without just overusing it like crazy throughout your copy on site that's lunch so obviously if you if you want to have lunch I assume that you probably do want to have lunch thank you very much for your time appreciate it thank you very much and if you want to stick around we're certainly happy to talk a little more shop we'll probably eat lunch at some point too thanks everybody