Understanding Your Content
By Chiara Fox
User Experience Week 2006

What Is “Content Analysis”?
The process of assessing the nature of the content on
a given web site.
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What is content?
• Words • Services
• Images • Physical items
• Video • Signage
• Tools or applications
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Content Analysis Is About Patterns
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And Relationships

Why Do a Content Analysis?
• You have to know what you have before you start
doing something with it.
• Often done at the beginning of:
• A site migration to a new platform or content management
system (CMS)
• A re-architecture project
• The task analysis and mental model process.
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What Are the Parts?
• Content analysis involves a series of deliverables.
• Content Inventory
• Content Audit
• Content Map
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Who Should Do the Content Analysis?
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The Content Inventory
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The Content Inventory
A content inventory is a detailed, meticulous
accounting of all items on the site.
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Data to Capture in a Content Inventory
• Content owner
• Person responsible for migration/updating page
• Freeze status
• ROT status
• Current location in site
• New location in site
• New file names/URL changes
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An Example of a Content Inventory
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Another Example of a Content Inventory
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What’s the interesting difference?
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Ask yourself...
• How is the document used?
• What is its purpose?
• What expectations will people bring to it?
• What can someone do with it?
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You know what you’ll get when you see links to...
•
•
•
•
•
•
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The Content Audit
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How Big of a Sample To Take?
Total Minutes for Sampling / 1080 minutes /
3 minutes per item / 3 minutes per item /
2 passes over item / 2 passes over item /
total documents = 5200 documents =
% of site sampled 3.5% of site
It doesn’t take a lot of content to get a feel for what is
on the site.
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How to Record Sampled Items
• Two methods for capturing the sampled content.
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Example of a Content Audit
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Example of a Content Audit, II
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The Content Map
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Map Your Content Audit
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So What Gets Mapped?
• Start with the spreadsheet
• Not formats (e.g., html, pdf, jpg)
• Generalize the pages by identifying the content types
(content genres) that you have
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Content Map for Task Analysis
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So, Where Does the Analysis Happen?
• We’ve talked a lot about capturing data about a site,
and how to record what we’ve found.
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What to Look for During Analysis
• Remember, it’s about:
Patterns Relationships
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Groupings and Connections
• The patterns and relationships will suggest groupings
for the different content types.
• Broad groupings probably already exist in the current
site structure.
• Look for a finer level of groupings and connections.
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Thank You!
Questions? Comments?
Chiara Fox: chiara@adaptivepath.com
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