Cognition: Human–Computer Communication - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 211

7.5.1 Content Strategy
A content strategy is a theory of what and how to create, update, and merge
content in a system such as a web site. Halvorson ( 2010 ) suggests that there are
several basic needs to take into account when developing a content strategy if you
want it to be successful:
• The need to do less, not more. Content should support key objectives or help users
complete the task they are trying to do, or both. It is also obviously cheaper and
easier to write less content, which makes it easier to maintain and faster to use.
• The need to understand the existing content, and its provenance. You may need
to do a content audit to address this.
• The need to be a good listener. Responsibility for content is not just down to the
content creators, and customers are often the people who are best placed to
understand what content they want or need.
• The need to have someone who is responsible for delivering content. A newspaper
has an editorial executive who makes the final decisions about what goes into a
particular edition of a newspaper; a web site should have someone in a similar role.
• The need to start asking questions. Always be prepared to ask ''why?'' when
somebody says ''we have to include this,'' ''we need to do that,'' and so on.
These needs should be incorporated into—and help drive—the three steps (or
phases) within your content strategy:
1. Auditing the existing content and documenting it.
2. Analyzing the different aspects within an organization that affect the content.
3. Creating the strategy for the creation, delivery, and governance of content.
The web and content are inextricably intertwined. If you want to deliver content
that is both usable and useful, you should make use of the wide range of available
processes, tools, and resources that have been designed to help make it easier to
create content.
7.5.2 Information Architecture
The term Information Architecture (IA) is used to describe how online information
is structured to support usability by both creators and users. As such, information
architecture is one of the components that is included as part of user experience
design. It is information architecture that occupies the intersection of content,
context, and users (Morville and Rosenfeld 2007 ).
Developing an IA is not simply a matter of drawing container boxes around
collections of related information and then moving them around. This process,
sometimes called wire framing, is, however, often a large part of the development
of an IA. Developing an IA does not just involve generating static content, but also
includes developing the dynamic paths through a web site, for example.