crossing disciplines: content strategy, topic maps & multidisciplinary teams
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
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Working with UX, design & development
Crossing disciplines (for fun & profit)
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Me.
Elizabeth McGuane @emcguane
Lead content strategist at LBi London Mappedblog.com
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What I’m talking about Working
with teams
Topic maps
Working better
The semantic
web
Documentation
Structured content
Classic movies
Content management
Horses
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Working in a team
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So what does it mean to be ‘multidisciplinary’?
• I've never worked on a team that wasn't
• Everyone brings their strength to the table
• Free exchange of ideas and information are good
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The project: a website redesign
• Financial services
• Cross-brand
• 6000+ content items audited
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And also
• Brand identity changing
• New CMS coming in
• Split between ‘digital’ and ‘brochureware’
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What?
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My team: Three (3) user experience experts
• Knowledge keepers, owners of the investigative work
• Developed and owned the personas
• Developed the experience concept
Their aim: a content-led website
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My team: Three (3) designers (in rotation)
• Came in late
• Moved around a lot
• Working to changing design brief (cos the brand was changing)
Their design concept: Open, fresh and flexible
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My team: One (1) developer (as a consultant)
• Came in late
• Reluctant CMS authority
• Reluctant liaison with client developers
• Never really worked on a collaborative design before
Their development concerns: Accessible, accessible, accessible
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Our story
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That audit: what we found
• Content was being duplicated across the site
• There was no central way to manage it
• This, despite there being a ‘content management system’
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Our task
• Create a system that designed against duplication
• And create a central repository for help & support content on the site
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Our answer
• Modular content
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The issues this raised
• Content is no longer a ‘page’
• Some of it is unique, some goes across a section, some is universal across the site
• So how do we manage it while we’re creating it?
• And how do we govern how it should be used in the future?
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Dealing with humans
• Our team was fluid – people joined and left as other tasks came up
• We needed to communicate with other disciplines, some of whom weren’t working with us
• We wanted an easy way to explain our modular content system to them over time
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So: content (me) and UX (another guy) had a big idea
• As content was repeatable, we needed to map its instances
• Our documentation had to encompass UX principles, design principles and content strategy
• And we were launching the project in phases, so it had to be carefully documented in a usable way
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Our big idea
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Trying to find a movie to watch
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Disambiguation: to remove uncertainty
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So there’s this:
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Oh but then:
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Um.
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We all need to be ���talking about the same thing���
and be sure we’re ���talking about the same thing
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When ambiguity is present, we need to organise information in a systematic, logical manner.
George Baker
George Baker
George Baker
(Horse) (Jockey) (Owner)
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What’s a topic?
• A set of ideas that you want to say things about
– (So, a ‘topic’ is about as meaningful as a ‘piece of content’)
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What’s a topic map?
• A way of storing and relating those ideas
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So simple, right?
• Sometimes simple ideas take a really long time to understand
• Why does this matter?
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Normal links don’t do this
• Writing a ‘page’ in HTML, you can decide to link any two pieces of content together, regardless of topic
• Topic maps demand clear topic-based relationships – they force you to codify what you’re talking about
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Why this idea matters in a closed system (like a set of project documents)
• Relationships between different ideas can be instantly accessed and understood
• Concepts like authors, sentences and document ownership are irrelevant
• The map can evolve over time without requiring rewriting or versioning
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So here’s what we set out to do
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We set up a topic map for our developing designs & content requirements
• Designed to give all disciplines an equal grasp of the site’s design, content and functional elements
• Built in Topincs, a web-based topic maps platform
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What’s the site made of?
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Who’s working on it?
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What are our requirements?
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What’s in a module?
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When are we doing the work?
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Reality is imperfect
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Topic maps are kind of obscure
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And the technology itself still needs to mature
• It’s difficult to explain and understand because current literature and systems were created by experts for experts
• Sometimes we embrace complexity – we fear things that are too fluid and simple
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People + budgets = changing plans
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This whole process was a learning curve
• We knew what we wanted to achieve, but had minimal technical support
• We were dealing with a morphing project & changing timelines
• So… we had to fall back on some traditional documentation to keep up
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What I've learned
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1. Documentation is about communication
• And it should exist for a reason – to allow different groups to communicate without confusion
• Cross-discipline documents are like the semantic web – they need to codify information so that it makes sense in any context
• No document in the history of forever has achieved this
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2. Content needs to be free – and so do we
• Our content was modular, and that meant we needed to record its repetition and variants
• A spreadsheet is not the best solution for this (or for a lot of things)
• We could use a system like this to free ourselves from Word-based content production
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3. We can work more elegantly
• By collaborating in earnest, at the start of the project when it matters most
• By using the tools available to us to distribute information, not create documentation-as-deliverable
• By embracing other disciplines’ skills and focus, and sharing our own
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Thank you!������
@emcguane���