Focusing on What Actually Matters

One of my favorite teachers ever was my high school marching band director. Apart from teaching a lot of music-related skills, he also had a strong interest in leadership – a passion which was then passed onto the other students in the group.

At one particular rehearsal, we began by doing some stretches, as was the norm. There is a particular stretch that everyone in the band loved: arm circles. We even had a song that went along with our arm circles, which literally stated, “I love arm circles! Arm circles I adore!”

Then, our director walked in. He interrupted our arm circle song to ask something to the effect of, “why are we still doing this?”

“Well, because we love it!”

“Yes, I’m aware… but it’s really unnecessary.”

He went on to explain that our arm muscles aren’t the most used when it comes to marching band. We would have been much better off stretching the muscles in our legs, which are used extensively while marching, than spending time stretching our arms to a 3-minute long song.

This is how my band director introduced what he dubbed as the “Why Bother?” method. Basically, before you do anything, you should ask yourself why you should bother doing it in the first place. It helps to keep the focus on what truly matters.

For example, before you schedule another meeting with your work colleagues about a project update, ask yourself, “why bother?” Is it necessary, or could it just be sent as an email? Because truth be told, I’ve attended a lot of meetings in the past couple of years that should’ve just been an email (one of these meetings was five minutes long, and all we did was go over announcements).

Why Bother (with Content Design)?

The “Why Bother?” method doesn’t just work in marching band, but also in content analysis. Let’s apply the “Why Bother?” method to content design. Before adding any new content, or reformatting old content, a good content strategist should ask, “why bother?” Will this content actually help towards the strategy, or is it just more clutter?

In The Content Strategy Toolkit, Meghan Casey writes that “Organizations and practitioners tend to jump into designing content before delivering a strategy that clarifies what content users need and how it should support business goals.” The result is an ineffective content strategy. Simply put, failing to ask “why bother?” could lead people to not bother with you or your content.

Content design involves the structure of how content is visually displayed, while also pulling in the content strategy that balances both the business and consumer needs. It takes into account the user scenarios in which the content will be viewed alongside the business’ goals.

This week, I created four different content design components for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT), a confederation of Native American tribes located in Montana. I based my work on an RFP which had been publicized by CSKT.

These content design components include:

Prioritization Table
Sitemaps
Content Model
Wireframes

Prioritization Table

A prioritization table emphasizes the type of content needed per user scenario. These user scenarios are in-line with the goals of the content strategy. For example, a business with a goal of sales conversions would have a user scenario of a lead visiting the website to look for information about their product or service.

Meghan Casey recommends using a table to contrast four specific types of content: focus, guide, drive, and “meh.” The following are her bulleted definitions from The Content Strategy Toolkit.

“What Content you should focus on because it’s important to your business and your users.”
“What content you need to guide users to because it’s important to them but not all that beneficial to your business.”
“What content you want to drive people to because it wasn’t what they were looking for, but it’s beneficial for you.”
“What content you’ll probably include (I call it ‘meh’ content) because you feel like you must, but it’s really not beneficial or important to anyone.”

*Part of the Prioritization Table I created for CSKT, using Meghan Casey’s template.*

CSKT has a number of different audiences for their website, spanning members, residents of their reservation and the surrounding area, governments, media, and more. Because of this, there are a multitude of different user scenarios for this one website. However, they all cater towards a goal of making government services, activities, and information more readily available and accessible to the audiences.

Sitemap

Since I already came into this content design undertaking with knowledge of information architecture, creating the sitemap was fairly simple for me. According to a Medium article by Ashley Ann, “Sitemaps are fairly self-explanatory. Usually, they’re a top-down diagram of the hierarchy of your site.” Creating a sitemap for a content strategy allows one to visualize how all of the content falls into place in an orderly fashion.

In looking at CSKT’s current website navigation, I already knew that some things were out-of-place on their hierarchy. Some pages which should have been categorized under other main pages got their own spot on the menu, which automatically presented a red flag.

Throughout this process, I kept in mind that the content strategy should make it easier for people to interact with government services. At the moment, this was difficult because different departments and services were sorted into different categories.

In creating the sitemap, I reorganized all of the pages into 4 categories: about, enrollment, services, and government. These 4 options consolidated existing pages into their categories, and made it clear what each one meant. For example, while Judicial is currently its own menu option on the website, in this proposed sitemap, it would instead fall under the Government page along with information about the Tribal Council.

Content Model

The Core Model, according to Meghan Casey, was developed by Are Halland in 2006 “to take the focus off website homepages as the crown of digital experiences and design.” Casey then goes on to refer to an article by Ida Allen about the Core Model, which I’ve located to learn more. According to Allen:

“The core model is first and foremost a thinking tool. It helps the content strategist identify the most important pages on the site. It helps the UX designer identify which modules she needs on a page. It helps the graphic designer know which are the most important elements to emphasize in the design. It helps include clients or stakeholders who are less web-savvy in your project strategy. It helps the copywriters and editors leave silo thinking behind and create better content.”

In short, the core model highlights the crucial components to include on important pages in order to have an effective content design. It lays out the sections needed as it pertains to specific types of content.

*The Core Model from Ida Aalen on her blog post on “A List Apart.”*

For this specific content design project, I used an altered version of the core model which focused exclusively on goals, core lists, core pages, and core page content. The definitions for these terms are somewhat hard to explain, but I’ll give it a try:

Goal: What the organization is setting out to achieve.
Core List: A page consisting of related pages
Core Page: A singular related page
Core Page Content: The main components that are needed across every singular core page in the core list

For example, take an events page of a website. Each event on this page could have its own separate page, which would include information such as the event date, location, time, and any other necessary information people would need to know about it. We can break these up into the following:

Goal: To inform people about upcoming events and increase sign ups.
Core List: Events
Core Page: Events Page
Core Page Content: Date, Location, Time, Description, RSVP

In the case of CSKT, the core lists under the new sitemap would be fairly simple, as it mainly includes events (which is where I got the example for above) and services. In the case of government services, there would be a core list of services with core pages for each. Each services page would have the same core page content components, which would serve the goal of the content strategy.

Wireframes

I love building websites, and wireframes are an essential part of the process. According to an article for Webflow by Jeff Cardello, “a wireframe represents the blueprint for a single page (or group of pages).” For the CSKT website, I created three wireframes for three types of pages that would be found on the site.

In content design, I found that wireframes focus very strongly on the core page content. For example, my wireframe for the services page features the core page content I had decided on in my core model. The components were already determined; now they just had to be visualized.

*A wireframe I created for a new CSKT Service page*

“Togetherness”

Q. Why bother with content design?

A. All of these components work together to create a strong and cohesive content design that supports the overall content strategy.

A good content strategy needs good content design. The way in which content appears on a website can make all the difference, and it is something that no good content strategist should overlook.

If you want to take a look at my content design for CSKT, you can do so here.