James Kelway on Information Architecture, User Experience, Web and Iterative Design

Luckily I haven’t had to do these for a while as the projects have moved on to the core IA tasks but more about those in the coming weeks.

Content Inventories or Content Audits ( a less detailed look at the physical make up of your site) are time consuming and do take a fair degree of concentration to achieve the end results. They are not fun, they are dull and if you do them make sure you get paid every last penny for the trouble.

Nobody in their right mind would ever do these for amusement (unless they are twisted) but they are so important in gauging what the site is all about and what it has to offer.

An Excel spreadsheet earlier today

The importance of an audit comes out when designing the new structure of a site. It also helps to gain real inside knowledge that not even the site owners may have.

Being the most knowledgeable in the team about the product is never a bad thing and gives you much needed ammunition for future battles. For instance they may be sentimental about an item that rarely gets any traffic, only you will know the facts through analysis of web metrics – the decision to remove the item becomes easy.

Statistics to back up the arguments – evidence based design decisions

You will also see where content is sparse but where traffic may be heading and be able to raise this to the content providers. Some analysis tools also give you overlays of the users’ click behaviour – another great tool for deciding priority of the content.

The main areas covered in a Content Audit are;

• Page ID – Allows future references in documentation to be made easily. The Home page starts with a zero, and decimal from there on in.
• Existing Navigation Category – News, Products or Suppliers for instance.
• Page Description – What is it you are looking at? Is it a News home page, a product listing or a contact page with Vcards?
• Page Elements – What is actually on the page? Name the individual content types. Poll, news article headline, body text, image etc.
• Format – What is the file type? HTML, JPEG etc
• Content Location – Where does the page reside? Use URL string
• Links to – Where does the page link to? USe URL string
• Purpose – What is the point of the page??
• Author – Who created the page
• Publisher – Who published the page
• 3rd Party Content – What external content is served up here
• Traffic – What are the traffic stats associated to the page or section

And that is it. All you have to do now is go through each unique page type and fill out the spreadsheet. Once that is done, you can then create a suggested structure on a new tab.

Compare and contrast with your client group and watch them marvel at your Excel prowess (you will be a master by now) and your irrefutable page analysis and recommendations. All in a (few) days work (or a week for a large site) for an IA. Things only get better from this point on…..

Content Inventories

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Content Inventories, Design Tools, Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.