Presented at Adaptive Path's UX Week 2006. Understanding your website content by doing a content analysis.

1. Understanding Your Content
By Chiara Fox
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2. What Is “Content Analysis”?
The process of assessing the nature of the content on
a given web site.
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3. What is content?
• Words • Services
• Images • Physical items
• Video • Signage
• Tools or applications
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4. Content Analysis Is About Patterns
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5. And Relationships

6. 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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7. What Are the Parts?
• Content analysis involves a series of deliverables.
• Content Inventory
• Content Audit
• Content Map
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8. Who Should Do the Content Analysis?
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9. The Content Inventory
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10. The Content Inventory
A content inventory is a detailed, meticulous
accounting of all items on the site.
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11. 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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12. An Example of a Content Inventory
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13. Another Example of a Content Inventory
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15. What’s the interesting difference?
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16. 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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17. You know what you’ll get when you see links to...
•
•
•
•
•
•
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18. The Content Audit
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20. 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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21. How to Record Sampled Items
• Two methods for capturing the sampled content.
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24. Example of a Content Audit
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26. Example of a Content Audit, II
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27. The Content Map
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28. Map Your Content Audit
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29. 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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30. Content Map for Task Analysis
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33. 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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34. What to Look for During Analysis
• Remember, it’s about:
Patterns Relationships
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35. 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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37. Thank You!
Questions? Comments?
Chiara Fox: chiara@adaptivepath.com
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