Adaptive Path Blog

In May 2008, Kristina Halvorson, Founder of Brain Traffic spoke at Adaptive Path’s Queens of Content event. Her presentation “Content Strategy: The Mania, the Myth, the Method” shed light on current perceptions of content strategy in user experience, and provided great fodder for further exploration.

I was particularly intrigued by what Kristina had to say, because while I agreed with the overarching message, I felt compelled to debate some of the finer points. So we did.

The result is a conversation that starts with content basics and closes with a bold challenge. Along the way you’ll read about standard-bearers, the infamous “seat at the strategy table,” why lorem ipsum should be DOA, 3 things every UX project lead needs to consider, typing monkeys, and hear wisdom from Winston Churchill.

Check it out in our Essays: Death to Lorem Ipsum & Other Adventures in Content

I have been thinking a lot recently about the first point of the MEX Manifesto, “Content itself will be the interface of the future” as it relates to Internet content on mobile devices. The point reminded me of a portion of Edward Tufte’s video review of the iPhone interface where he describes the experience of accessing the New York Times on the (then new) device:

“Here, visiting the New York Times on the Internet, notice how the URL and the title bar go away as the user moves into the newspaper. The idea is that the content is the interface, the information is the interface – not computer administrative debris.”

Tufte’s statement fuels my continued amazement at the degree to which our expectations around the Internet have been shaped by the PC legacy. Certainly the iPhone has greatly improved the mobile Internet experience, but it nearly mirrors the interactions and metaphors from the PC. Despite being able to touch links with one’s finger, content is not the interface – browsers, web sites, web pages, URLs and links are.

When I think about how we might start creating experiences where the content is truly the interface, two things come to mind: Information Architecture and mix tapes.

The blue print of the Internet we experience today has been created and shaped strongly by the discipline of information architecture. Don’t get me wrong – I love me my information architects – but I do believe the legacy of that discipline is part of what makes it difficult to deliver Internet content on mobile devices.

Information architecture is a discipline born out of information and library science. In light of this history, it’s not surprising that much of how we interact with content on the web today is based on a search and retrieve interaction model. Like the pages of library books, Internet content is trapped in the organizing principle of the web page.

Who can forget the angst and labor of creating mix tapes. They’re a brilliant, Rube Goldberg-style example of a workaround for an organizing principle. The music industry used the concept of albums as the organizing principle for music – but the model began to break down as new technologies were introduced and the the ways that people wanted to use music changed. We wanted to do more than buy and consume music. We wanted to create our own soundtracks so we cobbled the technology together to create our own albums. Most importantly, we broke the organizing principle from album to song. While the legacy of the album organizing principle still exists, I suspect digital music will make it obsolete within the next ten years.

Similarly, I think that delivering great Internet experiences on mobile devices will be less about “mobilizing” web sites and web pages and more about dismantling the page-based organizing principle into a more flexible one. It will be about breaking apart boulder-like web-pages into pebbles of content that can be configured and combined in ways that make sense in mobile contexts. It will be about privileging XML over HTML and focusing on lightweight applications and presentation layers like widgets. Most importantly, it will have to be based on a deep understanding of how people want to use Internet content in mobile contexts.

A couple evenings ago, Adaptive Path hosted a pair of presentations on content and copy. The first speaker, Kristina Halvorson, hails from Minneapolis firm Brain Traffic. Her talk was great, (and you can see it on Slideshare) but I found it bugged me a little bit. In it, she talked about the role of content strategy, and how it is often overlooked in the development of websites. I wouldn’t disagree, but I found the tone of the discussion reminscent of discussions about information architecture in 1998… We poor unloved souls who are brought into the process too late and aren’t given the credibility we deserve. Why won’t anyone pay attention to us?

I didn’t have time to ask the question, but I think content strategists have placed themselves in this situation, because they have not drawn a connection between their work and real business value. During the first web bust, information architects and interaction designers did a lot to demonstrate how their work lead to behavior changes that had significant impacts on the metrics that companies care about (I’m not talking just about ROI, but simply tying one’s work to a business’ larger goals).

I haven’t seen the content strategy community do the same. How will businesses benefit from content strategy? By making that case, content strategists will not be the poor shmoes asked to replace “lorem ipsum” on wireframes, and will instead be involved in the planning and strategy discussions.