Structuring content

Structuring contentin an evolving design.

@emcguane

About me.@emcguane

I used to work like this.

Now I work like this.

A project.

Pitch first, reverse engineer later.

Writing for everyone, from scratch.

•Platform

•Backbone

•Gaps

What are you willing to sacrifice?

•Agile, kind of

•Mobile-first, sort of

•Responsive, mostly

The story.

All the products.

Structure to support content delivery?

Structure to support editors.

Narrative structure.

I’m$a$sheep$farmer$and$use$my$Honda$generator$to$power$sheep$scanners,$as$soon$as$the$sheep$become$pregnant.$It$is$used$at$an$early$stage$in$pregnancy$to$tell$whether$a$ewe$is$in$lamb$or$not.$

The story of every product.

The story of the brand.

The arc of a page.

The hook

A single telling detail

ChoiceComparison at the

heart

Benefits in a narrative

Emotion as an anchor

Choice

Choice

Story told in sequence.

The whole story.

The teaser

The proofThe

technical stuff

The fun extras

The decision

The reader rules all.

Mobile first inevitably.

Where we went wrong.

“Let’s focus on structure to begin with, and think about content all the time.”

- @markboulton

We wrote words early. And looked to words already written.

Content modeling?

What formats should we build?

Just how much content variety does one site need?

How do you communicate these decisions?

Tools and documentation.

Own your IA.

Source material is only one input.

Structure can’t be siloed from meaning.

@markboulton again: “Designing a magazine or newspaper system requires the designer to exercise rigorous restraint with a hugely variable melting pot of content.”

Structure without goals or needs is useless.

A Page Description Diagram? (I hate naming things)

‘A trigger, not a finished brief.’- Greig Robinson

Structure and the CMS.

Always be OK with letting things go.

Work better together.

“The best solution isn’t to build tools that hide that complexity from the user, that make them think that the styling they’re adding to the desktop site is the “real” version of the content.

- @karenmcgrane

Need to think visually and structurally.

My success story.

Price.Rate.Service.

Why it worked:precise. reusable. needs-based.

Structure is a common thread

between disciplines.

Content modeling is “the practice by which disciplines collaborate on the design of structured content”.

- Cleve Gibbon & Rachel Lovinger

All design should be “the practice by which disciplines collaborate on the design of structured content”.

- Everyone someday, hopefully

Thank you.@emcguane