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Rise of the Chunks: Waging War on Blobs... and History

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Christopher Hess Lightning Talk at Confab Central 2014 I wonder how many nonprofits start out as a 3-ring binder. This was ours. Healthwise produces health and medical content as well as software and services to distribute that content. The Healthwise Handbook, this book, a really useful home health care guide, was our beginning, almost 40 years ago. When the internet happened, this small Boise company reinvented itself, aspiring to put all of medicine online. The KnowledgeBase, an online encyclopedia of longform documents, has been the basis of business since then (if you’ve looked at WebMD you’ve probably seen us.) And now, as everything to do with the exchange of online information changes, we’re working on another reinvention. One of our biggest challenges in accommodating new platforms and devices is the longform nature of those documents. They’re big, unstructured blobs. This is the aerial view of our asthma content. The yellow boxes show everywhere we talk about asthma triggers. This is divided by product, all generally the same information, just written a little differently. Here, our content model is our product model. And every time a client wants a different presentation, a different combination of the concepts contained in those documents, or just something said a little differently, we have to make another one. Or, we did. In 2012, I and fellow content strategist Sandy Jocoy came here to our first Confab. We’d been reading the books and articles, written by you all (thanks for those!), and we saw that there was a different way of doing things. You changed our course. Structured, modular content was our way to adapt. But we have SO much content. 30,000 documents, give or take. Where could we even start? As we’ve learned again and again, you just have to start. Take a bite. And when your partner in crime is a registered nurse and the content specialist for women’s health, you start with PAP test. We printed out subsets of our content pool. We took pens and scissors and broke these documents down into single medical concepts—what is a Pap test, How often should you have one. Then we taped them back together in their former forms, and we came up with some new ones, too. It totally worked. We got excited, and we started talking about it. A lot. We found people who believed in the same solution as we did, and who brought different skills to the work—engineers and UXers and product managers. We gained momentum. And we learned a ton. One thing it took me a while to learn is that gains in internal efficiency is never a good enough argument. But by figuring out how to meet business needs, and showing how we could have met missed opportunities, and being willing to redirect pilot programs and re-plan planning documents toward these ends that the BUSINESS cared a lot about, we got traction. ...

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