Chapter 10 The Future Isn’t Waiting

The world keeps moving. Voice user interfaces have found their way into our everyday lives. Artificial intelligence is on the table, and not only in the boardroom. In the United Nations, global leaders discuss potential regulation of AI and propose limits on its application. The screens we’ve long stared at are beginning to disappear.

Throughout this book, we’ve tried to celebrate a process that can bring your content to all kinds of technology, but not wanting to get too wrapped up in examples of the tech du jour. The principles of connected content apply to any current technology and help you get ready for whatever comes next.

When we talk about a screenless world, we don’t just mean the ­Amazon Echo and its cousins. We mean a world where the main job of each publisher is creating and connecting content, because the interfaces mostly lie elsewhere or are owned by other providers. This new frontier will be won by those with content of quality and distinction. But the shift to content-first isn’t just about changing workflow, it’s also about changing minds.

Real Talk

Prepare yourself for a plot twist. We haven’t been entirely honest with you. When writing a book like this, it’s tempting to make the whole process seem like smooth sailing. You want a success story, a result you too can achieve with our simple five-step weight loss plan! But when we tell you a story of how we managed near-perpetual future stability for an organization’s digital content, evidence to the contrary is only a Google search away.

If you visit the IA Summit website today, you won’t see our work. You won’t see structured content resources connecting the people and sessions of today to the events of the past. Instead you’ll see an entirely new one-off website, built on a new platform by a new team. What happened?

Content management can be scary, but sometimes it’s the place we run to when people management looks scarier. We convinced our event committee on the on the structured content approach, but our mistake was to leave it at that. Once that team left office, the project was undefended. The institutional knowledge drained away, replaced by the energy and ideas of a new team eager to make their own mark.

And to be honest, our IA Summit website didn’t look especially impressive. With limited time and resources available, we chose to invest in the underlying structure. But, of course, visitors judged it on the impact of its interface and found it lacking. The power and potential of structured content becomes more apparent over time, yet we offered information limited to the 2015 event. And we represented those resources through templates completed in too much of a hurry. Despite what fine machinery may purr under the hood, to the casual observer it looked an awful lot like the one-off websites they knew. Only a little bit worse. We were guilty of seeing what it would and could be rather than what it was. Where we saw the foundations of a content cathedral, others saw a construction site. No one outside the project committee knew what we were trying to do.

It’s not all bad news. A volunteer collective still beavers away to, um, squirrel away the slides, audio and video recordings, transcripts, photos, and other valuable artifacts from every IA Summit session. With a bit of digging, they even discovered some ancient history: the HTML pages for IA Summit events dating back to 2000. These relics lay forgotten on a network drive. The pages themselves haven’t aged well, but embedded within them are the best known records of each session. That might not mean a whole lot to you, but to an information architect it’s like unearthing the original flyer for the Sermon on the Mount. Kinda.

As long as all this content exists, all is not lost. In its original form it may lack structure, but that’s easy enough to add, even if it means copying and pasting text into a modern CMS. And the modeling work has gone a long way to translate the complexities and quirks of the domain into blueprints for content types and interface templates. For now it will lie in pieces on the garage floor, like a sports car restoration project that begs to be completed.

Other conferences have borrowed our domain model to kickstart their own work. That’s the beauty of a domain model—it’s intended to be reusable. Along the way we included some relationships that may apply only to our use case, but they’re not too hard to adapt. When you model a subject domain, you attempt to prioritize and capture the things that are most true, most often. That can result in a model that naturally reflects every example of that domain—every conference, every theme park, every sports car—giving it value beyond the examples you’ll cover. If every business in the same industry worked from a common model of that industry, “connected content” could ascend to a whole new level. But more on that in a little bit.

Organizational Culture

Addressing content concerns is really the easier of your two challenges. The harder one is addressing your organization’s culture. Experience has taught us that building for the future isn’t just about technology. It’s about people. It’s about putting in place the long-term commitment and executive sponsorship to protect your project even as things change. Short-term thinking is your biggest obstacle. Building for the future sets you up for steady product growth and evolution. But often product managers and stakeholders seek drastic revolutions that show conspicuous change. A project with tightly defined edges and a newsworthy launch can seem more attractive than something that involves building a lot of invisible structure and that relies on ongoing governance.

Even Tom Scott’s fabulous BBC Wildlife Finder couldn’t survive without a governance plan and executive sponsorship. That site is still up and working, but visit bbc.co.uk/nature/animals and the imposing sign overhead reads “last updated October 2014.” The product’s elegant content structure fizzes with timeless television clips, but the interface already shows its age, and, for now it seems, this natural world’s evolution has come to a stop. When Tom left the BBC, Wildlife Finder lost its champion.

Your digital strategy is itself a representation of the will of your organization to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. And where’s there’s a will, designing connected content is a way forward.

Throughout this book, we’ve made the case that using structured content is a better investment of time and resources than the endless cycle of redesign. But it’s a brave and insightful business owner who recognizes this pattern of behavior and is prepared to break it. More commonly they’re like yo-yo dieters. There comes a point in a website’s life where everyone finally admits that things have gotten too heavy. The instinct is to jettison everything and start again, in the hope that a “clean design” will make for a more lightweight experience. Purging can be good. Taking the opportunity to flush out all the redundant, outdated, and trivial content is definitely a positive step. But as with physical weight loss, sustainable results are possible only when you change your mindset. And yet, after the launch of the sleek new website, more and more content gets added back. Stakeholder requests creep in. Each piece of content and each new feature add a couple of pounds here, a couple of pounds there. And then you’re back to where you started.

Your content is about your business, not for your business. Your digital channels are not a magazine where each business department writes and publishes its own section independently. Instead, your digital strategy must present a cohesive whole designed around the needs of your audience and intended to meet those needs as efficiently as possible. Though, as we’ve mentioned before, those launch-hungry stakeholders can still get their glory when they commission interface representations that bring a new window to the same world of structured content beneath. And well they should—to paraphrase an old tech saying, interfaces age like fish, but content ages like wine.

Convincing Your Boss

So how do you get the powers that be to play ball? Start by buying them all a copy of this book. And maybe a spare copy for the weekend. But speaking of revenue generation (ours), the real answer is of course to hit them in the wallet.

What matters most to the person holding the purse strings? What’s important to you or your team may not be top priority for your boss or your boss’s boss. For many, it’s simply about making money or saving money. For others, it’s about leaving a legacy or delivering on a long-promised strategy. We’ve covered these arguments before, but here they are once more as you prep for that meeting. They’ve worked for us.

• Make the most of the content you already have. Buried in the rock face of your website are some real content gems. Give them a chance to shine. You’re not proposing massive amounts of content creation or completely changing the corporate message. You’re just proposing to get the inventory in good shape for whatever comes next. By adding structure, you’re allowing the content that’s already been paid for to be reused more easily across channels. You’re doing more with less.

• Point your limited production resources toward what’s most useful. By starting your content planning with user needs, you’re focusing effort on the most useful content for your audience. Instead of falling into the trap of producing more and more expensive content, you’re making smart choices about the right content. Stop wasting time and money on vanity content or products that don’t meet a defined objective. Instead, align your digital strategy with your business strategy.

• Avoid expensive and time-consuming redesigns. No matter how much you want to plan and model and generally try to lasso the future, things will change. Structured content embraces that change, providing a stable foundation on which to build and expand. This could be the last complete website or app redesign you ever have to do. Structured content projects don’t necessarily cost any more than building one-off large products, but they deliver value for much longer. And maintaining them will be cheaper over time because they’re easier to keep updated, easier to visually refresh, and easier to scale without getting messy. Not a bad return on investment.

• Lower risk and improve customer service. Losing duplicate content lowers the risk of having inaccurate information out there, which can only improve your customer experience. Have you ever had to give a customer a lower price because an update didn’t happen in the one place that everyone forgot about? What happens when old information on a page that is no longer maintained gets quoted in the press? It is better to produce focused resources that keep all the content on a topic in a single place. There’s just one place to keep track of, with those updates reflected everywhere. Less content to manage means more time to spend on improving customer satisfaction.

• Be everywhere. Google, Facebook, Twitter, PubMed, refrigerators, watches, phones, cars. Be wherever your audience is. That’s not going to happen if you have to maintain content separately for each channel or device. Structure sets your content free and allows you to be in more places at once while staying in control of your content and, with it, your brand. Extend your reach without the expense.

Making This Happen

Selling anything is difficult. It’s even more difficult when someone isn’t looking to buy. So for all the reasoned arguments, you may be more effective doing good deeds by stealth. Larger organizations can be monuments to bureaucracy and inertia. But they’re also big enough to hide in. Think about making a structured content prototype, Ocean’s Eleven style. Form a crew of engineers, designers, and content authors. A rebel alliance. A coalition of the willing. Under the guise of research or a small website build, try doing things the connected content way. Try it even if it means using a different CMS or hacking together some version of your own. After all, when was the last time a senior stakeholder cared which system was serving up their website?

Don’t overdo it, though; choose a small part of the domain to focus on. The goal is a proof-of-concept demo that shows how easily content can be created centrally and pushed into nicely designed, interlinked templates across different devices. Rather than going to your boss with arguments you got from a book, you’re offering proof that this is a good idea and, more importantly, that you’re able to pull it together. Maybe that all sounds a little maverick, but some great digital projects have been born from committed teams working outside the rules and asking for forgiveness, not permission.

Even if you have a greenlight from the get-go, starting small is still a good idea. Your team hasn’t worked this way before, so getting from start to finish quickly helps them buy into the approach. If your domain is complex, then those first steps of modeling can be tough. You’re asking for a lot of abstract thinking from people who don’t yet see the payoff. Start with a small section that everyone understands and carry that all the way through. Even if you don’t end up with something you want to launch publicly, you’ll have taken your team on the structured content journey. You will make mistakes. But when you do, having distinct layers of structure baked into your product will help you zero in on the parts that need attention later. When layers are created with care, any layer can be adjusted or expanded at any time.

As a team, you’ll build common ground with the insights you gain together. As you continue to expand your model, you’ll add more content types and attributes to accommodate new service lines or business functions. It’s a framework. It’s one that adapts to new requirements, audiences, or business objectives. And before you know it, your small project will become a big project as you start to merge those old microsites and PDF black holes into a single, extensible network of knowledge.

Measuring Success

Put away your perfectionist tendencies. Done is better than perfect. Move fast. Be bold. Just get your content out there already! That’s the only way to know if something is working. Don’t get mired in getting the model just right or the CMS set up just so for each and every author. But do agree on measurable goals to set a direction and know when you need to change course. Content strategy’s output may be content, but it’s the strategy that gets it there, makes it right, and keeps it coming. Success doesn’t always travel in a straight line. Let your model be your map.

Focus on providing useful and usable content for your audience. Adding structure makes content easier to find and make sense of. You’ll see evidence of success in your search logs, analytics, and user research. Organic search traffic goes up for new keywords. Conversions (however you’ve defined them) increase. Pathfinding reports show people reaching their destination in fewer steps. Related resources see more concentrated traffic. Usability testing shows that task completion rates are high and effort expended is low. And you drink from the keg of glory.

Well, hopefully. Sometimes things don’t go as planned, but you can’t move what you don’t measure. Don’t be afraid to unpublish content or try a new way of presenting it. Remember that new representations are less of a headache when the content structure is firmly in place.

It’s not just about your content. Take a look at your team too. Rework parts of the process so you’re getting the right inputs and outputs. There is no right or wrong. Continuous and incremental improvement is success.

It’s Just Information Architecture

We couldn’t really tell the story of an IA conference without acknowledging that when we talk about content structure, domain models, and the like, we’re really talking about information architecture. As a job, “information architect” sadly sounds like a dusty relic of the 1990s. It lost its cool with the rise of the UX designer, the technological shift toward lightweight mobile app structures, and, arguably, a cultural shift away from the web as a direct publishing channel and toward “products,” many of which are really spaces for users to store and share content of their own.

If you’re reading this, your organization is probably joining industries that have traditionally published content at scale for generations: media, government, a society or professional association, or a large corporate body bogged down by knowledge bases. And it’s a safe bet you don’t have a card-carrying information architect on staff. If you do, send them the finest muffins and bagels in the land. They’re lonely. And if that’s you, we wrote this book to help you show people why you matter. And we share your pain when people call it “AI.”

All this stuff is just information architecture. It’s been around for years in one form or another. Dan Klyn, information architect and co-founder of the Understanding Group, proposes a model for the discipline, dividing it into three interdependent parts:

• Ontology: Defining the terms that exist within the bounds of a domain with the understanding that the definitions themselves are probably specific to the domain. “Goal” means something very different to a soccer player than it does to a project manager.

• Taxonomy: Arranging terms based on the relationships between them in order to help people make sense of the overall domain.

• Choreography: The rules for how and when information held in the taxonomic structure should be presented. This includes navigation tools and the choices we make about which content to show in different channels to craft a particular experience.

Mastering these elements is the key to creating products that help people find content and make sense of it. Whenever an app or website leads us down a blind alley, makes us feel lost, or generally causes us confusion, we’re apt to dismiss it as “bad UX.” But the root cause of that symptom is bad information architecture. And that, more than anything, is why we urge you to avoid the temptation to start your projects by designing interface mockups; focus instead on what lies beneath.

Linking Data

We promised to return to the heady possibilities of a world where everyone publishing content about the same domain conforms to the same domain model. That world has yet to become mainstream, but as sci-fi author William Gibson said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”

Back in Chapter 1 we made the rude claim that “content is data.” That within any given article, blog post, or video clip lie references to things—specific people, places, and concepts. And that it’s our interest in the things that draw us toward the content about them. This revelation first came to web inventor Tim Berners-Lee not long after unleashing his infernal contraption on the world. The web was great at connecting documents together; what if we could connect the data inside them? His motivations were academic. University labs sharing their genome research through open standards. Treating the web as one big database—machine-readable records that could be queried, cross-referenced, and computed as easily as the stuff sitting on your own servers. But the potential for linked data doesn’t lie only in the lab.

What if every time you mentioned “Prince,” you could tell the computer you meant the singer Prince Rogers Nelson and were making no claims about constitutional monarchy? And what if all other publishers did the same? Suddenly web searches could get a lot more accurate; rather than matching keywords, they could be matching meaning. Or what if whenever you published the contact details of a branch office, you could automatically pull in a Google map of the location? Or temporarily fill gaps in your resources with content from Wikipedia? What if, recognizing that people now get their movie showtimes directly from other services, you wanted to make sure your independent cinema was listed among them?

There’s a whole other book that someone should write on using linked data in content strategy, and we hesitate to even puncture this can of delicious worms. Suffice it to say that connecting your own content is only the beginning. Real connectivity comes by connecting at “web scale,” using common reference points to define and disambiguate resources so that every piece of content from every publisher can express the things it references in a way that computers can understand and connect. With the right metadata, you can describe your content using terms from common vocabularies. Schema.org is the best place to start. And, true to our principles, rather than replicate their guidance here, consider this a link to their content.

What’s Next?

In the 1980s, architect Buckminster Fuller developed the idea of a “knowledge doubling curve.” Until the 20th century, human knowledge doubled every 100 years. By 1945 it was every 25 years. Now, thanks in large part to the invention of the world wide web, it’s estimated to be every 13 months and on track to be a matter of hours. In 2010, 24 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. Now it’s 400 hours every minute.

Not so long ago, computers were all warbling modems and 80-column text displays, tainting the air with burning dust and possibility. Now they’re impossibly sophisticated pocket devices, connecting us instantly to everyone we know and to that exponential growth in human knowledge. It’s a curious thing; as the technology becomes more advanced, it starts to disappear. We look straight through that little glass window toward the people and places on the other side.

Trends in interface design continue to evolve. The lickable acid-colored candy of the “Web 2.0” era gave way to high-fidelity skeuomorphic realism. Then there was the minimalist “flat design” trend, sparked by the need for more responsive, CSS-driven interfaces. Hot new devices launch with a fanfare, predicted to disrupt everything and kill off their predecessors. But radio didn’t kill newspapers, and television didn’t kill radio. So although voice skills and chatbots and virtual reality all offer thrilling possibilities, they will find their place alongside websites and apps and even email.

Even people’s expectations change, as technology ushers in behavioral shifts. Personalized curation, inherent to the experience of Amazon or Facebook, attempts to show us news stories, products, or advertising based on our past actions. That content drives engagement, in part because it’s in the path of least resistance. We get the content we want, right there in our Facebook feed. Intelligent agents like Google Now monitor our email and web searches and proactively serve up relevant information at the moment we need it most. The ethical considerations of all this are complex, but one thing is clear: More and more, people expect the right content to come to them at the right time.

Change is the only constant. The details of the devices don’t matter. Interfaces are a means to an end. If we can chart any future trend from observing the past, it’s that interfaces and devices are becoming increasingly ephemeral. Invisible. We’re tending toward pure content delivery. Separated from the silo of the website, and even from any controllable form of representation, your content will compete on quality and distinctiveness. From an entire web of knowledge, we’ll get the most relevant information sent through the least resistive means. If this were sci-fi, it would be jacked directly into our brains. Right now we’ll have to make do with chatting to Siri and Alexa.

Personalization and ubiquity will shape the future of content strategy. Your content has to be ready to be everywhere and delivered with precision to the people it’s meant for. “Everywhere’” requires content unbound by interface containers. Personalization requires content broken into tightly focused chunks, its topical categories readable by people and machines. Structured content is a solid implementation tactic, but the strategy driving it is up to you. The tactics won’t take hold until a system of belief is in place.

We’re optimistic about the future of digital content and about the evolving mindset of those who create it. Ted Nelson, the father of hypertext, wrote in 1974 that “everything is deeply intertwingled.” It’s a notion held by all who’ve attempted to tame the roots and branches of knowledge. Eventually, we realize there are no clear borders between subjects, topics, or domains. It’s one universe. Connections in our content simply represent how the world joins up.

All this talk of multichannel personalization can sound overwhelming, but you really can go a long way without much effort. Just design your content to be more connected, and let the computers take care of the rest. And if you can’t get your organization to commit to big changes, start with small ones that map to business objectives. With technology and with people, success comes from making the right connections and, sometimes, just knowing which buttons to push.