An Event Apart: Adaptive Web Content

by November 13, 2012

In her presentation at An Event Apart in San Francisco CA 2012 Karen McGrane discussed the need for structured content in Web sites. Here's my notes from her talk on Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Web Content:

  • Mobile scares publishing organizations. They don’t know what to do but know they need to do something. What most end up with is PDFs.
  • Publishers are just waiting for digital technology to take them back to the glory days of print.
  • Its tempting to think mobile is just a design and development challenge. But our content needs to adapt as well.

A Tale of Two Publishers

  • Conde Nast: created tablet apps for a number of their magazine titles. They went back to their roots of design & articles: to doing what they’ve always done just for different devices. Art and production staffers make two layouts for iPad edition (landscape & portrait) in addition to print layout. But the iPad apps have seen consistent declines in sales. They only sell in the tens of thousands compared to hundreds of thousands in print.
  • NPR: created an API that allows anyone to access and display structured content on different platforms. The API makes it possible to separate content from presentation and allows for re-use. All different devices can talk to API in clean structured way. NPR has seen an increase in page views of 80%. Mostly attributable to mobile use (new experiences built on the API).
  • The future of adaptive content is having a clean base of structure to work with. This allows you to make the right decisions for each platform.
  • Why are news organizations the innovators? They know how to build systems with good structure: headline, deck, lead, nutshell paragraph, etc. This is engrained in their culture & they are taught how to work this way. They understand the value of creating and storing this type of structure.
  • The future of adaptive content is pretty old. People have been talking about structured content for years. What’s stopping us?

Challenges

  • People are still thinking about how to write for print. They start with thinking about print, then how to shove that into a Web site, then how to shove that into a mobile device.
  • All their processes, organizations, structures, and modes of behavior are focused on print. They have generations of history and workflows influencing their decisions. We're fighting with hundreds of years of print history.
  • Thinking about where content will "look" like on a web page is dated. Yet this is what a lot of Web CMSs do.
  • We are not in the Web page business. We are in the content business. Focusing on Web pages makes us no better than publishers focusing on print.
  • One well-structured flexible reusable set of content that can be published to many places. This isn't writing for one medium and shifting it to others. We need to write platform-agnostic content.
  • Everyone thinks content and form are married together. Web standards has made great strides toward separating content and structures.
  • We have CMS that are vertically tied to specific display and delivery. As a result, we need to go deeper into the stack.
  • This is not a technology problem. It’s a strategy problem. We need to explain to people how these systems will work and why they should care. Share "why" before you decide "what" you have to do.

Solutions

  • A reusable content store gives you options for different displays and formats. Think about different sizes of content that are appropriate for different uses. We need meaningful metadata and to write our content for reuse.
  • TV Guide's value did not end up being an single format (magazine). It ended up being their database of structured content.
  • Write for the chunk, not for the page. Truncation is not a content strategy. Don’t just chop content off to make it fit onto small screens. There is a war between blobs and chunks. We can’t let the blobs win.
  • At The Guardian, robots read InDesign print layout, derive priority metadata to drive iPad layout.
  • Demystify metadata. Metadata allows us to programmatically assemble content in appropriate ways (for different devices, etc.)
  • Metadata helps prioritize content and eventually personalize it. But you need human judgment to decide what actually matters. Automated pages are not smart enough on their own but they can do a lot of the heavy lifting.
  • Metadata is what will help us deliver on the dream of personalized content. We currently treat every user the same -they all get the same content.
  • We need better CMS workflows in order to move toward the future of content. Content administrators hate the input fields in content management systems but they are just a symptom of bad workflow. We have to stop making checklists for deciding on CMSs. We need to look at the workflows for content creators instead.
  • If you have a bad author experience in your CMS, you will never have a great user experience in your product. Editors hate structured systems because the interface is often so poorly developed.
  • Companies rarely analyze their CMS systems deeply but they focus on every detail of key funnels like e-commerce checkout. For a content company, CMS systems are just as important. Better content and better CMS equals better business value. CMS is the enterprise software that UX forgot.
  • We need to make sure the workflow is streamlined, the system is usable, and creating structured content is easy. We need to look at the design of the workflow. Apply the same principles and techniques we use to design Websites to design our CMS systems.
  • The happier people are, the better content they'll be able to produce. Make people happy with their CMS.
  • Use mobile as a wedge. We have a huge opportunity to take a step back and figure how content publishing practices can be rethought to set ourselves up for future success. This will allow us to make it onto new platforms.
  • The more structure you put into content, the freer it will become.
  • We have to separate content from display (for real this time).
  • No one has regretted adding more flexibility in how they deploy content.
  • We need to capture content in a clean, presentation-independent way.
  • We need ongoing conversations about structured content.