No blog post this week. Instead, I'd like to ask you 6 questions to find out what you think about the posts so far.
I'd really appreciate your time and any comments you have. This will help me make the blog more interesting/useful etc.

Thanks loads,
Sarah

This last post on using data to improve your content pulls together all the previous information and gives you a timeline.

To start with, I’ll assume you have a content strategy. If you don’t have one, go and buy this book by Kristina Halverson and get yourself one.

Now you have a strategy, decide what you are going to work on first. Personally, I love using Agile and prioritising based on the most important thing for the user first. (Note, I said most important thing for the user and not my company.)

This could just start in your mind if you have been working in an industry for years but remember to test your assumptions with packages like Google Trends and Semrush. 

Try forums - I’ve already blogged about this.

When you start writing, make sure you are writing for the person reading and not the person who already knows everything about your subject area and is probably paying you. I’ve already posted on this so look at: writing for the user.

So hopefully you are testing your site loads and you have been through alpha, beta and live stages. All the way through you are picking up valuable data from your users through site analytics, feedback, lab research etc.

Exciting times. You are capturing everything: site analytics, info from your feedback mechanism etc. Now this is the thing…. keep doing it. Don’t stop. Every day you can learn something new. Go back those forums at times, see if there’s some emerging need you haven’t thought about. Go to your analytics and look at it every day. Your users are constantly giving you information. It’s positively rude to ignore it.

You know how I feel about content audits. If you must do one, capture decent info. Make sure it has the data. Don’t get locked into that spreadsheet. You still need to work out if you are doing the right thing *now*.

Go back to your content strategy. (Again, if you don’t have one, go get one.) Are you doing what you think you should be? 

I’d put in a workshop session every 6 months or so to see if the site I was working on was on track. I’d ask these questions:

• Does the content still fit the original idea for the site?
  
• If not, is that ok? Was that a conscious decision or did the site just meander off track?
  
• Do we need a new set of principles because our business has changed (like a new proposition)?
  
• What’s the most important thing we want our customers to do/understand/take away?
  
• Are we still doing that in the most user-centred way?
  
• Are they still getting what they want?
  
• Do we need to get more analytics to find out more meaningful info?

Get your business to decide what’s the most important thing and then start with that.
Take a look at your analytics. How are your top performing pages doing? Should they be your top performing pages? What about the ones at the bottom of the heap? Should they be at the top?

You probably have a feedback mechanism. Get all that data and make sure you are taking care of your audience. Now, you are probably doing that all the time anyway. It might be helpful to put in a point every few months to take a step back and look at the data over a longer period of time. Can you see trends in the past 6 months etc? Sometimes it is easy to just concentrate on ‘today’ but taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture is very worthwhile.

If I had an understanding boss, I’d take something on the site and start it from scratch. Be innovative and creative. But that’s not always realistic. :)

I’m a geek for this sort of research so I’d suggest, wherever you are in the process, use this research to understand how humans read.

You can see that no matter where you are in delivering your content strategy, you are in the perfect place to collect and use a variety of data. It’s that data that will turn your site and your content into something really wonderful.

This is the 4th post of 5 about using data to improve your content.

I'm going to make a sweeping generalisation here, but I'm guessing a lot of people in the web world first think of analytics and user testing when gathering 'data' to improve a website.

That's totally understandable. Both disciplines are very important when you are looking at your audience. But I find another area invaluable for data: academic research.

You may think of academic research as dry, dusty old tomes containing prose Chaucer would be proud of, and in some cases, you would be right. But not in all cases, and in content design, academic research is data you can rely on.

Generally these scientists have sat in labs for years testing the tiniest things.

"But it's not user testing!" I hear you cry. "All audiences are different and you are not testing the right thing!" Is that going through your head right now?

Let me see if I can convince you (if you need convincing).

As content people we take basics for granted. For example, lab research shows us:

• people only read 20 to 28% of a page
  
• for every 100 words you put on a page, cognitive load is increased
  
• eyes move in an f-shaped pattern

Just these 3 basic facts are critical to anyone writing for the internet. We take this into account when we are writing but sometimes we don't know why we need to other than 'users prefer it'.

Academic research can help you answer the 'why'.

Take a look at this excerpt from '100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know' by Susan Weinschenk on how people read. It's research on how the brain works and takes in information. That might seem like a step too far but it gives you tips on how to convert that into your content design. 

For example, it shows how:

• headings are critical
  
• caps are slower to read because we are not used to them, not that they are harder to read
  
• the font you choose affects what people perceive about text

These sorts of facts can help you write in a way that allows your users to easily understand your copy. 

We can guess, just by looking at our own everyday lives, that people want information quickly and easily. We can make assumptions that back up that view from data about increased mobile use and time-spent-on-page analytics. 

When we go into lab testing, users will tell us the same thing. Sometimes, if it is an emotional purchase, time spent is seen differently. When you are looking for car insurance, you want the best deal but it would be great if it was all over and done with. 

I've already blogged about finding the correct vocabulary to talk to your audience and it's critical to making content user-centric. But there's academic research that can tell you why certain words are easier to understand.

For example, did you know your audience is likely to read a high frequency word (so a word that you see often in language like 'the', 'and', 'children' etc) 100 milliseconds faster than a low frequency word? (Like 'cove' etc.) You're probably wondering what 100 milliseconds has got to do with anything, it's a tiny amount of time.

Just imagine you are sitting on a train, reception is dodgy, you have had a rubbish day at work and all you want to know is a single short piece of information. It's not going to take long to get through the text but it would be a tiny bit faster if someone used a high-frequency word instead of a low-frequency word.

Now imagine you are sitting on a train, reception is dodgy, you have had a rubbish day at work and you don't read so well. Your eyes hurt, the letters swim in front of you and you are trying to get through this text. 100 milliseconds isn't much to most. But what if it makes your information harder to get across for no real reason? Especially if you have used a lot of low-frequency words and added some technical terms for good measure. You probably wouldn't have lost anything by removing the jargon and using high-frequency words. You've just got in the way and made it unnecessarily laborious by using low-frequency terms though.

I don't think really good content design is about writing to 'the lowest common denominator'. I think it's about writing for your audience and knowing how they work. We can guess at lifestyle and reasons for interacting with our content but we can't really tell unless we ask users. 

With academic research you are a finding out how the brain works - the basics of reading. That can tell us loads about our audience and all audiences. In the Western, left-to-right reading world, our brain processing happens in similar ways and academics can help us understand that.

I don't sit down and think 'Ooo 100 milliseconds extra there, Sarah. Is it worth it?' I do think 'is that a common word? Is there another one I can use that won't harm the sentence or meaning? Do I want to use that word?'. As a content designer, it is a choice and I make it based on the tone I want to set and the vocabulary my audience will find easy to understand.

As always, I want them to take away what I am saying , not how I am saying it.


If you are not sure about something, how to write it or why lab testing came out the way it did - I'd suggest looking at academic research. You'll find the 'what to do' in lab testing; you'll find the 'why it happens' in research.

(Well, I think it's interesting.)

Some of the links don't lead to academic research but it's still research and it might be useful.

This post from Sebastian Wren, tells us how many words people have in their vocabulary at what age. It can help when you are setting the basics for tone and style. You've probably seen 'aim for a reading age of 9' in a style guide somewhere. This is just one element of where that point probably comes from.

Measuring word recognition in reading: eye movements and event related potentials is a brilliant introduction to reading and how it works. I'd recommend this one to anyone who writes.

This article from Scientific American by Ferris Jbar, called 'The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens' has some interesting thoughts and links to research about the way humans behave and take information.

Preliminary Experiments in the Physiology and Psychology of Reading by Edmund B. Huey gives you information about the physical and psychological effects of reading. It's really old but fascinating.

I also put some research links in my post on 'dumbing down'.