Inside content strategy –?the content model

Content modelling is a fundamental piece of content strategy – both in the sense that it’s essential, and that it forms the basis of successful projects.

Sure, it’s not sexy, but it can be really satisfying. Let me share an example of when a content model won a lucrative international contract.?

(Actually, I do find content modelling sexy, a little bit).

What is content modelling?

Content modelling maps out what content you deal with, how it’s made up, and how it interrelates. By understanding all the stuff in your organisation in this way, you can design systems and workflows to deliver content and evolve your operations efficiently.?

One way this happens is that you can create reusable components in your designs. These components will be easier to work with – for humans and AI. Another benefit is that everyone knows what the hell is going on at any one time.

This is a surprising omission in a lot of digital services.

Digitising farming in Ontario

When I worked at Zengenti, the sales team put in a bid to digitise the agriculture data used by farmers in Ontario. Imagine farmers planning their crops – finding the right publications, searching through the many different sections and tables and footnotes, cross referencing with other guides, to try and piece together a strategy.?

Painful.

Digitisation would allow farmers and agronomists to drum up a custom strategy through an app on their phones. The ministry would save a fortune not having to compile and publish physical guides each year.

The challenge for UK-based Zengenti was standing out against local suppliers. To prove our chops we decided to build a prototype of the app – a clickable wireframe prototype designed around real data. That way we could wow the client with a product demo solving their users' needs.?

But the data was new to us. And it was complex. Crop types with different growth stages and tolerances; treatments made of products with different active ingredients, each with conditional efficacies and limits; weeds, pests, regional resistance, food safety rules and application rates, spread across multiple publications. For the product designers to come up with a convincing solution, someone needed to delve deep into the mass of content and try and make some sense of it.

That someone was me ??

Constructing the domain model

I got hold of the guides. I read page after page of technical information about crop diseases and pesticides, treatment thresholds and herbicide classes, growth stages and harvest intervals. I learned about volunteer crops, buffer strips to prevent spray drift, and temperature inversion (proof if you need it that you can get a found poem out of anything).

It was a taxonomist’s dream, or nightmare, depending on your take. Generic and branded products overlapped, industry jargon abounded, and, inevitably due to the size and scope of the publications, there were inconsistencies. When you're using the data itself to learn the subject, these can throw you off.

To keep my head above the water I started taxonomy lists for crops and pesticides and organised the crop variants into an information architecture.

To build the model I first defined the content types and their attributes. This included examples of each item, and relevant parameters, so it took a long time. It felt like it would be endless, but eventually it settled into a finite set.?

With the types established I could begin to map relationships between them. Relationships are the key to creating the visual model.?The time consuming part of this stage was deciding which content types to place front and centre as?the model could be configured in numerous ways.

I considered the mental maps of the farmers; what was in the foreground for them. My immediate audience, however, was the design team. What would actually convert into a smooth app UX?

With the content types and model making sense, I fed the designers information so that they could design a convincing looking app.?We were working at speed so it didn't have to be perfect. But the core things had to be right.

To avoid overwhelm, I became good at providing only the right amount of information for the limited user journeys we were displaying: variables that a user could choose at each point, a handful of examples for each branch.

There were reiterations (many) and constant cross-checking. But it came together, and thanks to the skills of our designers, the prototype looked good.

The demo

Cometh the hour, we flew out to Toronto to do our pitch.?

If we were nervous beforehand, those nerves skyrocketed when the chief editor of the agricultural publications walked into the room. This was the guy who lived and breathed the subject matter. He knew the content in more detail than anyone. And he was watching us, really closely.

Disaster almost struck when the internet connection for demonstrating the live prototype went down. We had bypassed the unreliable wifi by tethering to a colleague's mobile phone, which worked a treat. Until it didn’t.

It turned out that his bank was blocking the international PAYG charges as they racked up alarmingly fast.

Miraculously he convinced the bank the charges were legitimate, and even more miraculously, he did so quickly. The demo continued.

Then came the moment of truth.

They loved it! The editor was blown away by how well we’d understood the subject and impressed by the prototype. Thanks to the content model, the slick interface we showed them was populated with realistic data and convincing pathways.?

We won the contract.

Go forth and model content

Surprisingly, once I started researching the model more thoroughly for the real product, cross-referencing with commercial product labels, the prototype version largely stood up, even though it had been created at speed.

But the final 20% of data to be included took weeks to define and get right. The devil's in the detail.?

You can get a lot of value quickly out of a rough content model.?

At the same time, it takes a lot longer to refine one, and in truth it’s never finished.

But it was good to see a well researched content model break the back of a daunting project – and provide winsome results.?

Here's to content modelling. Possibly more sexy than you think.