Scottish Life – Content Guideline Workshop

• The brief
• How we responded to the brief
• What we did
• The outcomes
• Timing and costs

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The Brief

Following usability testing of the Adviser hub of the Scottish Life web site undertaken by WUP, a number of issues were identified relating to site content:

• Not all content was presented or written in a way that made it easy for users to achieve their goals
• A content ‘good practice guide’ was required, and the content contributors needed to ‘buy-in’ to its development

How we responded to the brief

We proposed a ‘Content Contributors Workshop’, to be attended by content contributors, and ideally also by some senior managers with line responsibility for the content contributors. The objectives were:

• To gain a shared understanding of the principal problems with the site, especially those that relate to content and how it is presented
• To develop a first draft of the content guidelines

What we did

In order to provide participants with a first hand understanding of users’ needs and behaviours, we started this workshop by showing edited highlights of the recent user testing; while viewing the video, the participants identified issues about content. Using cognitive mapping techniques, the facilitators led a subsequent discussion so that participants could develop a collective view of the key content-related issues, the implications of these, and the required actions and priorities.

With the target users in mind, the participants then considered, through a series of exercises and group sessions:

• User goals and the content required to satisfy these goals
• How the content should be ’scoped’ and ’scaled’
• How content should be ‘chunked’ and labelled
• Where specific content should be located within the information architecture of the site
• The effect on users of sentence length, language complexity (FOG index), tone and acronyms and jargon

The outcomes

During the facilitated discussion, Scottish Life staff gained a shared understanding of the issues, and agreed on the areas to be covered in the development of web content guidelines. Subsequently, Scottish Life issued a Web Guidelines Good Practice Guide to the content contributors

“Extremely valuable in helping us develop a shared understanding of usability among our content contributors” Richard Spence- Online Marketing Consultant

Timing and costs

The project was conducted in November 2005 and took just 2 weeks to complete from proposal to workshop delivery, at a cost of approximately £1,750 (note this cost did not include the user testing which was part of an earlier project).

Contact us for more information on how WUP can help you with content guideline workshops.

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