For this week's dive into the ocean of User Experience I'll once again be looking again at the Oxnard Public Library's (OPL) website and performing a mini content inventory/audit. Everyone's favorite scholarly resource, Wikipedia, defines content inventories and audits like so:
A content inventory is the process and the result of cataloging the entire contents of a website. An allied practice—a content audit—is the process of evaluating that content.[1][2][3] A content inventory and a content audit are closely related concepts, and they are often conducted in tandem.
I'll be looking at a small sample size of fifteen different pages from the site and logging them into a spreadsheet. For the inventory portion, I'll be including various administrative information, such as a Page ID, Page Name, URL, Date of Last Update, and the number of both Words and Graphics on the corresponding page.
This is, in all honesty, as tedious a task as it sounds and, as Christopher Detzi points out, "can be a painstaking and time-consuming process depending upon how much content is on the website." Imagine logging all this information from an enormous 10,000+ page website. It's a terrifying prospect.
Yet, it might be worth it. Detzi calls a content audit -- the qualitative interpretation of the quantitative data collected in the content inventory -- an "exceptionally powerful tool." Further:
Beyond the basic assessment of a website’s content quantity and quality, [content audits] help designers understand an information space, facilitate strategic conversations, and uncover substantive insights that directly influence design direction and strategy.
Inventories, too, have value in and of themselves. Kristina Halvorson (who inspired this post's title) notes that a content inventory is "an outstanding way to keep up with your ever-evolving web presence," and:
Simply having all of your web content assets listed in one place can help you see important content attributes at-a-glance, like who owns what, or what still needs updating.
Essentially, content inventories capture the scope of your site's resources while audits capture how well said resources are performing.
With all that definition out of the way, let's look at what my mini inventory/audit of the OPL site looks like.
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| The actual spreadsheet can be viewed here. |
All of the administrative data that was previously mentioned is here, though -- if you're playing along at home -- you'll notice that there is some qualitative information as well (e.g. Web Written Quality, and Usefulness to Users/Library).
For each of these categories, I used a 3 points scale (1 is bad, whilst 3 is good) based on the website analysis techniques from Krug and Redish that I've previously explored. If you view the live spreadsheet, you can also see I've included a scale.
For Quality, pages that would have received four or more unhappy faces from Redish received a score of 1; three or less received a score of 2; zero unhappy faces (or maybe just a neutral face) received a score of 3.
Likewise, for Usefulness, pages that were either too confusing (ala Krug) or left me with three or more questions received a score of 1; pages with one or two missing elements received a score of 2; pages with all the information I needed -- and in an easily understood format received a score of 3.
Determining Usefulness as it related to the library itself was a bit more difficult (these are not intranet pages) and, for the most part, the scores were the same as they were for users. The only exception was the Frequently Asked Questions page, where that giant amount of text might be too much for an employee to slog through if they needed to answer a patron's question on the fly.
To be honest, I feel terrible about assigning so many 1's to pages as far as Web-Written-ness is concerned, but I wholeheartedly believe that they are lacking the clarity and organization that Redish recommends; these pages contain many a WALL O' TEXT or the information is difficult to parse through. In many cases, simply breaking things up and adding a few headers and/or bullets would turn these 1's into 3's.
What does leave me a bit concerned (beyond these ratings) is the fact that some of the pages boldly state that they haven't been updated in years. I'm not sure that including the date of the last update (and not all pages do) is particularly wise if that update was back in 2010. As a user, that might not make me feel as though this site is wholly current.
That all said, this is where this post would have ended... if I didn't also feel like dropping a little graphic action from my Information Visualization class in here. Since I'd taken the time to do word counts for each page, I wanted to see how those counts related -- if at all -- to both Quality and Usefulness. Enter the tree graphs...
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| Word Counts (size) and Quality (1-3) |
Admittedly, I was amazed to see that more words meant higher Quality, save for maybe the Borrower Services page, which I've already picked on at length. From this I suppose that the pages with fewer words were just quick write-ups posted directly on the site without much consideration as to how they would appear on the screen (as opposed to the page).
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| Word Counts (size) and Usefulness (1-3) |
In terms of Usefulness, word counts do -- in the case of Frequently Asked Questions and Library Events -- seem to make for better pages. This makes more sense to me, in that my rating systems for Usefulness depended on providing relevant information all in one place. What is also worth noting is that pages that scored poorly in terms of Quality also tended to score poorly in Usefulness.
Fortunately, most of the pages in the red have considerably smaller word counts, which means that they could be easily -- and quickly -- rewritten.
References
Content inventory. (2014, February 23). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Content_inventory&oldid=596839277
Detzi, C. (2012, March 20). From content audit to design insight: How a content audit facilitates decision-making and influences design strategy. UX Magazine. Retrieved from http://uxmag.com/articles/from-content-audit-to-design-insight
Halvorson, K. (2009, March 2). The content inventory is your friend. Brain Traffic. Retrieved from http://blog.braintraffic.com/2009/03/the-content-inventory-is-your-friend/
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