Beyond ROT: Creating useful and meaningful content audits

I've been thinking about content audits a lot lately because, well, that's the stage I'm at in my current project. There's been quite a few discussions and write-ups about audits but I've found that, for the most part, they have a pretty limited perspective. The fact is that a content audit can provide a huge amount of insight into content strengths and weaknesses in the early stages of a project, and help to inform all content strategy and information architecture activities moving forward.

A content audit is simply a snapshot of the current state of content, on a page-by-page basis, before a web redesign or content migration takes place. Perhaps the most discussed way of auditing a website's content is to determine the page count and the ROT: content that is redundant, out-dated, or trivial. While this is essential information, there is so much more information you can gather. And since you're looking at every page anyway, you might as well capture the information that will really help to bring value to your client and the project.

Here are some other content characteristics that you may want to capture, and why they're useful.

Page layout

This shows how the content is laid out on a page. Simply capture a screenshot for each page that uses a distinct layout and give it a name of some sort. I typically use a combination of acronyms and numbers. For example, two different landing page layouts might be LP-1 and LP-2. The purpose of this is to help clients see the inconsistencies in how similar types of information are being presented. It's also extremely helpful when you're doing a content migration where you need to understand how the content works within existing templates and the implications that has on the migration. Finally, it can raise big red flags for content processes if you find that content developers are creating multiple layouts on the fly from a single template.

Content type

Here, you make note of the basic type of content, leaving topic or departmental focus aside. For example, some types of content include forms, contact info, product details, articles, landing pages, FAQs, document archives, profiles, events, etc. You'll develop your list based on your specific project requirements. Together with page layout, this really helps to highlight inconsistencies in how information is being presented. It also helps to raise awareness of pages that are trying to do too many things at once. When you complete your initial audit and sort it by content type, you can quickly scan through your URLs to identify even more redundancy and get a better understanding of the opportunities for content re-use.

Audience

Make a note of who the content speaks to on each page. If it's not obvious after a quick scan of the page content, simply put "unknown". This is a good way to find out if the target audience will be able to immediately identify that this content is relevant to them. If your client has developed customer personas you can use these as a starting place, but remember that the purpose of an audit is to create a snapshot of the current state of content, which may or may not fit well with tools that have been built to guide future changes.

Quality

This is your subjective expert opinion as to the quality of the content on the page. I'll typically use ratings such as excellent, good, satisfactory, or poor, and associate them with qualifying best-practice statements as shown below. If you prefer, you could use grade-scores and use any qualifying statements that make sense to your project. Here's some that are pretty typical for me:

• Excellent = Content and writing style reinforces brand and provides a surprisingly good customer experience. 
• Good = Content is reasonably on-brand and supports users in understanding and acting on content. 
• Satisfactory = Users can get the answers they're looking for, though it may take some effort and the content may not reflect the brand. 
• Poor = Content does not meet user or business needs. 

Quality Characteristics

This is where you list out the specific weaknesses in the page content. It's important to work with a limited set of characteristics, and to define them precisely. You'll develop your best-practice characteristics based on your project needs and area of expertise, and then indicate where these best-practices are not being met. Some that I frequently use include:

• User-focused
• Brand voice
• Consistency 
• Context
• Focused message
• Out of date
• Plain language
• Business relevance
• Substance
• Typography, or information design
• Volume appropriate
• Writing mechanics

This is an important tool to highlight writing and process weaknesses and can really help your client to begin to understand the skills and resources required to create high-quality writing. It also helps to focus writer's workshops or training on areas that are particularly relevant or high priority.

These are only a few of the things you can look for in an audit. Some other common factors to consider include SEO criteria, content format (video, audio, html, pdf, etc), metadata used, or topics and subtopics. The trick is to find the right combination of criteria for your project, resources, and timeline.

Once you've captured the data, be sure to leave some time to analyse it. It's usually very interesting to determine which areas of the site, or which content types, have higher or lower quality content. Or how many different layouts are being used for similar content types? Which sections of the site are the most out of date, and which  are the most user focused? Which formats are being used for which topics? This really begins to surface inconsistencies and problem areas. These findings give you a strong understanding of the current state of the content and provide key insights when creating the gap analysis that will be the foundation for further content strategy work.

While I'm not going to talk about how to create an audit spreadsheet here, I definitely want to mention one tool that I discovered recently (thanks to Jason Armstrong at the +autonomous agency!) that has really helped to speed things up. If you use Google Chrome, you can go to the Chrome Web Store and download "Pasty". It's a free multi-URL opener that allows you to copy rows of URLs from your spread sheet, click the "Pasty" button, and open new tabs for each URL. You can easily open 50-100 pages with one click, and get through them pretty quickly.

What other content audit criteria or tips have you found to be very valuable? Please share them in the comments below!

The 4 focuses of content strategy

There are so many ways to slice and dice content strategy. Each slice has only limited value. The real benefits come from understanding each area of content strategy well enough to integrate them into a complete strategy.

Here are some of the different approaches that I take to content strategy, and how I integrate them.

Front-end content strategy: This is what your audience sees and experiences. It includes:

• User experience content strategy
• Marketing and editorial content strategy

Back-end content strategy: This is how to make the content work well. It includes:

• "Intelligent" content 
• Content governance and operations

Let's look at these four areas more closely.

User-experience content strategy focuses on: 

• User needs and motivations 
• Content flows and linkages
• User reactions and interactions with content
• Content types and formats
• Comments & other user-generated content
• Labeling
• Content findability
• Content usability
• Content usefulness
• Content relevance
• Content consistency

Marketing and editorial content strategy focuses on: 

• Marketing objectives
• Content marketing
• Brand guidelines
• Messaging
• Tone and voice
• Writing style and quality

Intelligent content strategy focuses on: 

• Content re-use
• Content modelling
• Multi-channel publishing
• Component-based content
• Dynamic content
• Customized content
• Content requirements for using within a specific technology

Content governance and operations strategy focuses on: 

• Corporate content policies
• Content development processes and workflows
• Content publishing processes and workflows
• Ownership and responsibilities
• Team building and training
• Organization-wide education and change management
• Content support tools

So, why are we focusing on all of these different aspects of content strategy? So that we know exactly what we need to integrate, and combine with business objectives, to create a holistic approach to content. 

An integrated approach to content strategy across all project phases ensures that content is effective and processes are efficient. It provides a basis for measuring web content success and effectiveness over time, from both a business and user perspective.

Once you understand the different focuses of content strategy, you can be sure that they're each represented in your activities and deliverables. I'll talk more about this in my next post.

Using Wireframes to Communicate Information Architecture

Kathy's note: This is the eighth installment in a 12-part series by Theresa Putkey that discusses the intersection of content strategy and user-centred design. Read all posts by Theresa.
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What are wireframes?
As mentioned in my previous Site Maps post, wireframes are akin to a blueprint for a house. For each major page on a website, a wireframe tells you which box should go where, what content should go in the box. You can easily find examples of wireframes by searching for “wireframes images.”

What are they good for?

Since an information architect (normally) has a deep understanding of how users are trying to find information, a wireframe can show others how the information should be laid out so users can best access this information. There are a number of benefits of wireframes, including:

• Showing layout: for the major pages on the site, a wireframe can act as a template for how the information, images, videos, and forms should be organized on a page. It can also show you how the global and local navigation will appear and behave on a site.
• Verifying persona needs: With your personas in hand, you can make sure the wireframes represent the most important information needs of the users. For example, a user might need to see a daily financial update announcement instead of the weather. You can ensure this update is in the appropriate wireframe.
• Fulfilling user scenarios: Scenarios represent what people are doing in “real life” and how the site helps them fulfill their “real life” needs. Wireframes can make sure all the scenarios are satisified. Although the whole scenario doesn’t need to be represented in the wireframes, you can represent the whole scenario or you can represent the more complex parts of the scenario. Ultimate, the wireframe helps you discuss the scenario and see if anything is missing in your design.
• Verifying requirements: While creating the wireframes, you can refer to the requirements list, then clarify the meaning of any requirements. In the wireframes themselves, you can note which box fulfills which requirement.

How many do you need?
With a site, you don’t need to represent every page in the site map. You only represent the major pages that are significantly different from each other. For example, you might have a content page, a home page, a secondary landing page. If you have any forms or workflows, you can represent these as well. How many you need depends on how many significantly different pages you have and any processes that need to be represented.

What are some challenges?
While wireframes do help communicate the information layout, I’ve run into several challenges with them:

• Requirements elicitation: Invariably, wireframes always generate more ideas. Instead of being a confirmation of the existing requirements, once people see things on the screen or page, they think of more ideas. This is often called “scope creep.” Often, people don’t have a clear understanding of how detailed the requirements, personas and scenarios need to be and end up fleshing out this detail in the wireframes phase. It happens in every project - I haven’t found a way to avoid it. There should be room for creativity and interpretation in wireframes, but new ideas always elicit a response!
• More abstract, less concrete: Unlike visual design, wireframes are more abstract. While I use Axure for wireframes and can make them somewhat interactive, people relate to visual design more than they do to the wireframes. Visual design not only adds colour to a design, but it also pulls the eye to certain aspects of the page, gives a better “feel” for the page, and evokes a response based on colour. People respond so much better to visual design, sorry to say. They can agree to a wireframe’s functionality, but once they see the visual design, they get excited. I like to think that the wireframe’s work allows the visual designer to make splendid design.

Conclusion
Wireframes help communicate the information layout for a site. They help the visual designer produce a great design and they speed the development process. While there are some downfalls to them, such as being more abstract and sometimes being used too heavily for requirements elicitation, they do help with agreement on site layout and design.

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About the Author 
 
Theresa Putkey is an information architect consultant living in Vancouver, BC. With a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Davis,    she focuses on integrating user needs into website and software design projects. She's currently doing her online Masters of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. You can find out more about Theresa at www.keypointe.ca, or follow her on twitter @tputkey. Read all posts by Theresa.

Site maps

Kathy's note: This is the seventh installment in a 12-part series by Theresa Putkey that discusses the intersection of content strategy and user-centred design. Read all posts by Theresa.
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Site maps are something I’ve been struggling with lately. With content dynamically generated, what’s the best way to do a site map? Perhaps it’s best to back up for a minute, explain what site maps are, and then explain my quandary.


What are site maps?
Site maps show the structure of a website. While wireframes are called the “blueprint” of the UX world, I’d say that a site map is more like the electrical wiring diagram or plumbing diagram. These diagrams show you the path that the wiring or plumbing takes through the house. They make sure there’s no wasted materials, no pipes leading to dead ends, no electrical wires not contained in junction boxes.

The site map is used for structuring the pages on the site: it groups the pages into some logical order (based on the user needs or personas for the website). To create a site map, you’ll need to do a content audit or content inventory, deciding on what you want to keep and what needs to be removed. Site map creation can be driven by card sorting and you can test your site map through task testing.

Site maps can be done by either information architects or content strategists. As I see the division:

• For an IA, the site map is more important for structuring the site properly and creating a representative number of wireframes so the content on the site can be accommodated.
• For the content strategist, the site map is more important for creating and editing content.

For examples of site maps, do a search for site map images. You’ll find a number of examples.

What are they good for?
Site maps shows you links between pages. The highest level is normally used for the global navigation while the secondary level and tertiary level can be used as sub-navigation items and page links, respectively.

By using a site map, you agree to the site structure before you build it. You know what pages you have and the stakeholders, project team and developers know what should go where. Based on the site map, during the development phase, the content strategist can start creating or editing content to fit onto the pages and continue to revise the site map should it need further modification.

Quandaries
Some issues I’ve experienced in the past include sites that are dynamically created. For example, a page can be created based on a taxonomy. If you take Epicurious.com, they have an infinite number of pages driven from their faceted classification. In this case, a site map cannot express the structure of the site. The wireframes must hold all the information necessary to display information and they must be standardized enough to accommodate the faceted classification. Explaining and agreeing to this structure and functionality with a team that doesn’t understand how faceted classification and the technology works can be quite difficult. I frequently encounter clients who don’t understand the technology driving the websites. While I do explain it to them, there’s always someone else who comes along in the project who does not understand the technology. It’s constant give-and-take between education and progress. You can’t progress and make decisions if clients don’t know how something will work. It’s a constant source of vexation for me because I always have to judge how much someone knows, sometimes I get it wrong. I’m always thinking about how to improve my communication skills so the customer gets what he/she needs out of my work.

Another issue I’ve encountered is what I would call “a site in transition.” For example, some companies need to move their intranet to a new platform, but intranets sites fall into the decentralized control area. Sometimes there are too many sites to move them all at the same time. The site map for the first version of the new intranet might be very small (showing the pages that belong in the first version of the new intranet). But the navigation may still need to lead to these decentralized sites. Not all the sites are carried to the new platform, are on the old platform, look different than the new site. It’s best practice to link navigation to pages within a site and the idea of having landing pages with links has been thrown out. Sometimes the navigation must link to sites that look different. This will cause the user to feel disoriented. It’s also quite difficult to denote these different links within a site map. What pages are on the site? What pages are only in the navigation but not on the site? To solve this problem, I created a site map and a “navigation map,” if you will. 

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About the Author
 
Theresa Putkey is an information architect consultant living in Vancouver, BC. With a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Davis, she focuses on integrating user needs into website and software design projects. She's currently doing her online Masters of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. You can find out more about Theresa at www.keypointe.ca, or follow her on twitter @tputkey.

Read all posts by Theresa.

UX Kickoff, Collaboration & Reviews

Kathy's note: This is the fifth installment in a 12-part series by Theresa Putkey that discusses the intersection of content strategy and user-centred design. Read all posts by Theresa.
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In my time as a UX professional, I’ve had numerous kickoff meetings, done a lot of collaboration, held a lot of reviews. The kickoff, collaboration and review area all part an overall communication strategy that gets people to agree to the user experience as soon as possible and to help it evolve quickly over time.

In content strategy, you’ll also need to have a kickoff, to collaborate and hold reviews. You can use the thoughts below to make your meetings and work more efficient and effective. The overall point of what I say below: don’t wait until you’re done with the deliverable to get feedback. Get feedback all along so what you present is on-the-mark (or darn near close).

Here’s some problems I’ve had and some proposed solutions for them.

Kickoffs

In January 2011 I wrote a post on my own blog about kickoff meetings. In that blog post, I said,

In recent projects, I’ve been struggling to set the right tone for the project. I mean, the project goes well once we get going, but there isn’t the right kind of kickoff that 1) gets the client excited; 2) sets expectations; 3) educates everyone; 4) builds a team dynamic within this group.

I can’t say that since January I’ve had any further luck with kickoff meetings. I’ve even attended an IA/UX kickoff meeting where were spent 15 minutes on IA/UX and 1.5 hours on a website hosting issue!

What’s really important for UX is to have an actual UX kickoff meeting where the UX people set the agenda, invite the appropriate players, and do the appropriate exercises at the UX meeting. I can’t stress enough how important it is to set expectations up front, to control the agenda, to have something for people to *do* during the meeting, and to let people know ahead of time what is on the menu. Otherwise, people can co-opt the meeting, feel directionless, feel like they weren’t included. Kickoffs are about communication, about making people feel included and making them aware of what’s going on.

Here’s a great post on A List Apart by Kevin M. Hoffman: Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings.

Collaboration

Once you hold your kickoff, it’s time to collaborate. When I used to work in the waterfall development method, I’d sit in a cube for 2 weeks, write a 150 page document, present it for review, have it torn apart, go back to my cube for another 2 weeks and re-do the whole design. It was defeating, humbling, and discouraging.

Collaboration includes brainstorming, card sorting, affinity diagraming, design workshops, anything that moves you closer to understanding each other, getting ideas out there and vetted. You can collaborate in the kickoff meeting, in subsequent workshops, or ad-hoc in the office or over the phone.

When I stepped out of waterfall and became a consultant, I wanted to show my clients that I was working on something, so I started presenting my deliverables earlier and earlier in the design process. I got much needed feedback that I wouldn’t have gotten if I held onto the design till the formal review. I would have spent a lot of time and money doing the initial design, it might have been off base, and I would have spent a lot of time reworking the design (and not necessarily gotten paid for it).

For these reviews, I don’t schedule review meetings with all the stakeholders, but simply talk to other team members to discuss the design, take feedback, update the document. I would also show it to one or two of the more important stakeholders to get initial feedback.

Don’t wait until a design is almost final to present it. If changes are requested, they may not be able to be incorporated or they will take significantly longer to make. Sharing design is a great way to help people feel included and informed.

Reviews

Reviews are tough. I’m an information architect who likes to present a deliverable, give explanations, then take feedback. But I’ve been in meetings where I’ve asked my clients to wait till the end to make comments and have then been told, “Yeah, I don’t work like that, I’m going to give feedback as we go along.” Invariably I get the question, “What about X?” and I say, “We’re just about to get to it.” I can’t communicate my vision, but some people don’t care about that.

Sometimes its best to just give up the explanation of the vision time. People attempting to use a website or web app don’t get an explanation, so if the deliverable can’t be understood without me, is it much good? (Sure sure, there are limits here, but think about the question and think about how you might improve your deliverables to communicate better without explanation.)

On my projects, I like to do paper sketching and silent review periods. I like to get peoples’ impressions without being able to explain myself.

In any case, reviews are meant to gather consensus on the deliverable. Set an agenda for the meeting, have someone take notes, don’t ask people to solution, just ask what they do and don’t like. 

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About the Author
 
Theresa Putkey is an information architect consultant living in Vancouver, BC. With a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Davis, she focuses on integrating user needs into website and software design projects. She's currently doing her online Masters of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. You can find out more about Theresa at www.keypointe.ca, or follow her on twitter @tputkey.  
Read all posts by Theresa.

Content Strategy Deliverable: The Content Review (aka Heuristic or Expert Review)

This article is part of Rahel Bailie's series on content strategy deliverables. To read all articles in the series, visit Rahel's content strategy deliverables blog list at Intentional Design Inc. You can also follow Rahel on twitter @Rahelab.

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Content Review sample report

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One of the best ways to get an initial picture of content strengths and weaknesses is through an expert review. Also known as a heuristic review, or a content scorecard, the expert review shows how well your current content stands up to industry standards and best practices. 

Benefits of expert reviews

Expert reviews are great for demonstrating content strengths and weaknesses to a client. They’re faster and more affordable than user testing, and can be scaled to meet client and project needs. In conjunction with a content audit, they’re an effective and efficient way to get a really good understanding of the scope of a potential redesign or rewrite of the site. They’re also incredibly valuable in helping to establish project focus and priorities.

Limitations of expert reviews

An expert review is subjective. The quality of the findings is completely dependent on your expertise as a content reviewer. And you need a deep knowledge of writing mechanics and technique, usability and interaction design, information design, content marketing, and branding if you intend to provide holistic results. It’s better to limit the scope of the review to one specific area rather than provide feedback on areas outside of your expertise. It’s also a good idea to have three independent reviewers work through the same heuristics, if possible. Then they collaboratively analyze discrepancies between their opinions and provide focused, consolidated findings. This eliminates some of the potential bias of a single reviewer. 

It’s important to note that an expert review is a diagnostic tool, and content validation should always include testing with real customers. 

Determining the heuristics

It can be a challenge to find the right set of heuristics, or criteria, to include in your evaluation. Typically, I include detailed criteria across 5 – 8 core categories. The focus of the heuristics depends on project and client needs, and your specialized expertise. Usability.gov has some great usability and design guidelines, many of which focus on content. There are tons of different usability and user-centred design guidelines, but they’re all adapted from Jakob Nielsen’s classic set of ten usability heuristics. Think about how these heuristics relate to content and make sure these areas are represented in your criteria. Finally, keep in mind the current best practices for social media and customer engagement when you’re finalizing your criteria. 

Make sure the criteria are specific, granular, can be demonstrated easily, and are organized into relevant categories. In the attached expert review sample, the table of contents shows the categories. The report detail pages will include one page per category, each page listing the specific criteria. In the sample, I’ve demonstrated how one category (Is the information design logical, effective, and consistent?) is made up of eight specific criteria.

Conducting the review

I like to conduct expert reviews around user scenarios. It helps establish a user-centred perspective, keeps you focused on priority areas, and provides a good cross-section of page types. Choose two or three key scenarios to evaluate. 

Create a spreadsheet that includes all of your criteria, the pages you’ll be reviewing, and plenty of space for notes. This is for your eyes only! As you work through the scenarios, evaluate each page based on the criteria. It’s easiest to do multiple sweeps through the pages, focusing on different elements each time. 

Documenting the findings

You end up with LOADS of data from an expert review! The challenge is in boiling it down to key messages that are useful to your client. I always start by providing the big picture, and then drilling down to more detail. For each category, I like to show an example of one criterion with specific comments and recommendations. If a client needs more clarification about specific criteria that I did not highlight, I talk them through it or provide an example at their request. Usually, the focus of the report is on high-level findings and recommendations.

Have a look at my Content Heuristic Review sample report.

I’d love to hear from other people who conduct content or usability expert reviews. Do you have any other tips or advice? What’s worked for you, or what challenges have you had?

Presentation: Creating an effective content team

I finally made some time to play around with Prezi, and I used it to clarify my thoughts about the roles and responsibilities necessary in an effective content team.

Have a look and let me know what you think. It's my first attempt at Prezi, so I'd love to hear your comments about that. And, of course, your thoughts on the content itself.

To view the full-screen version of this presentation, click the forward arrow once, and then from the More menu in the bottom right corner, choose Fullscreen.

Creating an Effective Content Team on Prezi

User-centred design and its process

Editor's note: This is the second in a 12-part series by Theresa Putkey that discusses the intersection of content strategy and user-centred design.
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In the last post, Integrating Usability & Content Strategy: Series Kickoff, we briefly discussed what usability or user-centred design is. This post, the second in a series of posts, will give you an introduction to user-centred design and the process for approaching a user-centred design project. 

My approach is to educate those who don’t know a lot about the practice.

Clarify roles
When talking about usability, people can refer to it by many different names: usability, user-centred design (UX), user-experience design. In these posts, I use the words interchangeably and abbreviate the term with “UX”.

Those who work in UX may be known as information architects, interaction designers, visual designers, usability engineers, user-experience designers, user-experience architects, business analysts, user researchers, and content strategists. Wow, I’ve really lumped a big portion of roles into this one area. It’s important to think about what you need on the project and then find the right UX team with the right strengths. It can be confusing, but just as there are different construction contractors who focus on different types of buildings, so there are different UX experts who have different focuses.

Essentially, different roles can fulfill UX needs, depending on what you need. For example, if you need an interactive web application with some visual design, you might choose an interaction designer who can use Photoshop. If you have a content heavy site that needs some refreshing and an information layout, you might choose an information architect. If you have a content heavy site that just isn't meeting your objectives, a content strategist may be the right choice. Many UX professionals have multiple skill-sets, so you can cover multiple roles with a few people.
 
UX: One Part of an Overall Project
When talking about user-centred design, it’s important to know that this is a portion of a larger project. For example, a software company is trying to build a software product. There are a lot of stakeholders in this process and a lot of tasks. If we look at the project schedule, it would have such tasks as building a business case, doing market research, figuring out the business requirements, planning the features, doing user research and interface design, as well as lining up the developers, quality assurance, technical documentation, technical support, and sales.

Given all the tasks needed to product such a product, you can see that UX is one part of the overall puzzle. As a UX expert, it actually took me a long time to realize that my expert advice wasn’t the only aspect of the project!

The main differentiator is that the UX expert represents the user interests. In all of the tasks for producing a product, it's easy to overlook the user. While the user perspective may be considered, the project team has a lot of interests to balance. The UX expert represents the user interests throughout the project and has specialized experience or training to help them effectively understand and communicate user needs.

It can work in either a “waterfall” software development method or in an Agile environment. UX can make all aspects of the development process easier and it can also be a bottleneck!

UX: What's It Good For? 
One of the best books I’ve read that presents the business value of UX is “Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through User Experience.” It was published in 2002, but I think everyone should read it. I’ll give you one quote:

“Successful user experiences deliver a firm’s value proposition--the brand promise--to customers in the most effective and appropriate way. Usability is now linked to revenues--and profits--as never before: If customers can’t engage in the full brand experience because of usability issues, the value proposition is diminished in the customers’ mind.” (Donoghue, page xviii.)

In other words, the purpose of UX is to ensure people have a good experience with the developed product or service and to continue to refine the experience, from a user perspective.

All Well And Good, You Say, But What’s The Process?
User-centred design can take many forms, but there are some agreed-upon approaches. One of my favourite sites for introducing people to UX is the Usability.gov site. This site has a great explanation of the process and the tasks involved. Instead of reiterating process again here, I'm just going to let you check it out there. But here's one quote to whet your appetite! 

“To create a user-centered Web site you must think about the needs of your users throughout each step in the development of your site, including:

•  planning your site 
• planning your site 
• collecting data from users 
• developing prototypes 
• writing content  
• conducting usability testing with users

The Usability.gov site doesn't specifically mention content strategy, since it's a relatively new specialty. On the Design a New Site page, a content strategist would typically be responsible for the content inventory, card sorting, and writing for the web portions. But a content strategist will also get involved wherever there are content considerations.
 
Once you look at this site, you can start searching the web for more information. I've provided some links at the bottom of this article to get you started.


Problems
I might have gone out on a limb earlier by saying there are “agreed-upon” approaches. The UX field is still “gelling” and establishing itself as a valuable service to an organization. As I mentioned, there are numerous roles able to represent the user interests on a project. When hiring a UX expert on a project, make sure you know what skills you need and that this person fits the bill.

There are almost as many UX job descriptions as there are usability experts. When thinking of becoming a UX expert (or if you are looking for a focus), market to your strengths. If you like information organization, move towards information architecture and content strategy. If you like design, move towards interaction design and visual design. If you like analysis, move towards business analysis.

Resources for Learning More
When I was first learning about usability, I read “Built for Use,” a great book on the business value of user-centred design. But there are a bunch of resources! Here are some of my favourites:

• Books: Keep On Learning
• Blogs: 10 UX Blogs You Should Be Reading  

Websites: 

• Use It  
• User Interface Engineering  
• Information Architecture Institute 
• Interaction Design  
• UX Matters 
• UX Magazine

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About the Author
 
Theresa Putkey is an information architect consultant living in Vancouver, BC. With a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Davis, she focuses on integrating user needs into website and software design projects. She's currently doing her online Masters of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. You can find out more about Theresa at www.keypointe.ca, or follow her on twitter @tputkey.