Avoiding Bottlenecks: A Discussion on Client Content Collection and Organization

By Brian Molstad

About This Article
This article is the first in a series designed to generate discussion of issues that frequently impact the daily lives of user experience designers.  Each will attempt to summarize the current situation and present some examples.  Readers are encouraged to post comments illustrating their past experiences, viewpoints, and suggestions for the present and future.  We can all benefit by discovering how each of us deals with and views contemporary issues.

The Content Concern
If there is one thing all of us have in common as user experience designers, it’s the experience of seeing a project slow down, or even halt due to missing content from a client.  Even in this era of CMS tools from smaller solutions like Macromedia Contribute and DHTML editors like HTML Area to massive enterprise content management systems like Vignette, many clients either lack the budget for these tools or simply want their agencies to publish and manage the content for them.

 

I’ve found that many businesses in the Milwaukee area fall into the latter category.  Clients often feel that even with these new tools that streamline the process greatly, content uploading is time consuming and they may not fancy themselves computer-savvy enough to use them effectively.

What’s more, clients are often unprepared for the realization that there is a massive amount of content that they will have to either create or assemble.  This usually occurs right after the exciting brainstorming sessions that result in documentation of the information architecture of the project.  They come down from a blue-sky euphoria of endless internet possibilities to discover that this architecture requires content (sometimes lots of it) in order to come to fruition.  It’s at this point that the euphoria can sometimes dissolve into an overwhelming reality.

Some Methods of Management
Every company or agency has different methods of helping clients cope with this effort and ensuring the integrity of the project.  Some methods are clearly defined while other agencies have a much more relaxed approach.  It’s likely that every agency would prefer to deliver proposals with terms and conditions outlining that clients can be fined a certain amount for each day the agreed upon content is late. However, smaller agencies may not have the gumption to lay down such a law.

Regardless of the method, it is crucial to address content at the earliest stages of the project, optimally before a proposal is even signed.  While my company does not yet levy fines for late content, our proposals do lay out that late or poorly formatted content can increase the project schedule as well as management time and thus, project cost. 

Schedule: When setting up the project schedule, include major portions of client content delivery as milestones in addition to completion of development stages.  We use a client extranet that posts the project milestones with subtasks assigned to specific people for each milestone.  Without a clear project schedule that includes content dates, it’s difficult to gauge whether the content collection is on track.

Documentation: Sometimes, broadly-titled subtasks like, “Format and Deliver All Product Images” can suffice in letting a client know what needs to be done on their end, but often they may need a bit more assistance.  In those cases, creating a content map (after sign-off of the information architecture) that outlines each content element mapped to a specific page of the information architecture can act as a helpful checklist for the client to use as they assemble their content. The content map should be able to be sorted by content title, delivery date and content owner as well as other categories, in order to effectively track the content and get a sense for what’s left to be done.

Training: If a CMS system will be integrated into the site and the client will be responsible for uploading content, time to train the client on how to use it must be added to the project schedule, and certain sample content items will need to be available prior to that training. 

For Discussion
The above methods can be executed in a near infinite variety of different ways.  The MUE readership would like to know about your team’s preferred policies and practices.  Some questions to consider:

1. What content-related project nightmares have you survived?  How did they change they way things are done at your company/agency?
2. What guidelines/rules are set up in your proposals?  Are they strict or loose?
3. Are content deadlines set up in your project schedules?  Who tracks them and what are the consequences if one is missed?
4. What documentation, either online or off do you use as content maps or inventories?  Does your company use a third-party or custom built system to assist with collection? 
5. What are your formatting and labeling guidelines?
6. What editing, or quality assurance procedures do you have in place?  Is it the client’s responsibility to make sure the content is perfect upon delivery or do you offer proofreading services?
7. Who’s in charge of collection?  Does the responsible party change for each project or is it a certain person’s regular duty?

We’ve all had our experiences dealing with late, poorly formatted or mislabeled content from clients.  It’s a situation that has delayed launch dates, and broken budgets.  A discussion here may help us all to more effectively cope with or even prevent future problems. 

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Have a suggestion for a discussion on an issue that’s been weighing heavily on your mind?  Email Brian Molstad at [email protected] with your suggestion or proposed article on the topic. 

Comments

[Kelli]

Thanks for the article. I'm currently in the early phases of redesigning a corporate Web site that will also include an intranet and an extranet. None of the three will be overly complex and the content updates will probably be most made to the homepages for each one, along with a scheduling/calendar application and the ability to post items to the extranet and the intranet. So I'm wondering if anyone has recommendations for a basic CMS that would allow easy updates but not overburden the client with unneeded functionality. I know the CMS will be critical to both gathering and updating content, so I want to make sure it's something that people will actually use. The article mentioned Macromedia's Contribute, which I will definitely check out, but if anyone else has suggestions or ideas, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you.

[Brian Molstad]

The other editor mentioned above, HTML Area or a similar one called "FredCK Editor (FCK Editor - www.fckeditor.net) are good open source tools that allow the developer to set up editable area on the site. The user can only edit the sections that have been enabled and thus, can't mess up any of the graphics on the site. Implemented properly, you can also set up different login access so the editable configurations are different for each user. It's not an out-of-the-box solution like Contribute but it does have it's advantages.

What content collection challenges have you faced or are you facing?

I'm particularly intersted in what other automated systems others are using to collect organize and sign-off on delivered content.