OLIVIA THORNTON

The project

The client was migrating their content operations from three existing Content Management Systems to Drupal.

They wanted to get a health check on their current content and how they can move onto the new platforms in a mature and deliberate fashion.

Project stages:

• Content Workshop
• Market analysis
• Content review
• Recommendations
• IA review (incl. microsite nav updates)
• Content modelling and page templates

My process

I worked closely with a Project Manager for the most part, drawing in support from our UX Designers and a UX Researcher working on the wider modernization project.

Landscape analysis

My first step was to understand how their peers were providing similar types of content and what we could learn about the trends in the market.

Workshop

To understand the client’s content eco-system, their pain points and needs, I designed and facilitated a content workshop. A 3.5 hour session on site with the content team and some of the key role holders involved in requesting content.

We broke the content areas down using Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy Quad.

This was followed up with interviews to dig a bit deeper into some of their processes.

Content review

I looked at variety of pages across the site and analyzed them based on editorial content, page structure, user experience and internal process.

I looked at user needs, CTAs, flow of information, readability, tone and style and more.

The site was also put through a crawler tool (Sitebulb) to determine some of the data shown in the deliverable report.

The aim was to find opportunities for how content is created, focusing on user needs, and to feed into new CMS templates for Drupal.

Recommendations

Throughout the report I had provided recommendations for how to resolve some of the pain points they were having and pull their content programs inline with the market.

At the end of the report I also provided an overview of how to start navigating some of the recommendations.

Information Architecture review

I had already worked with the content team to redesign the IA for the current retail website, specifically for product and user focused content.

The aim of this review was to identify how the IA redesign translated into the new website, and what effects that would have on wholesale users.

The aim was to provide recommendations for updates to the IA specific to the modernization project and hospitality project. This included taxonomy recommendations and user authenticated services, and the new hospitality ordering portal.

Content modelling

As part of the workshop, I’d asked the content team to talk through what components/content blocks they would need based on their experiences with their CMSs, what they feel like they’re missing and what they’ve heard from users that they’d like to incorporate.

From here, I created a list of content templates (pages and the content blocks) needed for each. Content templates were handed over to the UX Designers to create high fidelity mockups, and to the Engineering team to create tickets for the new platform setup.

Deliverables

A Content State report that brought all the findings together, along with recommendations for growth and modernization.

A handover to the Engineering team and UX team, and ongoing content support for their CMS migration.