Category: Content Strategy

Content strategy is all too often overlooked. From designing for readers to search and metadata to taxonomy, our authors explore the many facets of content.

Content Strategy / Foundational Thinking / Information Architecture

Introduction to Ontology Concepts and Modeling

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What is ontology? An ontology is a formal system for modeling concepts and their relationships. Unlike relational database systems, which are essentially interconnected tables, ontologies put a premium on the relationships between concepts by storing the information in a graph database, or triplestore. (The following examples use data derived from PLOS, which makes all of its Open Access data and content available.) Relational databases are good at representing tabular data for one-to-one relationships: However, real-life data is seldom this tidy;

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people walking in a maze
Content Strategy / Findability

Forget the Trail of Breadcrumbs

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Enterprises often have a simplistic understanding of navigational structures in UX Design. Companies shy away from messing with known organizational schemas for fear that their users or customers will become confused and run away. We don’t give our users enough credit. As a result, most software navigational structures either reflect hierarchical departmental company/brand organization (because how can users be confused by that?), or a very top-heavy list of bucketed themes loosely based on general product “themes”  (hello Amazon!). 

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Search and Metadata / User Centered

Content Recommendations and the Creation of Emotions

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This article investigates content recommender systems. Because Netflix is probably the best known recommendation system and numerous articles have been published about their system, I will concentrate on their content recommendation mechanism as representative of the type. I will show that the Netflix mechanism contains characteristics of updated theories of emotion—mainly constructed emotions theory—but it still lacks several essential components. The lack of these components can explain some inaccuracies in Netflix recommendations and can suggest broader implications.

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Content Strategy / Design Principles

UX Writing: The Case for User-Centric Language

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If I asked you what is one of the biggest problems on websites today, I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t say it has anything to do with words. But what if I told you it does? Let’s talk about user-centric language. One research group describes the usability problems that result from something as simple as using the wrong words on websites: “Writers often use the language they are most familiar with when describing offerings on websites, without realizing that those

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Findability / Search and Metadata

Keep the Kitchen Cabinets from Overflowing

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Don’t laugh. I’m sure you’ve done this before. At the office, there’s a refrigerator cleanup every two weeks. At least I think it happens every two weeks. The office administrator sends out an email or posts a note on the fridge, warning you that things will be dumped if they’re not labeled. You’ve seen these long-forgotten food containers of who-knows-when science experiments pushed up against the back of the fridge. Same with those things that start growing in your pantry….

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