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Testing the relevance of contributed or migrated content

— Using historical theories and concepts to determine how to model content for a content management solution.”

Managing content contributions or a migration process from an existing online resource requires patience and discipline, two things of which information designers can never have enough!

In few other situations do things get trickier than when an organisation wants to publish key messages and insists in a fit of decentralisation that its business units represent themselves in such a context.

Let’s assume we have developed a hierarchical information architecture. For the moment, though, it’s entirely empty. How do we describe each node properly in content?

Guiding principles

When deciding on what needs to be communicated by new content or through testing the relevance of old content within a new structure, we can use two time-honoured principles from centuries past:

a. Occam’s Razor

William of Ockham was not actually the inventor of the Razor, but the Friar from Sussex has always been the popular source when referring to the maxim that:

Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity

b. (A paraphrasing of) Bentham’s utilitarianism

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the context of content:

Deliver the greatest amount of satisfaction to the greatest number of users

Along with his influential theory of utilitarianism, reformer and philosopher Jeremy Bentham can also be credited with the inspiration for the modern prison through his Panopticon.

The questions

Accordingly, these principles require us to describing and explaining a node, we satisfy only the following questions, concisely and in the precise order:

1. What?
2. Why?
3. How?
4. Who? and optionally,
5. [When? If the node is axiomatically subject to a period of time]

The content should respond to the above and nothing more, otherwise it has exceeded the remit of its purpose to describe the node.

The content should then provide users with access to:

• The next sibling element;
• Thematically-aligned elements;
• The immediate parent;
• The root element

If these criteria are satisfied, the node is properly described and explained.