“Complex issues … written about patiently, clearly, and accurately.”
Are you still trying to wrap your head around what structured content is, how to use it, and what the benefit is to the folks who use your content? One way to think of it is that structured content treats information as a set of ideas, concepts, and facts to communicate, each described in a way that conveys its meaning in a machine readable way. Here's a brief illustration to demonstrate what that looks like.
Domain modeling helps organizations discover the information structures and meaning that allow structured content to reach further and last longer. By uncovering the assumptions and tacit rules that plague your content ecosystem, domain modeling can help you facilitate the shared vision necessary to create resilient, scalable systems for communication across channels.
By situating data in context, knowledge graphs create valuable opportunities for content creation, recommendation, and management—even at small scales. A boutique approach to knowledge graph design offers a scalable strategy for starting out small and solving well-defined communication and discovery problems to create measurable value.
Structured content design focuses on communicating effectively to an organization’s patrons, constituents, and customers, wherever they are and however they choose to access content. While it is the cornerstone of effective, scalable content design for the web, it’s also much more than just a “web” technique: it is a way to prioritize effective communication across contexts.
Sanity Studio offers a fantastic open source structured content editor that can be hosted anywhere. This comprehensive guide provides detailed steps on self-hosting Sanity Studio on DreamHost with continuous development using GitHub actions.
UX Methods is a progressive web app designed to help those new to the practice of user experience design explore and understand the purpose-driven connections between UX tools, techniques, and approaches. It is also a case study in boutique knowledge graph design which explores the benefits of bringing semantic web technologies to smaller scale projects.
The way that we consume information on the web is changing. Voice and IA technology are driving this change in a way that affects anyone publishing online. And yet: we continue to hold on to the metaphor of the content we publish as “pages,” destined to be found and read as delivered by patient, attentive online readers. I recently had the opportunity to talk with the Seattle Content Strategy MeetUp group about this alarming state of affairs—and about what we can do to fix it.
Voice user interfaces, smart software agents, and AI-powered search are changing the way users—and computers—interact with content. Whether or not you’re building services for these emerging technologies, structured content is now necessary to ensure the accuracy and integrity of your content across the evolving digital landscape.
Over the last several years I’ve become an ardent advocate of “structured content design.” This is the process of designing digital resources (like websites and apps) from the content out, as opposed to creating interaction and visual design first, then shoehorning the content into it right before (or right after) launch. A structured content approach to digital work has a number of advantages over typical “interface first” processes.
As the systems of information for which we design get more complex and more fluid (hospitals, government, and higher education are all good examples), it is increasingly important that we explicitly express the rules that underly the visible structures we deliver. So where does this leave us with site maps? They’re still effective communication tools (and clients do love them), but I think we’ve moved beyond the point where they’re a foundation of information architecture.
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