Realigning the City of Austin content auditing process
December 2019
Project details
How I reiterated the City of Austin’s content audit template to meet the needs of our target audience to accommodate stakeholder's needs and define scoping criteria within a two-week timeframe.
Outcomes:
Streamlined content audit data collection, content audit scoping criteria, Iterated new content audit template, Redefined content audit goals and objectives
Tools:
Google sheets, Whiteboarding, Facilitation
Timeline:
2-weeks
Overview
The Office of Design and Delivery (ODD), a City of Austin organization, set a goal to redesign the city website. In order to achieve a usable and service-based city website redesign, the design team and the content team worked together to create an improvement strategy by considering resident's needs and the accessibility of the web content.
To better understand the current content landscape, ODD conducted content audits for each city department. After joining the team as a content audit specialist to conduct content audits, I immediately realized there is a gap in the scoping criteria and audit outcomes.
To address the scoping criteria gap and unclear content audit goal outcomes, I decided to conduct a brainstorming session and a mini-workshop with both the content and product team.
Redesigned content audit template
Problem definition
Problem statement
I broke down the issues I saw in the existing content audit template into these three specific problems
1
Unclear scoping criteria
There are no clear existing scope criteria defined for the content audit to analyze the content.
2
Need for goals alignment
It was unclear whether the current content audit outcomes were meeting the needs of the end-users. End-users are the content strategist team who transitions the city content onto the new City of Austin website
3
Usability of the audit template
It was unclear whether the content strategist team have a clear idea of the data points collected within the audit and the existing collected data points meet the content transition goals. Some examples of collected data points are Document type, Page title, Google analytics,ROT analysis, etc.
Project goals
Understand how the content team uses the content audit information during the content transition process.
Define clear scoping criteria for the content audit in order to successfully analyze the state of the current content.
Identify the existing gap in the type of information collected in the current content audit template.
IDEATION PROCESS OUTCOMES
By the end of the brainstorming session and facilitated workshop our team will have:
Identified the scoping criteria for content audit to successfully analyze the existing state of the City of Austin web content.
Restructured and standardized the audit template to meet the City of Austin’s need to transition content to a newly redesigned website.
My role
I led the content audit redesign process by brainstorming and goal alignment workshop within an agile sprint period i.e 2 weeks to standardize the content audit template, identify the missing data point collection and identify the scope for audit.
After standardizing the template, I continued to conduct content audits for 10 city departments and presented the audit’s insights to the City of Austin departments. The goal for presenting audit insights to departments to receive their buy-in to transition the content to the redesigned website.
Small Minor Business Resources(SMBR) a City of Austin department, content audit insights sharing presentation deck from one of the sprint review meetings.
The process
Brainstorming session:
After clearly defining the goals, started the whiteboarding session by answering these 5 high level scoping audit questions:
How much content is on the site?
What kind of content is it?
How is the site structured?
How effective is the content?
How is the content managed?
The process of answering these questions helped in evaluating the current data points collected during the content audit and identify the missing data points and determine the scoping criteria.
One of the key insights from this session are
Upacking and defining the content evaluators like Redundant,Trival, Outdated and Relevant/Irrelevant to determine the content quality and the results this content analysis i.e is Keep-as-is, Update, Re-write and consoildate
Identified City of Austin website content audit scoping criteria from brainstorming session
Workshop session:
To determine the audit outcomes aligning with the content transition facilitated a separate hour workshop with the content team and the product team.
Here are some notable outcomes from the workshop:
WORKSHOP OUTCOME #1
To meet the accessibility guidelines of reusable content, the content team suggested a readability test using the Hemmingway app. Based on this suggestion, I decided to add and gather a readability score data point to the audit template in order to analyze the readability for each web page.
WORKSHOP OUTCOME #2
Came up with the idea of adding Content Heuristics and UX Heuristics as data points to analyze the quality of content .
The heuristics answered some of the important questions such as:
How is the content structured?
Is the web content easy to digest?
Are there accryons or jargons used in the web content?
What is the current navigation structure of the content?
Does the heading relate to the content?
This type of analysis helped the audit team in writing content improvement recommendations for the content team in content transition.
The outcomes
OUTCOME #1
The redefined content audit goals and objectives after the redesigning process
Original goal
To truly understand the content and how to improve it for residents, you must assess each piece of content.
A content inventory we'll help your department discover:
What content is currently on your site
Pageviews and other data for your content
What content is out of date or no longer relevant
Redefine content audit goal
“Understand the quality of the web content supported by quantitative information in order to strategize the content improvements and meet Austin resident needs during the content transition.”
Redefine content audit objectives
By the end of the content audit we will better understand:
How much content is on the site?
Where the content is located.
The level of quality and effectiveness of the current content.
OUTCOME #2
Here is the iterated content audit template after considering the new scoping criteria and realigned audit goals and objectives.
Content audit template before iteration
Content audit template after the brainstorming and workshop session
OUTCOME #3
The change in audit data points collection and content quality analysis to provide better recommendations.
Before…Data points and analysis before iteration process
Quantitative Information
Google Analytics analysis
Content-type Analysis
Content-Type
Redundancies, Outdated and Trivial Analysis(ROT analysis)
After…
Data points and analysis after iteration process
Quantitative Information
Google Analytics analysis
Readability Score analysis above or below the score of grade 8
Content-type Analysis
Content-Type
Redundancies, Outdated and Trivial Analysis(ROT analysis)
Content Quality
Content Heuristics
UX Heuristics
Personal reflection
After retrospecting on the brainstorming process, here are some learned insights:
The content team and product team learned the redefined goals and objectives of the content audit.
Two new content strategists joined our team. The reiteration helped them learn terminologies used in audits, and data points gathered during the content audit.
The average time of conducting content audits with new iterated templates has increased, but the quality of the content audits has improved.
The need for transitioning the already conducted content audit’s to the new version in order to keep audits consistent across all the city departments.
We discovered the need for a detailed “content audit terminology” reference document.
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