Issue 5

Structure

Quick thoughts about how content lives in systems

I’m quick to admit that I can be a purist at times, especially when it comes to designing systems that handle content at scale. However, I’m on a years-long quest to be more pragmatic, and several years ago, I had a realization about content during a migration.

But first, some context.

An illustration showing angry anthropomorphized blobs about to fight anthropomorphized chunks. — Blobs v. chunks

Those who work as content strategists or as content architects sometimes talk about blobs versus chunks (props to Karen McGrane, at least as far back as 2012). Blobs are unstructured, shapeless, free-form groups of content. On the other hand, chunks are well-structured, orderly, meaningful pieces of content enriched with metadata.

At first glance, then, it’s kind of counterintuitive, but the highly structured chunks are actually more flexible than the blobs. Chunks are easy to re-use or send to different digital (or print) experiences.

Of course, as a purist, I want all my content to be chunks. But remember, I’m trying to be more pragmatic. Back to my realization ...

We were in the midst of migrating thousands of pages of unstructured, blobby content into a nice, new CMS with business goals that included publishing content to multiple channels. We needed chunks, and we needed them yesterday. But we didn’t have the resources to rework all the content from blobs to chunks.

And this is where I had my realization.

We could still gain business value by enriching our blobs with metadata. Since the content was blobby, the metadata needed to be a little “loose” and not super-super granular. But metadata-enriched blobs are a stepping stone toward chunks.

If you’ve got blobby content and you’re trying to make it smarter, more flexible, and more future-proof, maybe your first step should be enriching it with metadata.

If you’d like to know more about what this might look like for you, set up a chat with me!

Style

Quick thoughts about how to improve your content

Many organizations want to have a natural, human voice.

That’s a good thing.

However, sometimes the way they go for “human” is creating content that includes “please” and “sorry.”

I’m …sorry…but that just doesn’t help.

In any type of business writing, avoiding these two terms will make your writing more concise and direct.

Atlassian’s design system puts it simply:

Saying “sorry” in error messages can make the situation worse by causing errors to appear more severe than they actually are. Similarly, saying “please” can undermine the authority and credibility of your message and lead people to think a required step is optional. Unless the error has severe and irreparable consequences, avoid niceties. — https://atlassian.design/content/writing-guidelines/writing-error-messages

Same could be said about the phrase I sometimes see in user interface text: “Don’t worry.” You say that, and now I am worried.

(Full disclosure: My day job is working for Atlassian.)

“If we can learn to frame uncertainty as the doorway to possibility, we can actually use the same wiring in our brain that warns us against the unknown to help us get excited about, and even embrace, uncertainty. … Begin by framing yourself as someone who has enough courage to stand at the edge of opportunity.”

– The Upside of Uncertainty:
A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown
by Nathan Furr

Solutions

Quick thoughts about selecting content tooling

If you were to survey the vendors making content management systems, you'd probably hear about how developer-friendly they are. Of course this is important, but make sure your vendor scorecard includes some items for how friendly their solution is to content creators and editors. And, just as with most Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools, remember that your configuration determines how usable the tool will be.

Scuttlebutt

News from the UX design, content strategy, and content management communities

Assessing content quality is a great and common starting point for using artificial intelligence (AI) in content creation and content management. Grammarly has been leading the way, using AI to check grammar, look for plagiarism, adherence to corporate style guides, and more. In December 2024, the company announced the acquisition of Coda, a collaborative workspace tool much more centered around content creation.

Soft skills

A look at the less-tangible characteristics and skills that can expand your influence

Content professionals—technical writers, content strategists, content designers, etc.—tend to interface with people from more disciplines and more parts of the business than many of their peers. Through their positions and what I’d argue is their predisposition, they see a much broader picture.

Don’t play the victim (e.g. “How come nobody sees what I see?”). Instead, view yourself as the orchestrator, the center of a hub.

Someone in such a position can play a vital role in helping connect people, projects, and workflows. When this happens, organizations might spark innovation, or they might avoid redundant work or lengthy alignment meetings.

If you’re someone in a role like this (whether you’re a content professional or in some other role), are you introducing people to each other? Are you helping show similarities or potentials for working together? Are you channeling your inner improv actor and saying “Yes, and …”?

I’d love to hear from you if you’ve found yourself in this kind of connector role. What positive change did you bring, and how? Just reply to this email and tell me about it.

Top of mind

Things that are bouncing around in my head as I synthesize a range of ideas

SaaS has brought plenty of benefits to the world, maybe the greatest being the continuous delivery of bugfixes and new features.

In the content management world, it seems like it’s also brought a bunch of content management systems (CMSes) absolutely focused on the largest enterprises and their bigger coffers. Some key functionality is often gated away, unless you’re on the highest-tier plan with the vendor.

I know a lot of the big products in the CMS market, and I’m constantly building my knowledge as I build up my CMS industry report (the freebie that you get upon subscribing to Model Thinking).

In discussions I’ve had, there are a few issues where the usual SaaS CMS products falter, and I think there’s an untapped market here.

The customer entrusts their content to the vendor. In the industry, there’s discussion of vendor lock-in, where once your content lives in a particular CMS, it’s hard to migrate out. That may be a piece of this problem, but I think it’s bigger than that. Uptime and availability is also part of it, but not really where I’m going, either. Will the vendor stay in business? Will an organization be able to afford the vendor on an ongoing basis? What if there’s an acquisition? There’s probably a whole list of fears that customers may have about the SaaS CMS vendor in this vein.
Hobbyists and small- and mid-sized businesses are priced out by the SaaS focus on enterprise. Surely, there are small- and mid-size businesses who have outgrown their site-builder tool’s capabilities and could find competitive advantage in their business with a strong omnichannel content strategy powered by a sophisticated CMS. But largely, this is cost-prohibitive right now, even in some lower-tier offerings. In reality, I suspect that there’s more upside to the number of potential customers that are smaller businesses. And they are probably more nimble and quicker to get on the vendor’s books.

Many of these smaller businesses don’t have the resources or desire to host a CMS on their own computer systems, so they need a SaaS solution. (I’m setting aside some of the other nuances of the discussion like how to build the omnichannel experiences…)

Have you seen SaaS be too prohibitive? Do you have a vendor you think fits the bill? Just reply to this email if you have thoughts.

John Collins

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Stop saying please