What is going wrong?

A range of concerns are common.

• It takes too long to get content online because there are too many approvers or steps in the approval process
• Bottlenecks occur because there are too few people acting as approvers
• Approvers don’t want to use the system to manage approvals because it is too clunky or they don’t like reading content from a computer screen
• Content gets rewritten by approvers, making it less readable or introducing other problems
• Approvers make so many changes to the content, that it no longer meets its original intent
• Content gets approved before it is reviewed, then publishers are reluctant to allow editors to make changes
• Authors find ways to bypass the approval process because of the problems they’ve had with it
• Content still has errors, despite going through an approval process

Considering the role of the approval process

The main reason that approval processes are not working well is that many organisations have not given enough thought to why they have them. What is approval for? What role does it play in content development? Is approval the same as evaluation or review? What is an approver expected to do? Does all content require the same type of approval?

Automating key publishing processes means that is that there is often little discussion between authors, reviewers and approvers. This adds pressure to a poorly designed approval process.

Improving the process

Discuss and define the purpose

Ensure that the role the approval process plays is discussed, agreed and documented. Different types of approval—for instance legal or marketing approval—must be clearly defined, along with the types of content they apply to.

Define and assign roles

Define each role in the content publishing process. Content approvers need to know why they are reviewing the content and whether they can change content or simply recommend changes.

Assign roles and responsibilities based on skills, knowledge, authority and availability. If legal approvers tend to add legalese to your content, don’t allow them to make changes. Limit their role to sign-off.

Be flexible and responsive to changing needs

Different parts of the organisation may require different approaches. This may include allowing some publishing steps to occur outside the content management system.

Over time, needs may change as personnel and publishing requirements change. It is important that web managers encourage feedback and respond with changes to processes as needed.

Don’t just approve—plan and review too

Most people mention problems with the approval process because it is one of the few parts of the publishing process that is formalised.  In fact, things are going wrong much earlier.

Content should be planned before it is written. Approvers won’t be suggesting or making radical changes if writers have already discussed the content with them.  Make sure anyone who could affect the final copy is consulted. Get their input. Make sure they are aware of why you are publishing the content, who it is for, the information needs it must meet and the language appropriate to the audience.  This will make the approval process work more smoothly.

Content should also be reviewed and edited before it is sent for approval.  Quality content will take less time for approvers to check, and bottlenecks and other delays can be reduced.

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Who uses text alternatives?

People with disabilities

Text alternatives are important for people with certain disabilities. The most obvious group is those who are blind or have very little sight. When reading online, they may be using a:

• Screen reader: software that reads out text, including the text alternatives for images or graphics
• Braille reader: device that provides a Braille version of the text and text alternatives that can be read with the fingertips
• Screen magnifier: software that enlarges text and graphical elements. When a map is very detailed, the software may not show enough legible detail or the graphic may become too pixelated to be legible at high levels of magnification. A text alternative will be very important in these cases.

People with cognitive impairments that make it hard to understand maps may also benefit from a text alternative.

Other people who may benefit

Text alternatives can be:

• Helpful for older people whose vision is not as sharp as it was when they were younger
• Handy for those who ‘just don’t get’ maps
• Useful for people with limited bandwidth, unreliable power connections, or both (as often happens to me in rural India where I spend a few months of each year)
• Read by search engines to index your non-text content.

For interactive maps, text alternatives will also help those who may not be confident using the interactive controls.

Why does someone who cannot see need to use a map?

People with vision impairments need maps for most of the reasons that sighted people need them. They may need to:

• Assess the likely cost of a taxi fare
• Work out public transport options
• Find a convenient place to meet a friend
• Know what facilities or landmarks are nearby
• Be able to ask directions and get an answer that makes sense.

How to write text alternatives for maps

To write a text alternative for a map you will need to consider the:

• Reason you are providing the map on your site
• Information the map provides to a sighted user.

Then, think about:

• What your users will be doing with the information
• How you can organise the information to satisfy those uses. What structure (sequencing, grouping, labelling) will work well?

How to include the text alternative

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 set out several options for including a text alternative for a map. It can be:

• A separate, linked page
• On the same page as the map
• An ALT attribute on the IMG element for the map. Most maps will require more information than you can provide with the ALT attribute.

Example 1: Simple location map

On the ‘contact us’ page on my business website, I have a link to a Google map below my office address. The reason for including it was to help people find my office, whether they are driving or travelling by public transport.

On the same page, I include a text version of information about driving from the city or nearby shopping centre and travelling by train. This is the key information that a sighted user would get from the map.

Example 2: Detailed features and facilities map

On the Royal Botanical Gardens website, the ‘Garden maps’ page links to several maps. The first is a visitors’ map. This map is to help visitors find their way to various lawns, plant collections and facilities. It is very detailed and needs a detailed text alternative.

For this example I worked with Sam Vukanovic, the Digital Media Officer from the Gardens, to make sure I had interpreted the map correctly. Andrew Arch from the World Wide Web Consortium offered some useful suggestions. And Pierre Fredericksen and Josh Crawford from Vision Australia provided their feedback.

Design considerations for the text alternative

My main focus was on helping people find features and facilities shown on the map. I considered adding information about walking around on the various paths because I felt the location tables were a bit ‘dry’. However, there is another map that has walking routes and the text alternative for that map should provide this information. Likewise, I could have included information about nearby parking (other than the disabled parking shown on the map), but this is provided elsewhere on the site.

The order I used for each part of the information was deliberate. I started with a general orientation, and then listed transport, parking and entry points ahead of the main features of the Gardens. I think this is the way most people would use the map — at least on first use. It would be worth keeping an eye on user feedback and changing the order as needed.

I used alphabetical ordering within the tables to make it easier to look something up by name.

I divided the list of lawns, lakes and gardens into two tables to give a sense of features in the north and those in the south. Another option would be a 3-column table with the third column giving the general location (e.g. north, central, south). This may make it easier to look up a feature, but makes it a little more work to get an overview of what is in the north versus south. Again, this should be monitored and changes made based on users’ feedback.

References to the Gardens with a capital ‘G’, and to gates as ‘Gate A’  comply with the Gardens’ style guide. I have used full names  for some features that have abbreviated names on the graphical map.

Versions of the Melbourne map, Royal Botanic Gardens

• Text version
• Graphical version (GIF 284 KB)

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Should we use words that challenge readers?

One participant said she was ‘concerned about this plain language thing’. She felt that the increasing use of the Internet and text messaging was leading to a loss of vocabulary, and web writers would contribute to this unless they used words that challenged readers.

While I share her concern about poor language skills, the solution is not the responsibility of web writers.   Expanding readers’ vocabularies is a task for the education system, teachers and parents. In fact, if web writers use words that challenge users, we are not really doing our job.

Communication is the writer’s main goal

The main goal of online content is to communicate. If web writers have an educative role to play it is a narrow one — to educate users in the subject matter at hand. To do that, we must ensure we choose words that our users understand, present information they need and want to know, and do so in a way that works well for on-screen reading.

We are not hired to teach language skills. It is not our job to challenge the reading skills of our users by using words with which they may not be familiar.

Plain language is not dumbing the language down

The sentiment that often motivates comments like the one above is the belief that writing in plain language is dumbing content down. The truth — supported by a weight of evidence — is that plain language is:

• Faster to read because the text is almost always much shorter
• Easier to understand because unnecessary complexity is removed from the text
• Preferred by a wide range of readers, including those who are highly educated and used to reading complex material (including lawyers, believe it or not)!

Joe Kimble’s ‘Writing for dollars, writing to please‘ provides a great summary of the evidence that plain language works. When it comes to reading information,  rather than reading for pleasure, no one wants to read anything that is longer or harder to understand than it should be.

Choosing words is important, but only part of plain language

You might think plain language is about using simple words, and what I’ve said so far might reinforce that view. However plain language is about more than the choice of words. It is also concerned with structure, layout and length of content.

Choice of words is an important consideration though. The key is to choose words that are appropriate for the reader. Unnecessarily long or arcane words are out unless they are technical terms that the reader will be expecting to see or will be searching for.

Writing in plain language is hard work

I think the ‘dumbing down’ sentiment carries an assumption that plain language is only for writers who lack sophistication or talent. It’s easy for  writers to trot out pages and pages of turgid writing. The web is full of it. But it is much harder to turn this into something that is clear and concise, informative and precise. Ask any writer who has tried. (But don’t let me put you off. It does get easier with practise!)

Further reading

• About plain language
• What is plain language?
• Selling the benefits of plain language

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‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less’. (Through the Looking Glass)

This reminds me of a conversation I had when I called my local council to check whether I needed a building permit to build a pergola.  It went something like this:

Me: ‘Hi, I want to know if I need a building permit to build a pergola. I’ve been to your website and found the building permit fact sheet which says I don’t need one if the building is under a certain size. But a neighbour assured me I did and suggested I call you to clarify the situation’.

Council man: ‘Will it have a roof?’

Me: ‘Yes’.

Council man (in that scornful Humpty Dumpty tone):  ’You should have scrolled down further. If it’s got a roof we call it a verandah. All verandahs need a permit’.

A bit miffed at his tone, I went back to check the fact sheet. I scrolled down, as  instructed, and found the verandah section.  It said:

‘Verandahs.  Construction of a verandah attached to any building.  Permit required? Yes.’

I scrolled back up to the pergola section where it said:

‘Pergolas. Not more than 3.6m high, 20m square in area and located at the rear of the building to which it is appurtenant. Permit required? No.’

There was no mention of a roof in either section, or anywhere else on the fact sheet. So I’m not sure how I was supposed to know that a pergola became a verandah when you put a roof on it.

Changing the meaning of words is risky

In the lead up to this conversation with my local council, I had spoken to a range of people about my project.  Some had structures just like the one I wanted to build and they called them ‘pergolas’. I had looked on the web trying to find someone to build one for me and all the pictures I saw of pergolas were referred to as ‘pergolas’, not ‘verandahs’.

Since then, I’ve spoken to more people about the issue. They commonly use the term ‘pergola’ for the structure I want to build. And I’ve done some experiments in my web writing workshop, asking people to read the fact sheet.  Most have come to the same conclusion — you don’t need a building permit for a pergola.

There is a clear lesson here. If you use a word to mean something other than its common meaning, you run the risk of giving people the wrong message.

Explain any special uses of terms

I’ve since had a look at a few other council websites. I discovered that state building regulations are the reason for the shift in meaning. Here’s what I found on one of those sites, under the heading ‘Build a pergola’:

‘if it has a roof … then it is classified as a ‘verandah’ by the State of Victoria, and as such, would then require a building permit’.

It’s that simple. If laws or rules require a special use of terms that people may then misunderstand, say so.

Listen to your customers … and fix your content!

The most annoying thing about this situation was not the confusing use of terminology (although it might have been if I’d built the pergola without the permit). It was the Humpty Dumpty attitude I got on the phone.  It was clear that I wasn’t the first customer to call my council about this issue: the council employee was ready with his response — ‘you should have scrolled down further’.

Being scornful is not the solution. Fixing your content is.

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We spend a fair amount of time watching people use the web. In our usability testing sessions, people often make comments like:

‘I don’t want to read all this‘.

‘I just want what I need‘.

‘If I was at home doing this, I’d have given up by now’.

Time is the common thread here. People don’t want to read web pages that look like dense walls of text — it takes too much time. They don’t want to waste time reading things that aren’t relevant to their current task or goal. They want the answer to their question as fast as they can get it.

Web writers don’t have the time they need for writing

Time is also an issue for staff producing content for their organisation’s website. Participants in our writing workshops often tell us that time is their number one problem:

‘I’m expected to find time to write content for our website on top of all my other duties’.

‘Management seems to want things online yesterday. We rarely get the time to think about the content, let alone write it’.

‘Content for the website is usually produced at the last minute. We spend a lot more time and effort on our printed content’.

Time and quality go hand-in-hand

‘I have made this [letter] longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.’ — Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provincials (1657)

A key problem with rushing to put content online is that the content is nearly always much longer than it needs to be. As the quotation from Pascal implies, it takes time to edit and cut out the words, phrases and sentences that aren’t doing any real work.

But that’s not all that can go wrong. Lack of time can lead to content that is poorly focused, structured, designed and worded.

Poor quality content is harder to use. It takes more time to read and more effort to understand.

The burden of time rests with the publisher

One thing is clear. Web users are not going to slow down. They are not going to work longer or harder to try to figure out what your content is trying to say.

The burden of time rests with the publisher — the person in your organisation who is responsible for the site. They must make sure that enough staff and time are available for content production and maintenance. And they must have resources and processes to manage situations where publication timeframes are unavoidably short.

If publishers ignore this, users will ignore the content. Perhaps they will call or email your organisation instead. Some may go elsewhere. Those who struggle on will be frustrated or annoyed. Worse still, they may get the wrong message or make a mistake. Let’s hope it’s not a serious one.

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Poor publishing strategy in the public sector

Many of my clients are  public sector organisations. Most use content management systems and have staff from all over the organisation producing content. Publishing decisions are decentralised and there are rarely any strategic efforts to guide this activity.  So publishing goes on relatively unconstrained.

These websites are often enormous. Many have two or three times as many PDF documents as there are web pages.  Some are chock full of reports and assorted documents. Hundreds, or even thousands of them. Many are years and years old.  Often, they’re rarely read.  Other sites have a copy of every brochure the organisation has produced in the last few years.  Many brochures refer readers to ‘more information online’ when they’re already online and all they can find is the brochure they’ve just read.

In some cases, particularly universities, content is duplicated. Sometimes there are different versions of the same information.  A prospective student once told me about finding three different versions of course information on a university website and getting a fourth version when she called them to clarify the situation. She said she enrolled somewhere else as a result.

Reasons for publishing that need to be challenged

Over the years I’ve heard all sorts of reasons for publishing content online.

• It doesn’t cost us anything, so let’s put it online
• Someone might find it useful
• If anyone ever calls about it, we can tell them where to download it
• We don’t have much content on our part of the website, so lets put some of this stuff up
• We’ll be able to find it again if we put it on our section of the intranet
• If we just link to it, then we’ll have to keep checking that the link still works
• It’s not our core business, but we get telephone enquiries about it
• It’s one of the things we offer advice on, even if it’s not our core business (and despite having another part of the site dedicated to it)
• I spent a lot of time writing this, and I want it to go online

How many of these sound familiar to you? More often than not, these sorts of motivations should be questioned.

How to avoid publishing low value content

You can’t do it on your own

Most people who raise this problem with me try to deal with it on their own. They try to explain to the would-be publisher why it’s not a good idea to publish information that no one is likely to want. They try to explain that the website is not a filing cabinet, that the more you put on it, the harder it becomes to organise and find things. They plead, cajole and sometimes get frustrated and angry.  Sometimes it works. But a lot of the time it doesn’t. It’s tiring and will eventually wear you out.

Coordination is needed

Instead, organisations need a coordinated approach. A web publishing strategy or policy needs to guide decisions on when to publish and when not to. It needs to apply to every part of the organisation. Someone senior needs to support and champion this approach, and make sure it doesn’t get watered down over time.

There should be a publishing process that starts with asking questions about the business and end user benefits of publishing a piece of content. If you wanted to do a print run of brochures, you’d have to make a business case for it. The same should apply to web content.

How to get started

Different things will work in different organisations. Here are some key things to try.

Gather evidence

You could do a content audit and show how much content there is (often a shock in itself) and how much of it is under-used. You can get free tools to crawl your site and generate a list of pages. And you’ll need to get hold of your website usage statistics. Be careful that you’re not just highlighting old content. That’s a different problem that happens at the other end of the content lifecycle — lack of maintenance, removal and archiving of content.

Or you could start documenting poor publishing decisions and following them up by checking on usage statistics for that content.

Find a champion

If you have a web team, talk to them. Maybe they can help you push this agenda. If you have an online communications team, approach them.

Whoever you talk to it will be important to find someone senior in the organisation who cares about your website and can help you make the case for reigning in poor publishing decisions. You need someone articulate, someone with clout in the organisation and someone with stamina. Changing an organisation’s culture (which is what is really needed) takes time and persistence.

Get it included in an existing project

Are there any web or communications projects happening in your organisation? Are you doing a policy or style guide review? Is a new content management system being rolled out or are you making changes to the existing one? You might get some attention for this problem by raising it in the context of an existing project.

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I think the 5 Es can also be helpful for understanding content usability. And given the state of content on many websites, we can do with a little more understanding! So here’s my version of the 5 Es applied to content.

Effective

Effective content is:

• Relevant. It meets users information needs, answers their questions, helps them complete their tasks or meet their goals.  It is not fluff, happy talk, welcome messages or things people already know or don’t care about.
• Complete. There are no gaps or pieces missing. Users can get what they need from it.
• Clear and unambiguous. The message is communicated effectively. No risks are taken by trying to be cute or clever.
• Accurate and up-to-date.

Efficient

Efficient content is:

• Fast to find via navigation or search.
• Easy to read. It uses common, everyday words. It does not force users to look up dictionaries or glossaries or memorise acronyms or abbreviations. It uses short sentences. It avoids passive voice, weak verbs and double negatives.
• Concise.  It has been reviewed and edited, and non-essential words removed.
• Structured well. The important or most frequently used information is at the top. Related information is grouped together. It has a logical sequence.
• Designed for scan-reading. Headings, lists, tables and graphics make it easy for users to see what they’re looking for.

Engaging

Engaging content is:

• Presented well on screen. It looks clean and uncluttered rather than busy and dense.
• Neither too formal, nor too informal.
• Not afraid to use personal pronouns. It speaks to ‘you’ rather than ‘customers’, and it  is from ‘us’ rather than ‘the Department of Some Excruitiatingly Long Name’.

Error tolerant

Error tolerant content is:

• Clear and unambiguous. The content is unlikely to be misundertood by users.
• Accurate and up-to-date.

Easy to learn

Easy to learn content is:

• Written using familiar terms. Users do not have to struggle with jargon or words they are unfamiliar with.
• Structured and presented to aid comprehension.
• Supported by examples, images or illustrations where needed.

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One of the key issues is that so much of what gets published online is unnecessarily wordy. There are two problem areas  — wordy writing and content that isn’t of any real value, such as:

• Welcome messages — as though someone will be offended if we don’t welcome them every time they come to our website
• Instructions that don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know — ‘click on the links below to find the information you want’
• Introductions that state the obvious or repeat information that appears further down the page
• Background that people already know or don’t care much about.

An article in the current edition of The Atlantic suggests that people have moved to using online newspapers because the print versions are unnecessarily long. It includes some great examples. Although the analysis relates to journalism, there are lessons here for web writers too.

See: Cut this story, by Michael Kinsley

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Lack of knowledge around content production and accessibility

In my experience:

• many web writers have little understanding of web accessibility
• some have heard of ‘alt tags’ but few know how to write them or what they are for
• organisations are not aware of the impact writers and publishers can have on accessibility
• web writers rarely get training in web accessibility.

Content management systems do not prevent accessibility problems

Even within a tightly controlled environment such as a content management system, writers can affect compliance with the new guidelines. There are 19 WCAG 2.0  ‘success criteria’ that a site may fail if those who write the content are not trained in accessibility.

Make a resolution to address this issue in 2010

Do your organisation, writers and users a favour. Make a new year’s resolution to address this issue.  To help you get started, I’ve attached a presentation I gave on this topic at the OZeWAI conference in Melbourne a few weeks ago.  Let me know if you have any queries.  In the meantime …

Happy New Year!

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The words we use in page titles play a key role in search engine optimisation. Most search engines give them more weight than words elsewhere on the page. And given scan-reading behaviour, well-written page titles are more likely to be noticed by web users in a page of search results.

The trouble with page titles is that we don’t give them enough attention.

When WYSIWYG editors ruled, page titles were invisible

When WYSIWYG editors were the most popular publishing tools, many people didn’t even realise they had to write a page title. The title edit field was rarely displayed in the content editing area. Out of sight meant out of mind, and loads of web pages never got a title.

Google’s timeline option shows the problem increasing from the mid-90′s and easing after 2006.

Google timeline results for 'untitled document'

Content management systems help, but only a little

Content management systems help address this problem because they can write the page title for us. However they can introduce a new set of problems.

Many systems are set up to take the main heading (the H1) and use that as the page title. This is better than ‘untitled document’, but only just. Using only the main heading of the page, such as ‘contact us’, will not provide enough context in search results. Who is ‘us’ when users see a whole page of similar search results on Google?

Many pages may have the same page title, such as 'Contact us'

Some systems add the organisation name to the main heading. This gives some context, but for large organisations there may still be several  ‘contact us’ or ‘about us’ pages in search results: one for each business unit.

And that’s not the only problem with this approach.  The image below shows a page from the State Library of Western Australia. The page title — ‘Australia: State library of Western Australia’ — has been created by adding the organisation name to the main heading.

The page is about Australian family history resources, but that’s not at all obvious from the page title.

Australian family history resources, State Library of Western Australia

Content management systems can help writers by adding some text to the title field to get started with. But they should always allow the writer to edit it.

And now we’re overrun by untitled PDF, Word and Powerpoint documents

While the number of untitled web pages has dropped, the problem of untitled or poorly titled documents continues with PDF, Word and Powerpoint files.

Again, a key problem is that the title field is not visible when writers produce the content. However many writers are also unaware that the title will be used as the link text in search results, and that it is important for search engine optimisation.

Untitled Powerpoint slides in Google search results

Pay more attention to page titles

To fix this problem, we need to pay more attention to page titles.

Web writers need to understand their role and how to write them well — for all the documents they publish online, not just web pages. And website managers need to check how their content management system handles the creation of page titles. It’s OK to start with the main heading and organisation name, but it’s important to ensure that writers can edit this text.