Researching Subjects for Content Strategy

This chapter is from the book

Designing Connected Content: Plan and Model Digital Products for Today and Tomorrow

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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book 

Designing Connected Content: Plan and Model Digital Products for Today and Tomorrow

Learn More Buy

Getting Started

Desk research is a great way to start. That’s research from your desk, not researching desks. Unless of course your domain is furniture.

We bet you’re already pretty good at Googling for stuff. It’s a great way to soak yourself in the world of your subject. Vehicle maintenance, single-malt scotch whisky, pension planning—whatever your subject domain, there’s a ton of material online. Start with Wikipedia articles, and for bonus points try the Talk tab on any Wikipedia page to see experts debate the finer points of a topic. For more specialist information, see if your domain has a professional membership association, such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists. Those bodies make it their business to put out well-researched, authoritative information.

For an alternative to well-researched and authoritative information, visit discussion forums. That’s unfair—some of them are pretty good. It’s a chance to engage with experts and enthusiasts in their natural habitat. Forums and Facebook groups are where communities gather to discuss anything from skydiving to Beanie Babies. Read their conversations and see what conceptual objects emerge. Do they talk about equipment or techniques? Bible passages? Comic-book artists? Particular variants of the Android operating system? When people discuss a subject, they usually spend most of their time speaking about specific things or objects. Make a list of those things. Learn the shape of their world.

Becoming familiar with a topic helps you chart your territory. It gets you from not knowing what you don’t know to knowing what you don’t know. That’s a good place to be. It means you have questions about how the subject works. What connects to what? How is one thing different from another? Now is the time to reach out to the people who really do know what they’re talking about.

Ask the Experts

Subject-matter experts (SMEs) are everywhere. Remember that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the G-men visit Dr. Indiana Jones to get the lowdown on the Ark of the Covenant? Indy is an SME. Now that’s not to say all experts wear tweed jackets or lab coats. Many of them are much closer to home. They could even be your stakeholder or client.

What defines SMEs is their expertise in the subject domain. They might not know anything about app design, database tables, or content management systems, but by golly they’ve forgotten more about tropical fish keeping than you’ll ever know. You need to get that knowledge out of their head and down on paper. It’s the stuff designs are made of.

You’re going to interview some domain experts. They’ll tell you how the domain works. The most important concepts. The significant relationships. Any weird complexity that defies explanation. As the content specialist, you’ll later help demystify and prioritize these concepts for your audience. But to do that, you first need to understand them. Ready to get started?

Preparing for the Interview

First you’ll need to find appropriate interview subjects. Remember, you’re looking for people who know the ins and outs of the subject domain. They could be your client, though people with some objectivity may work better. We’ve found that the person signing the checks sometimes has a specific agenda that can lead to a warped picture.

Interviewees could be:

• Researchers. These people have experience in gathering market intelligence. They’ll have a good overview of the landscape.

• Individual contributors. If you want to get the bottom line on financial trading systems, ask financial traders. If you want to soak in the world of wine, talk to a sommelier. The folks on the front line have a more up-to-date understanding than anyone.

• Founders. Company founders know an awful lot. They’ve done a lot of background research to set up the company in the first place. They’ve ­studied the problem space—or in our case, the subject domain.

• External experts. Depending on the topic, some of the best authorities may lie outside your organization altogether. Who knows, maybe you do need a field trip to a dusty university to meet with a professor of archeology.

You’ll need to interview many kinds of experts to build a complete picture of the subject domain. Get permission to talk to everyone, especially if they’re not connected to your project. Ask your main client or stakeholder for a list of the best people to talk with. Make sure that approaching them isn’t going to cause political friction.

When putting the ask out, explain what you’re interested in learning from them. Explain that it’s to help with your digital content project, not to gather feature requests. When you start talking to people in any organization, pretty soon you’ll find folks with an axe to grind. They have been waiting for years for someone to ask about the website. And they have a mental list of all 97 things wrong with it. Politely explain that you’ll be happy to make a note of all 97. But this round of research is for learning about the subject. They’ll later get their chance to write a letter to Santa.

Prepare for each interview by doing desk research in advance. Get a sense of the subject so that you can drive the conversation. Gather questions about things you need them to explain. Decide how broad you’d like the conversation to go. Are you asking them to tell you all about astronomy as a whole, or are you focusing only on its observational branch?

You’re going in to learn. Although a little foreknowledge is great for giving you context, this isn’t the time to show off how much you know. Practice professional naiveté; pretend you don’t know and let them tell you. “Oh, I didn’t know that!” you’ll lie. “So does that mean that cubism is an art movement rather than an art style?” (even though you totally looked it up on Wikipedia beforehand). Experts may even offer conflicting advice. The world is messy, and knowledge isn’t clean. If what you hear contradicts what you understand, explore that further. You may find yourself uncovering diverse viewpoints that somehow need to be expressed in your product.

If you can, visit your SME where they’re most comfortable talking about their expertise. Phone calls and Skype are convenient, but nothing beats what researchers call “contextual inquiry.” Interview subjects tend to open up more if they’re on their own turf. They have all their contextual cues around them. They’re relying less on memory alone.

Conducting the Interview

Take along a few things to help you out:

• A reliable audio recording device

• Notepad, pencil, eraser, and sticky notes

• Printouts of anything that you want to ask more about

Schedule the interview for no more than one hour. Anything longer can be off-putting to the interviewee. You’re going to be pretty focused, and maintaining concentration beyond an hour is difficult. Budget your time carefully:

• Introduction (5 minutes). During the introduction, you explain who you are and why you’re there. Make sure they know that you’ve come to learn from their expertise.

• Set context (5 minutes). Here you’ll explain that you’re trying to understand the domain, which is why you’re asking super-specific questions. Ask also if they have any questions for you before you get started.

• Main interview (30 minutes). During this time, you get down to what you came for. Ask broad questions to get the interviewee’s overview of a topic; then dive into the details. It’s not every day someone gets asked for a complete braindump. Use your first few questions to get them into the flow. If your interviewee is struggling, lean on your preparatory research to ask some clarifying questions. For example, “I was doing some reading and got confused about the difference between a hurricane and a cyclone. Could you help me understand?” If they’re finding it hard to verbalize their answers, suggest that they try to draw it in whatever way makes sense to them.

  Listen for the concepts—the nouns—they reference. Make sure to capture these in your notes, and probe further about anything that’s unclear. To make the most of the interview, you want to come away with a list of the subject’s principal concepts and an understanding of how they connect.

• Clarify (13 minutes). Start your wrap-up by summarizing your conversation. Repeat back your understanding and correct any errors. If you’ve sketched out any visual representation of the domain, review it together.

• Thanks (2 minutes). Thank them for their time. Explain that their expertise helps make a better product. If they have a lot more to say, ask if you can schedule another session. Ask if they can recommend other experts to speak with and whether they’d make an introduction. If they turn out to be an awesome expert, ask if they’d be willing to take part in a workshop session later in the project (more about that in Chapter 5).

• The Columbo moment (5 minutes). Try to “end” the interview at least five minutes early. This gives time for something that will be familiar to fans of TV detective Columbo. The crumpled police lieutenant would interview a suspect. He’d then make as if to leave, before turning back with an ­innocent-but-crucial “oh, just one more thing . . ..” With your interview subject, it’ll be the other way around. As you pack up and head for the door, your interviewee will get a flash of inspiration. They’ll explain some crucial detail that would otherwise get missed. This doesn’t always happen, but expect the unexpected.

This should go without saying, but be on time and be courteous. These folks aren’t part of your project team. They don’t have to help you out, so be nice. Tell them you heard that they’re the expert in this subject (it always pays to butter them up). Tell them that you need their help in explaining things step by step:

FADE IN:

INT: Event planning office. Day.

Coffee-ringed papers litter every desk. A busy whiteboard
looms large, plastered with sticky notes and graffitied with
gridlines. Poster mock-ups peel from the walls. Phones ring in
the background, the soundtrack to perpetual urgency.

                              YOU
       Thanks so much for your time! My name is Carrie,
       and I’m working on content for the new IA Summit
       website. You’re chairing the event. I heard you
       know everything there is to know, so I was hoping
       to spend the next hour picking your brain. This
       isn’t the conversation where we talk about what
       should go on the website. This is just to help me
       understand how this event works so that I can plan
       the content. If it’s okay, I’d like to record the
       conversation so I don’t have to take quite so many
       notes.
       
       So please, tell me about the IA Summit.
       
                             EXPERT
       Sure. Gosh. Where to begin. Well, we’re currently
       planning next year’s event, which will be at the
       Hilton in Chicago. Right now, I’ve just signed one
       of our keynote speakers, which I’m pumped about.
       They’ve never spoken at the event before. Over
       there you’ll see Dalia, my co-chair. She’s chasing
       up some of our volunteers to help with promotion.
       It’s a busy time for us, as our call for papers
       has closed now. We need our reviewers to help
       select which talks and workshops and stuff go into
       each program track.

Whoa, let’s back up a second. Your expert has just thrown a bunch of useful information at you. But understandably, it’s weighted toward the things they’re thinking about right now, so it comes out a little jumbled. Still, it’s more than enough to start asking questions:

                               YOU
       You said next year’s event is in Chicago. Is there
       an IA Summit every year? Is it always in Chicago?

                             EXPERT
       Yes, there’s an event once every year. It’s always
       in a different city somewhere in North America.
       Last year we were at the Hyatt in Vancouver.

                              YOU
       So it’s always in a hotel? Does that make it
       easier to keep everyone together?

                             EXPERT
       Most always in a hotel, yes. It means they have
       conference facilities already set up. And rooms,
       of course. Wherever we hold the event, we always
       manage to get a discounted rate at a downtown
       hotel.

                              YOU
       I didn’t realize there was more than one co-chair!
       Are you all volunteers?

                             EXPERT
       Oh, no one gets paid—I wish we did! So we need
       a bunch of people helping out. There are three
       co-chairs—we are replaced every year. There’re
       also people like the curation manager and the
       experience director. And the people who review
       submissions. Last year I managed the review
       process, so I know how tricky that is.

                               YOU
       Okay, so there are some different roles filled
       each year. And sometimes the same person might
       have one role one year and a different role the
       following year?

                             EXPERT
       Yeah, they might even wear a few different hats
       for the same event—just depends on how many
       volunteers we get. Some previous attendees
       or speakers are now getting more involved in
       organizing.

Interesting. So now you know it’s an annual event, with a different location each year—usually in a hotel, because they need conference facilities and attendee accommodation. There are several roles associated with each event, and the same person might have one or more roles for a given event. Let’s keep going:

                               YOU
       You mentioned the reviewers were planning the
       program tracks. How does that work?

                             EXPERT
       Every conference has some sessions—talks, shorter
       talks, and hands-on stuff. Reviewers decide which
       session submissions make the cut. They plan out
       the main three days. Each day starts with a
       keynote, then splits into three tracks. Attendees
       choose whether they want to see more academic
       or practical talks. We all come together again
       at the end of the day for our happy hour. On
       Saturday night, we’ll have karaoke too, assuming
       we can get a sponsor. Oh, I forgot! Before the
       main conference, we have a couple of days of
       pre-conference workshops.

                               YOU
       Tell me more about the tracks. Can any kind of
       session go in any of the tracks? What about the
       keynote and the social events?

                             EXPERT
       Yes. We try to mix up different session formats
       in each track. The 5-minute lightning talks were
       popular last year, so we’re doing those again.
       For the keynotes and socials, everyone’s invited.
       It’s not just keynotes either. We’ve started doing
       things like morning yoga. But doing that extra
       stuff depends on sponsorship.

                               YOU
       Can a sponsor only sponsor a social session?

                             EXPERT
       We’ll gladly take their money for any kind of
       session! Often they sponsor specific social
       sessions, like the happy hour. But sometimes they
       just give money to the event generally...

As you chat, tease out information to give structure to your understanding of the domain. By asking clarifying questions, you expose the inherent logic and business rules. You’ll later express these through content and interface design. Keep digging into areas of complexity:

• Are speaker and keynote speaker two different roles?

• Can organizers also be speakers at the same event?

• If each conference is an “event,” what do you call the IA Summit as a whole?

• How are pre-conference workshops different from main conference sessions?

Your goal is to come out of the interview with a list of terms. You should understand what each of those terms means (TABLE 4.1) and how they fit together.

Table 4.1 Terms and Definitions

Soon you’ll use these concepts to construct an abstract model of the subject domain. We’ve found, though, that it’s often difficult to get people to think at this level. If interviewing alone isn’t getting you the answers you need, try using an exercise.

Conducting a Casual Card Sort

A card sort is a popular exercise for helping people categorize information. Take a set of index cards with you to the interview. On each, write down one concept from the subject domain (you may have gleaned these from previous interviews). Ask your interviewee to arrange the cards in a way that makes sense to them. This may be in piles of related things or by just placing related things close to each other. If they want to, let them create new cards, remove cards, or rename existing ones. As they go along, ask them to “think aloud” and explain their decision process. In truth, the cards themselves aren’t important. They’re just physical stimuli to help your participant think and talk aloud about the subject’s structure.

Sketching a Mental Model

Some people express themselves better visually rather than verbally. Take a drawing pad and some sticky notes to the interview. As you chat, start to jot down the concepts you hear, drawing lines to connect related concepts. You’re making a “mind map.” Show your interviewee what you’re doing. Have them help you sketch (FIGURE 4.2). Work together to draw a visual representation of the domain. In Chapter 5, we’ll develop this idea as you build a detailed domain model.

FIGURE 4.2 Collaborative sketching of a mental model.