Content Debt

How Putting Content on the Back Burner Impacts the User Experience.

Think about a library book you want to borrow. How easy it is to look up the book, to find it on the shelf, and take it home.

How easy it is to return it.

Now imagine you’re in the most disorganized library in the world. The online catalogue can’t tell you if the book is in the library or if it’s checked out. You walk in, and find cookbooks in the horror section, and sci-fi novels in the self-help area. The authors are not in alphabetical order, and the Dewey Decimal system seems to never have been invented.

Unfortunately, when it comes to how most companies manage their content, it looks a lot more like the book pile at a garage sale than the shelf at your local library. Yes, even very large corporations.

Debt, debt, and more debt.

Technical debt owes its origins to software developers who realized pretty fast that creating things quickly can be scrappy and yield great proof-of-concepts…but also leads to a lot of disorganization, confusion, and general trouble down the road.

The same thing happens with content debt.

The thing with content, technical, or plain old money debt is that after a while, it really slows you down and crushes your ability to reach your fullest potential. Because it often accumulates slowly — then all of a sudden very quickly — it’s easy to put it on the back-burner, not prioritized until it becomes a very BIG problem.

And it usually looks like…

An inability to grow

It takes a lot for a company to expand to new regions. People have to do a cost-benefit analysis, a team has to engage in competitive market research, and, well, a lot of other business words I don’t fully understand just yet.

What almost always comes last is the realization that your existing content needs to expand too. And what soon follows is that absolutely nobody knows where it all is.

Classic.

The process of organizing, sorting, and archiving content is often abandoned in favor of creating and curating new content. The problem is that the people who create new content may not have the skills needed to organize content for an upcoming launch or expansion.

What does this look like? Well, it’s a complete mess.

For one, the user experience for any new region is spotty. In the case of a global expansion, trying to find all your content is a pain, and you’re never really sure you have it all.

Maybe this manifests as people getting important messaging in the incorrect language. Or getting some messages and not others.

At the end of the day, it makes your users feel like they’re an afterthought, and that your experiences are not created with them in mind.

And they’re right.

Mixed messaging

In order for messaging to work, it needs to be owned by…someone. And I don’t mean 204 different someones across 32 verticals.

One function, preferably content strategy or content design, should be a key stakeholder if not maintainer of the content.

Why? Because similarly to the inability to scale, mixed messaging happens when content is disorganized. It’s how you end up with 17 different emails from the same company at the same time, which is an incredibly frustrating experience for users.

The thing is, many companies may not even know that it’s happening. Because each team handles sending its own emails (many of them automated), they may not realize how adding a new form of communication interacts with an existing one. At times, this leads to messages that actively contradict each other.

(Source: Canva)

Confused and unhappy customers

Obviously, getting a ton of mixed messages in the middle of your user experience can be frustrating. Which of course leads to confused and unhappy customers. The ultimate failure for a UX practitioner.

Setting ground rules about your content helps you keep your customers happy. But even more importantly, being organized helps you get ahead of very bad user experiences. Or at least, clean up after a bad experience.

There is nothing worse than having content so disorganized that you can’t tell when people have received messaging they shouldn’t have. It’s even worse when you don’t have the organization to respond in a timely and efficient manner.

Lost time, and doubled up effort

Disorganized content is expensive. Very expensive. People are being paid to create things that already exist, and redo things that have already been tried, failed, and tried again. Folks have to learn new workflows and dig through a CMS that someone else already figured out. It’s a complete waste of time.

And at the end of the day, it costs the company money in employee labor, and bad customer experiences.

“We’ll get to that later” is a phrase commonly heard when it comes to creating, editing, auditing, and maintaining content. There are always, it seems, much more pressing issues than figuring out what to do with existing content, where it goes, and who owns it. Engineering needs resourcing, we need to hire more designers, we have to train a new project manager.

But the consequences of content debt are ugly. They’re predictable, trackable, quantifiable, and fixable. Content debt needs to go.

And the faster we can get control of it, the faster we can move our organizations forward.