Digital

What we’re doing about content debt

October 22, 2015 by craigmilligan No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

This is a post by Kate Ho, our Head of Product.

Understanding content debt

In software development, there’s a term technical debt: it’s a metaphor used to describe the amount of work required to tidy up a system in order to keep the code clean. Cleaner code means it’s easier to make changes and updates.

Code debt becomes a problem as a system gets bigger and matures. For example, over time you’ll have parts of code which might have been written a long time ago (legacy code), and may not reflect the current requirements of the system.

Why does no one talk about content debt?

Doing a quick search on Google for technical debt throws up a lot of articles, but do the same for content debt, and you’ll see that it’s a hardly-used phrase with nowhere near the same popularity. With a big site like mygov.scot, we’re constantly adding more and more information about how to access information… but one of the biggest issues is how to make sure that we keep our information up to date and relevant.

Content debt can look like:

• broken links
• changes in policy, and not reflected in the information
• changes required as a result of user feedback
• inconsistent content across multiple pages
• badly designed/poorly linked content

Why is this important?

Having high quality, up to date information is key to a service like mygov.scot; without the most up to date information, or the most up to date links, then the user/public/citizen won’t be able to have trust and faith in the site.

Preventing a build-up of content debt

There won’t be a silver bullet when it comes to eliminating content debt: our approach will have to be part process and part tools.

In terms of process, we are working towards a robust content delivery process. Starting off with a discovery phase to map out complex user journeys composed of user needs, developed through a combination of sense-making workshops with multi-disciplinary teams of content designers, user experience designers and business analysts.

In addition, we have regular sessions triaging feedback from users and scheduling updates to address any issues which have been raised. Plus, having a peer review process as part of the team is our way of doing content testing.

In terms of tools, my main involvement in helping prevent content debt build-up, we’re starting to scope out and design tools to make content maintenance less painful.

Designing the Content Maintenance Tool

We’re currently working on a revamp of the Healthcheck tool, which will now be renamed the Content Maintenance tool (it does what it says on the tin).

There are 5 parts to the tool:

• Broken links – this shows all of the links out from our site which are currently being marked as unavailable. Our content designers can find the replacement link and change where this links points to here.
• Redirects – this shows all of the links out from our site which are currently being redirected. Often when the destination website has created their own redirect it will only take a content designer a moment to scan over the page before updating the link to match the new redirect.
• Items for review – this shows all of the content items which are marked for review. We have this option so that if we know something related to an article is likely to change at a particular date (e.g. a new tax year), then we mark it in the system so that it can be reviewed around that date.
• Feedback – this shows all of the feedback that we’ve received via the on-page feedback form at the bottom of all of our articles and guides.
• Watched content – this shows other web pages that we think are related to our content (e.g. GOV.UK pages) so that it notifies us when something changes. Our content designers can review the changes and decide whether to update that page’s content or not.

There are newer features to come which will help teams to maintain information across the whole website. Making sure that we log and talk about content debt is important as the volume of information on mygov.scot grows.

We’ll be sharing updates on this, and much more on social, so follow the team via @mygovscot on Twitter for more updates. Want to comment? Get in touch below!

Tags: content, Product

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