Discovery of a content audit in Excel. A hypothetical how-to.
One of the first things a UX or content writer can do when they onboard is conduct an audit. Conducting audits can help you learn about the company in a shall we say, more intimate way. Conducting audits gives us a great way to learn the voice and tone of the company you’re working for, but also how they adhere to a style guide (AP, Chicago, a mishmash?).
Let’s go over how we may approach conducting a content audit from a strategic, UX perspective.
We’ll pretend we work for a fictional insurance company and want to conduct a general audit, as well as a specific discounts audit.
What we want to discover:
Overarching message category (payment, enrollment, activation, account settings, etc.)
What’s the purpose of the message, and how can we communicate it using the least amount of words possible? Brevity is key.
What action caused the message, for example: Account, User Action, User or Backend Error, etc.
Highest level content description
Examples are confirmation, action request, remediation, welcome, etc.
General level of messaging importance: high, medium, or low.
What we’ll audit:
Subject Line
Message Headline
Message Description
Action
Hierarchy
Character count
Succinctness
Reading Level
Accessibility Rating
Accessibility Notes
Clarity
Voice
Tone
Overall Quality
Strategic Recommendations
Message Headline
Message Description
Action
Hierarchy
Character count
Succinctness
Reading Level
Accessibility Rating
Accessibility Notes
Clarity
Voice
Tone
Overall Quality
Strategic Recommendations
Situational audit
This next section, we’ll work through a user experience discovery. Let’s imagine we’re tasked with finding out how long it will take to learn about a certain discount a user may want to know about.
Discovery of discounts
Questions to keep in mind
What terms do you use or look for?
What path/links/pages do you choose to discover this insurance offering?
Do you notice any promotion about this discount as you peruse the pages?
What path/links/pages do you choose to discover this insurance offering?
Do you notice any promotion about this discount as you peruse the pages?
What are the goals?
To see how a business will promote new offerings/content.
How easily are discounts made discoverable?
How to conduct a content audit
This type of audit requires you to dig into the user journey of discoverability. If we want to learn how long it takes for a user to discover a discount.
Work with design partners in Figma, Miro, or other collaborative software.
Map out the project roadmap.
Map out the customer journey.
Make updates based on feedback from several stakeholder sessions.
Iterate and reiterate based on the business and the customer’s needs. Find a middle ground that incorporates best practices, especially with accessibility and overall user experience in mind.
Create mock-ups of updated content. Send any update suggestions to user testing.
Continued iterations with partners based on findings.