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Content Research

Summary

User Research, also known as Content Inventory is the process of listing all the content (existing or to be created) of a website. The goals of such inventory are to gain better understanding of the website’s topic and see how different pieces of information relate to each others and to users within the website.

What information to collect[1]

  • Link name : the label used to name the page in the website’s navigation
  • Page name : the main heading on the page
  • Page URL : the complete URL of the page
  • Content type : whether it’s a blog post, a FAQ, a product, …
  • Resources : resources linked from the page such as PDFs, Word Documents, images and figures, videos, …
  • Status : whether or not the page is up-to-date
  • Update date : date of the last update of the page
  • Owner : who owns/created the page

Content Inventory Generation

On large websites, generating such a list manually could take a long time. Luckily there are tools available to automate this process, such as:

It is important for the Content Inventory to reflect the relationships and hierarchy between different pages of a website.

  1. A Practical Guide to Information Architecture, by Donna Spencer