Chunking Content – Part 1

I recently was in the process of helping out a fellow SP colleague with a SP wiki. In one of her articles she went into depth about the benefits and ease of editing a SP wiki. Another respected colleague disagreed about some of the benefits and posed some in-depth responses regarding the ease of edit and co-authoring. It got me thinking back to my technical writing training. Originally, when I first began working in my current position I knew coding fairly well, mostly the back end stuff at least. I was just starting to learn some of the front end writing techniques.
My company put me through much training at that time which related to how to organize content through mapping and chunking.

Challenges of Creating Content

Creating content so users can easily find it is one of the biggest challenges, especially web-based. Reasons for this are:

• The wall of text
• Hard to read
• They get lost in cyberspace
• Data is organized in a confusing way

Challenges the authors face with creating the content include

• Organizing and presenting content for reading on screen
• Understanding technology constraints or limits
• Helping users understand
  • Where they are relative to the content
  • How to move around, navigate

The benefits of chunking content are:

• Quicker and easier to access – Users can find the information they need an average of 20-40% faster than unmapped content
• Improved clarity, reduction in errors – Users make fewer errors because the content is clear, easy to understand, complete and correct
• Visible organization – Users understand how the author has chunked the content, since logic of the organization and structure is apparent and consistent
• Completeness – mapping content exposes gaps in information and facilitates producing an accurate, useful and complete deliverable.
• Faster learning – new information is learned more quickly, therefore reducing time.
• Simplified writing approach – This provides a standard for new writes. Allows them to hit the ground running.
• Greater efficiency – writer training in this method report improvement of 10-30%. Over 95% trained in these writing techniques spend less time debating where and how to start.
• Improved analysis – The analytical approach determines what should and should not be included in the content making it easier to spot gaps or inconsistencies.
• Better organization – using organization and presentation principals we can make better decisions on how to organize and structure content.
• Easier update – Modular units of text are updated more easily than traditional writing
• Reuseable content – Modular units are easily reused in multiple locations within a document set, curriculum or web site.
  • Example: the use of XML or HTML a modular unit can be written once and displayed many times and in different ways depending on the context or medium.
• Quality control
  • Increased quality of work
  • Reduce training time
  • Increase productivity
• Cost containment
  • Improved effectiveness
  • Quick to production
• Knowledge management
  • This unique structure provides the ideal basis for designing and structuring information repositories
  • Efficient use of assets – chunked data is easier to find, use, reuse or modify when necessary

When writing content there are several factors to keep in mind.

• Purpose – what is the root purpose of the content?
• Audience –
  • What does the audience already know? (What not to include)
  • What does the audience need to learn? (What to include)
• Existing materials – what exists, if any?
• Subject Matter Experts -
  • Have they been identified?
  • Will they be available when writing takes place?
• Compliance – Are there any legal requirements?
• Technology analysis – What (tools) do you need consider in a web-based deliverable?

Tools

Display tools – is the audience accessing and viewing the content

• in a browser (type and version)?
• In an on-line reader (adobe PDF)?
• Cell-phone display window
• on a smart phone or portable device?

Audience tools – does the user have hardware/software needed?

• Access to view content?
• ability to play audio or video?
• Browser version/type?
• Required plug-ins for viewing or listening

Content development tools

• How are we required to develop the content?
  • MS Word
  • HTML
  • SGML or XML
  • Multimedia authoring tool
  • Graphics or animation
  • Help file authoring (RoboHelp)
  • SharePoint Wiki

Content conversion – is it required that content be converted to another media type?

• HTML
• PDF
• XML files
• Help files

Content management – Who?

• uploads files
• updates files
• eliminates out of date files
• Content owner, authorizes read or write access for content updates

Today I briefly reviewed the highlights and benefits of chunking content. Also touched on the difficulties for readers and authors when compiling the content. Once we understand the principals of chunking content, the users and the media type output we will save time developing the content. Users save time finding what they need. Development of the content becomes repeatable and reusable. In Part 2 I will describe the “Information Types” and their detail. Also we’ll discuss the Maps and Blocks, which make up Information Types.

excerpts taken from Information Mapping v2

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