What moving houses taught me about content audits
The process behind my first content audit as a content design intern on the Shopify UX team
It was one week until the day that many of us know and fear — moving day. In just one week, I would lug all the stuff strewn around my room across town to a new neighborhood. It also happened that at this same time I was starting a new project, a big project, a project that felt similarly overwhelming to my impending move, my very first official content audit. *Insert sinister sound effect*.
I’m a content design intern on the Retail team at Shopify, so I focus on the part of our product that helps merchants sell in-person, whether that’s at brick and mortar stores or at pop-up shops. This content audit focused on the onboarding page for merchants which helps them get set up, from adding products to buying hardware. After reading this page, merchants should feel confident about using Shopify to sell in-person. The goal of the audit was to propose recommendations that would improve the page and make it even more useful for our merchants.
Little did I know, my move and my content audit would be so similar. They were so similar that most, if not all of the steps, directly paralleled each other. My move gave me useful perspective, direction, and a few tips along the way for completing my first content audit.
Pre-packing stress
When I moved, instead of immediately diving into packing I made a list. My list wasn’t just writing out everything I had to move, but instead it was:
- Assessment: What stuff do I want to move versus what will I donate?
- Approach: How will I organize packing everything up? What do I still need versus what can I pack away immediately?
- Logistics: How many trips will I need? How long will trips between the two houses be?
Creating this perspective for myself in my move helped me approach the first step of my content audit — making initial observations. I used the same question framework to guide my audit planning:
- Assessment: What content is currently on the page? What is it saying? In what order are users seeing this content? How many clicks does it take to navigate to this page and to the sub pages?
- Approach: What kind of audit am I going to perform? Do I want an outcome that is qualitative or quantitative? What is my goal and how am I going to get there?
- Logistics: How long do I want to spend auditing versus making recommendations? How am I going to schedule my week?
After answering all of these questions, and making observations along the way, I was ready to start evaluating the current content.
Packing
After making initial observations in the audit, it was time to identify the major problems with the current content. This step felt a lot like sitting down to pack up my stuff — instead of packing one t-shirt in every box, I decided to put all of my t-shirts in the same box and label it the t-shirt box.
When the time came to decide on which problems were the biggest, I realized my packing method would come in handy. I had a lot of specific observations that needed to be grouped together into larger problems. For example, one of my observations addressed how one line of text didn’t state the benefit to the user. On its own, this problem felt small, after all it only affected one line of text. Then, as I collected the rest of my observations, I realized that there were multiple cases where the text didn’t state the benefit to the user. Suddenly, the problem felt a lot bigger because it was a pattern within the product.
I continued to take similar specific problems from my observations and group them into like-problem categories. This made it easier to make recommendations that were more effective because it’s easier to figure out how to move a box of t-shirts than it is to move a messy pile of them. This was my way of packing each of my observations into their shared boxes.
Dropping the keys off and other important things
This next step in my audit was sorting the problems by how important they were to solve. In my move, I reached the point where everything was packed and I was ready to walk out the door, or so I thought. On one of my last days in my old house, I remembered that there were still some important steps I needed to cover before moving. Steps like cleaning my current place, getting the keys for my new place, and making sure the necessities like electricity and water were ready for when I moved.
All of these to-do items were important, but some definitely outranked others. For example, remembering to contact the gas provider for my new house was more important than forgetting to sweep one room in my old house.
The goal of my content audit was to propose recommendations that would improve the page, so I ranked the problems I wanted to solve in order of importance. To decide which problems were more important than others, I tried to figure out which problems had the largest impact on users and what the risk of solving them would be. I asked myself:
- How much risk is involved in solving this problem? Would a failed solution stop a user from being able to complete the task?
- What is the impact of implementing this solution? Will it greatly improve a user’s workflow?
These questions helped me rank problems so that those with the greatest impact and the least risk could be solved first. Doing this also determined the order the problems should be solved in so I wouldn’t run into a situation where I remembered to sweep but forgot to make sure my utilities were set up.
Moving in
I had already researched, sorted, and thought about my content audit for a couple weeks, so I expected recommendations to flow easily. Instead, I kept hitting roadblocks. The solutions I was coming up with were trying to solve too many problems at once. Then I remembered the biggest lesson I learned from my move — different problems require different approaches to solutions. Moving my bed was a lot different than moving my bike. Both seemed like they’d be similar — big items, each could be taken apart, and in past moves, I had used my car to move each of them — but after trying to stuff them both into my car, I realized they each needed a different approach. Moving my bed meant hiring a Task Rabbit to help because it was too big to fit in my car, while moving my bike ended up being a quick bike ride across town.
When I returned to my audit recommendations, I came up with solutions that were specifically tailored to the problem I was solving. For example, for the content-related problems, I proposed developing content standards specific to the page I was auditing. For design related solutions, I used rough mock-ups and images to convey my recommendation. This way, each of the fixes matched the problem.
Finishing touches
The final step in my move and in my content audit was to provide the finishing touches. For my move, that meant hanging up posters and choosing a spot for the houseplants — making the new house feel like home. For my audit, that meant collecting my findings and presenting them in a cohesive story, which made the findings more impactful. Both my move and my content audit taught me how to develop a strategy for projects with many moving parts (ha!).
Takeaways:
Make initial observations
- Assess what you’re working with, decide the order you want to approach the project in, and then create a timeline for yourself.
Identify and consolidate problems
- Group similar problems into larger categories so it’s easier to make recommendations.
Rank problems
- Determine the impact and risk of each problem and their potential solutions. Those with the largest impact and lowest risk are probably the most important to solve first, whereas the problems with low impact and high risk are less important to solve.
Make recommendations
- Different problems require different approaches, whether those are approaches to solving the problem or approaches to presenting the solution in a way that makes sense. Give each problem some dedicated thought space and time.
Present solutions
- Take a deep breath, the hard part is over. Now it’s just finding the right way to talk about all of the work you did.
A content audit is something that you can always return to and adjust as pages get updated. Once a recommendation is implemented, check back to see the impact of your solution. Ask yourself if the recommendation is performing how you thought it would, see if there’s any user research that informs how it’s being used, and try auditing the section again. There’s no harm in redecorating if something doesn’t fit.
Interested in interning on the Shopify UX team? The next application window will open in May for the Fall 2022 cohort. Find more information and sign up to stay updated at internships.shopify.com.
