Session Title
10 Minute Content Inventory
Presenter
Don Bruns, Zaum Interactive
Session Type: Demo
The content inventory is probably the most dreaded, mind-numbing, soul-sucking task that any user experience professional ever has to endure. I developed the 10 Minute Content Inventory to help take some of the pain out of creating content inventories.
The 10 Minute Content Inventory is a semi-automated process that includes a combination of site spidering, screen-scraping, and macros to automate some of the more mundane tasks associated with creating a content inventory document.
This helps free up the UX professional to spend more time performing actual content analysis, instead of spending days compiling and QA-ing a giant spreadsheet.
Although the process may sound a little daunting, I’ve trained some very non-technical UX professionals to use this process. If you pick me to speak at the conference, I’ll share all of my code and toolkits with the conference participants.
Biography
Don Bruns is the Director of User Experience for Zaum Interactive. As a consultant in the digital realm for over 14 years, he brings his experience in solving complex business challenges through innovative web-based solutions.
Don comes to Zaum from Razorfish where he served as Associate Director of User Experience, responsible for leading engagements for clients such as Pershing, Novartis, PCMag, and KPMG. In 2007, he was the User Experience Lead on the redesign of USA.gov, the official portal of the U.S. federal government and the winner of several awards, including Time Magazine’s list of “25 Websites We Can’t Live Without.”
As a passionate and seasoned web professional, Don is frequently asked to speak at industry events on topics of information architecture, metadata strategy, and enterprise content management. Offline passions include volunteering with a Siberian Husky rescue group, where he has personally fostered and found homes for 7 dogs.
4 Comments
You can see a 2-minute overview of this presentation at http://donbruns.net/ixda/10minute.html
A faster way to glean much-needed insight that isn’t just about skipping this step and happily filing content under “Ignorance is Bliss”? Awesome–can’t wait!
Mind-numbing is right, and a way to get around it would be welcome. Before I could decide whether to attend or comment favorably, I’d need to know whether it could be used on a Mac.
Elizabeth, that’s an interesting question. Not being a Mac person myself, I never thought about that.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe the makers of Xenu offer a Mac version. Although I’m sure there are similar spidering products for the Mac that you could use. But everything else would work on the Mac. The screen scraper is web based, and Excel is available for Mac.
I guess the important takeaway idea is that the 10 Minute Content Inventory doesn’t revolve around a single technology. It’s more of an approach to performing content inventories. Depending on the situation, you might use one facet of it, but not another. e.g., You might use the scraping, but not the spidering. Or vice versa.