Up until our last post, the New Web Estate project had been quite theoretical. We found ourselves speaking in the abstract about everything: “Once the governance is in place, it will be easier to manage everything” … “We will just fly that information into a page from a data list” … “The CMS will handle this content and take other content from that database”. And so on.
When it comes to implementation, the vision gets tested and you realise that what you want could look very different.
With governance, you find that organisational structures look great on paper, but trying to get consensus on them in reality is much tougher – especially where budgets are tight.
The technical implementation, during the theoretical stage, can be kicked down the road to the tune of, “That’s a job for the developers and the IT department.” In reality, the decades of technical debt built up at Sussex mean that shifting from theory to practice means a slew of spreadsheets and diagrams that incrementally move you all collectively towards the most granular and specific instructions needed to build a CMS.
Usability and design, as always, comes under scrutiny and trade-offs have to be made between what looks good technically, artistically and politically – as well as what works accessibly.
I recall saying some months ago, “We’re getting to the point where the rubber hits the road.” We’re now driving the thing and we’re having to live with it being a bit daunting, uncomfortable and uncertain at times. Informally, I’ve also referred to this time as “when push comes to shove”, “the doing phase”, “walking the walk” and “the sweary stage” of the project, depending on my mood.
Creating the conditions for this change, to try to change how people think about digital, has been a monumental effort. We’re now in the depths of design sprints with another agency (more to follow in another post) and, while we don’t know exactly what the road ahead looks like, we know the destination will be worth it and I wouldn’t trade the journey in for anything else right now.
In previous posts we’ve explored the concept of connected content, where your website content is broken down into the smallest units of information so it can be reassembled in a headless environment across different platforms.
Let’s now cover how we’ve understood the building blocks we need for a new CMS, looking at the key “products” of the organisation and moving through to more technical considerations that need covering fully in another post.
An organisation as a set of products
Most organisations are the sum of their products – for instance, an airline is the sum of the flights, package holidays and car hire add-ons that it offers, as well as supplementary products like seat upgrades, extra baggage and so on.
The idea of a university having “products” is probably toe-curling for some employees because, ideologically to some minds, education should not be commodity, but the reality is most of its activities come with a price attached, which people pay for.
These products form the basic “types” of content that will exist on our website, including:
courses
facilities, such as on-campus accommodation or venue hire
events
research activities, such as projects or business collaborations.
As discussed in the posts linked above, all types of content can be broken down into its smallest constituent parts. At Sussex, we’ve called each smallest part an “element”. For instance, in a course type, we could have a start-date element or a title element. We’ve also gone for an intermediate category called a “group”; a ranking (such as First in the world for Development Studies) would be an instance of the ranking group, comprising the ranking-name element, ranking-value element, plus others. These groups of elements within the CMS can be pulled into “components” – the visual manifestation of the content – and then appear across the website in some snazzy design.
The course content type has a lot of elements and some groups within it, and we spent a lot of time with Pickle Jar Communications plotting out what those elements would be. We’ve now refined the list down and you can see a snapshot of how that looks below.
Value-added content
After doing this with several key content types, we started to see some overlaps emerge. For example, the title element could be used on course, but also facility – the difference would be the instance of each title, such as title=biology-bsc or title=veg-bowl-cafe. These overlaps were numerous to the extent that, by the time we’d covered our main products, there weren’t many new elements to be discovered.
At this point, we examined the content we have that’s designed to add value, provide support or inspire users in some way. Rather than listing elements out exhaustively, with more general content such as careers advice it was a more exploratory process (see below).
Here we’re sketching out how this information could and should look as composable, connected content, to see if anything new comes up.
With this example, we realised some kind of earnings group would be useful. The benefit here is that earnings information could feasibly appear on an instance of the career type, such as becoming a civil engineer, as well as part of an instance of the course type, such as for engineering.
Technical considerations
This process has thrown up a range of technical thoughts, such as how forms would work in this model, how connected elements work on news items that need to stay the same after being published, or how Google would index sizeable amounts of content that appears across more than one page or location.
We’ve been adding these questions to a document and will revisit them as we go through the process.
Joining the dots but knowing where to stop
It is naive to think we can make all our content connected in this way, but we’re aiming to increase the proportion we do connect up quite significantly.
There is also a balance to be struck between what is useful to connect up, and what isn’t, as well as knowing what level of granularity to stop at. In a perfect world, would it be useful to break every single member of staff’s name down into first name and last name? And, if you could, is the website CMS the right place to be doing that?
Likewise, how many elements do you create? Is the body element enough to cover all body text? Would having elements for career-overview or study-skills be useful to classify on their own? Or would they just run as body text?
It’s worth remembering that any connected model would just be the beginning of the next phase. New types and elements can be added all the time. The art of this work is knowing where to leave gaps to explore later, to continue building a connected model in a sustainable way.
Aligning internal thinking
As you go through this process, you realise a lot of the work of connecting content is largely a matter of perception. One person’s element could be another person’s group, where they just run in several paragraphs and style some headings into one element. There’s a balance to be struck; make it too prescriptive or complicated and the model is hard to maintain, but make it too loose or informal and you risk new instances of body elements containing 2,000 words and a ton styling plus an instance of hero-pullquote acting as a title because an editor prefers the font.
This is where good governance comes into play, and where solid training and empathetic communication is essential. There’s no way a model like this could be sustained across 500 editors dipping in and out of a new CMS now and again. But equally it’s not realistic for an organisation like Sussex to centralise all website activity into a division-sized super-team. It hasn’t been for nothing that, alongside the practical aspects, I’ve been ruminating over feminine ethics, emergency resourcing parallels and the third space (makes me the life and soul of most parties) in a bid to help coalesce a group of people capable of maintaining and sustaining this model.
Plugging it all in
Back to the tangible reality of types, groups and elements – the next step will be building this connected model in a new CMS, with the help of an implementation agency.
By this point, we will have a clear picture of what those types, groups and elements look like (listed in a massive spreadsheet), as well as a good understanding of what we need to plug into this new content model – listed in several massive spreadsheets as a content audit.
We’ll share more about how we’ve audited the existing content of our website soon, as well as more about the new CMS.
I’ve recently been speaking to several colleagues across the University of Sussex to understand how creative work gets done. These conversations have clarified in my mind some of the challenges facing universities in general, particularly in the relationship between academia and professional services.
A flashback
In a former life, I worked at a daily newspaper. I began my career in advertising, before moving into planning and production, and then into editorial, ending up as a news reporter.
When I joined the newspaper in 2007, it was a newsroom of more than 300 people. It was a vast, intimidating setting with off-yellow lighting and a low artificial ceiling. It took some getting used to.
Straight down the middle of this open-plan office floor was the main walkway, indicated by a slightly darker shade of greige carpet from which narrower aisles of the same carpet branched off into various departmental clusters.
This central strip was not just a practical way to get office workers around the building. It was also a marker – a clear line between editorial and advertising, with sales teams and prepress on one side, and editorial features, sport, news and subbing on the other. In business terms, it was a cultural chasm.
My work in the prepress department was mostly building pages every day on a big screen, like a game of Tetris, dragging and dropping advertising into empty pages to either fill them up or leave a decent size and shape of page space for editorial production. I’d then cross the floor over to editorial to present them with the following morning’s flatplan on sheets of A3 paper. They’d pore over the space they’d been given, ties loosened, sleeves rolled up, tutting and sighing about “too much” or “not enough”, before I was sent back to my side of the office to fix it. The only thing missing was cigarette smoke hanging in the air, though if you closed your eyes you could still smell it. The glory days, eh?
I clearly couldn’t get enough of such feudal gaslighting because after a time I applied for a job as a trainee sub-editor. I vividly remember my first weeks in editorial. Coming into the office to sit on the other side for the whole day was the strangest feeling. One of the sales reps even said, “Don’t forget about us, Adrian”. (Don’t worry, Tina – I haven’t)
When I asked what he meant, he said, “In nearly 50 years, you’re only the second ever person I’ve known to cross the floor from advertising to editorial. And the first person was me.”
Put simply, crossing the floor was not the done thing. For some, I was a curiousity. For others, it was plain outrageous, though most were decent enough to keep that view to themselves. I enjoyed most of my time on both sides of the floor, but truthfully I never really felt I belonged fully on either side.
Entering the third space
Universities are not so different, except the expansive floor of the news room is replaced by offices for professional services staff, sometimes secured by key card access, and rabbit warrens of corridors of painted doors, usually shut, sometimes with an academic behind them. (You knock to find out if there’s someone inside and a muffled voice normally shouts, “Yes” and then you enter.)
When I became head of digital content at Sussex, I was keen to meet people from all quarters.
One senior academic, who also headed up an administrative function, described themselves as “inhabiting a third space”, where they were neither part of professional services nor felt fully accepted as an academic.
These people in universities, in the “third space”, are often your pro-vice-chancellor-types, committee members or steering group colleagues. They’ve nodded as I discuss the third space concept. Those nods can mean different things to different people, because of our own experiences and viewpoints.
The question (finally, if you’re still reading) is: what does the third space mean for a website?
My space or yours?
Running a website is not as straight-forward as having a section for academia and a section for university administration, with the two dancing around each other in some kind of awkward courting arrangement where neither will look the other in the eye.
Research pages, for instance, cannot exist purely for the thought-experiments of an academic in their corner. There are journals and blogs for that. Neither can such pages be a portal into the kinds of policies and case studies that are geared towards attracting an audience of 1 REF assessor and their dog, or a handful of policymakers or the merest synapse-beat of a wealthy donor.
They need to exist in a different space – a third space that speaks to a wider audience.
This isn’t just a research content issue. It applies equally to course marketing content, education materials and business collaboration efforts.
This can only happen through content that is devoid, even ambivalent, of internal structures, run by a digital service that is comfortable living in a third space.
Broadening the intersection
The third space cannot become a walled city of its own. It needs to welcome in, and work closely with, academics and administrators.
Over time, the vision has to be for people on both “sides” to get accustomed to the third space and for the culture to subtly shift enough for people to feel comfortable crossing the floor into it as often as they inhabit their spiritual home.
That means hot-desking in it, brain-storming in it and talking through complex user journeys over another pot of coffee. Whatever it takes.
If we do this slowly and surely enough, the intersection of the ven diagram between one side and the other side will get bigger, until we’re all inhabiting one space together.
Sometimes a project can crawl along at a slow rate and you wonder what you’re really achieving. Other times, you can take a massive step forward.
Earlier this month, we took a huge leap. The New Web Estate business case was approved by the executive of the University. After some delay (it was initially planned for approval last autumn) we have lift-off.
About 18 months ago we started planning this project, and since then this blog has documented the key steps we’ve taken towards getting the business case approved.
No time to waste
The celebrations didn’t last long. We gave ourselves a couple of days to savour the moment but we now have a year to deliver phase 1 of the project: a minimum viable product that will help Sussex market itself and compete with other universities in a tough higher sector.
I could go on about how all this work should have been approved years ago, but where will that get us? Sussex is now very much in the race. It’s a race against time to meet the business needs above, which are the enabler for the work, but clearly we must balance this with the diligence needed to deliver a great user experience.
When 2 become 1
The question is: can the two work together? Can business needs and user needs coexist in perfect harmony?
And do users care if they get a new product quickly in a minimum viable form? Or is it better to take longer to fully refine it?
There is a lot of change in the higher education sector, and we may need to move at the speed of a crisis while trying to be user-centered.
What now?
The dust has settled and we have a plan for the next steps, which include assembling a bigger team to do the job, procuring a new CMS and implementing a connected model of content.
Putting all our theory into practice will be the next challenge, while navigating the culture and sensitivities of a large institution. If we get it right, then the sky’s the limit.
After a solid 25 years of the internet as we know it, many website managers are finding it hard to keep their heads above water while managing information.
This is made more difficult when websites are based on how their organisation is structured internally – through its departments, offices and areas of activity. As the sprawl of noise grows, static sections with their own masses of HTML become harder to adapt.
It’s easy to see how, for a big organisation such as a university, this way of working can quickly get out of hand and result in duplicate internal work – and worse, duplicate content that misdirects users in their goals.
The reality is most big organisations with aging web estates are now in the same boat. Left unchecked, their content sprawl (or squall, to continue the analogy) threatens to overwhelm their vessel, like waves crashing over them at sea.
The most appealing way from a content team’s perspective is to centralise everything. This looks good on paper but raises a lot of questions around organisational culture.
Another way is to accept a devolved way of working – similar to how large, collegiate universities operate, such as Cambridge, which has millions of web pages and thousands of sections. To change this would mean fundamentally changing centuries of organisational culture (in Cambridge’s case, over 700 years’ worth). That’s basically impossible. But Cambridge is Cambridge; the commercial drivers for change are more pressing at Sussex and other slightly-less renowned institutions.
The connected approach
A third way, as covered previously on this blog, is to dispense with the notion of a website based on discrete pages. Instead, the author, Dana Rock of Pickle Jar Communications, argues that we can reimagine content as smaller building blocks that can connect together in a variety of ways, across various structures and platforms. The beauty here is that individual pages do not need to be owned by particular departments (but some content elements could be).
The challenge now is turning Pickle Jar’s theory into practice.
Take for instance a page of calendar dates. It can be a single solid page of information (such as “Calendar dates for 2024/2025”) or a series of connected smaller elements (such as “Teaching ends”, “Graduation”, etc) that can be curated to fit together within a web page, or across several web pages, or within an app, or on a screen in a reception area…
Ahead of knowing exactly which CMS we will use to do the job, we have already started sketching out details of how this could work. The image above crudely shows the example of term dates on the left of the image as content elements within a data list within a CMS, and on the right are a couple of examples of where those elements could appear within cells in a table on a term dates page or even as inline elements within body copy on a page about assessments.
Even going through these steps reveals pinch points and issues with the process, and flags questions around how such content would be edited, but it also reveals massive opportunities. If a date changes on a set of pages (see the example of “11 April 2025” in the image), it’s feasible for someone to be able to change this directly, without affecting the content around it. However, with the example of “Teaching ends”, you would need rigorous governance to avoid inline text becoming nonsensical quite quickly.
Managing connected content
Clearly a more centralised approach would be essential to making this work, but it wouldn’t need to be all-or-nothing, as previously discussed in a post about cultivating a network of editors.
We are some way off knowing exactly how the governance of this will pan out, but it’s a big departure from what we’ve been doing so far.
Whatever happens, we need to find a way to manage content systematically. And we’re not alone. Most organisations will either need to make peace with their existing content model and formalise it or find a new way. If they don’t do anything, they could find themselves in even choppier waters.
If a website isn’t made of paper, why does it have pages?
Traditionally websites have been built like books. The “page” has long been the basic unit of content. But while this made sense in the past, when early web developers were building the first sites, we now don’t need to be limited by this vestigial approach.
The current Sussex web estate shows many of the common challenges for large organisations whose devolved web content has grown organically over time. There are pockets of excellent content, but overall the journey for web users is often fragmented with key content duplicated, missing or hard to find.
Time for a rethink
The University approached Pickle Jar Communications at the end of 2023 for help with the New Web Estate project.
Pickle Jar Communications is a consultancy which has worked with the education sector for over 17 years, helping universities and schools around the world develop a more strategic approach to their digital content.
From the beginning of the project we could see both the considerable size of the challenge. But also an equally sizable potential: to transform the web estate so that it could rightly showcase and serve such a world-class institution.
We set about understanding Sussex’s strategic needs for the web, gathering audience insights and conducting an in-depth audit of the website. Working collaboratively with the project team, this analysis enabled us to outline a new, smarter approach for the content of a new web estate.
Structured content: what it is and why it’s useful
Moving away from “pages”, a structured approach to content is like building a website out of Lego blocks.
Content is broken down into “content elements”. These are the smallest unit of information, for example a person’s name or contact details. These elements are used to build slightly larger “content clusters”, such as a contact details box, or a larger “content type”, such as a staff profile. Content elements can be used in multiple places where they are useful.
Crucially, there is a single source of information for the content elements. Someone’s name changed? It can be updated in all the places it appears on the site.
Structured content is beneficial because it:
avoids duplication, reduces errors and improves efficiency by creating once and publishing everywhere with a single source of truth;
makes content more intelligible to machines, improving SEO and AI readability;
supports personalisation;
increases sustainability, as it reduces the wastage of duplicate content.
Structuring Sussex’s content
Across a series of workshops, Pickle Jar collaborated with stakeholders to define the key content types and elements that would be used on the new website. This is like gathering the bricks and creating a blueprint for the new architecture.
We also developed a new web taxonomy. The taxonomy is a series of tags which can be used across the web content to link together related pieces of content. For example, it would enable someone browsing a particular subject area to see news and events relating to that area.
No doubt you have seen a web taxonomy in action when you’ve been browsing on a website which offers you “similar items” or “related news” on a given topic. Based on audience insights, it can significantly improve the user experience.
What this means for a new website
Shifting to a structured approach to content is a significant undertaking. From my experience of working with different organisations, the Sussex web estate project team should be applauded for their tenacity and commitment. I’ve been wholeheartedly impressed by their drive to create a better user experience.
Hey there. It’s beginning to feel a lot like it’s common in big organisations for teams to compete for resource and attention to get the job done.
Why is this?
The reality of business and big organisations being historically male-dominated is well documented, and it’s only in recent years that many organisations have sought to address gender representation at senior levels and aim to close pay gaps between women and men.
Out of this male hegemony over business operations and strategy (which IMHO has influenced corporate structures, procedures and culture since the Second World War), we’re experiencing a distinctly male justice perspective on how we work.
You what, mate?
You might be surprised to realise you already know what a “male justice perspective” is. You’ve been living through it for most of your career.
In relation to workplaces, a masculine justice perspective emphasises individuality and independence in human relations.
This leads to the potential for conflict, which gets moderated by rules and procedures. These rules and procedures create a kind of “ethics” and the difference between “right” and “wrong”.
The masculine justice perspective means any dilemmas or disagreements must be resolved definitively, with the claims of the person “in the right” being protected by the rules and procedures.
This is how organisations have traditionally functioned for decades.
A feminine perspective – another way
For some time, researchers (according to leadership expert Peter Northouse) have questioned whether women talk about ethics and the needs of a group in a different way. Northouse cites an American researcher called Carol Gilligan, who spent a lot of time in the 1970, 80 and 90s probing the idea of a feminine ethic of care.
Gilligan (through her book, In A Different Voice) contributed to the idea that women may take a different view on ethics and justice, based on the way children develop. She puts forward the concept of a distinctly female ethical voice, based on the idea that girls follow a different developmental path to boys in relation to friendships and groups.
Gilligan suggests that children’s games are where boys and girls learn about rules and become socialised in their roles. You might agree if you’ve seen how some boys and girls behave in the playground at school*.
The ethic of care in the face of a justice viewpoint
What does this mean for the traditional justice perspective?
Whereas the masculine justice perspective emphasises individuality and independence, the feminine ethic of care relies on connection and interdependency between groups.
This means there are more likely to be positive interactions, as people view themselves as part of a network of relationships and emphasise the preservation of bonds in the network to resolve any issues so that everyone benefits.
“Ethics” in this scenario are reinforced when people care about others and encourage each other to engage rather than confront other individuals.
Of course, it doesn’t really work like this, precisely because of how organisations have functioned for decades.
Ethical perspectives and hierarchy
Given that organisations have been male-dominated for a long time, it’s no surprise they operate in a hierarchical way, which encourages and cultivates competition, from a masculine perspective.
From this perspective, hierarchy is not only desired but essential to the maintenance of a masculine ethical view of the organisation.
A feminine construct dismantles the hierarchy and views all people in the organisation as part of an inter-connected web, on whom they all depend.
What this means for a university website
Historically, as website editors are often based in schools or departments, it means they fall into a hierarchy. And by extension the justice perspective means there is competition for resource, agency and prestige.
We then enter an arms race, where different factions seek to acquire their own staff, and appoint them to the most senior role they can get away with, in order to go toe-to-toe with others who may seek to undermine their claim to the digital estate.
But what if we take a feminine perspective? What if we view this group of people not as separate individuals, working to the beat of their own line manager or departmental aims, but a combined group with a shared understanding? A group who naturally rely on each other for the betterment of themselves and the group?
Perhaps even the betterment of the university?
Or even [whispered] for the benefit of users?
Why this can work at Sussex
The good news is that Sussex is heading in the right direction in terms of women in more senior positions: women have been taking home 52% of the upper-mid pay quartile over the past three years, compared with men, and increasing their proportion of the take-home of top pay quartile earnings over the same three years, up from 40% in 2022, to 42% in 2023, to 45% in 2024**.
If quartiles mean nothing to you, in cash terms, the top quartile is something in the region of a £60K salary.
While it’s hard to be sure, especially as neither perspective is the exclusive preserve of men nor women, it’s conceivable that Sussex is primed to operate from a feminine ethical perspective, which in turn places a greater value on a combined network with shared benefits.
This can only be a good thing for website governance in the future and, by extension, our website users and their online experience.
On 12 June 2015 I was sat at my desk (yes, my own desk!) in the news room of The Argus – the daily regional newspaper covering the county of Sussex.
I was monitoring the police and fire logs for breaking news and at about 5.30pm two separate incidents appeared on the fire service log. Each just said “FDR1” – a fire that is a danger or risk to life. Both were in Brighton & Hove.
There had already been two FDR1s in the city that day. As the old adage goes, sometimes you wait ages for an FDR1 and then four turn up at once.
I found out Hove Engineerium was on fire at the same time as a shop in the North Laine area of Brighton. I was sent by my news desk to the Engineerium, where five crews from the fire service were already on the scene.
Afterwards, I learnt there were seven fire engines at the other fire. There were only six fire engines for the whole city, so naturally I wondered where the others had come from and, since they were all in Brighton, what would happen if the places they’d come from also had an FDR1?
I wasn’t one for press office spin, but what the fire service said actually made perfect sense.
Imagine a map of your local area laid before you, and imagine it is covered by a large net. Imagine each knot in the net is a resource that you need. Imagine grabbing the net with your hand and scrunching it up. As you gather the net, other knots will move closer to what you’ve scrunched up.
Now imagine the net covers the south-east of England. You get the idea. We saw this play out in July 2023, when part of the Royal Albion Hotel in Brighton went up in smoke, drawing in fire crews from as far away as London (pictured above).
Unknotting the net
If you’re still reading, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with the governance of a university website.
At the university, about 500 people currently edit the website, with more accessing forms and uploading news or events. Each main department or area has several people editing pages.
The (logical) argument for each team having several editors is that they need a back-up for the main editor, and a back-up for the back-up, etc.
With turnover, training back-ups for hundreds of people and keeping that knowledge up-to-date, it’s a never-ending job, with no tangible benefit for users.
Thankfully, the vast majority of our digital content is not a danger or risk to life, so it doesn’t need to be this way.
It’s entirely possible that a more specialist group of editors could be part of a larger net that gets pulled, as needed, on to priority work. Why not have fewer editors but with more expert knowledge of the subject area and the right level of skills? If they’re busy, they can draw on the network for help. If they have capacity, they can get pulled on to other projects where they can do their best work. And if they’re sick or on holiday, the wider network covers for them.
We’ve been thinking about the idea that this kind of network could mean the whole organisation is resourced efficiently, yet has access to the right skills to produce great content. We have a long way to go and there is more to do to prove that, actually, by taking this approach the University won’t burn down in an emergency.
We’ve had a series of engagement meetings about who is going to control information in a new web estate and how we manage that.
It involved a lot of notetaking, scribbling and imagining. It was enlightening and, fingers crossed, it’s also been encouraging. There’s a real collective desire to improve our content processes.
Historically, pretty much anyone could gain editing access to the Sussex website. It was just the way things are done.
But now we need to rethink our governance model and ways of managing information. We need fewer editors with better skills and clearer responsibilities, rather than 500 people editing their own small section once in a while.
One clear way to do this is by centralising more of our website management, so we have better governance. But this is not a palatable concept, because it’s absolutely about control of content.
A case study – the Student Hub
We’ve tried centralising in the past and it’s been very difficult, partly because you’re trying to instigate a cultural change and partly because of the “uniqueness” of Sussex.
The Student Hub (a project started in 2018) was partly successful in centralising website content for current students, rending it from the internal structures to which it was hitherto inextricably linked.
We tried bringing everyone along, explaining the purpose of what we were doing and why.
Over time, it became clear that the only way we were going to truly finish populating the student sub-domain, and centralising the governance of this content along the way, was by stealth. Through the back door. There were a lot of emotions tied up with the content we were trying to migrate.
The Student Hub project is now more or less done (more or less informally, because the budget was about 50 quid’s worth of vouchers for some user testing and some digestive biscuits from Asda). There’s always more we can do, but that will now be part of the New Web Estate project.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, the drive from senior people to complete the work had evaporated, because of other priorities.
Yet neither had we been told to stop. So we kept on going until the job was done. In the end, we deployed the last sections without sign-off just to get it over the line.
We did win, kind-of. But really the question is: Did users win?
Did students win? Did they get all their information in one place?
Our work was at the expense of some internal relationships. We had not won together.
A second chance
This time round, as part of the NWE project, it will be different.
We will win together – and not just as a department, or a division, or as a collective of professional service staff.
We will win as a university, across professional services and academia, across the third space, across our student body, across our wider community, across all site users.
And we’ll do it through more engagement meetings, more discussions about control and autonomy, more debates about academic freedom and more relationships with people we didn’t get close enough to the first time round.
I can say this with certainty because, this time round, if we don’t win together, we will definitely lose together.
Sometimes (but not often) people ask me: What’s the difference between a digital team and a communications or marketing team?
(Sometimes people also confuse digital teams with IT, but let’s not open that box right now…)
It’s true that both digital teams and comms or marketing teams create content or produce information – in some cases out of very little raw material.
But where a digital team differs is in its bird’s-eye view of the wider digital estate of an organisation – both owned (website) and “rented” (social media, other portals, etc).
In taking this view, it notices something profound about humans: we tend to favour action over inaction.
Introducing action bias
Action bias, as it’s called by some academics and experts, is a psychological instinct to “do something” rather than “do nothing”. It’s natural and it happens all the time in most walks of life – even when there’s no evidence to suggest that action is the best course to take.
Action bias pervades decision-making in many organisations. It favours the creation of new information, deluging our audiences and drowning out the important stuff that users need to see, read or do in their lives.
In the world of communications and marketing, it is the essence of the profession. But for digital content teams, this bias towards action can be debilitating. It means the constant creation of more noise, marketing messages, news, guides, explainers, FAQs, policies and other “resources”.
For any big website, such as those run by universities or public authorities, prioritising creation over maintenance or deletion only leads to one outcome: a terrible user experience.
How to stop action bias
How do you stop people having action bias?
That’s such a great question and thank you for asking.
I’ve been asking myself the same questions over the past few years: How can we, as a team, avoid this from happening? How can we persuade others in our organisation to interogate the problems before jumping to the creative stage?
Let’s talk about it – looking ahead to ContentEd
It was playing on my mind so much that I pitched a talk about it to ContentEd, a conference for content professionals in the education sector.
My talk is for you if you’ve ever despaired of the ideas of others or the volume of information on the internet – whether you’re a creator, commissioner or manager of content, or a leader of people.
There’ll be loads of other great speakers as well.
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