Content Migration Alone Is Not An Effective Content Strategy

What “Lift & Shift” Is, Why It Happens, and Why It Is Not Effective

Migration of content (also known as “lift & shift”) occurs when content is merely moved from the current intranet over to the new design without any thoughtful editing, reorganizing, archiving, or deleting. Yes, this seems pretty lazy, but before you brand the “lift & shifters” as apathetic, know that many people tasked with an intranet redesign are no way slothful but are rather stymied by implementing an effective content strategy. Redesigning an intranet is a daunting task; and removing, moving, and editing content can be one of the most frightening responsibilities. Besides, there are plenty of other activities outside of entangling with content that designers can justify busying themselves with, such as: following the suggestions of vocal and powerful teams who express their content vision, deriving a feature set, or concentrating on branding and visual look.

But untouched content goes stale, so the likelihood that the current content is perfect and should remain unchanged is very low. If the intranet UI and branding are redesigned, the content will need at least the same attention, and probably much more.

In fact, winners of the 2015 Intranet Design Annual conducted thorough content inventories and audits to improve content assets before including them in the new intranet design. Verizon, for example, eliminated 50% of its HR content by removing redundant, outdated, and trivial information and consolidated the rest where needed.

Consider Content Evaluation to Be an Opportunity, Not a Punishment

Imagine you are designing a new intranet, but you don’t know how many topics or pages you have, there is no user or analytics data, and no feedback whatsoever about how effective your content is. In this situation it would be pretty easy to sink into an abyss of despair. But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Alicia Backlund, Product Strategist at Level Five Solutions, a Kansas-based web strategy and design firm. (Backlund was previously Intranet Operations Manager for the winning Intranet team from Sprint—a nationwide telecommunications company, bringing wireless products and services to 55 million customers.) Instead, she suggests changing your perspective to contemplate the redesign as a positive prospect.

“Chances are, you have quite a bit of content out there that nobody—user or owner—has looked at in a long time. It happens to everyone,” she says. “An intranet redesign is the perfect reason and opportunity to take a good, hard look at your content and move only what makes sense to move.”

Backlund shares this opportunistic attitude with another winning intranet designer, Kunaal Kapoor. Kapoor is VP of Business Development and Client Partnerships at the US and UK-based SharePoint and UX consulting firm, BrightStarr; and he worked on the intranet for ConocoPhillips, the world’s largest independent exploration and production company.

Kapoor describes it like this, “Content inventory gives you that opportunity to design for the future. Look at the opportunity. Ideology needs to be the first and foremost step for any redesign.” He adds, “I think creating that culture is more critical than using any particular tool.”

Two award-winning intranet designers: (left) Alicia Backlund, Product Strategist at Level Five Solutions; (right) Kunaal Kapoor, VP of Business Development and Client Partnerships at BrightStarr.

Understand Employees to Empower Them

How do you figure out which content to edit, move, and remove? First, don’t skimp on the user research and communicating the information about users to the whole intranet team. Both designers suggest starting with truly understanding what employees need, want, and do. “I think the success of the ConocoPhillips intranet was mostly because the users were familiar to the design team,” says Kapoor. “And the end users were expressed and represented in personas or stories. That there was enough representation of the end users is what made the intranet such a success. The company made the effort not to focus mostly on technology. The intranet was more user centric rather than technology centric.”

He continues, “From a content inventory standpoint, what is critical is understanding what people do, and talking to content authors,” says Kapoor. Looking for commonalities among the users and for repetitive tasks can be informative and drive content choices, too. He continues, “If some content is common between people and cyclical—like content they deal with monthly, like an expense report—it helps to create a template, identify forms, combine some into one, and make them searchable so they can be located very quickly.”

Backlund agrees that knowing what employees want and need is the bedrock of a great intranet. “Employers have good reasons for wanting to communicate certain messages to their employees, and employees have equally important reasons to continually try to cut through the noise and focus on only those things they have to know to get their job done,” she says. “That's where good, solid usability fundamentals come into play. If it's important to the users, migrate it, of course. And if it's important to the company, ditto.”

Usability testing, ethnographic studies, and even surveys can help you learn about your users.

Determine Which Pages Were Not Visited and Why

Like many good intranet designers, Backlund proposes that page traffic is a good barometer to determine content’s importance. “There are some pretty obvious ways to start the decision-making process about what to move— for example, page traffic,” she says. “A page that has only been viewed by .0005 percent of your user base (and half of that was probably you, figuring out what the heck the page said in the first place) is a clear candidate for some special attention.”

Backlund cautions that analytics cannot be considered in a vacuum. “Be careful. Numbers don't always tell the whole story. Maybe the traffic is low because the page is difficult to find. Maybe a high-traffic page isn't actually answering the questions of all those users who are hitting it.”

There are usually two main reasons why content isn’t accessed: 1) it is not helpful, and 2) it is difficult to discover in the menus, search results, or on pages. Kapoor says that “making sure users are able to get to the content easily using search or the navigation or icons” is obligatory.

Analyze the following items to improve findability or discoverability of content:

• Metadata for the content
• Name and position of the link, menu item, or search results leading to the content
• Related links and in-line links

Backlund urges to couple page-visit data with user research: “The only way to know for sure [what the data means] is to really, truly know your users and their goals, and the only way to do that is through ongoing efforts. The better you get to know your users through regular conversations, testing, and feedback, the more confident you'll be about what content means the most to them.”

Consider Pages Visited for Just Very Short Periods

For pages people usually visited for just a moment, consider why this might be happening. Understand whether:

• Employees realize they are in the right place.
• The information is helpful and accurate.
• The page is actually successful after seconds of an interaction. (For example, users are usually looking for a phone number on the page, and they see it right away at the top of the page.)

Some common offenders to look for, understand, and amend:

• Page title should be visible and descriptive, and should match the terms used in the links to that page.
• Headings and subheadings should also be visible and descriptive.
• Information above the fold should be helpful, interesting, should match the pages title, and have good information scent.
• Graphics must be relevant and interesting.  Stock art or unrelated images may repel employees.
• Language should be understandable, devoid of jargon. (You can however use terms that are part of your organization’s culture, but be aware that not all employees know all of the buzzwords.)

Evaluate Content Attributes

You may be tempted to take a shortcut and delete content randomly, banking on the notion that employees who miss something will complain to you. This is a risky game to play (though some would argue is better than leaving outdated content on the intranet). Better is to look at particular criteria for deciding which content to remove.

Consider the following 5 attributes as a guide, and to provide a safety net for archived content.

Content-Attributes Guide Based on Criteria

1. Accuracy: Is it true? Is it correct? Is it the most recent information?
2. Freshness (age): When was it created? When was it edited last?
3. Uniqueness: Does the same or similar content exist somewhere else on the intranet, or housed in another enterprise app?
4. Importance to employee: Is there a need for it? Does it impact employees’ work or job satisfaction?
5. Importance to employer: Does management want employees to have this information?

For your content to be useful, consider archiving or removing pages that suffer from the following failures:

• Not viewed by anybody (depending on the type of content, in the last 30 to 60 days)
• Not used, not downloaded if downloadable
• No owner
• Not updated recently (depending on the type of content, in the last few months. In this case, contact the owners and ask if they want to keep the pages)

Archive Content, but Secure a Safety Net

Once you determine that content isn’t effective, take the leap to archive it while securing a safety net. For example, Kapoor describes a process they applied for the ConocoPhillips intranet, “We implemented some analytics around search, and it was reported when information was not found because it had been archived. Since the information was relevant after all, we made it available.” But in most cases, archiving was the right move, says Kapoor. “Most of the archived content stayed there. For a couple examples it did happen when certain content wasn’t used for months but then people needed it. That content needed representation and was then included.”

Of course, users who search and do not find content that had been archived have a negative experience, whose impact we cannot quantify. However, Kapoor says that this is the lesser of the two evils. “I think it is quite frequent that clients are concerned about archiving content,” he said. But if you are taking an educated guess, it is worth the risk in most cases to hide the questionable content. Kapoor says, “It’s easier on the end user if the design hides irrelevant information. It’s easier to put it back after than to give all the info to the user.”

An important piece of the safety net is ensuring that the intranet-teams’ contact information is visible and available. Thus, in the event particular content is missing, employees can quickly report the problem through an immediate, proactive channel.

Implement Methods for Keeping Effective Content

With multiple intranets, collaboration spaces, team spaces, and project areas, intranet content can become unwieldy quickly. What starts as a really good idea—giving everyone a way to create a place for their teams to share and converse—can end in one more unindexed, metadata-poor page, not included in the search or navigation. Kapoor says, “Governance—creating a model of who owns what, in terms of support and training—is all critical.”

Implement systems for keeping content fresh. These should be regular, planned activities, systematic processes, and inductive forms in your content management system. Below are some ideas in these areas.

Activities

• Set up analytics to track page edits and visits. Automate checks to identify stale content and take action, such as contacting the owners, archiving it, or removing it.
• Compile sets of content that are known to be needed and important, and plan a strategy to give these higher visibility. You can elevate these items in search results, include them in the global navigation, and include links to related content. (In the short-term, these may need to be hard coded on the SERP for specific queries—for example with “best bets”—and other key places in the menu, and as related links.)
• Create a governance model that supports categorization and tagging at the time of content creation.
• Provide training and support for creating new content.

CMS and Intranet Features

• Automatically date all content: when it was created, when it was last updated.
• Enable employee “content rating” (stars or other scales) and comments on all pages. Review, analyze, look for trends, and address the issues; pass the findings to the content owners.
• Display the content owner—name, face, and contact information—on all pages. Benefits of doing this include:
  • Solidify the owner’s responsibility for tracking and updating the content.
  • Enable other employees to give feedback to the right person.
  • Impose a bit of social pressure to the owner to keep the information accurate and helpful. (If the “content owner” is not truly vested in the content, you may also want to display the information for an intranet team member.)
• If there is no known owner, display contact information for a person on the intranet team to put content back up if it was erroneously removed.
• In the CMS, at the creation phase, suggest (or force) tagging and categorization of all content. Explain to the owner that the content will be easier to find when there is thorough metadata associated with it.
• At creation, suggest (or enforce) that the owner research whether the content already exists on the intranet. If it does, reconcile the duplication. At the very least, crosslink between the two topics.

Backlund stresses the importance of publishing a particular piece of information in one place, but linking to it from other applicable places. She explains “One of the most difficult things about intranets is that, unlike the web, there is often only one source of the right answer to a question—one HR document detailing this year's holidays, one process for escalating customer complaints. So that one source has to be both accurate and findable. Multiple copies of the same information are fraught with opportunity for conflicting information. But linking in only one area adds to the risk that the user won't find an answer at all. So, make sure you have a single source of record, but place links in context so that your users (and hopefully, your intranet's search engine) can find it in all the right places.”

Consult an Expert If You Need to

If the spider of your intranet’s pages feels more like a tarantula, it may help to turn to a practiced professional, says Kapoor. “A lot of times, when it comes to building intranets, content inventory plays a critical part. What we recommend is to engage with a partner or people who have done a content inventory several times. And when working with a partner, work collaboratively.”

Summary

The most engaging intranets have content that is fresh, accurate, and supportive. To get there, systematically decide which content belongs on the intranet, and implement plans to keep it up-to-date. Don’t look for a magic formula or the perfect tool to make the content inventory, audit, and decisions successful or painless. Rather, follow Backlund and Kapoor’s suggestion to keep a positive perspective to carry you through.

Kapoor says a mistake that a lot of organizations make is that "they consider a new intranet design to be a migration rather than fixing the issues [such as] duplication, or noise.” He advises you to "look at it as an opportunity, creating new version, and new UX design to make information on the intranet more relevant.”

Backlund counsels, “If at all possible, take a minute to ask yourself, ‘Is the content as concise, objective, and scannable as it can possibly be? Can we take 5 minutes and make some serious improvements?’ And if you can, do it!”

Instead of fearing or dreading content evaluation, look at it as your ultimate opportunity to make things right. And if you start to waiver and steer toward “lift & shift”, pivot your viewpoint to “uplift” instead.

For more advice from winning designers, or to get a closer look at this year’s 10 winning intranets, purchase this year’s Intranet Design Annual report.