Hey folks!

This is my inaugural post of my blog, so I’d like to start out by introducing myself and briefly explaining the point of my blog.

First, about me:

• I’m a writer, editor, and documentation manager with over 20 years of experience in journalism and technical communications.
• I’ve been a magazine editor, a library database administrator, a terminologist, and a lead editor of a major internet news site.
• The bulk of my experience is in managing writers and editors of online Help, developer reference, and IT Pro documentation for major software companies, namely Seattle-based Microsoft and Vertafore.
• My specific expertise is in content strategy for web sites and online content, and managing large-scale content projects.
• I also have experience in information architecture, user experience (UX) design, and writing user interface (UI) text.

For more information about my background, see https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasdcooney/en.

The point of my blog is to share with like-minded folks my expertise in web content strategy and hopefully help my peers and more junior content professionals get the most bang for the buck with the content they produce and manage. I also aspire to learn a ton from my readers, since I don’t pretend to know everything or be an expert on every emerging content technique or strategy.

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Content and the Paradox of Choice

Some years ago, when I was a manager of the Mac Office content publishing team at Microsoft, I attended a seminar on UX. The speakers covered a variety of topics and best practices, but one particular discussion stuck with me.

The panel members were discussing the ever-present struggle that software teams have between program managers (PMs) and UX and user assistance (UA) teams over the optimal amount of features to include in a product release or a given area of the  UI.

PMs, who are evaluated — at least to some degree — on their feature output, are often advocating for including more features. They argue that more new features help sell the product by adding value and make the product easier to use by providing users the freedom to choose among lots of options. On the other hand, UX and UA folks are wary of this “more is more” approach, and often push back on PMs, stressing the need for fewer, better experiences for users.

In the context this discussion about the optimal number of features, one of the panelists brought up a book he had read called The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz . From the book, he described that Schwartz, a psychologist, had done studies on how people (Western, affluent) behave when they are confronted with choices, and how the choices they make influence how they feel. The studies showed that people became paralyzed when confronted with too many choices. And after they made a choice, they had a nagging doubt that they may have made the wrong choice. They ended up with lower satisfaction, blaming themselves for their choice.

The following TED talk with the author gives you a good summary of the book and the conclusions of the author: 

Some takeaways for content professionals:

• Too many choices in menus, top-level navigation, etc. are overwhelming for users. They will click away from your site. Ruthlessly cut back to at most 5-7 top-level navigational “buckets.”
• Reduce “see also” and “related topics” links to as few as possible (3-5 links being optimal).
• Discrete topics should stand on their own, but avoid topic creep; continually “weed the garden” to reduce your overall topic set to just the essentials.
• Make your content scannable with bulleted lists of 3-5 items or 10 steps or less. Avoid huge blocks of text or lists and numbered steps that require the user to scroll.
• Reduce the hierarchy of your content to 3 levels or less. Users do not want to have to click down multiple levels of content to find what is relevant.

Bottom line: Our impulse is to provide a ton of choices to users, but if you fight against this and give people fewer, better choices, your content will perform better, customer satisfaction will go up, and your content will achieve its intent.