Content Hygiene
Understanding Sunshine Coast Council policy to clean up old, outdated or duplicated content on the corporate site.
UX, Content Hygiene
Introduction
This was basically my first project I worked on at my time in Council. It was more of a contribution to it and helping the work already happening.
But also gave me the opportunity to work on the UX side of things and see how that work happens. In this case it was a method, process or technique called, Content Hygiene, where I guess you audit the content of a site in this case for Council, looking at their policy docs and whether or not the current Council site content is aligned, accurate and up to date with those.
I think in the future the full project is utilizing an AI framework to best manage, analyze, and understand the content on the corporate site compared to the policy docs. With this they can easily do the expected outcome of removing outdated, duplicated and unnecessary content.
Examples
Utilizing a Miro board to understand the Purpose, Mission, Vision and Goals the policy docs from Council.
These docs are quite long and honestly many have very similar sort of values which makes it a bit complex but I think for this task we purely just see what its all about, extract it, add it to the board and move on to the next doc. Then I assume a further conversation might be had with stakeholders in terms of how to better categorize the information for the web.
Outcomes
Removing outdated, duplicated, and any content that isn't aligned with those Council policy docs and goals.
Possibly removing up to half of the content on the corporate site which of course would lead people accessing said information to understand it much easier, quicker and more efficiently.
Retrospective
Quite a brief project but learnt some core UX processes with Content Hygiene.
It was a good introductory small project to get introduced to Council, some of the different teams etc. Working with & collaborating with people in the Web team, and their external vendor.
Note taking
Auditing the content in a Government Policy doc can be quite the monumental task. My main way of doing this was using Ctrl + F to find the keywords but also just skimming through it from the content page to see each section etc. And utilizing Miro & Notion to do this note taking.
Bring something
Getting stakeholders involved means you most likely need to start or bring something to the table to get them interested and incentivizes them to contribute.
UX work
I need to continue learning more around the UX, research, and just the user behavior/experience part of websites & apps.