{"id":4110,"date":"2019-04-08T08:39:01","date_gmt":"2019-04-08T12:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/?p=4110"},"modified":"2019-04-12T19:12:35","modified_gmt":"2019-04-12T23:12:35","slug":"paying-down-enterprise-content-debt-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/2019\/04\/paying-down-enterprise-content-debt-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Paying Down Enterprise Content Debt: Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Purple \"Gray<\/a> \"Gray<\/a><\/p>\n

Summary:<\/strong> This series outlines the steps to diagnose, treat, and manage enterprise content debt, using Firefox add-ons as a case study. Part 1 identifies and frames the enterprise content debt issue.<\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n

Background<\/h2>\n

If you want to block annoying ads or populate your new tab with sassy cats, you can do it…with browser extensions and themes. Users can download thousands of these \u201cadd-ons\u201d from Firefox\u2019s host site, addons.mozilla.org<\/a> (\u201cAMO\u201d), to customize their browsing experience with new functionality or a dash of whimsy.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot

The Tabby Cat extension takes over your new tab with adorable cats<\/p><\/div>\n

Add-ons can be a useful and delightful way for people to improve their web experience\u2014if <\/i>they can discover, understand, trust, and appreciate their offerings. Over the last year, the add-ons UX pod at Firefox, in partnership with the larger add-ons team, worked on ways to do just that.<\/p>\n

One of the ways we did this was by looking at these interconnected issues through the lens of content structure and quality. In this series, I\u2019ll walk you through the steps we took to develop a new content model for the add-ons ecosystem.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Understanding the problem<\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

Add-ons are largely created by third-party developers, who also create the content that describes the add-ons for users. That content includes things like extension name, icon, summary, long, description, screenshots, etcetera:<\/p>\n

\"Example

Sample developer-provided content for the Momentum extension<\/p><\/div>\n

With 10,000+ extensions and 400,000+ themes, we are talking about a lot of content. And while the add-ons team completely appreciated the value of the add-ons themselves<\/i>, we didn’t really understand how valuable the content <\/i>was, and we didn’t use it to its fullest potential.<\/p>\n

The first shift we made was recognizing that what we had was enterprise content<\/b>\u2014 structured content and metadata stored in a formal repository, reviewed, sometimes localized, and published in different forms in multiple places.<\/p>\n

Then, when we assessed the value of it to the enterprise, we uncovered something called content debt<\/b><\/a>.\"Illustration<\/p>\n

Content debt is the hidden cost of not managing the creation, maintenance, utility, and usability of digital content<\/b>. It accumulates when we don\u2019t treat content like an asset with financial value, when we value expediency over the big picture, and when we fail to prioritize content management. You can think of content debt like home maintenance. If you don\u2019t clean your gutters now, you\u2019ll pay in the long term with costly water damage.<\/p>\n

AMO\u2019s content debt included issues of quality<\/b> (missed opportunities to communicate value and respond to user questions), governance<\/b> (varying content quality with limited organizational oversight), and structure <\/b>(the need for new content types to evolve site design and improve social shares and search descriptions).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n

A few examples of content debt in action:<\/b><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Screenshot

Facebook social share experience: Confusing image accompanied by text describing how to report an issue with the extension<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Screenshot

Google Search results example for an extension. Lacks description of basic functionality and value proposition. No SEO-optimized keywords or social proof like average rating.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Screenshot

A search for \u201cInvesting\u201d doesn’t yield the most helpful results<\/p><\/div>\n

All of this equals quite a bit of content debt that prevents developers and users from being as successful as they could be in achieving their interconnected goals: offering and obtaining extensions. It also hinders the ecosystem as a whole when it comes to things like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which the team wanted to improve.<\/p>\n

Given the AMO site\u2019s age (15 years), and the amount of content it contains, debt is to be expected. And it\u2019s rare for a content strategist to be given a content challenge that doesn\u2019t <\/i>involve some debt because it\u2019s rare that you are building a system completely from scratch. But, that\u2019s not the end of the story.<\/p>\n

When we considered the situation from a systems-wide perspective, we realized that we needed to move beyond thinking of the content as something created by an individual developer in a vacuum. Yes, the content is developer-generated\u2014and with that a certain degree of variation is to be expected\u2014but how could we provide developers with the support and perspective to create better content that could be used not only on their product page, but across the content ecosystem? While the end goal is more users with more extensions by way of usable content, we needed to create the underpinning rules that allowed for that content to be expressed across the experience in a successful way.<\/p>\n

In part 2,<\/a> I walk through the specific steps the team took to diagnose and develop solutions for our enterprise content debt. Meanwhile, speaking of the team…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Meet our ‘UX supergroup’<\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cA harmonious interface is the product of functional, interdisciplinary communication and clear, well-informed decision making.\u201d <\/i>\u2014Erika Hall, Conversational Design<\/i>, 108<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

While the problem space is framed in terms of content strategy, the diagnosis and solutions were very much interdisciplinary. For this work, I was fortunate to be part of a \u201cUX supergroup,\u201d i.e., an embedded project team that included a user researcher (Jennifer Davidson<\/a>), a designer with strength in interaction design (Emanuela Damiani<\/a>), a designer with strength in visual design (Philip Walmsley<\/a>), and a UX content strategist (me).<\/p>\n

We were able to do some of our best work by bringing to bear our discipline-specific expertise in an integrated and deeply collaborative way. Plus, we had a mascot\u2014Pusheen the cat<\/a>\u2014inspired in part by our favorite tab-changing extension, Tabby Cat<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Photo

Left to right: Jennifer, Emanuela, Philip, Meridel #teampusheen<\/p><\/div>\n

See Part 2, Paying Down Enterprise Content Debt: Developing Solutions<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thank you to Michelle Heubusch, Jennifer Davidson, Emanuela Damiani, Philip Walmsley, Kev Needham, Mike Conca, Amy Tsay, Jorge Villalobos, Stuart Colville, Caitlin Neiman, Andreas Wagner, Raphael Raue, and Peiying Mo<\/i> for their partnership in this work. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summary: This series outlines the steps to diagnose, treat, and manage enterprise content debt, using Firefox add-ons as a case study. Part 1 identifies and frames the enterprise content debt … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1624,"featured_media":4238,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[246],"tags":[119,52921,440691,440690,52922],"coauthors":[52917],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4110"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1624"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4110\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4110"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ux\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}