How Measuring and Managing Content Quality Can Help You Prioritize Your Work

Intuillion's Alex Masycheff started with a story about how the content he needed to open a rental car's gas tank was not easily findable, so he turned to Google search while at the gas station. 

Keep in mind that different users have different goals. If publishing on a knowledge base or portal, different users--even prospective buyers--will come there. Goals of actual and potential users are different. 

Is documentation serving all types of users equally. Is it worth the effort to improve? 

Probably already getting minimum statistics. such as how many times a topic was viewed, what was and wasn't found, etc. 

Need a framework to measure. 4 components: content quality, content importance, content efforts, and behavioral patterns.

What is content quality? It includes intrinsic quality, representational quality, contextual quality, and accessibility quality. 

Methods to gather user feedback include surveys, doc usability testing, requests of customer support, analyze user behavior. 

Behavior analysis: Cues of low content quality. Information not accessible. High bounce rate. Low ratings. Negative comments. More support calls & tickets. 

AI can help with sentiment analysis. By analyzing comments left by users, can understand what users think. 

Content importance includes urgency, criticality, efficiency, multi-contextually, dependency, and repeatability. Cues of high importance include many visits with significant time spent, repeat visits from the same user, user bookmarks topic, users navigate through an array of topics, or the source topic contains conditional content. The latter means the topic serves the needs of different audiences. 

Using these cues alone may not help, and may mislead. This is where behavior patterns come in.

3 major types of user online behavior include acquire, compare/choose, and understand. Behaviors are associated with each type. 

Once you know what you need to do, is it worth the effort for you to do? The time is all of the efforts in the content lifecycle. Chart importance vs. effort. Can also chart effort vs. quality.