Weeknotes // 7 June 2024

Developing our online content design course and some love for the Australian Government Style Manual.

I missed a couple of months

As you might be able to tell from the amount of time that’s elapsed between this post and the previous one, I’ve not hit any sort of routine with weeknotes yet. It seems like such a simple idea: write about your week on a Friday. The problem comes when other stuff pushes the time for writing these things out of the way. Maybe I need to try a different approach, like writing the notes at odd moments through the week and then publishing on Friday. I want to keep doing these as a reminder to keep me writing, if nothing else.

We’re developing our online self-service content design training

We have an online content design training course at the University. It’s called Effective Digital Content and it covers a lot of ground very well. A series of videos go through all the stuff you need to know before you start publishing content on University websites: think about your users, write in plain English, make it accessible. The course explains how to write good link text, how to write headings, how to write good alt text.

We’re now working out how to help staff apply the learning in the course to realistic scenarios. So maybe we give learners a piece of content without headings and they have to add the headings. Or maybe it’s a piece of text written in complex language and they have to simplify it.

To test this idea out, I’ve been developing a small unit on using the style guide. Why it’s important, how to use it, and an activity where a learner can practise applying the style guide to a piece of text.

The people taking this course are usually doing so before they get edit access to a live University website. We’re thinking it would also be good for these staff to apply what they’re learning to their live site. We can provide controlled practice exercises in the course, but real content isn’t always tidy and the answers aren’t always clear cut. It would be good to incorporate these messy edge cases and grey areas into the course somehow.

The Australian Government Style Manual is a thing of beauty

I’ve seen some good style guides in my time, but this thing blows them all out of the water. I only just saw it today as I was doing some research into style guides.

Australian Government Style Manual

Why do I love it so much?

  • It’s clearly written. You can skim through it and get what it’s saying very easily. This is not an easy thing to accomplish.
  • It’s comprehensive without feeling heavy. The section on alt text doesn’t skimp on the details, but that’s necessary because alt text isn’t a simple topic.
  • It feels alive and up to date. The release notes and the blog help to show that it’s a living site that’s being updated.
  • It’s backed up with references to external sources. Lots of style guides don’t do this, maybe because these external sources aren’t felt to be relevant. But I think they add credibility to the guidance.

One page I particularly liked was the page on editing and proofreading.

Australian Style Manual: Editing and proofreading

Editing is a massive part of getting your content right, but it can be a difficult area. By that I mean it’s difficult to do well, but also that there are sensitivities around it too. It’s not always easy to see someone else make changes to a text that you’ve worked on. This is why a formal process can be a good idea: it depersonalises the process of changing the text and assigns defined roles to staff working within that process.

I went to a workshop about the service we provide to researchers who need a website

On Tuesday I went to a workshop run by my colleague Sonia. The aim of the workshop was to look at the digital communications that academics need alongside a research project. Typically that would be a website explaining what the project involves, who’s involved, a bit about impact and outreach, associated events and so on. There are various ways to get these sites built and put online, and we had some interesting conversations about how these sites get built. A typical problem is that the sites stay online long after the project is finished and the staff have moved on to other things. Then no-one knows whose responsibility it is, and the site lives on as a sort of zombie.

I liked getting a range of staff in the same room for a morning to work on a shared problem, and I feel like we came out of the session with some new ideas. One need seems to be for more guidance on what digital comms platforms are available to researchers, and why they might want to choose one over another.

I had a chat about sustainable web design with our new intern Chris

Chris is working on sustainability in web design, which is a hot topic at the moment. It feels like there’s been a collective awakening in recent years that digital technology comes with a massive carbon cost. There were a few themes we talked about:

  • Small, simple web design is good for several reasons. It’s simpler to manage, it’s easier to use, and it’s more accessible. So if it’s better for the environment too, it feels like we should all be pulling in the same direction.
  • And yet: deleting content is often very hard to do. That’s a shame, because it’s an essential stage in simplifying a large, complex website. The risks and costs associated with deleting content often outweigh the rewards that we get for deleting it. Conversely, the good feeling we get from creating content and publishing it on the web is a reward of sorts. So we end up creating more than we delete, our websites grow to be large and unwieldy, and our data centres drink up electricity. We need to be celebrating the deletion of redundant, old and trivial content.

What I’ve been reading

Tom Dolan: A plea for Product craft: shout about your ‘negative space’

I keep thinking about this post by Tom Dolan. The main thing I took from it is that user research and lean methodologies will sometimes dissuade you from investing time, effort and money in a bad idea. That means the thing you’ve accomplished is that fact that you didn’t do a thing. This is hard to shout about, but in reality it’s a valuable thing. We need to avoid doing things that aren’t a good use of time, effort and money.

Key quote: “Because this is why we do user-centred design. It’s not for art’s sake. It’s to manage risk. To stop us building expensive things that nobody will use.”

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