I’m currently engaged in a long-term contract with Wells Fargo Treasury Management, migrating existing document repositories and knowledgebases into an enterprise-scale CMS called InfoSource. The primary goal of this project is to reduce inefficiencies and redundancies caused by the prior practice of housing information within multiple, often incompatible libraries and formats. By managing all of the organization’s reference, procedural, and customer-facing documentation in a single, standardized system, end-user’s ability to quickly and comprehensively retrieve critical information will be greatly enhanced.
In my role on the primary InfoSource publishing team, which is tasked with converting existing content to be compatible with the new system and developing new content where necessary, I’m mostly wearing my technical writing hat. However, since much of the benefit of InfoSource resides above the document level in the system’s powerful metadata, search, and analytic capabilities, I’m also relying upon my skills in information architecture and user experience design to craft documentation that is not only useful at the document level, but is also systematically sound.
Restructuring content to comply with InfoSource editorial standards. Much of the previously existing content was created in an ad-hoc manner, with little regard to consistency of structure, layout, or voice.
Documenting previously undocumented processes to expand the client’s published knowledgebase. A bread-and-butter technical writing activity, creating content from scratch by through subject matter expert interviews and providing structure to informal processes.
Although I normally prefer to conduct SME interviews onsite and in person because of the greater information density of observing them in their actual work environment, the highly distributed nature of Wells’ organization required that these interactions be almost exclusively conducted remotely.
Improving the information architecture of the client’s knowledgebase, enabling more efficient retrieval of information within the CMS.
InfoSource employs a faceted classification system to help users locate information, so a large part of my focus is on establishing well thought out taxonomies for each functional group being “onboarded” into the system, then ensuring that each document’s metadata appropriately places the document within the structure.
Consistent mental models. A crucial part of crafting useful and findable content within a sprawling CMS is ensuring that the content is designed to align well with users’ mental models, or understanding of the meaning and relevance of content chunks of various scales. Once the information scent is established at the system architecture level, it must be maintained at the document level as well to guard against confusion, disorientation, or even loss of credibility in the mind of the user.
One of the most reliable methods I’ve used on this project to gain insight into the perspective of users is to engage with those who submit feedback using InfoSource’s built-in function. Users who take the initiative to reach out to the publishing team in that way tend to be more responsive toward getting into a dialogue about their needs, expectations, and experiences using the system and are an excellent resource to augment the efforts of designated subject mater experts.