Data Management for Content Designers

Content design is the process of identifying and arranging content – words, images, charts, links, diagrams, etc. – that meets user and business needs. If you create information resources like websites, apps, or intranets for others to use, you’re doing this already. A critical first step in designing effective content is to figure out what you have, and if it’s any good. Content Inventories and Content Audits are the core tools that UX Designers, Product Designers, Information Architects, and Content Strategists use to understand the scope and quality of a product’s content.

Most people in these roles, however, have not been trained to effectively manage the large data sets that the content collections of today’s websites represent. This means that instead of making informed, data-driven decisions, we often make best guesses based on what we’ve been able to cobble together in inefficient spreadsheets.

This workshop will help you more effectively structure, manage, and draw insight from Content Inventories and Content Audits in Google Sheets. We’ll use real-world examples and plenty of hands on practice to help you:

• structure data for efficient use and reuse
• manipulate content data programmatically with core spreadsheet functions and formulas
• use pivot tables to extract nuanced insights from large content sets
• manage permissions and sharing features for effective cross-team collaboration
• create documents with attention to the visual design details that make them easy to use, maintain, and understand
• learn to apply the principles of good data management in Inventories and Audits to the scores of other tasks that come to you in the form of spreadsheets