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Part IV ✦ Designing a CMS
you do so, instead of asking them to fill in a bunch of metadata fields, show them the
personal and professional descriptive paragraphs that you wrote and ask them which
one they think best describes them. Make sure that you provide a “none of the above”
choice and a space where users can write in their own descriptions (thus providing
you with invaluable feedback about the categories that you create).
Localization
Brainstorm the full list of localities that may visit your publications. Group your list into con-
stituent, key, and one primary locality. (See the section “Audiences and Localization,” earlier
in this chapter, for the definitions of these terms.) Then fill in the following constraints to
document your overall approach to localities:
✦ ID: Create a unique identifier for each locality that you can identify.
✦ Name: Create a name that you can use to refer to this locality later.
✦ Language: What language or languages does this locality speak?
✦ Region: In what geographical locations do people in this locality live?
✦ Affiliation: What significant affiliations (for example, social, political, religious) do
people in this locality have that affect the way that you communicate with them?
✦ Service: Is this locality your primary locality, a key locality, or a constituent locality?
If it’s a constituent locality, what key locality serves it? Does the key locality fully
encompass this locality, or are people from this locality less than optimally served? If
you expect the Russian key locality to serve all Eastern European localities, for exam-
ple, what respect or understanding do you lose from nonnative Russian speakers?
✦ Audience: To what audiences do people from this locality belong? Does studying the
locality add anything to your audience analysis?
✦ Key member: Can you get a representative from this locality to serve as an advisor to
your project?
✦ Traits: How do you know that a user is in this locality? List the traits and decide how
you can collect them and how you can ensure that they’re accurate.
Tasks
Consider the effect of your audience analysis on the ongoing maintenance of the CMS. Then
fill in the following table to define any tasks that you imagine must happen on a recurring
basis to run the CMS. Here are some task types to get you thinking:
✦ Periodic audience surveys.
✦ Review of the current set of audiences.
✦ Audience focus groups.
✦ Retrieval of user data that you buy periodically.
✦ Retiring inactive profiles from the user database.
✦ Review of the traits that make up each audience.
✦ Review of site logs to discover audience activity.
✦ Ongoing use case and usability testing.
✦ Periodic review of competing publications.
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