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Use cases and auditing content

Before you can start creating or structuring content for your website, you must identify what content is needed.

Use cases

Your website’s use cases are a list of reasons your different audiences might visit your website. By identifying what information they are looking for, you can better create content to meet their needs.

What are use cases?

Your target audiences will land on your webpages seeking certain information. They might have searched for this information via a search engine, clicked through from an email or been signposted by a member of staff. The information they are hoping to find is what we mean by a ‘use case’.

Imagine you were putting together a new website about how to finance an undergraduate degree at Queen Mary. Thinking about the audience you hope to target, what use cases will you need to cater to? It’s useful to write these out in the format of “I want to…”. For example -

  • I want to learn what financial support is available for me at Queen Mary.
  • I want to know who’s eligible for what financial support.
  • I want to know if there are scholarships.

Just like in identifying your audiences, it’s important to be as specific and granular as possible. It’s worth noting each of the audiences you have identified will have slightly different use cases. They are different sorts of people, so their questions and needs will be different. 

Activity steps

  1. Ask members of your team to list as many use cases as they can think of for each of your website’s target audiences. People might like time to think about this, so rather than confine the entire activity to a single meeting, we would suggest you give people a few days to action this.
  2. Once everybody has had a chance to list their use cases, meet to discuss what people have noted. It is a good idea to prioritise the use cases within each target audience, and then use these priorities when it comes to creating content and thinking about the order in which content is displayed on your webpages.

Activity goal

You will have a document outlining all use cases for each of your target audiences. You can reference this when auditing and creating content for your website. 

Auditing content

Carrying out a content audit will show you what content already exists, and in doing so, what content needs to be created from scratch. 

Activity steps

  1. List out your use cases in a spreadsheet everybody can access, and then note next to each use case -
    • whether content answering that use case already exists
    • content owners/subject experts
  2. You will be able to use this spreadsheet to determine what content needs to be created. It will also be a great resource when you come to think about website structure, as it will list all of the information you need to include.

Content audit template [XLS 10KB]

Activity goal

You will know what content exists already, where it exists, and who within your team owns it.

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