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Well, let’s move on to some other ideas around organising content.
Chunk content – keep related ideas together
One of the things we want to do is to chunk our content and that means keeping related pieces of information together. We don’t want them spread all over the document.
That will also mean crafting units of information that the user can get their head around. Now the size of a unit of information will vary depending on your user and the content that you’re talking about, but you’ll want a chunk of information that I can understand as a single unit.
A knowledge schema
When you are doing that, you are actually creating a knowledge schema for the document or for this topic. And a knowledge schema is just a fancy way of saying, hey, this is the best way of thinking about it.
A content hierarchy
Often we’ll end up with some sort of hierarchy of ideas, big chunks broken down into smaller chunks, broken down into further detail.
What we’re aiming to do is to provide nice, sweet morsels of information for our user rather than throwing a pie in the face of information at them. That’s what we’re trying to.
Lots of choices when chunking
Now, if I was to rearrange that content in the indoor air pollution, if I was to chunk that content, I’ve got lots of different choices about how I could do it. For example, my big chunks could be around health impacts and building life impacts, and then I could have some sub chunks around different types of pollutants. How they’re a particular type of risk in various buildings and how we might control them.
Or I could talk about different types of pollutants. I could talk about pollutant 1 and then pollutant 2, they would be my big chunks. And then I could break that down into some sub chunks of characteristics and control methods and so on.
Or I could chunk my information into different types of buildings. So I could talk about residential buildings and commercial buildings and then I could chunk that further into different types of pollutants and their characteristics, and how to control them, and so on.
There’s always lots of different choices about how we chunk information.
Content hierarchies are useful and commonly used
Now I know you’ve probably seen this before because my guess is that you’ve probably read a textbook at some stage in your life. And this is the way they are organised.
Our smallest piece of information is a thing called a sentence. That’s a small chunk and then we chunk those together into things called paragraphs, and we chunk those together into things called subsections and sections and chapters and so on. So that’s what chunking is all about, and it will often end up in a hierarchy.
I’m not going to talk too much more about that because I’m pretty sure that you have seen this. I just want to say that this is a really helpful way of structuring information by chunking it.
Treat topics in proportion to importance
Chunking information also has another benefit. It does allow you to treat topics in proportion to their importance, so that means you’ll be able to give more weight to the really important ideas by putting them in a prominent location or increasing the size of the chunks. You’ll just make them a bit more obvious, and this idea of chunking allows you to do that.
Chunking and forming a hierarchy does allow you to show the relative importance of the various topics.
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