Besides tools for understanding users, UXers have a

ton of tools to understand content and context.

In fact, many of them are the same tools.

We mentioned that when we talk about understanding content,

we're talking about understanding what content our product has available.

Understanding what content users need to complete their tasks,

and then melding those together in an understandable way.

Therefore, methods and tools that are extremely helpful

in our quest to understand content include; card sorting.

Card sorting is a method that is often seen as

a user research activity and in many ways it is.

However, I put this method in the understanding content section because I

believe that card sorts give us insights into how users perceive content.

Thereby increasing our understanding of how to place content within our product.

Card sorts are activities that can be done live or remotely, in which we have all

the different pieces of content on cards, and

ask the users to sort that content into groups.

In this way, we could figure out how users would

group content and therefore, better organize it for our own product.

Some card sorting tools to consider are optimal sort.

A quick easy tool that you can use to do remote or in-person card sorts.

Web sort is a similar tool.

Lastly, if doing in-person card sorts of good old

index cards or post it's work in a pinch.

Next, we have search logs.

Looking at what terms people are searching for, cannot only help us understand what

content our users need, but can also help us to understand which they don't.

For this, you can look at Google Analytics, or an in house search log tool.

Content inventories.

This is a method that I introduced when talking about understanding content.

The best tool I've seen for content inventory

is good old Excel, or some other spreadsheet software.

When we think about tools and methods that would be helpful in

understanding context, we start to see that by gaining a clear understanding of

the user, and the content, the best tool we can use to put

those in to context would be, our brain, and our ability to empathize.

Earlier, we discussed environmental context, meaning what environment the user

is in when they are using our product or service.

We should see that understanding environmental context is

something we can gain from empathizing with our user.

We also talked about detailed context.

We can see that understanding detailed context is something

we become aware of when working with understanding our content,.

Awareness and empathy of our users and our content is

what ultimately helps us to understand and put things into context.