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Six things you should know about reuse
Our information architecture expert lists six important aspects of reuse.
WHAT IS REUSE?
Reuse makes it possible to create content once but use it for different purposes, or for the same purpose but for different products or in different contexts. The content that is reused may be of varying size, such as a full safety chapter that is generic to all or most of your different manuals, or something smaller like a warning text that needs to be standardised within a single manual.
SIX THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT REUSE
There are two main benefits of reuse:
More efficient production and translation of information, as the same sentence doesn’t need to be written twice or translated twice.
Higher consistency for the users, as the same type of information is presented exactly the same.
A plan for reuse requires some kind of governance and guidelines. This should cover strategic decisions, like what types of content to reuse, and if reuse is required or optional for that type of content. In larger organisations, you should also have governance and guidelines for reuse across departments – who owns the reused content?
Your technical writers also need guidelines that help them reuse existing content and create new reusable content.
The most important thing when starting with reuse is to understand where it can make an impact – where do you get the most bang for the buck?
Striving for efficiency not only today but also long-term means that reuse needs to be planned. Reusing some content now might save hours short-term, but understanding if it also saves time in the long run requires planning.
Reuse can be measured in many ways - but reuse itself is not the purpose! A more important indicator is efficiency gains in content creation, translation, and content consistency. That is where it all starts, and it is the key measurement to determine wether or not your reuse is successful.
Images and other visual assets can also be reused. The creation of those assets can be tweaked to make reuse possible: Details that differ between products do not need to be shown in images if those details are not relevant to the user. Such a decision makes it possible to reuse a single image instead of creating a unique image for each product.
Reuse also comes at some cost. It can add complexity to the content management system where the content is created and to the production of information. Reused content requires some admin to set up, and when others want to reuse or update it, there needs to be some kind of governance and rules in place for handling changes. Perhaps the reused content should only be updated in one of many places where it is currently in use?
Johan Elisson is an information architecture specialist at Aleido. His work sets the foundation for efficient information handling that is easy to use. Resuse is one of many components within information architecture.

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