Case studies: a practical guide

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. This guide covers what case studies actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

The reason this keeps coming up

Problem, approach, result, in that order. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

What good looks like

Numbers make it credible. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Name the client if they will let you. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Problem, approach, result, in that order
• Numbers make it credible
• Name the client if they will let you
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Warning signs

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

Making it stick

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.