Case studies: what to get right first

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you only fix one thing about case studies this quarter, make it the first item below.

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Start here

Problem, approach, result, in that order. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Then this

Numbers make it credible. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Eventually

Name the client if they will let you. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

In practice

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about case studies before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Numbers make it credible — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.