Getting started with case studies
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A short on-ramp to case studies for teams who have not touched it before.
Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
Why it matters
Problem, approach, result, in that order. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Numbers make it credible
- Change one thing and measure it
Name the client if they will let you. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
In practice
Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Three things worth confirming about case studies before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Problem, approach, result, in that order — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.