Teaching the value of content strategy to UX designers

After teaching about Information Architecture to a class of aspiring UX Designers at General Assembly Melbourne, I was asked to go back for a lecture about content strategy and copywriting. Having been a content strategist for a while now, I know the challenges of working with designers. I saw this as a perfect way to explain some of the key concepts about writing and content, thus (hopefully!) making it easier for designers to understand the value of working closely with content strategists.

The key messages I wanted to deliver:

• Content strategy and copywriting are part of UX, not a separate thing,
• Content needs to be taken into consideration from the start,
• Copywriting doesn’t come after sketching/wireframing, because content influences design,
• Copywriting is not only important in advertising. Microcopy is just as important,
• A brand/product personality developed through a well-crafted tone of voice is a key to success.

And here’s how I did it.

I used InVision’s blog as an example to analyse the key elements of a good content strategy.

Content is king.

My very first slide contained what’s probably the most famous quote in this industry from the last 20 years. “Content is king”, stated Bill Gates in 1996 in an essay where he predicted the importance that content (information, entertainment) would assume over the next 20 years. I asked the students to imagine websites like Netflix, Amazon, Google, Medium, Facebook or The Huffington Post without content. They just wouldn’t exist.

I then prompted the students, asking them—Why should you, as UX Designers, care?

The answer is that design without content is just decoration.

Take Shutterstock and Unsplash. They are both photography websites. But their content strategy and content type are very different. The former sells stock photography and is focused on quantity. The latter provides free, unique photos for a more “niche” target. Their different content strategy leads to completely different design—actually, I should say UX!

So what’s a content strategy?

A pretty self-explanatory Venn diagram.

I used Kristina Halvorson’s definition:

“Content strategy plans for the creation, publication and governance of useful, usable content.”

I then presented the students with a scenario. Imagine you have created an app, let’s say it’s a new app for project management. You think you really had the best idea ever this time. You’re excited!
How do you go about presenting your product to the public? Is it going to target a “techie startup” kind of audience, or do you wish to target the big corporate world?
And what strategies are you going to put in place to make your app more popular? How will you point out its benefits? Is there going to be an “about the app” section in the website, or a video tutorial, or both? How will you position your brand as a source of truth for all things productivity and team management? Are you going to have a blog? What is it going to be about? Are you going to create a podcast? Do you have budget to invite speakers or writers? How will your product’s voice “sound” across social media channels?

I then explained that all these questions can be summed up into one: what’s your content strategy going to be?

Content strategy: What, Why, How, Where, When, Who

Getting into it.

To give a better idea of what a good content strategy looks like, and what are the key questions you need to ask when planning one, I used InVision as an example. This collaborative tool, perfect for quickly sharing design prototypes and wireframes and getting feedback (we couldn’t live without it at Envato!), is particularly famous for its blog. Designers, copywriters, UX and product people as well as developers can find very interesting posts with insights from professionals around the world.

Here are the key questions that you should ask yourself (and your team) when planning for a content strategy:

• What topics are we going to cover?
• What formats are we going to use?
• Why does anyone care?
• Why does this provide business value?
• How are we going to deliver the message?
• How should we say it (i.e. what’s the tone of voice)?
• Where will we get the content?
• Where can we share the content?
• When will this be published?
• When will it need to be updated?
• Who is responsible for this content?
• Who will maintain it over time?

…And then I answered the questions thinking about what the content strategy at InVision may be like. If any of the InVision strategists is reading and would like to chime in—please do!

Copywriting and UX

I asked the students: is this a good experience?

This image was tweeted by Ryan Block a while ago and I saved it. I knew it would come in handy when I needed to make a point about how copy can make or break a user experience!

The answer is clear, and helped me make the point that copywriting, and content strategy along with it, is a crucial part of UX. Content and design work together to create the user experience, and as stated before—design without content is just decoration. It’s important to tell a story and engage, and you can’t achieve that only with the look of your interface.

Would it be the same if the copy on the Airbnb home page said “Affordable rooms and apartments”, and the background was just an image portraying a random bedroom?

The qualities of good (online) copy

I then moved forward to explain the key qualities of a good piece of copy on the internet.

Good copy:

1. Is written with the audience in mind. Who are they? What do they want? Where are they? How educated are they? Do they speak English? What technology are they using? What relationship do they have with the site (or the app)?
2. Makes a product understandable. I stressed how important it is to:

• Provide the right information at the right time,
• Prevent the user from getting stuck,
• If something goes wrong, reassure and provide alternatives.

Not a great example of an error message. “Bad request! Your browser sent a request…” tells me that it’s all my fault and I’m a terrible, terrible person (I’m just as bad as my request, OMG). “Size of a request header field exceeds server limit”—I have honestly no idea what you’re talking about here. What went wrong? How do I fix it?

3. Is unobtrusive. Meaning that 1) good copy doesn’t get in the way, and 2) it’s not about how good of a writer you are, it’s about what’s easier to understand.

4. Is honest. Golden rules here include: don’t try to manipulate the user, don’t hide important information and don’t lie.

5. Builds enthusiasm. It’s important to show your audience why they will love your product and how it can help them. Just as it’s crucial to relieve common anxieties.

Basecamp does a good job of relieving common user anxieties at the bottom of this landing page: just below the CTA there’s a message saying “No obligation, no credit card required”. I bet a lot of people felt relieved as they thought they were supposed to provide credit card details, as it can often happen with “free trials”.

6. Is thorough down to the last details. Meaning that you should never leave anything up to chance, ending up with arbitrary or “lazy” words. Why is this important? Because good copy or bad copy can make or break a product. I reminded my students of the famous story of the $300 Million button to make the point even clearer.

7. Has a clear tone of voice. If you want to speak to your users, you need to do so according to your brand’s personality. The tone of voice you use influences enormously the way users will interact with your product. It needs to be consistent, but also flexible enough to change according to the context and the medium.

Tiny details like this do a great job at communicating Slack’s personality everywhere in the app. Consistency is key, and details are crucial.

Clearly, the perfect way to achieve this is to have a clear style guide outlining the brand’s personality and its tone of voice. I used the uber popular Mailchimp style guide as an example to give the students an idea of what I meant. It covers extensively not only the personality of the brand and its voice, but also the way this translates into different parts of the app and different context of communication.

In its “Voice and Tone” section, the style guide states: “MailChimp’s voice is human. It’s familiar, friendly, and straightforward.” And we can see, from a couple of examples, how the team manages to communicate these traits throughout the app.

Familiar, friendly and straightforward: this is the copy used at the final stage of the campaign set-up.

Different context, same personality. This is a very delicate part of the app: the user is about to create an account on MailChimp. The app manages to speak in a friendly, familiar and straightforward way without losing the focus on the key task the user is supposed to complete.

Putting it all into practice.

I personally feel that when it comes to content strategy, and even more so copywriting, people don’t realise how tricky and complicated it can be to get it right. So I thought the best way to pass this message across was to have the students experience it first-hand.

I gave the students a piece of copy—the description of an Italian restaurant. I had prepared a card for every one of them: every card contained a specific “tone of voice”. Humble, sarcastic, childish, proud, humorous… That sort of thing. I then prompted the students to re-write the copy by applying the given tone of voice.

It was an interesting exercise that helped them understand the challenges involved in writing according to a specific style. And obviously I didn’t fail to remind them that when it comes to mastering tones of voice, there’s a guy who went above and beyond…

Queneau’s “Exercises in style” is the holy grail of copywriters. He re-writes the same, simple story (less than a page long) in 99 different tones of voice (including: surprised, dreaming, metaphorical, casual, precise, visual, auditory, telegraphic, philosophic…). A great source of inspiration, and a must-read!

Skip the lorem ipsum

Before wrapping up, I wanted to touch on a topic that I feel is particularly important when it comes to designers and content strategists working together. Very often, the process of designing a new feature, page, app or products sees the designer creating wireframes where he/she places “lorem ipsum” content, and then handing it over to the writer after it has been approved.

What this means is that the content strategist has no say in… well… the content strategy.

• Who said that that page needs one headline and three lines of text below?
• Who decided that that sign-up form only needs one line of copy?
• Who thought that between those two sections on the page, an additional line of copy wouldn’t be necessary?
• Have you thought of what’s going to happen to that 3-line title on mobile?

So my final advice was: skip the lorem ipsum! Work with content strategists whenever possible. They don’t only write words. They’ll work out with you where the copy should sit on the page, and how much of it is needed, and whether other types of content would be beneficial (videos, images and so on).

And if you can’t work closely with a content strategist at all, skip the lorem ipsum anyway! It will help you state what you want to say, and how, from the very beginning. My UX manager at Envato usually replaces the lorem ipsum with something like “Value proposition about how great this feature is”, and “Additional text explaining more about the subscription model and why it’s great ”. That’s a good solution. It helps him to start thinking about how the content will be organised, and it helps me when I see the wireframes because I’ll understand his thinking. Everybody wins!

As a final exercise at the end of the class, the students were asked to pair up and interview each other about their past work experience. Then, they had to write each other’s “About me” section for their portfolio. I participated as well—was great to do the task with them!