User Experience & Content Strategy
A relatively new debate — what is important content or user experience. To me its like asking what comes first chicken or egg?
In the layers of User experience content (text, images and video) fits in between the visual design and interaction design making it extremely important for desired user experience. The impact is more profound in the application delivery information compared to the enterprise application.
Layers of User Experience
No matter how good the UX strategy is, if the content is not good the experience would be flawed. Both content and the design needs to work in tandem to give the desired experience.
UX gurus Nielsen and Norman stated it best: “In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company’s offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.”
What is Content Strategy?
While there are many definitions, content strategy as a long term plan of creating, delivering and maintaining useful and valuable content for the users of your product.
A strategy is needed to create a bridge between the end user and business goals, not only from the UX perspective but also from the content side.
Thoughtful content (the type of content that relates to the users and satisfies their needs) helps is putting the message across in the best possible way the users can understand. In fact, good content enhance design or experience.
Content Strategy isn’t a trend, and it’s not a silver bullet.
Content and UX design
There is an inherent conflict between the UX designer and content strategist when it comes to the design process. Though the intention of both are same — a better user experience.
When user experience and content strategy work together, the synergistic effect is much greater than simply resolving conflict. Many a times combining the skills of UX and Content professionals not only improves the product but also helps in creating a clear vision for the business.
At times content drives your platform strategy (responsive vs adaptive). When there is wide spectrum of users using wide range of devices it becomes extremely important to consider your content delivery.
Clarity and Readability
User experience is about making the application or website delightful. The same is applied to the content, most users merely scan copy. It becomes utmost important to have clear structure for the content with meaningful headers and subheads, with meaningful hooks in the form of tex, images or video.
Better Information Architecture
Information Architecture (IA) is a critical part of UX design process, content strategy can play a huge role in creating more optimal IA. Defining the type of content and its structure with the design team will eliminate a lot of guesswork for an Information Architect.
Conversion Optimisation
Conversion is one of the primary goals of UX strategy, its means clearer wording, calls to actions and value proposition (enough persuasion), content plays a significant role here. Content helps to find the optimal voice, tone and messaging to boost conversions.
Yes content is still the king in some sense, but definitely needs a lot of support from the UX and Technology to build a successful business.
