How content planning can help set your projects up for success
Once you’ve completed the research stage of your content design project, it’s important to spend some time planning your next steps.
Doing job stories, user stories and acceptance criteria can help you decide what information you’re going to cover and where.
Job stories and user stories give you a way to condense your research down and show what is required from a piece of content.
For the content designer, stories give you something to focus on and work towards during production.
For the product owner, stories give you a standardised way to decide how important a user need is and when it should be addressed in a project.
Job stories look like this:
- When I’m on a low income, I want to find out if I qualify for benefits, so I can get help to pay my rent and other outgoings.
- When deductions from my universal credit award are causing me hardship, I want to find out if and how they can be reduced, so I have enough to live on.
User stories look like this:
- As a claimant who has successfully applied for an advance, I want to know how long I have to wait for my money, so I can plan my finances.
- As a universal credit claimant who is working, I want to know how much I can earn before my claim is reduced, so I can make sure I have enough to live on.
You can choose to use job stories or user stories, but obviously job stories are a better choice if you only have one audience to deal with.
Traditionally, we’ve stuck quite closely to these story structures in our team. But GOV.UK says you can also write this if appropriate:
I need/want/expect to… (what does the user want to do?)
So that… (why does the user want to do this?)
Story tips
When doing your stories, it’s a good idea to write them from your user’s perspective in the language they would use. This gives you an opportunity to put yourself in their shoes.
You should also avoid “solutionising” — coming up with an answer to your problem before you’ve properly thought things through.
And it’s a good idea to avoid beginning user stories with “As a user…”. If you do, it may mean you need to do more work to investigate who your audience is.
Deciding what content should cover
Acceptance criteria complement the job story or user story by defining when the user need is met.
When we’re producing articles, it tells us when we can stop writing because the user has all the information they need to move forward.
It keeps articles tighter, shorter and clearer so the user doesn’t get side-tracked by content that is unrelated to their situation, problem or question.
Some people write acceptance criteria as a one-liner from the user’s perspective, for example:
This approach feels quite tautological — it doesn’t add much to the job or user story. We tend to do acceptance criteria like this:
Written like this, the acceptance criteria provide a neat tick-list of what you need to cover in your article — and also what you don’t. If it’s not on the list, it’s not getting in!
