The four pillars model of content design

Introducing a visual framework for practitioners.

Content designers working on the four pillars

Introduction

I recently read the new edition of Content Design by Sarah Winters and Rachel Edwards. It’s a great resource, full of helpful guidance. But it reminded me that content design is somewhat lacking in visual models/frameworks compared to product design.

Product/UX designers have the Double Diamond or Fives Planes of UX to visualise how they work. Where are the fancy diagrams for content design?

To address this ‘problem’, I’ve worked with my content design team to create a visual framework. We’re calling it, rather grandiosely: The Four Pillars of Content Design. We’re not arrogantly claiming it’s the way to do content design, but we feel it’s a way.

Our goal is that the framework becomes:

• a practical resource for our team
• an asset that explains our process to internal stakeholders and external suppliers
• a tool that gets adopted by our peers for their own work (one can dream)

Introducing the four pillars model

Here’s the high-level idea:

Content design is underpinned by the four pillars of research, planning, design and maintenance, based on a foundation of theoretical knowledge.

The Four Pillars of Content Design, 2025

Please note: Content strategy — the overarching plan of how content will help achieve your organisation or product objectives — sits behind this framework. The four pillars model focuses on the practice of content design.

Before we get into the granular details, let’s cover what content design actually is, and summarise each pillar and the foundation of the model.

What is content design?

Content design has been described as designing with words, or user experience for word nerds. In the context of being a local government content designer, I’d explain it like this:

Content design is the practice of creating inclusive content that’s understandable and useful.

That means our content needs to be accessible, readable and usable, so people can find information, access a service or complete a task quickly and easily.

The term “content design” was coined by Sarah Winters while working for the UK government in the early 2010s. Since then, it’s grown as a recognised design discipline which overlaps with UX writing.

Content designers aren’t limited to words. But in our craft, language is very much our raw material and writing our primary skillset.

What are the pillars?

The four pillars underpin content design and are each critical to its long-term effectiveness.

The Research, Plan, Design and Maintain pillars

Here’s the in-a-nutshell summary of each pillar:

1. Research: This is all about understanding your content, how people are using it and what they need from it. It’s about realising what problems you’re trying to solve, and your organisation’s goals for the content.
2. Plan: This is about taking what you’ve learned to plan who you’re actually designing for, what your content requirements are and how it should be structured to provide the best user experience.
3. Design: This is where you build on your research and planning to craft content that’s accessible, readable and usable — refining and even reiterating based on feedback from peers, colleagues and users.
4. Maintain: This is the work no one wants to talk about, because it’s boring. Maintenance might be unglamorous, but it’s also really important to monitor content, fix issues and keep it up to date.

What’s the foundation?

The four pillars are built on top of a solid foundation of fundamental UX design knowledge.

Content design is very much a facet of user experience (UX), which means at least a basic understanding of UX design is essential. Lack of theoretical knowledge in this area will undermine the pillars in practice.

Building a foundation to the model

What is this mysterious UX knowledge? I’d suggest the following:

• Design principles: Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things links usability to seven fundamental principles: Discoverability, Affordances, Signifiers, Constraints, Mappings, Feedback, and Conceptual Model.
• Usability heuristics: Jakob Nielsen’s rule-of-thumb guidelines overlap with Norman’s ideas, and can be used as part of a heuristic evaluation to identify usability problems with a product or system user interface.
• Inclusive design: This is the practice of designing for everyone to avoid factors such as age, disability, culture, education level, access to technology or socio-economic status becoming barriers.
• Emotional design: There’s more to UX (and content design) than usability. Designing for emotions to elicit delight or avoid distress is important for every product, system and piece of content.

There are lots of other user experience principles out there, and if you want to explore more I’d suggest Jon Yablonky’s Laws of UX (which I’ve written about) or a book such as Universal Principles of Design.

The four pillars model in practice

How does it work?

The four pillars framework is a linear/iterative hybrid approach.

You can see below that the process is mostly linear (you do it in order). But an important part of the ‘Design’ pillar is revising and reiterating work based on feedback. And then at the end of the whole process there’s a loop back to the start, because content design is never finished.

The four pillars in practice

Now let’s explore each of the four pillars…

1. Research pillar

What is it?

Understanding your content, organisation goals, users and their problems/needs.

Expanding the research pillar

What does it involve?

• Content inventory/audit: Start by taking stock of what content you already have. Next, review a sample (or all of it) for readability, accessibility and other criteria to evaluate its quality. Doing a content inventory/audit is most beneficial for larger projects.
• Analytics: Explore how your content and product are used. We’re talking quantitative data like page views, traffic sources, device types, search keywords, heat maps, etc. You can learn a lot from a relatively quick dive into your analytics.
• Customer feedback: Analyse any qualitative data you already have. This could be from website feedback forms or customer satisfaction surveys. Find out if there are any clear themes or trends that provide useful context for how content is working.
• Subject experts: Engage with the topic specialists who know your information and services inside out. They can tell you what the organisation’s goals are for the content. Maintain a good relationship with these folks — you need them.
• Proto personas: Sketch some proto personas to capture your working assumptions of who your users are, and what they need. You can then expand them into polished full user personas or discard them as appropriate based on research and testing.
• User research: Don’t rely solely on existing data; do original user research. There are a lot of options in the UX research methods playbook, but classics like surveys and user interviews will produce a useful mix of qualitative and quantitative insights.

2. Plan pillar

What is it?

Agreeing who you’re designing for, and how you can create content that’ll meet their needs.

Expanding the plan pillar

What does it involve?

• User personas: Design some composite user types with problems your content can solve. User personas work because it’s easier to empathise with a single person who has individual goals, frustrations and specific lifestyle information than a faceless mass of users.
• Empathy mapping: Plot an empathy map to show the attitudes and behaviours of your user personas. Empathy maps are simple diagrams with quadrants split into what users Say, Think, Feel and Do. You can create a different empathy map for each user journey.
• Journey mapping: Create a journey map to show all the steps your personas go through to access your information or service. Journey mapping is split into an initial Prompt followed by Finding, Doing and Getting (although there are different approaches to journey mapping).
• Information architecture: Design an information architecture (IA) diagram that organises and labels content in a way that makes sense to users. This could be informed by card sorting from the ‘Research’ pillar. You can then validate your ideas through tree testing.
• User flows: Create user flow diagrams that show the path users take through your product or system, including their starting/end points, actions, decisions and inputs/outputs. These visualisations can help you plan the content you need for each step of the user journey.
• User / Job stories: Write user stories as a way of framing requirements from the user’s perspective, describing who the user is, what they need and why they need it. Job stories are basically the same, but dispense with user types when the audience is similar.

3. Design pillar

What is it?

Designing content that’s accessible, readable and usable, iterating based on feedback.

Expanding the design pillar

What does it involve?

• Wireframing/Prototyping: Visualise user interface (UI) concepts if it’s appropriate for the project. Content designers typically design with words, but may need to create wireframes/prototypes (anyone with ‘designer’ in their job title should have basic visual design skills).
• UX writing: Craft your content using best practices to make it understandable and useful. This includes UX writing techniques such as progressive disclosure, plain language, active voice, consistent tone and effective formatting for quick scanning and decision-making.
• Proofread and edit: Review your content and improve it — make it shorter, simpler and easier to read and use. Try using online tools like Hemingway, Grammarly or AI tools to highlight and fix any language that’s complex and difficult to read.
• Accessibility checks: Evaluate your content to make sure it’s usable for disabled people. It should pass Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 as a minimum. You should use a mix of automated tools like WAVE as well as manual testing.
• Content critique: Share your work and ask for feedback from your team. Content critiques, also known as ‘crits’, should be positive, constructive and focus on the content, not the designer. Use the feedback to refine and reiterate as needed.
• Stakeholder sign-off: Share draft content with your subject matter experts and secure sign-off from any senior stakeholders before publishing. This may involve further edits and compromises before everyone can agree that the content is ready.

4. Maintain pillar

What is it?

Monitoring and managing content; fixing readability, accessibility and searchability issues.

Expanding the maintain pillar

What does it involve?

• Analytics: Monitor your new content, paying attention to any key performance indicators (KPIs) which signal that it’s improved. Consider creating interactive dashboards to focus on your core metrics, and give subject experts and stakeholders access to it.
• Quality assurance (QA): Ensure you’ve got a robust system to monitor/fix standard QA issues like broken links, misspellings and readability issues. It’s boring work, but essential — if these issues build up it’ll undermine the usability and trustworthiness of your content.
• User feedback: Engineer a mechanism for users to give feedback on your content. For example, a ‘Help us improve this page’ form across your website. This gives you real-time feedback on issues with your product or system (without waiting for QA crawls).
• Search engine optimisation (SEO): The best approach to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs) is simply to create useful, engaging and sharable content. However, it’s worth learning about the basics of SEO, best practices to follow and bad practices to avoid.
• Accessibility audit: Carry out an an annual accessibility audit of your product or system, then update your accessibility statement to reflect your compliance with WCAG, what the issues are and what your plan is to fix them. To be clear: this is not a once-and-done task.
• Content reviews: Have a process to periodically review existing content. Check the information is still needed and up to date. This is another unglamorous-but-essential process to ensure that your content remains accurate, relevant and meets user needs.

Benefits of the four pillars model

Designing the early iteration of the framework

We feel the strengths of the four pillars model are that it’s:

• visual — diagrams help communicate concepts and processes better than words alone.
• memorable — the four pillars plus the foundation are easy concepts to remember.
• simple — the high-level model is clear enough to share with stakeholders to explain how we work.
• practical — the full model is also detailed enough to be a useful resource for content design practitioners.
• customisable — you can use the framework as a template, and adapt it for your own team/organisation.
• scalable — you can scale the pillars based on the size and priority of your work (see below).
• future-proof — new technology isn’t incompatible with the model, e.g. designing AI assistant language and tone is effectively just UX writing in a different context.

Scaling the four pillars

I’m expanding this benefit to its own section, as it addresses one of the issues with most guidance on practices like content design:

Books, articles and courses usually only tell you how to do things perfectly — but in reality it’s impractical to go 100% all-out on every piece of content.

For a major project like a large website redesign or brand new mobile app, it would be appropriate to try and cover every process in each of the four pillars.

But most work isn’t like this. The reality is that for most content designers — in government/public sector, anyway — you’re constantly juggling mini-projects and other business-as-usual work.

Example: Refreshing a section of website pages

Let’s apply the four pillars model to refreshing a dozen pages on a local services website about recycling, fostering or health and wellbeing.

In this example, you can see the scaled model below is very Design and Maintain heavy — there are some steps you can’t avoid if you want to write, publish and manage content professionally.

Scaling the four pillars for the real world

But for smaller pieces of work, your research and planning need to be lighter and quicker.

For example: in the Research pillar you don’t need to formally inventory/audit a dozen pages or create personas specifically for them. But you can look at analytics and customer feedback and speak to the subject experts; you might be able to run a short survey and do a few usability tests.

In the Plan pillar: journey maps, IA and user flow diagrams might be complete overkill if you’re aiming for a small, flat structure of webpages/nodes. But you can probably find time to create some basic empathy maps to get a feel for your users, and write some job stories to agree what needs the content has to meet.

Of course, sometimes research throws up unexpected discoveries — that’s the nature of research. But in most cases there isn’t the time, budget or resource to turn every piece of work into a full-blown project. This is the reality most guidance shies away from. However, big projects with senior stakeholder buy-in do come around — and when they do, you can go ‘full four pillars’ on them!

RAG rating using the four pillars model

A final suggestion is to use the four pillars as a framework for your team’s professional development.

You can use the four pillars model to evaluate your team’s knowledge, skills and experience in different areas of content design.

I’ve rebuilt my team several times over the years. If you were to take a snapshot of the our capabilities at random points in time, it would vary wildly. So I decided to run through the four pillars framework with the current team, and encouraged everyone to be honest about their abilities in different areas (see below — we’ve now switched to Red/Amber/Green colour system).

RAG rating using the four pillars framework

You can see that for the current make-up of our team, planning activities are our weakest area. This quick, simple exercise has immediately highlighted areas to improve.

As a manager, it’s incredibly useful to know where our strengths and weaknesses lie as a team — and where to focus on improving my content designers’ understanding and abilities.

Conclusion

This article proposes The Four Pillars of Content Design framework:

Content design is underpinned by the four pillars of research, planning, design and maintenance, based on a foundation of theoretical knowledge.

We suggest the framework’s key benefits are that it’s visual, memorable, simple, practical, customisable, scalable and future-proof.

We don’t claim the four pillars to be especially innovative or ground-breaking; it’s mainly contextualising existing practice in a more visual way. But I would argue there’s value in having a clear, easy-to-remember model to refer to. Sometimes in life half the battle is simply everyone agreeing on and understanding what the plan is.

We look forward to sharing the model with content design community and, in the spirit of our work, improving it based on feedback from fellow practitioners.