Good content is good UX
Just as good design is good business, good content is good ux.
Consider the wild content practitioner. They subsist off a healthy diet of books, wit, and coffee. They can be found on product teams cavorting with developers, UI/UX designers, offering managers and other product specialists, or they can be observed strategizing and publishing content. They are abuzz with words, sometimes even resorting to colorful vernacular. These busy bees are the collaborative cross-pollinators of teams. But what exactly do they do?
Content is meaning, rooted in user needs
Well, let’s start at the word, “content.” Content, agnostic of form, is the true meaning and story at the center of the experience you’re delivering. And just as good design is good business, good content is good ux. Content is a more specific slice of user experience. And all that content designers and strategists do must be rooted in user needs. Those needs don’t necessarily have to be met with the written word, but can also be met through video, visuals, gamification, interactive experiences, and more.
Alright, here’s the part where I gratuitously insert a venn diagram into the post since I’m on the subject of UX. The CUBI Experience Model, which is an acronym describing its four components; Content, User Goals, Business Goals, and Interactions, is powerful in its declaration of content as a main component to an overall user experience. It is a useful action framework for contextualizing how content plays a major role in the effective delivery of all experiences, and most importantly, helps me explain what the heck it is that I do at the office all day.
Content designers and strategists are writers, makers, and publishers, often with complementary skill sets in design disciplines like information design or information architecture, ux design, design research, and curriculum design. They retain technical understanding of what is happening behind the curtain, and may have the propensity to partake in that effort but focus on crafting the story and overall journey of the user.
What is content strategy?
Content strategy is the overarching plan for linking content artifacts across a journey and guides users toward fulfillment of their goals. The purpose of content strategy is to present meaningful, cohesive, engaging, and sustainable content as a carefully crafted journey toward an intended user outcome. The process of creating individual components, often through writing in collaboration with UI/UX professionals and developers, is known as content design. Zoom one level out, and how it is published and where, is its content strategy. However, these roles can retain different labels and responsibilities company-to-company.
Why is content so important?
If companies spend all their time making engaging products, and absolutely stunning, draw-dropping user experiences that ultimately say nothing, can they really be effective? They can’t. Without content designers and strategists, content can still get created. However, in this sans-content professional scenario, experiences never get the attention, love, and respect they deserve while failing to truly reaching their full potential.
Stories are the most recognizable pattern of communication in which humans can derive meaning. If the experience that is crafted ultimately fails to deliver a story, its effectiveness drops significantly. And there are of course, quite a few ways to measure this very real discrepancy, but that’s an entirely separate can of squirmy content worms ripe with prickly KPI parasites.
Jeffrey Zeldman describes this phenomenon below.
Content always, not just first.
You may have heard the term, “content first,” or its variations like the above “content precedes design.” This implies that content should be created and considered first before the rest of the experience gets designed and built. Technically, that approach is correct, but there’s more to the story. Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach upend the old “content first” adage, in their book, Content Strategy for the Web, which is full of practical, yet sassy advice for creating effective content strategies at any company. They posit that content should be created not just first, but considered before, during, and beyond a project. Below I’ll offer a few ways this concept can be put into practice from my own experience.
Tips for your “content always” team
- Before you go into any project, ensure what you build fits within a broader content strategy that you have planned for using team strategy sessions and design research.
- Advocate the necessity to include your content professional(s) in all major meetings and checkpoints along the course of your project.
- Scope your content early on, and have a draft ready by the time the team goes into prototyping so that your intentions are clear from the start and you have a plan.
- Ensure you instate a system of peer review so that your work has undergone grammar checks by other content professionals if possible, and the concept has been evaluated and approved by peers.
- Be at a semifinal draft state by the time your team goes into final “build.” This will prevent a lot of re-work and cleanup.
- Ensure there are final content checks and reviews once the build is completed, before it is officially published. You WILL miss things. Refer to The Chicago Manual of Style or the AP stylebook if you’re stuck.
- Once a project is done, the curation work begins. Ensure the content is kept “fresh” and up-to-date, and that whatever you build as a team is integrated into your broader content strategy going forward.
You’re not an afterthought
Content design and content strategy are still emerging disciplines, so it can feel like content is still in the backseat when it comes to building experiences together. Most teams are used to operating without this enhancement, so it’s the job of content practitioners to understand and advocate for the value of their role. Let’s work together to bring clarity and understanding of business value through the role that content plays. More importantly, however, let’s build amazing experiences that users stick around for. You know, since it’s good business and all. ;-)
This post was based on my talk for onboarding content designers at IBM.
Stay tuned for more words on content and beyond.
Allison Biesboer is a Content Designer & Strategist at IBM. She’s based in Austin, Texas. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
