The one where we killed Lorem Ipsum and lived happily ever after
Written by Mario Ferrer & Sergio Vila
Season 1, Episode 15
FADE IN: INTERIOR, MEETING ROOM — MORNING
A designer and a UX Writer are discussing their new project for a critical client. They have to give their old website a complete redesign. They both look very excited and are eager to start working on it.
Designer: Yes! We’re finally getting a chance, and I’m super excited to start working on this!
UX Writer: Yeah, me too! All those books I bought from Amazon™ on “how to write for the web” will finally pay off. How should we start?
Designer: Ok, let’s do this. You start working on the content, and when it’s ready, I will begin designing.
UX Writer: Hmm… how about you start designing first and then I’ll fill it with content?
Designer: But I can’t create a design until I have some content…
UX Writer: But I want to see the design first…
The argument goes on and on, and what started as a friendly meeting is slowly evolving into an episode of Judge Judy. At one point the shouting stops and they decide to split up so each one can go work on their thing. The air is tense, and their friendship is on the line as they exit the meeting room.
CUT TO: INTERIOR, OPEN OFFICE SPACE — MID AFTERNOON
The designer walks back to his designer desk, opens his designer MacBook, and starts working on an awesome Bauhaus™ approved website. He doesn’t have the content yet, so he decides to use fake text to fill in the blanks. Lines and lines and lines of Bacon Ipsum (he’s just that hipster) start filling in the mockup. The designer looks over at his fellow designers and states:
Designer: Using Bacon Ipsum is much better. That way stakeholders won’t be distracted by the text, and they’ll focus on the design. People are more interested in a website when it looks modern and is visually attractive.**
** Disclaimer: every time a designer says something like this, Jakob Nielsen kills a puppy.
CUT TO: INTERIOR, OFFICE CAFETERIA — MID AFTERNOON
The UX Writer sits on his favorite couch in the cafeteria; while he bangs on the keys of his laptop as if possessed by the spirit of Hemingway.
FADE IN: INTERIOR, MEETING ROOM — MORNING
They meet again after some months of hard work. The moment of truth has arrived. They start putting everything together and replace the Bacon Ipsum on the Bauhaus-approved website with the real content. They look at each other with slight contempt.
Designer: It’s too much text! How do you expect to fit all that?
UX Writer: What happened? Those spaces on your designs are minuscule!
Designer: You’ll need to rewrite…
UX Writer: You’ll need to redesign…
FADE OUT
DESIGN DIRECTOR’S NOTES
We are sure the situation described before may sound familiar to some of you. That’s why the most widely accepted solution to keep the design rolling is using a placeholder text like Lorem Ipsum. It comes in handy to layout your design, test font styles, and get an overall view of the look and feel of your product.
The problem is that isolating content from early design phases may have unpredictable results and it can create inconsistencies with your content strategy. Best case scenario, you have to adapt texts to a layout that already existed. Worst case, layouts get butchered.
Let’s take a moment to reflect upon on all those dead pixels.
Lorem Ipsum is a bad idea to start your designs, it shatters the user experience. Plain and simple. Oh, you don’t believe me? Take a look at these examples:
Oh, my! There’s not enough space
There’s too much to say and the space is too small. It becomes impossible to fit everything and the design breaks.
Now there’s waaay too much text
Sometimes there’s more space than needed and the designer creates the layout assuming that content will fill the entire screen. This may result in having to fill the space with unnecessary text when it could have been solved in a more elegant and efficient way.
Proto-content, Proto-WHAT?
You use sketches, wireframes, and low fidelity prototypes to plan your designs, right? Why don’t you do the same for content? You don’t need the final polished content to do that. A first draft of the idea is enough to help you structure a layout that is closer to the final product, something you can’t do with filler text.
Liam King, the founder of Lagom Strategy, suggests we use proto-content to fill in the gap between design and content. Think of proto-content as a mockup of the message you want to deliver to your users. It doesn’t have to be final, but it should make sense. It’s like creating a rough draft of the experience your users will be getting. Proto-content eventually makes it easier to validate ideas and iterate.
Start working with proto-content
Getting rid of Lorem Ipsum doesn’t come for free. It WILL take a bit longer to write a few paragraphs of content than pushing a block of Lorem Ipsum, but the insights you will gain are worth it. Content creates understanding, and it’s quite difficult to test your product with users if you don’t use real words. Not to mention you can even speed up production by following a content-first approach. It will help you avoid further significant redesigns because the text is not fitting the layout.
Getting started:
Current content:
If you are redesigning a product or a website it will undoubtedly have some content you can use in your new designs. It’s better to have old content than no content at all, as it will offer you some context and provide you with some guidelines to start designing.
Competitor content:
Don’t have any content you can use? Don’t worry. In the early design phase you could use content form your competitors website. Once you have an initial idea of what you want to say, replace it with your own content. This approach is very useful to define the content requirements for your project.
Draft content:
This is one of our favourite approaches. The designer writes in his own words what the design should tell the user, and then he sits together with the UX Writer to iterate and polish. Even if the content goes through several rounds of revision, it is contextual and meaningful.
FINAL THOUGHTS
You can mix all the previous proto-content techniques depending on your needs. Remember that what you will be producing is not the final content and it’s not a way to replace UX Writers in your design projects. You won’t launch your wireframes or mockups as if they were the final product, right? The same applies to content.
Next time you start a design project fight the urge to use Lorem Ipsum and consider using proto-content instead. As J. Zeldman says: “Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”
We recommend you to read the following articles. The authors are way smarter than us…
- Using proto-content for a better user experience by Rob Mills
- Designing content first for a Better UX by Liam King
- Designing for conversation: content first approach by Ning T.
Written by Mario Ferrer & Sergio Vila
Designfeld is a comedy series based on a typical tech company about a UX Designer and his fellow UX Writer, in their struggle to find… they don’t even know what they’re struggling to find… they just want to share their views on Design and why it can get quirky sometimes.
