Digital content: Doing more with less
Content overwhelm
The world is awash with digital content. It’s everywhere. You can’t turn a corner without being confronted with another email or a notification on your phone, or a digital billboard convincing you to buy something you’re already fairly certain you don’t need or want. Let’s face it, we’re overwhelmed but it’s worse than that. Overwhelm feels like it’s become the new normal. That slight feeling of panic every time the phone goes or the email pings or something else tells you that someone somewhere has commented on a thing you wrote once on a social media platform you don’t even remember joining. It’s a surprisingly large burden to carry.
Environmental impact of content and design
The burden of online content isn’t just related to our wellbeing. It’s also about the wellbeing of our planet. Every word we write, every comment we submit, every email or slack message we send uses up data. It takes energy to create this content, to send it, to save it and recall it.
If you thought back to when you first got online, and tried to remember every email, message and piece of content you’ve ever written, could you? I certainly couldn’t. But every time we create content, we add to this ever increasing data store. How many PDF files, how many photographs, how many unfinished documents do you have sitting in your folders that you don’t need but you keep just incase you need to prove you did the thinking? Far too many? Yeah, me too.
Then think about how much information is duplicated across the internet. We’re not wildly original. Often we say the same things over and over again in different ways.
Where does this information live? Oh “the cloud”? Remind me again about that data cloud that floats about in the sky that we can randomly pluck knowledge out of? It’s not really a cloud. It’s big bunkers filled with rows and rows of servers that save your information and regurgitate it back onto the internet. Sounds a bit less romantic put that way doesn’t it? And every one of those buildings is made with materials that impact the planet, every one of those servers does too — and they won’t last forever either. How recyclable do you think they are once they reach the end of their shelf life?
I know, it upsets me too.
How content design can help solve the problem
Content design is about making it easy to do a thing using content. Most commonly, by simplifying the words we use and reducing them to the bare minimum.
There’s a connection here, I promise, and here it is: content design is how we reduce the amount of content we put online by:
- making sure the information we use is what a user needs to do a thing and no more
- linking to content that already exists rather than duplicating it
- creating content that’s shorter and easier to load, which in turn uses less energy
The relationships between the content is where the value lies
Like I said before, we’re often not the most original of folk. Artists for generations have told us that it’s not so much what you say as how you say it. It’s in the expression of what we know that we show that we are capable of infinite variety.
In digital spaces, this takes on a new meaning. It’s not about how you know, but it’s about what your content knows. Every piece of information we know, or share, somehow relates to another. If we become more conscious about what we know and focus more on how what we know relates to other information, how it changes shape and nuance and meaning in different contexts, it gives us an opportunity to do something original. To find the patterns between our pieces of content and put them together in new and original ways to provide value to the people we serve.
It’s this that led me to the concept of atomic content design, otherwise known as breaking a piece of content down into its constituent parts and recombining it in different combinations across different channels. It helps me to reduce my digital footprint and increase the value to the people I’m designing for.
How do you do more with less content?
