You can’t design a vessel unless you know what it’ll carry.
Weeknotes #2: Designing for Content (English)
One of my favorite 37signals’ blog posts from when I was starting out in Interaction Design was: Design is still about words.
Basahin ang post na ‘to sa mas casual na Tagalog-English dito.
This week, many of our activities were about planning and designing for content.
Full disclosure: I started out as a qualitative-quantitative media researcher (not as a visual designer), so you can say that I may be biased towards my own background.
So to understand the value of content in a design process, from the point-of-view of a designer, I’ll share a short conversation about how content impacts our day-to-day design process.
Content Planning* is a Symptom of Sense
Angela (A): How did you guys design again, back in the day when our team didn’t have a set process? And you’d just get orders to design a website, without a project brief or content plan?
B: We were all new at doing web design, back then; no one really knew what we should or shouldn’t be doing.
A: So would you say you had more freedom, then? You could do what you wanted.
That sounds like it was better. Why did you tell me earlier that asking for content prior to design is important?
B: Because if you don’t have prior documentation — like a brief or content plan — it’s like you’re designing just for yourself. But this — the work we do — normally isn’t just for yourself.
Having a content plan before you start to design just makes more sense. Because it has more purpose.
For example, I don’t especially like designing for other people — it’s always easier to design for yourself. Because, obviously, your taste won’t always work for other people. A content plan makes it easier to understand what I need to design; and makes it more justifiable, too.
It’s just better when there’s direction. It’s easier to wrap your head around the design. You’ll be able to think about it more, than if you didn’t get a clear content plan: “Oh, so this is what’s going on the site. If that’s the case, we could have done…”
“Oh, so this is what’s going on the site. If that’s the case, then we could have done…”
So when I design, I prefer that it’s already aligned to what will actually need to be communicated.
I enjoy the wireframing we did earlier today, because there was direction. It feels much better to work on well thought-out things.
Not things that we’re placed on a design “just because”.
*What is “Content” and “Content Planning”?
Content: Words, pictures, video that are on (literally, “contained”) a webpage, web site or app or any interface, for that matter.
It could be a story, an article, an infographic, a title, a notification, movie, show, webisode, thumbnail, Twitter post, emoji, a Like button. Anything displayed on the “surface” of an interface is content.
To clarify, let’s say that when we talk about “media” (social media, broadcast media, print media), they typically have two main parts:
The communication channel (or platform): What brings the content to you. Is it TV? The “silver screen”? A pirated DVD? The radio; an app; your Facebook news feed? You can say it’s the technology layer. In a sense, the bread to your sandwich filling. The mannequin to clothes. EDSA (Metro Manila’s main thoroughfare), to traffic. It’s the “vessel”.
The other — content itself. It’s what’s in and on the channel.
It’s The Avengers movie. Which you could watch in the movie theater, on HBO, Netflix or chopped up in little online pirated videos. It would still be “The Avengers movie”.
It’s that scandal you used to watch on a Nokia feature phone, that would now also be accessible on Snapchat — it would still be“content”. Every time Facebook says “What’s on your mind?”. It’s an exchange of “content” from Facebook to you, and from you to Facebook.
All of these bits need to be written, shot, edited, uploaded, planned. Unless you’re drunk and you post something without thinking. This is what content content planning and management (or lack of it) entails.
Constructive Advice
We worked at a media corporation for a while, where the “bread-and-butter” was content planning and creation. I wrote about helpful links that I read and how I learned to plan content for the web when we were starting out, in case you’d like to read about the topic in-depth.
What we know about work, we owe — not only to our formal education and our jobs, but also to the forward-thinking designers, developers, researchers,product managers and teams who choose to share their processes and lessons (for free) on Youtube, blogs, websites and MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) tutorials. This is the spirit of designing in the open. Where design teams show their process and what they learn along the way. This is done to grow the knowledge base of the industry, and also to get feedback and dialogue going about the work.
(If you’re interested in reading more about the beauty of open design, you can read this.)
We share what we experience in these weeknotes. To respect our clients’ confidentiality, we won’t directly post details about them. Everything we share here are the opinions (and life lessons) of the writer.
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