Why designing content leads to better UX
I recently read a post about content-first design that said:
“Design is communication. And you can’t communicate if you don’t know what you want to say.”
It’s no mystery that design and content should go hand-in-hand. But how things look often seems more important than what is said. There are many stories about UX writers trying to get involved earlier in the design process. Because content that is thrown-in last minute, or (worse) not really thought about at all, does service to no one. Especially not users.
While there are many reasons for prioritizing the words on the screen, here are a few that I think stand out:
The user’s language should become our own
When content is not researched, we tend to use whatever terms are commonplace in our teams and company. Sometimes they work but, most of the time, these words don’t match our users’ language (product people like to use fancy, technical names). When we don’t speak the same language as our user, we lose them. They stop understanding (or trying to) and we fail in a fundamental cornerstone of user experience.
In one of our products, for the longest time, we were calling a certain area ‘Inbox’. In some ways it looked like an inbox, but wasn’t really a spitting image of Gmail, and didn’t entirely work like one either. So, after some research, we discovered two main problems:
- How this area looked and worked did not match what users associate to an inbox.
- ‘Inbox’ was not the first term (or even second) used when participants were asked to describe it.
Someone, years ago, decided that ‘Inbox’ was the word. But the term was never validated. By learning our users’ language, we learn to understand how they think.
Consistency, consistency, consistency
I am a sucker for consistent copy. I love guidelines, grammar rules, and anything that I can point to and say: “Look, it’s a rule, it must always be that way”. I think most writers share this (slight) obsession. And when someone is thinking about the details of content, you can at least expect copy to be correct, consistent and, therefore, professional.
Everyone loves a good story
Any great video game is effective because of its story, its narrative, and the conversation between player and game. A Narrative Writer (or Game Writer) is vital to this design process. They create the story that makes someone want to keep playing. They are writing a novel and translating it to the screen. The same should go for any kind of product. What do Airbnb, Slack and Dropbox have in common? Great storytelling. There are writers on their teams that make “just another app” stand out for sounding great.
Boost your team’s productivity
When content is thought about early in the design process (at research stage), team productivity goes way up. When done properly, content goes through several iterations, and will be reviewed by various stakeholders before a final version is decided on. This back-and-forth communication is good, but can lead to versioning problems. Content may take one form in an early prototype and a completely different form later on. If copy is designed and approved before even putting it into any kind of design, a lot of these issues disappear.
Good content is fine, great content solves a problem
Just like great design, great content solves a user’s problems. Tone and voice are important, yes, but that isn’t the only thing a content person should be thinking about. They should be involved in the research, to understand how users think. They should be present in usability tests, to see which words are working and which aren’t. And they should be interviewing users to find out what language makes them click. Design and content work together to communicate something. Design alone cannot solve all user problems, and neither can content. Finding harmony between the two will make a lot of people, especially users, very happy.
