Setting the Stage for Collaborative Content
My girlfriend and I have recently started dipping our toes into the housing market here in Seattle, so I find myself browsing through Zillow listings and recommendations from our real estate agent quite a bit. In looking at house after house online and in person over the past few months, one thing has become clear to me: the right staging makes a big difference in how I can imagine living in a place.
Laying out the welcome mat
Staging refers to a practice where people listing a home for sale tidy up and decorate the house in a way meant to present it in the best possible light. Most sellers hire professionals to help with the process, but some do the staging themselves. They put the right couch, table or chair here. They add a trendy, black-and-white portrait of a giraffe on the wall there. On the floor in one room goes a yoga mat and weights, and on the kitchen counter goes a basket of fresh lemons.
All of this is done to help potential buyers envision how the space can be used given the layout of the house. Even if the staging doesn’t perfectly match the furniture they own or the style of art they like, it gets buyers to a place where they’re closer to understanding how an otherwise empty building could become a place that feels like home and what tweaks they’d need to make to get to that point.
While this process of selling and buying houses might not seem like it would relate to user experience and content strategy initially, I realized that there’s a fairly strong analogy for content-first design to be found when you think about it a little more.
Making your designs move-in ready
There are lots of ways to define what content-first design thinking is, but one version I like is this:
“Content-first means considering content early on in projects and discussing things properly to deliver content on time and on budget.”
- Paige Toomes, GatherContent
The reason I like that particular definition is that it takes into account the reality most people in the UX world face. In its purest form, the term content-first design means literally what it says on the box: you create the content at the very start — even before the user interface exists — and go from there.
But just like most people don’t get to build a house around the stuff they already own, most of us in the UX world don’t get the luxury of designing a brand-new product in our day-to-day work. We’re often operating within the confines of existing design systems and products, and the best we can do is to bring content into the design process early.
Content-first design, to me, is the staging process of the UX world. It’s an approach that emphasizes starting with content that’s similar to what you may expect to be in your end product given an established user interface. It puts relevant copy in the right places in the UI early on to get understanding, feedback, and eventual buy-in from everyone involved.
Checking the foundation
Imagine that the “house” we’re talking about is your UI and what you’re “staging” it with is placeholder content. To help your potential “buyers” — in this case, your teammates — understand what’s going on in the UI and how to make it usable, you want that copy as close as it can be to the final version from the start so that you can test and resolve issues in your designs earlier and eventually make the “sale” by shipping the product.
Using Lorem Ipsum or other gibberish as a placeholder — a practice we’ve all been guilty of — seems like a handy way to get things started, but it’s actually counterproductive because the copy lacks context. It’s akin to staging a living room with a water slide instead of a couch: it might sound like an awesome idea at first, but it’s not useful in the end.
Irrelevant placeholder copy wastes time by adding an element to your designs that is going to have to be removed later and isn’t productive in the meantime. On top of that, using it gets in the way of opportunities you might otherwise have to surface fixable issues. Since those problems will have to be resolved eventually and that nonsense content will inevitably need to get changed, why not start with something better?
Handing over the keys
As a senior UX content strategist who works on a wide array of extremely technical products, I rely on my PMs and UX design partners as the subject matter experts. Like, all the time every day. They know the technical ins and outs, and they give me the context and specifics I need to craft the final language seen by our users.
Although writing is obviously key to being a content strategist, I feel that a big part of my role is to enable and empower my colleagues to be content creators themselves. When I’m at my best as a teammate, I’m working to help the designers, developers, and PMs make the leap from using Lorem Ipsum to “staging” the UI with meaningful content, and there are a few strategic tools that can help any DIY stager work like a professional.
First, it’s important to remember that you can rely on what already exists. Whether in your product or a competitor’s, it’s likely that something has already been written that can work as a placeholder in your UI. Take the time to find and use relevant content to get the ball rolling, but always ensure that you edit and adjust later to make sure the words are your own and that they fit the needs of your product and users.
If you have to create something new, though, one option I like is to start by telling a quick story. Think about it as if you were coming into the space for the first time, and describe that space in a way that creates a narrative for the user. What is in this UI and how should it be used? Draft a few sentences explaining what they would be seeing, what they’d be doing, and what would happen if they did it.
Getting that context in the UI, as simple as it might seem, helps bring understanding to the next person on your team who sees it and provides a starting point for further conversation. That sort of effort makes the experience feel familiar to people.
Adding the finishing touches
From there, you can go the extra mile and refer to style guides and content patterns to help shape the words on the page. Much of our daily work in UX doesn’t require the deft touch of a linguistic virtuoso as much as it does reusable molds and paint-by-number-style rules. To get back to the house analogy, guides and patterns are a helpful way to remind us of best practices as we add and arrange the furniture and art in the room.
With all of these tools available to help set the stage, everyone involved in the process — writers, UX designers, PMs, and engineers — can work together to bring the difference between the first pass and the end product closer together. Having a collaborative system in place for creating content brings consistency and efficiency, all of which translates to the end users in a better product that’s shipped faster. Or, to put it in real estate terms, content-first design can help you sell more quickly for over list price.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to search for a house with an indoor water slide. Useful or not, it does sound pretty awesome.
