by Abbey Kos
“Be careful of words,” says Anne Sexton in my favourite poem, “even the miraculous ones.” For two dozen lines she goes on about words: they’re swarming insects, rocks and daisies, birds falling out of the sky.
I’m no Anne Sexton, but I think words are miraculous, too. And that’s why I love content design — the practice of using simple, human language to guide people through a service journey.
To be fair, “content design” itself is still a bit of a buzzword (ironic, given the whole point of it is to create clear and accessible words). Plenty of people — other designers included — think a content designer is just a copywriter with glasses and a Macbook.
But while some of this work is admittedly old wine in new bottles (good grammar, well-constructed and sharp language, etc.), user-centred content does genuinely represent a new area of focus for both the web and design in general. Service design says we can’t assume what people want; content design says we can’t assume what people want to hear. Simple in theory, but easy to get wrong.
Even small content design choices can have huge implications for how services perform. We found this out firsthand when redesigning onboarding for Patchwork, our tool that connects professionals from different agencies around the clients they share.
As copy, our original language was good enough — accessible, clean, grammatically correct. But as user-centred content, it wasn’t quite fit for purpose. It didn’t show we were listening — that we’d paid attention to our users and their needs. And it was evident from the moment users opened their first onboarding email.
“Patchwork lets you find and contact colleagues from the network of professionals around your clients, helping you to work better together.”
Seems straightforward, right? Here’s a tool that’ll help you do your job better. But, as we found out after content-focused research, our users weren’t motivated by wanting to do their jobs better. They were motivated by wanting to help their clients.
And knowing that, we were able to rehaul our content to match:
“Hello from Patchwork, a service that helps people by connecting the professionals who support them.”
Small difference, but big results. Once we implemented our new onboarding email, the number of users who clicked through from the email and activated their account increased to 99% (up from 84% based on a sample of previous data).
GDS experiments with this kind of small-scale, human-centred copy all the time. One of their most famous experiments came out of a partnership with the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights team, the NHS, the Department for Health, and the Driving & Vehicle Licensing Agency (phew!) on a scientifically valid study of what messaging was most effective at getting people to register as organ donors.
The team tested eight different landing pages, each with their own layout and text built on different psychological drivers. One tried to build social norms (“Every day thousands of people who see this page decide to register”). Another highlighted loss (“Three people die every day because there are not enough organ donors”). Another focused on the opportunity donation provided (“You could save or transform up to 9 lives as an organ donor”).
The results were clear. Extrapolated over 12 months, the best-performing variant (now in place) is responsible for nearly 100,000 more registrations than the original. That’s 100,000 extra organ donors every year just from one paragraph on one webpage.
One of the best things about content design is that it’s incredibly easy to start experimenting with. All you need is a plan and a place to try things out. If you’re new to content design, here are some tips to get you started.
- Decide who you’re talking to. “Everyone” isn’t usually a great answer, unfortunately. Start with a specific audience, ideally one you know a lot about. Does your council know a lot about older people in the area? Take a look at your content around blue badges. Are there a lot of cyclists locally? Consider how you talk about bike paths and safe riding.
Example: The (hypothetical) council of Liliputshire has a lot of young families — 10% more than the average. Knowing that, their content designer decides to look at language around children’s services.
- Decide what you want them to do. Every piece of content has an “ask” in it, something specific it wants from the reader. Sometimes the ask is a basic one, like visiting a website. Sometimes it’s more advanced: attend a consultation, fill out a postal vote, or change how bins are collected. Choose one specific “ask” to experiment with.
There are lots of pages on the Liliputshire website for children’s services. However, the content designer focuses on a page asking young mums to register for parenting classes.
- Think about what your audience values. Now that you know who you’re talking to and what you want them to do, look at what’s important to your end users. How do they like to be talked to? What are their priorities? Don’t assume — look back at research or, at the very least, talk to the colleagues and/or frontline staff who interact most with the people you’re trying to reach.
Liliputshire’s content designer speaks with a few of her colleagues in children’s social care and looks at the results of a recent focus group with young mums. She learns that young mums in Liliputshire feel isolated and wish they had more opportunities to connect with one another.
- Put the pieces together. Take your goal, your audience, and your audience’s priorities, and put those pieces together in multiple ways. Your goal should be to draft a handful of testable options that feel tangibly different from one another.
Using the information at hand, the content designer comes up with three different opening sentences about parenting classes: one about friendship, one about learning, and one about building a support network.
- Test out your drafts and see what works best. Once you’ve got a few options, work with your IT team to get your content online. Depending on how your site’s been built, you may be able to try out all your options at once through A/B testing. Otherwise, switch out each option after a few days.
Liliputshire’s site supports A/B testing. For the next two weeks, visitors to the parenting classes page will see one of three opening sentences displayed randomly.
- Look at your results, stick with the best choice, and start over. Once you’ve tested all your options, look back at which performed best. The number of people who visit your page, click a link, or register for a programme are the best ways to determine the kind of impact your content has. Leave the best-performing option live on the website, come up with some theories about why it worked, and look for somewhere new to test those theories out.
After a month, the content designer checks back at how each of her options performed. She sees the “friendship” angle is bringing more people to the site and getting more people to sign up. She wonders if all parents might also want opportunities for friendship, so she tries this same approach on another webpage — this one for helping new parents find play groups.
Other designers might disagree, but I think language is the beating heart of a service. There’s no way around it. The most elegantly designed site, the most intuitive UX — without words, they’re just a series of pretty boxes.
That’s why it’s our duty as designers and policy nerds and people who work in public services to focus as much on words as we do on the services and technology that our words live in. The best websites, the most user-friendly journeys — they fall apart if we aren’t careful of words. Even the miraculous ones.
Or, to put it another way, there’s this: if good services are verbs, we’d better make damned sure we’re using the right verbs (and nouns, and adjectives, and everything else).
