Content debt: How it affects your product & why you should tackle it
It may even be driving your users away.
A few weeks ago, we ordered in our team lunch from a Serbian restaurant. The food arrived much later than promised, and what’s more, the takeout boxes weren’t labelled. So there we were, a group of 20 plus, irritated, hungry people, walking around the dining room, opening box after box to find their lunch. Somehow I was the only one who seemed amused by this. I went around telling my colleagues: “Now you know why I keep saying content is important!” Not a good idea, I soon realized, when my words were met with grunts and groans.
These days, I’m going out of my way to make people see why they need to take content seriously. Much like Alaine Mackenzie said in her talk on product content strategy, I have become a “broken record”. But whenever I point out content problems in our product, on our website, in our prototypes and even in our sales decks, I’m met with the usual “oh-it’s-just-some-copy-we-don’t-have-time-to-fix-it-now” excuse.
Most often people don’t see that their content (or the lack of a proper content strategy) could lead to users abandoning their product. They don’t consider words as an important element in product design or they think of it as something that can be “fixed later”. And, because the effects of low-quality content are not as apparent as, say, bad, defective code. Or, it would be more appropriate to say that it does not manifest itself in the same way. This mindset of not treating content as a priority in your product’s design creates what is called content debt.
What is content debt?
A derivative of the term ‘technical debt’, content debt, in simple words, is
the hidden cost you build up by not creating enough content, by shipping out low quality content or by creating useless, superfluous content.
So content debt is really an aftereffect of wrong priorities. It builds up and accrues interest each time you put content on the back burner in your product design cycles. UX writers and content strategists are always cribbing about how they are asked to write something intelligent/cute/funny/snappy to replace the lorem ipsums on the wireframes.
Sadly, content cannot fix bad design, especially if added as an afterthought.
And, your design is probably fundamentally flawed when you make that decision to ignore content.
So how can you make out if you are in content debt?
You’re in content debt, if:
- different features of your product speak differently (most often, they speak like the designer/developer who worked on it), aka voice and tone inconsistency
- you have created too much content, but no one knows where to find it or what to use it for
- your product has evolved over different redesigns and releases, but your content hasn’t
- you have created too much redundant content that overwhelms, irritates or confuses the user
- no one in your team thinks that content is their responsibility
- or, everyone in your team thinks that content is their responsibility
- your content doesn’t serve your users, it doesn’t inform or guide them to take action
- your content was created based on flawed assumptions about your target users
- your product has added on features too fast, but content hasn’t caught up that fast
Why should you tackle content debt?
Now that you know and have accepted that you’re in content debt, you should also be aware of the different ways that it can affect your product and business.
It leads to user frustration
When there is not enough content, or inconsistencies throughout the product, it leads to a fragmented and not-so-optimal user experience.
Yes, delight is great, but without consistency, it doesn’t add much to your user’s experience.
“When consistency is present in your design, people can transfer knowledge to new contexts and learn new things quickly without pain. This way they can focus on executing the task and not learning how the product UI works every time they switch the context,” writes Anton Nikolov. This applies to content as well. By confusing the user with different types of content across touchpoints, you’ll only end up with frustrated users, who may even abandon your product.
It erodes trust
So you invested some money in your marketing landing page and are paying someone to write flashy blog posts and engage with your community on social media. And, you’re pretty much acing it at content marketing and driving users to your product.
But the moment your user starts using the product, she is met with an experience that doesn’t match what she was advertised to buy. She gets that long welcome email, crappy error messages, the trying-hard-to-be-funny button copy and no where near helpful support content. This leaves the user feeling cheated and it erodes the trust that you had built with all your marketing content. So prioritizing one kind of content over another also doesn’t help.
It leads to more support tickets
If your content does not serve the user, does not inform them of your product and how it will benefit them, or doesn’t help them when they’re stuck, it is only natural that there will be more support tickets. Sometimes you may have created enough and more content, but the design places it in a way that the user cannot access it easily.
Bad interface content leads to bad usability and triggers what can be a dangerous downward spiral. Bad usability leads to more tickets; that means more workload on your support team; more frustrated users; more cost to hire additional support staff…and so on. By the end of this, you would have already lost some users and earned some bad reviews on social media and app stores.
It leads to wasted time and resources
Much like technical debt and design debt, content debt, too, will put pressure on your team when it’s time to pay it down. This is an unwarranted cost because you’re just paying a bigger price now to fix what you had put off earlier. And now, it has also created some damage, some frustration and many lost opportunities.
You waste the time and talent of your team trying to fix this debt, and lose out on the resources that could have been used to build and design better things. So you’re wasting much-needed human capital on something you knew you could’ve done better right when you started.
Bad UX content will cost you more than good UX content.
What next?
Hopefully by now you see why you cannot just hack content. Or, why you cannot make the newest person in your team — your intern — fill in some “young, millennial stuff” to replace your lorem ipsums.
In my next post, I’ll try to put together what I think are some practical starting points to “fix” or pay down your content debt.
Till then, remember that bad UX content will cost you more than good UX content. So why not start creating a culture of content-led design for your products?
