Content strategy in UX design
This article will help us understand what is content strategy and why great content delivery is one of the essential aspect in delivering great user experience.
Content is found everywhere, everything we make has content. It’s in forms, copy, images, videos, stories, metadata. In our design 80% is the content itself. As Oliver Reichenstein states in his essay “Web Design Is 95% Typography” which we also can treat as content as well. So, with these numbers, we can figure out how important content strategy is in crafting user experience (UX) overall.
Content strategy(CS) has been around for a long time. Large companies like Twitter, Apple, Disney, Facebook have had functional content strategy for years now. Around the year 2010 only the UX conference started focusing on seminars, workshops and conferences on this topic before that it was not a topic of concern and unseen value.
We are treating design and content as separate entities. We have a content department and a design department.
What is Content Strategy?
It comprises two words, one is content and another is strategy.
Content can be defined as the topic or subject matter involved in the process of delivery. For example video, text, images and others.
Strategy can be defined as what are the ways that help us to attain business objectives. Which is generally intended to achieve in long term planning.It can also be defined as an art of planning the best way to gain an advantage or achieve success. It’s not just a plan but also actually about the outcome. It’s how we are going to attain the outcome.
Content strategy(CS) plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.
Kristina Halvorson, author of the book Content Strategy for the Web.
Content is king. Which is still relevant in 2020 as well. Today a lot of companies hire Content strategists to write up their content and deliver more value to users/readers. Content provides us the medium to communicate our intention. Having a plan to create a bridge between user and business goals is essential from both content and UX perspective as well. It provides us a clear vision of what we need to achieve (the type of content that relates to the users and satisfies there needs) and how exactly we can get there (by understanding the users and creating quality content).
Delivering the content is as important as the content itself.
- Jarel Spool
We need to ensure that we have useful and usable content, that is well structured, and easily found is vital to improving the user experience of a website.
While we are delivering a great user experience we should not only think about the design elements involved rather also think of delivering useful and usable content. Bad content never delivers great user experience rather diminishes it.
It would be great to communicate with our users with design and content together. Our design should speak the content and reflect the intent of making. By perfecting aligning these two we can connect users with design.
Relation between Content Strategy and UX
CS is technically not a part of UX but it has a direct impact on the end content product that it doesn’t and can’t live within the domain of UX. Not every content strategy needs UX strategy, and not every UX strategy needs content strategy. But yes they are both required for effective execution of creating, delivery and managing content. CS reiterates that our strategy helps you to identify what already exists, what should be created and, more importantly, why it should be created.
We can create content strategy by outlining the objectives of our user, identifying them and delivering what is exactly needed. This can be done with the hand to hand communication between CS and UX designers.
So, CS comes into assistance in making a great user experience. Rather than separating the two fields into two it should be an element in delivering a better experience after all.
Best practices for meaningful content
To deliver and provide best practice there are some points we need to consider:
- Content should reflect on how users think and speak about the topic. The structure and creation should revolve on those matters.
- Meet the expectation of the users by delivering user-centered design putting the focus on the user needs and expectations.
- Align business goals and user goals which can be reflected in content
- Communicate the users as they can understand. This may also depend on what our target users are including voice and tone used.
- Provide just useful content and kick out the useless ones.
- Staying up to date with the content and update when there is a change.
- Delivering with consistency can also help in understanding what we are communicating to them as well.
- The content should be accessible to all people. People must be benefited by the information we provide.
- Being able to find so that our users can find content both internally or navigating or through search engines.
- Making clear about the requirements for the overall site.
- Making content easy to digest through better typography.
- Deliver excellent information architecture through visual weight and hierarchy.
- Optimize conversion of visitors and users with clear words, call to action and value proposition. Content should help users to grab the brand voice, tone and messaging to boost conversion.
Conclusion
UX and Content come hand to hand. UX alone cannot communicate what’s needed, so content should be crafted to make an impact on our users. Content should drive design. A CS will focus on describing too much while UX designers can limit words used. When content and UX designers/strategists will find an easy connection and understand the purpose of our design. Ultimately, we can evolve our UX and deliver better with iteration.
