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How thinking about hierarchical grids helps you take a content-first approach to design
Bad things can happen when you don’t think about content
As UX Designers, we’re often asked to tread a fine line between content and design. As a result, our designs, especially early on in the process, tend to avoid content since they might not be finalized.
If you want to include some introductory text on the home page, but your team is still debating it, any sketch you show the team might have placeholder text since including that content might derail the discussion.
We often abstract the design to get the team to focus on what the page should do, instead of whether something is a droplist or radio button. This allows us to figure out what we need to design and explore several creative options.
However, that begs the question: When do you add the content back in? There’s a tendency to avoid adding content until the latest possible stage: usually before user testing or even later if you feel necessary.
Leaving content for last can sometimes lead to several problems in the late stages of projects. I encountered this when I ran into an unexpected design rejection late in the process.
Design rejection due to external factors
My team hit a snag three weeks before a re-design for a federal organization was due. Our current design solution wouldn’t work from an organizational (and legal) standpoint. Unfortunately, the way the legislation was worded and organizational consistency across other products caused us to be blindsided by an unexpected design rejection.
In that time crunch, the team leaned towards a poor design solution: using the bad original design with minor tweaks. Fortunately, we tested some alternative design solutions in our user tests.
While we had to scramble, organizing the testing data helped us quickly figure out how to implement that design solution.
