UX Foundations: Content Strategy

1. UX Foundations: Content Strategy

Management of content – in the web design process, we think about the content at the planning stage and plays a role throughout the entire process, from ideation to design and development through publishing and maintenance.

Content strategy is about bringing the right content to the right person at the right time, in the right context. To make sure this content is accurate, up-to-date and appropriate it is necessary to understand the audience we’re dealing with by constant engagement.

A content strategist studies the content and the audience. Content represents the information, valuable information directed to its audience. Content in web design consists of (?). The meaning of a piece of content isn’t universal, and there’s no guarantee everyone will interpret it the same way. The content strategist facilitates successful communication, by enhancing the meaningful information. A professional understands the intended message, the context it’s presented in, and how to transfer it to the right audience.

The message – it has to be heard and understood by the right audience. The content strategist will also focus on the content creator and its intentions.

Key driving questions?

• What? At the core is the message
• Why?
• How?  
• Where?
• For whom? People: unique individuals
• By whom?
• With what?
• In what context?
• When?
• How often?
• What next?  

At the core of CS we find the message that is for people. We have to understand these people, their motivations and goals. Intentions of the creator, the motivations of the recipient, how to ensure successful communication between them.

Understand the stakeholders:

• What message are we communicating?

• What does “success” means for this project?
• How do we set realistic, measurable goals?

1. Educate yourself on the project and its goals?
2. Perform stakeholders interviews  & other employers of the business(business goals, tactics, projects’ objectives/requirements)

Define the audience:

• Who are we trying to reach? How is this audience unique? How does this uniqueness connect them to your product or service?
• Map out potential audience/primary audience/secondary/tertiary audience then narrow down a group within the group
• Identify what contexts may influence people’s perceptions (accessibility, restrictions)

Get real data from real people (surveys), create a representative sample of an ideal persona, 2 opposite and one extreme. Make an empathy map for each of your personas.

Define the content:

• Quantitative content audit: a tally of every piece of content including all relevant attributes and metadata
• Qualitative Content Audit: in-depth study and measurement of each piece of content against project goals and overall quality. The content has to meet project goals, be useful to the audience, be clear, consistent and concise.

Content models:

• Static pages
• Blogs and news-posts
• Fillable forms

The content model breaks large views of content down to their individual parts.

Voice and tone of content of a company, organization, or project must be:

• Authentic
• Consistent  
• Values promoted?
• Personality of the company?
• How the company wants to be perceived?
• Is it important to communicate authority and professionalism?
• Does humour have a role to play in our communication?
• Ensure the all content follows the same voice and tone (guidelines)

Style guides:

• Set of standards for the writing and design of docs, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization or fields (a manual for content creation for the company that fits a brand) => styleguide.io
• In order for it to be successful it has to be understand and followed by everyone