Interactions - May/June 2010

You’ll often find that their experience and perspectives can provide much-needed context for (and sometimes even contradict) the viewpoints of your primary project stakeholders.

Semantically, even the phrase “content strategy” has an immediate impact on our perceptions of content (mountains and mountains of junk, a problem so big we can’t possibly begin to solve it). However subtly, “ content strategy” begins to shift our take on content as a commodity—something easy to come by, undifferentiated—to a valuable asset worthy of strategic planning. So start saying it. Often.

process? It’s pretty simple,
actually: Make content your
problem.
If you’re designing an appli-
cation, ensure that you create
brand-appropriate voice and
tone guidelines. Yes, you might
be writing the copy as you go,
which means you can keep
things consistent. But if some-
one else has hired you to do the
design, it’s likely that the copy
will be rewritten or expanded
at some point by someone who
is not you. Define brand val-
ues. Demonstrate how voice
and tone should embody those
values. Create a usage guide to
ensure consistent terminology
and recurring interface copy.
And, while you’re at it, make
sure that content requirements
are clearly called out through-
out your technical documenta-
tion… including the error mes-
sages.

If you’re designing a website, begin with a quantitative audit of existing content. Ask what content people want; ask why they want it, then figure out if it maps back to business objectives and user goals. If it doesn’t, throw it out. Invite content owners to usability tests. When appropriate, test real content. Once user experience-design recommendations are complete, conduct a qualitative audit of your source content prior to completing a gap analysis.

Then, prior to finalizing content recommendations, work with the client to confirm that sufficient resources have been allocated for the creation and maintenance of that content. Otherwise, you’re handing over a UX strategy that can’t be fully executed, let alone sustained.

And that won’t improve any-
one’s experience.
words into action

Because we rarely have answers about the content early in any project—who owns it, where it’s going to come from, how much of it we already have and whether or not it’s even any good—we’re forced to make a lot of assumptions about the content, the fuel that will make our Web products go. Moreover, the content itself— what exists now, and what will be created—is rarely under our jurisdiction. So we can only hope that our carefully considered design will ultimately deliver useful, usable content to the right people, in the right place, at the right time.

The good news is that there are, in fact, processes and tools available that can improve our chances that said content will become a reality. Even better news is that these tools and processes are slowly finding their way to the UX design table as part of content strategy.

How can you integrate con-
tent strategy into your design
how we can change
In a recent Q&A with
Sparksheet’s Dan Levy, Jeffrey
Zeldman said:

Content informs design; design
without content is decoration.
Content has the same relationship to
design that product has to advertis-
ing. Good ads are based on the prod-
uct; good designs come from and
facilitate the content. This is one
reason we bring content strategy to
every design assignment, and one
reason we insist on working with
real content, not lorem ipsum (place-
holder) content. Nothing is sadder
than a beautiful design that works
great with lorem ipsum but doesn’t
actually support the real content.

Our shared goal, across all Web disciplines, is to create beautiful designs that prioritize, contextualize, and effectively deliver content that people want and need. That’s what the Web should be. And, as always, it’s ours for the making. Successful, collaborative design means making content matter, starting now. Think about

it. Talk about it. Do it.

About the Author
Kristina Halvorson is the
founder and president of
Brain Traffic, an agency
specializing in content
strategy and writing for
websites. Widely recognized as one of the
country’s leading content strategists, she
speaks regularly to audiences around the
world about how to deliver useful, usable
content online, where and when your cus-
tomers need it most. Halvorson is the
author of Content Strategy for the Web (New
Riders, 2009), which helps to define the
discipline and business value of content
strategy, offering simple steps for introduc-
ing the discipline into the Web project pro-
cess. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.