What is content strategy and its purpose?
Content strategy is the methodology of planning, creation, delivery and governance of content in both visual and typographical form. This ensures that the content strategist’s work is highly structured, relevant, accessible and useable creating a higher quality user experience.
One of the examples of content strategy and organization in the works would be the selecting of a car on BMW’s website. You pick your chosen car with necessary yet limited information only to be found yet the more you explore the more alternative information appears, almost in a hagiarchy of importance.
For example,
Stage 1
- Title
- Power
- Price
Stage 2
- Still contains previous information
- Two new alternative directories (Find out more & Build and price) and one media
Stage 3
- The page expands to show a multitude of content and media in great detail such as the specs and configuration while still retaining original content.
“Good Content is appropriate”
To ensure content is appropriate it must be relevant and applicable for the user as we have seen with the BMW it must be regulated and shown depending on the circumstance of the user’s destiny.
Accessing Users Behaviours
“Content is something we connect to emotionally, converse about or learn from… but content with context is useless.” – Daniel Eizans
This is an interesting quote as it portrays content as a series of contextual connections and mutually defines a new meaning through human behavior to content.
Content planning for physical factors:
- Segmentation potential
- Disability
- Device type
- Gender
- Geolocation
- Time
Content planning for Emotional:
- Marital status
- Personalisation tools
- recommendations
- User feedback
- Use of social and contextual networking data
Learning factors:
- Familiarity with content
- education attained
- Learning disabilities
- Reading level
“Good Content is useful”
Good content allows for clear and precise communication that is adapted to user desires.
*Book recommended by Daniel – “How Design Makes The World” – Ask fundamental questions such as,
“What am I trying to improve?”
“Who am I trying to improve for?”
“How do I ensure I am successful throughout the entire project at improving the right thing for the right people?”
“Good content is User Centred”
This means the final product must meet the demands and expectations of users. For example, Don Norman says that the importance of understanding the user mental model before designing products is crucial as we need to understand what type of user I am dealing with, what will they do and a sense of dramatic irony for the user too.
“Good content is clear”
Good content speaks to people in a language they understand and is organized in a way that makes it more manageable and accessible.
“Good content is consistent”
This means through the consistency of language and presentation which helps elevate the user load and helps users navigate. Although consistency isn’t always one direction, for example, Kyle gave an example of a site for doctors and insurance providers will use around three tones of voice depending on who they are dealing with.
“Good content is concise”
This can sometimes mean sacrificing your creativity or ideas to get to the point. “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” This really changed the way I thought about content, I need to be more aware of what I create and who I am creating to.
“Good content is Supported”
Again, this comes in an age of support becoming standardized and if you do not provide it, it can reflect badly on you. This means content needs to be user-accessible, e.g. text to speech for deaf, larger words for people with poor eyesight, etc.
Crafting Content Strategy
What is a content strategist?
Content strategists are responsible for creating content that resonates with an existing fan base but at the same time reals new consumers in (sometimes even when they don’t resonate to begin with). Content strategists use data, research and understanding of psychology to shape consumers’ narratives and to create content experiences tailored to their intended target audience. Long story short their job is to ensure that design is time-scaled and monitored to avoid any lapse of judgments or errors.
“Content people work for the user” —-
“…online, you don’t have a captive audience. You have a multitasking, distracted, ready-to-leave-your-site-at-any-time audience who have very specific goals in mind. If your content doesn’t meet those goals, and quickly, they will leave.”
Online, everyone’s an audience of some kind so I can say this from my perspective. If the flow of content is too hasty or boring people will lose interest quickly and quickly will click off the site. Kyle recommends a browser tool called “Readability Test Tool” that averages a score of a website taking into consideration things like complexities of sentences and syllables per word, etc. I decided to put my website in and got an average score of 41.1 % index score, which means it is easily understood by 17 – 19-year-olds and appropriately above, although this isn’t a big deal as my portfolio website is not targeted at teenagers/kids. I need to ensure my future projects are readable by my target audiences. This is a very useful tool to help guide me.
What is a user story?
When designing and implementing content, stories matter. User stories are common narratives that describe the user’s needs thus in return can create a better product; simply it’s the art of storytelling whether that be for a product or design. For a user story to be successful it must be engaging and relative to a person(s) needs.
Kyle showed us a reverse hierarchal pyramid on user stories:
(We can look back at the previous BMW study for reference)
- Most important information – Title, Power, Price
- Supporting Details – Incentives (“call to actions”), Interactive media
- General Info – Product history, description, backstory, etc.
As a designer, we must do a good job in balancing content but also understand the context where it is read and understood by users. This means we must also put ourselves into the mind of a user. This is easier than we think as we are often the users ourselves. We must realize that users are people too, not statistics on an excel sheet. This means we have to be aware of our user’s settings, for example, similar to Kyle’s scenario we can find an early morning digital news site. Therefore we must take into account all exterior notions and activities such as the lighting and even then if the user takes a train to commute to work, etc.
What is Information Architecture?
Simply put it information architecture is a method of structuring and organizing content to help the user find their goal through the direction of the designer.
An example of these would be:
- Content audits
- Site mapping
- User flow Diagrams
Content strategists – What is involved?
Content strategists can do all of down below.
User Personas
Understanding the user – one of the habits that Kyle has outlined was designing for the user and not ourselves. Without prior warning, I often find myself in these situations as often designing for myself without any thought of how others will use my designs. Realizing this has made me think about my bias as a designer and how I will now go about my designs in a self-aware manner. Simple discoveries and realizations like this can change my whole perception of design.
For example, a scenario that Kyle has mentioned is one by Silicon Valley, Alan Cooper recalls how skewed the products could be and often enough had to remind themselves on how abnormal the population is, “The average person who uses a software-based product around here isn’t very average.”
So how can we build better products?
We need to figure out who we are designing for and their setting such as:
- Goals
- Attitudes
- Motivations
- Mental Models
- Relationships
- Technology
- Pain Points
- Environment
- Processes
“If we design for everyone we make no individual happy”
This statement is correct, I like to think of it as politics as if one side of the political spectrum gets a bill granted that is seemingly for them, the opposite will always be dismayed no matter their circumstances. While we fight this problem, we can’t fix it. The best way to design for users is not to target everyone but instead to target specific groups. The answer? – Personas.
What is a User Persona?
“A persona is a way to model, summarize and communicate research about people who have been observed or researched in some way. A persona is depicted as a specific person but is not a real individual; rather, it is synthesized from observations of many people.”
An example of this would be:
Deeply understanding users is fundamental to a designer’s product, this means I must study each one of my intended users for my elements project to find a medium. To understand the user fluently we must understand the three-stage process to understanding such as:
- Persona – Defines who the story is about. – What are the attitudes, motivations, goals, pain points, etc?
- Scenario – Defines when, where and how the story of the persona takes place. – How do they behave during a sequence of events?
- Goal – Defines what the persona wants or needs to fulfill. – Why is the person taking action?
How are personas created?
- Interview and/or observe an adequate number of people
- Find patterns in the interviewees’ responses and actions and use those to group similar people together
- Create archetypical models of those groups based on the patterns found
- Drawing from that understanding of users and the model of that understanding creates user-centered designs
- Share those models with other team members and stakeholders.
If we don’t have access to a child, we can alternately ask the parents of the children.
What are personas used for?
- Build empathy
- Develop focus
- Communicate and form a consensus
- Make and defend decisions
- measure effectiveness
- Effectiveness?
How do personas work?
Narrative practice – The ability to create, share and hear stories.
Long-term memory – The ability to acquire and maintain memories of the past from our own life experiences, which can be brought to bear on problems that other people face.
Concrete thinking – The tendency for people to better relate to and remember tangible examples, rather than abstractions.
Theory of the mind – The ability to predict another person’s behavior by understanding their mental state.
Empathy – The ability to understand, relate to and even share the feelings of other specific people.
Experience-taking – The ability to have the emotions, thoughts beliefs and internal responses of a fictional character when reading or watching a story.
*Remember*
Ask primarily open-ended questions.
Ask participants to show more than tell.
When possible, ask for specific stories, especially about anything you cannot observe.
Creating a persona document
Things to include:
- Name
- Demographic
- Descriptive title
- Photograph
- Quote
- A day in the life narrative
- End goals.
Spaghetti Sauce – Ted Talk
In this talk, Malcolm Gladwell dives into the evolution of the ‘perfect spaghetti sauce’ however there is no perfect only “perfects”.
Malcolm begins with an introduction to the most competitive spaghetti sauce brands in the 20th century and the reformulation and rise of the better successor ‘Prego’ through its extra-thick spaghetti sauce formula. Through this process, the food industry changed its thought process to meet the happiness of consumers. However, humans cannot want what they cannot find, “There is no such thing as perfect, only perfects.” For example, being able to provide a regulated amount of varieties instead of a generalised ‘end game’ product provides for each different taste preference. Through a sense of culture, tradition and pseudo authenticity ‘cooking universals’ were employed in the belief that humans are all looking for the same end goal. This story proves that this is not true as humans all have different notions of what their favorite blend of tomato paste is as we are not just one organism living in multiple bodies.
This can also apply to design as people don’t know what they want so it is my job to direct and help them to find a perfect design that fits their liking. I also must remember that I am not designing for myself, therefore I must ask questions to autonomously create a desired design. Alternatively, learning users through genetics, environmental and cultural means is contextual knowledge the next step is finding a happy point that a specific user craves. Understanding is key.
*Book to read – How Design makes the world*
*Book to read – Physiologic of everyday things*