First things first, here are some notes I did out of what was covered in this week’s lecture…
This week’s lecture was all about content design. We looked at the importance of considering content as well as journey mapping, touchpoints, they way we read online, trailblazers in content driven design and user stories, among other things. There was a lot covered so once again, I’m just going to pick out a few key things to reflect on.
One of the first things we looked at was how all the content needs to be crafted and how our roles as designers are becoming much more focused on that crafting through design (of course), content strategising, copywriting and editing. Because of this we as designers need to be able to write well as well as be able to consider all areas of content such as text, image, video and of course data when designing. In relation to my healthcare project, I’m currently put a lot of consideration into my typography as well as the written content to go with it. At some stage as well I’m going to have to start deeply considering my imagery and whether I want to just use images or also implement illustration.
We looked at how much better gov.uk is at content design than gov.ie. Sarah Winters is the one who led the design team of Gov.uk and we were able to take a look at their design principles ( I have them listed above somewhere) which I think are applicable to design for any digital product really. So I think these principle were good to take note of.
W looked at another Law of Ux. This it it was Peak-End Rule. To my understanding this law is that people largely base their opinion of an experience by its start and end. That must be why when I do my bi-yearly Pirates of the Caribbean movie marathon I will watch all of them and then the first three of them again so that I can end on a high since the 4th and 5th ones are kinda not that good and I don’t want them to taint my love of the franchise… Anyways, were this comes into design is that you’ve got to focus on the big points and final moments of the journey and the points where the product is meant to be the most helpful, valuable, or entertaining and make sure they, most of all, offer users a delightfully engaging experience.
That brought us into journey mapping where we looked at what they are, how to go about it and what all to consider when developing one which I found really helpful. This is something I’m going to try and do for my health care product this week.
We then looked at touch point which is something we touched on (see what I did there) in year 1’s Exploring Identity module. A touchpoint is essentially anytime a customer comes into contact with your brand and we looked at a lot of the different things that could be…
We then looked at the way we read has changes as the world shifts to online and how it’s impacted like by our levels of motivation, focus, personal characteristics, type of task etc. And how we as designer can make completing tasks that include reading a bit less arduous for users. After all even though there’s so much written content on the web, people still rarely read online. So it’s imperative that if you want users to read something, you’ve got to take into full consideration your headings, pacing, formatting, use of language etc. to get through to people. We also looked at the other types of content such as imagery and dat etc.
We later looked at the trailblazers of content design; Hiut Denim, Mail Chimp and Gov.uk. Looking at these three really illustrated to me how to do content design well.
Then towards the end we looked at user stories which is another thing I’m going to try and do this week. That’s it, overall it was another informative lecture.