Content Strategy
“Content strategy focuses on the planning, creation, delivery and governance of content”
We learnt that when creating content, its important to ask yourself these questions:
- What are you trying to improve?
- Who are you trying to improve it for?
- How do you ensure you are successful at improving the right thing for the right people?
For this blog post, I am going to focus on the second one as it is all about the users and the importance of knowing your users.
When designing, it can be easy to fall into the way of designing for you instead of the users of the product. It is important to avoid this as everyone has different needs and we need to adapt our content to meet them.
Knowing your users can mean:
- Age
- Gender
- Disability
- Device type
- Geolocation
- How they think
- Pain points
- Which tools can they use?
- Technology ability
- What are their goals?
- What are their wants and needs?
- What type of content do they like?
As you can see, there are so many things you must consider when creating content for your user. This is important because if users don’t get their needs met, they will simply leave and find something else.
Accessibility
Although all these points are important, I believe that web accessibility is one of the most essential things. Even though it is a requirement for digital interfaces to be accessible, there are still so many out there that don’t meet these requirements. This means people with disabilities, whether they are temporary or permanent, simply cant use them.
I wanted to research this further as it’s something I am passionate about. Here are some ways to make digital interfaces more accessible:
- Responsiveness e.g., Users with visual impairments can increase the size of text without taking away from readability.
- Colour and contrast e.g., making sure people with different types of colour blindness can perceive the content
- Add alternative text to images: This is beneficial to people using screen readers
- Compatibility: Your product should be compatible with assistive technologies e.g., screen readers, keyboard-only users, sip and puff devices etc.
- Video captions: For people with hearing impairments.
- Hierarchy: Information hierarchy is important as it makes it easier for screen readers to follow.
These are only some of the ways content can be made more accessible. Accessibility not only benefits those with disabilities, but it benefits everyone. For example, if a video has captions, this can also benefit someone who can’t hear the video in a loud environment.
Overall, this class was interesting and beneficial. I enjoyed learning about the importance of content strategy and how it encouraged me to look more into accessibility. To make my content even better, I will be looking into user personas and how to create my own.