As content designers we’re always trying to meet our users’ needs in the best and clearest way possible. That’s the very essence of our job. So what do we do if someone comes to our content with a need we just can’t meet?
We’ve faced this problem working with a few clients lately, especially in government where law and regulations come into play.
The TLDR version: be upfront.
If you work in content, you’ve probably heard of headless content management systems. Perhaps there’s a vendor giving your organisation the hard sell on a headless CMS right now. Perhaps you have a developer in your team who waxes lyrical about how much easier and more fun their job would be if you went headless. Or perhaps you’ve simply come across this strange term in your reading and wondered if it’s something you’re supposed to know about.
So why content design?
Let’s go back to the beginning. It’s a story that starts as long ago as 1999. I headed into the web space with a new copy of ‘Information Architecture for the WWW’ under my arm, and started work on some IA projects with a bit of lean user research added. Over the next few years I came to realise that, without content, IA was simply empty boxes and arrows (a favourite IA website at the time). In an attempt to redress this I found myself writing a lot of different types of content but always in a rushed and ad hoc way.
Many lists of required reading for content strategists have been posted over the years (thank you). Those of us who’ve been practising content strategy for a long time have voraciously consumed these books and quickly incorporated what we’ve learnt into our processes.
But there’s so much more to read to keep up with best practice in our discipline or just to get timely tips for making our jobs easier and our clients’ outcomes better.
In the content strategy world, “lorem ipsum” is almost as dirty a phrase as “FAQs”. We all know that when we create design artefacts, whether they’re wireframes, mockups or prototypes, we should be using real content, not fake Latin.
Even before content marketers entered the fray, “content strategy” was a label that confused a lot of people. After all, not everything content strategists do seems to fall under the heading of “strategy”. Content strategy includes everything from big-picture, Strategy with a capital S stuff, to the extremely detail-oriented work of content audits and page-by-page planning.
If you hang around with content strategists, it won’t be long before you hear someone complain about content marketing. There’s a feeling out there that content marketers have taken over the term “content strategy” without really understanding what it means. This tweet from content strategist Dan Craddock is not unusual:
Was just invited to speak at a content strategy event, only to find out it's actually a content marketing event. *sigh*
In the past few years, content modelling and structured content have been much talked about in the content strategy world. But in fact, these aren’t new ideas. Content modelling is based on the venerable database administration practice of data modelling, while the term “structured content” has a long history in technical communications. So why have content strategists jumped on board? What’s made structured content sexy all of a sudden?
Angus and Rikki had a wonderful time at DrupalCon Sydney - meeting new people, learning about all the great things happening in Drupal, and sunning ourselves by the beach in Coogee!
Our talk "Content strategists and developers: We need each other!" was very well received. It even gets a shoutout from Drupal luminary Jeff Eaton is his podcast summarising the conference (listen to the whole thing, but we come in around the 27:45 mark).
Earlier this week, I was fortunate to take part in a workshop called Taking Content Everywhere, led by US content strategist Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
We all agree (hopefully) that websites should be intuitive. But what do we actually mean?
For most public-facing websites, the meaning of “intuitive” is pretty simple – in theory, if not in practice.
For example, if you’re building an online shop, you want to create a site structure, navigation scheme and labelling system that will help your potential customers find the products and information they’re looking for with as little guesswork as possible. (It’s Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” principle.)
Just because you don’t have a big website, that doesn’t mean you don’t need content strategy.
Content strategy has been around for years, but it seems to have hit critical mass recently. People who build and maintain websites have started to realise that, for all our progress in making websites more usable and awesome, most of the written content on those websites is still really, really bad. Content strategy is a discipline that tries to fix this. It’s important because, after all, content is the main reason why people visit websites.
Earlier this week, Susan and I attended a fascinating talk about content strategy by Karen McGrane. You can read more about the talk - and content strategy in general - at our friend John Ryan's blog.
While the talk was aimed at user experience professionals, a lot of it was also relevant to website owners and administrators. In particular, one of Karen's points struck me so much that I had to take a photo: