A Wider Net

“Lorem Ipsum.” Seeing those two words in the beginning of any copy block on a design comp, wireframe or prototype means only one thing:

Don’t need to read anything — the content for this project hasn’t been figured out yet.

But the reality is that content is the foundational piece of any interactive experience. Content is the driving factor on why individuals use the Internet: to find relevant, informative and rewarding information.

So are we doing a disservice by putting in ambiguous content placeholders when designing UX deliverables for any experience?

The answer: For 95% of the time, yes. So here are some tips to help define what the content should be:

• At the project kick-off meeting, ask if there is an overall content strategy for the project: a comprehensive process to create, manage and govern all content. If the answer is yes, demand to be an active part of the discussion and outcome (if you are not already) – it is imperative that you understand the synthesis and cultivation of this content to build an effective Information Architecture for the site. If the answer is no, stress that there should be one and assist in that effort. Recruit key members of your team to help in shaping a content strategy for the project – you shouldn’t bear this responsibility alone.
• As you gather user, functional and business requirements, start thinking about how user engagement will help shape content. The goal of content should no longer be just about reciting a narrative about your products and services to others; it should be about creating dialogue about your story through user participation. Ask about the social media strategy for the project to determine what key interactions need to be designed to facilitate that engagement. You need to understand how content will be exchange to determine how the experience should work.
• As you start thinking about your UX strategy, take the time to not only plan for necessary tasks for generating content but what specific output is required. The goal of your UX deliverables should educate both your external stakeholders (the users of the site) and the internal stakeholders who will be developing the site. It’s not just about creating sitemaps, user flows and wireframes; develop deliverables like content flows, taxonomy/ontology documentation and content matrixes. This will help your project team see how content is being utilized and understand the lexicon of the experience itself – enabling them to ‘speak the language’ that will help them build the foundational structure for copy, content management and SEO.
• When you are first sketching out or quickly putting together the overall look and feel of any interactive experience whether in wireframes or prototypes, “Lorem ipsum”, image placeholders or content squares (you know, the squares with the big X in them) can help determine where content can go. But once you add it into your designs, go back and start defining key messaging and attributes for that content. Create annotations in your deliverables that will provide the reader with the understanding how content will be displayed on the page. Kristina Halvorson utilizes the concept of “page tables” as placeholders for content definitions that provides what key messages will be displayed and what will be conveyed to users with regards to content. Along with this, start building a categorization system for every content element you include in your designs that defines: the type of content and any possible attributes about that content (video size, URL, copy tone and messaging, etc.) It might seem like a lot of additional leg work but it will help you create a content inventory to determine what content is needed and identify any gaps. The output from this system can also be used as a blueprint for copy decks to help copywriters know what exactly to include when crafting the copy.

Of course, these are some guidelines that can be used in a website project but in the end; find what works best for you, your team and your projects. The UX deliverables are not as important as the actual delivery – a rewarding interactive experience for your users.

Tags: content strategy, information architecture, UX strategy

This entry was posted on Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Branding & Design, User Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.