A presentation about the role of content strategy in user experience design

1. Usable Language
How content shapes the
user experience
Randall Snare
Elizabeth McGuane

2. What in God’s name are
we talking about?
1 How content is essential
to user experience design
2 How to improve your site
using content alone

3. What is user
experience design?

4. says . . .
“User experience is a
person's perceptions and
responses that result from
the use or anticipated use
of a product, system or
service.”

5. So what is content
strategy?

6. says . . .
“Content strategy is the
practice of planning for
content creation, delivery,
and governance, and is a
repeatable system that
defines the entire editorial
content development
process for a website.”

7. Wikipedia is missing
something (shocking, I
know)

8. Let’s get specific, shall
we?

9. The 4 major UX elements
Information
architecture
Design
Analytics
Usability

10. Information Architecture

11. Information architecture
Sounds important, right?
The term was actually invented by an architect-
turned-graphic designer, Richard Saul Wurman

12. Information architecture
“Information architecture is
really about what's not obvious.
Users don't notice the
information architecture of a site
unless it isn't working.”
- Rosenfeld and Morville, Information Architecture
for the World Wide Web

13. “Instruction for organized space”
Gathering, organizing and
presenting information to
suit your user’s needs is
analogous to designing a
building that will serve the
needs of its occupants.
From INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND THE
INFORMATION PROFESSIONS,
R. E. Wyllys, University of Texas at Austin

14. Wurman’s Tokyo subway map

15. Who cares about the
geography of the system?
All you need to know is the
sequence of the stations.

16. Great Wurman IA quotes
“Most
of the word information
contains the word inform, so
I call things information only
if they inform me, not if they
are just collections of
data…
“If I
throw 140,000 words on
the floor and connect those
words with a sentence or two, we
wouldn't call that a dictionary...
The ability to find something
goes hand-in-hand with how
well it's organized.”

17. So what’s the point?
Make the complex clear

18. There are lots of ways to
organise information
•L - by location
•A - by alphabet
•T - by time (chronology)
•C - by category
•H - by hierarchy

19. The web organises by the last 2
Category - putting relevant information together
Hierarchy - deciding what is least and most
important

20. Even if it’s organised perfectly,
if it isn’t labelled right, you’ve
lost.

21. Labels and information
architecture - some good and
bad examples

23. 4 major categories

25. 18 major categories
over 30 sub-
categories

27. Chronological
organisation

29. 2 tiered navigation

31. What?

33. Everything is navigation

34. Expanded navigation

35. Pop quiz:
what do the following
labels mean?

38. information architecture . . .
How well you organise your
information depends on how well
you know your information (i.e.
content).
If it’s not labelled well, it doesn’t
matter how you organised it, no
one will find it.

39. Design

40. In the olden days,
wireframes came first

41. What’s a wireframe?

42. Wireframes can be simple
or complex depending on
how well you know your
content.

48. The best wireframes
anticipate the amount and
type of content they’ll need
to include

49. What comes after wireframes?
A polished, finished site - that’s
hard to change
That means the design decisions
you make in your wireframes will
directly affect the volume and
type of content you’ll be able to add
in the future

50. That means, content first,
wireframes and design
second
Text

51. How design affects content:
Boxes

55. What to do with boxes
They work best for image-heavy
pages with minimal text
They need to be fluid
The content should dictate the
length and arrangement of the
boxes (and that’s hard to do)

56. Better boxes

57. How content affects design:
expanding menus

60. Expanding menu guidelines:
Pack a punch: your content has to
fit in a small area, so it needs to be
succinct.
Use white space around your
content
Don’t use expanding menus as
your main navigation

61. How content affects design:
help text and teasers

65. Tips for teasers and help text
Keep it short (sound familiar?) - people
won’t read a long teaser.
Make it meaningful: all the reader needs
to know is
•What they should do (help text)
•What they’ll see on the next page
(teasers)

66. Design
You can’t design in a vacuum, the
content makes the design real
and functional (and grow-able)

67. Analytics

68. What is analytics?
Data. Lots and lots of data

69. What does content have to do
with analytics?
A lot

70. Keywords
Often people will find your site through
a search engine.
Analytics will tell you which words
they used to find you (keywords)

71. You can’t cheat with keywords
Analytics tells you more . . .
Meaningless, jargon-y keywords won’t
do your site any good -- because people
won’t use your site once they’ve found
it

72. What does SEO mean?
Search
Engine
Optimisation
Effective SEO means relevant content
“Optimise for the searcher, not
the search engine. Focus on
your customers, not the
technology.”
- Gerry McGovern (Jan 20,
2009

73. Traffic sources
Analytics shows you the context for your
visitors: i.e. where they came from.
• Search engines
• Referring sites
• Direct traffic
All of these details help you get a
clearer picture of the humans
using your site

74. Funnels: this is a sales funnel for an
event. You can buy tickets online:
248 people start this funnel
Only 20 people check out
That sucks. We see that most people dropped out
between step 1 and step 2, so there is obviously a
problem with the first page:

75. How would we fix this?

76. When you pick a day, a morning and afternoon
session is automatically ticked, which may be
the reason people left the page.
Automatically
ticked
To fix it, add some help text
that says something like,
“When you select a day, you
pay for a morning and
afternoon session. If you’d
like to mix and match, give us
a call on 555-5555.”

77. Internal site search
Look at what people are searching for on
which pages.
If there’s a pattern, move that content to
where you users expect it to be.

78. Internal site search report

79. Analysing content
Where are your users going?
What are your users doing?
How did your users get there?

80. Top content
Top content shows you your most popular
pages.
It also tells you:
• The bounce rate
• The percentage exit

81. Top content by title
Top content by title shows you your most popular
page titles.
The difference?
Specificity
The bounce rates are definitive proof that your page
titles and links that got them there work (or don’t).

82. Top content by section
“Content drilldown” shows you your most popular
sections.
You can use this information to tweak your information
architecture.

83. Map overlay
Shows you which countries your users are coming from.

84. Navigation summary
Shows you how your users move through your site.

85. Pop quiz
The intro text on one of your pages looks like this:
Your analytics tells you
that you have a
significant traffic
coming from non-
English speaking
countries.
Would you change your
blurb text? How?

86. Pop quiz
Your analytics tells you that one of your most viewed
pages is a recipe for grilled chicken.
You know that most
people get to this page
from external search
engines, and that most
people leave the page
once they get there.
How would you fix it?

87. Analytics
Analytics shows you how people
respond to your content -- and
how they don’t. It should be a tool
that helps you constantly update
your site.

88. Usability

89. User testing transport websites
Last year we ran an “off the street” usability test
for World Usability Day
The theme of the day was transportation, so we
tested a series of airline, rail and public transport
sites.

90. Looking for the right word
These videos show people struggling to find a
navigation label

91. This video shows a guy struggling to find
the word ‘destinations.’ It takes him a long
time.

92. What about design?
The next test shows how too much content on a page -
the result of poor layout and content planning - can
discourage a user from reading

93. This video shows a woman saying she only
wants ‘relevant content.’ We love her.
I want less
information and I
want it to be
relevant

94. These are “quick and dirty” user
tests
All you need for your own user test:
•Impartial users (not coworkers)
•User testing software (we use Silverback)

96. But there are lots of others
Remote online
user testing
Desktop software
(we use this too)

97. Most basic user testing is
linguistic, or interview-based
It’s an ‘ask and listen’ solution to problems in your
website’s design
But sometimes the interviewer has to be almost
invisible - to get the answers the user isn’t aware of

98. What about sample size?
We tested sites with over 80
people for World Usability Day
But you can get reliable results
with as few as 5 users

100. But first , know your user base

101. Let’s wrap
it up

102. User experience design
demands us to understand how
people use, observe and even
feel about words and language

103. We can improve web
usability using language
skills alone

104. Randall Snare @randallsnare
Elizabeth McGuane @emcguane
iqcontent.com
mappedblog.com