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Meeting at the Intersection of UX Design and Content Strategy
Marli Mesibov is a Boston-based content strategist who discusses how content strategy fits into user experience (UX) design. While content strategy, UX design, and other disciplines are distinct, they intersect at various points such as branding, user journeys, site maps, wireframes, content templates, and microinteractions. Effective collaboration between content strategists and UX designers is mutually beneficial.
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Meeting at the Intersection of UX Design and Content Strategy
- 1. Content Strategy March 10,2015 Marli Mesibov @marsinthestars#BostonChi UXDesign Meeting at the intersection of
- 2. Marli Mesibov @marsinthestars Contentstrategist How does that fit into UX design? Boston-based @marsinthestars#BostonChi
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- 4. @marsinthestars#BostonChi UX and content strategy gotogether like puppies and kids.
- 5. @marsinthestars#BostonChi But puppies aren’tkids. And UX isn’t content strategy. Or UI design. Or content management.
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- 23. @marsinthestars#BostonChi Content strategy and UX collaborationis mutually beneficial.
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Editor's Notes
- #3 My name is Marli Mesibov, and I’m a content strategist based out of Boston, MA.
- #4 I’m a content strategist, and also a user experience strategist. I’d like today to be fairly informal, and give us a chance to discuss content strategy, content management, UX, and where they overlap. Let’s start here. What job focuses on making things useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible, and valuable? UX, right? Let me rephrase the question. What job focuses on making content useful, usable desirable, findable, accessible, credible, and valuable? Content strategy, right?
- #5 Look, content strategy and UX go together like puppies and kids.
- #6 But puppies aren’t kids. And UX is not the same as content strategy. Or design. Or content management. So let’s start with defining 4 things: UX, UI, content strategy, and content management.
- #7 User experience is a process. It is design in the same way that designing cities is design, or problem solving is design. Everyone’s definitions vary slightly, so please add your own thoughts and perspectives. UX can take as long or as short as you want (on website, or from day they hear to day they die)
- #8 UI (or interaction) design can be, but doesn’t have to be a subset of User Experience design. It’s quite literally, the field of designing how the user interacts with each screen. Good UI design is often done by using the user experience process, but UI design can also be created through guesswork or best-guess work. Slowly, UI design + UX is becoming synonymous with good UI design.
- #9 Content Strategy is very similar to UX, but is specific to content. Luckily, content is everywhere. And all that content should have a purpose, and should speak to a specific audience. My goal, as a content strategist, is to create a positive user experience at every customer touch point. I want everything the user sees, every phrase, every button, ever video, to further their goals and my company’s objectives.
- #10 Content management can be, but doesn’t have to be, a subset of content strategy. Good content management is done by making these decisions – what to create, when to publish, and how to manage – by aligning with the content strategy. In the same way that UI design done well generally means UI design done for the greater UX, content management done well is becoming synonymous with content management aligned with a strategy.
- #11 UX and content strategy can work in their own separate departments. Sometimes they have to remain separate, because they began as writing and design teams. But let’s look at 6 situations where UX and content strategy run into each other full force.
- #12 Brand: what we say, how we look. Tell the story of OHO’s website. The designer had created a whole series of images, colors, representations, but there was no message. As a result, they could see who they wanted to be, but they weren’t sure how to act.
- #13 ATF working on Fidelity w/Jim. A user journey is the steps the user will take to purchase your product, or to take advantage of your service. A simple user journey to describe is an ecommerce journey, going from the moment the user decides to shop through to the confirmation email – but some user journeys include multiple devices, and might go all the way past purchase to receiving the product, taking it in for repairs, and so on. A UI designer will often sketch out a user journey to understand how many screens they’ll need. However, the journey is incomplete without understanding not only the interactions required for each screen but the messaging. What do we want to communicate to the user? How will we best communicate that? How will that impact the journey?
- #14 Rowan University Everyone does IA Site maps (how they work, what’s in them) Content strategists look not just at how the flow would go, but what content we have to support the IA
- #15 Carbonite pair programming Wireframes represent info that appears on pages Got to focus on content that furthers the goals. Designers refer back to content strategy (ideally) when creating wireframes Alternative: content strategist does gap analysis Alternative: I contact the client to make sure they’ll have news & events frequently Alternative: I suggest backup plans for that section of the page
- #16 Content creation! (templates and designs) (MSK) – figure out what content blocks will go in the design (content mapping) Create content (adaptive content) that won’t break the site. Where strategy guides wireframes, templates can then set up a system to help copywriters, photographers, etc create content. This is also (sometimes) where content management comes into place.***
- #17 Fidelity Microinteractions (help text, error messaging, pop ups) are one specific area of content creation that I want to call out. A lot of people think of error messaging, for example, as being a copy job. But it’s more than that. It’s a content and design interaction.
- #18 There are skills to hone, to help working together. Try out the skills you’re not good at. It will make you value the other person’s contributions. Sketching/Pictionary Sketching what someone else says and ability to communicate to someone else what to sketch Grouping and categorizing (post ups) Compromising
- #19 Try out the skills you’re not good at. It will make you value the other person’s contributions.
- #20 Sketching/Pictionary is a good way to practice communicating in the visual medium to non-designers and to designers (as a non-designer)
- #21 Sketching what someone else says to, and giving the instructions to someone else, helps you learn to communicate
- #22 Grouping and categorizing (post ups) is a great way to brainstorm together with information that’s valuable to both the design and the content team.
- #23 Compromising is as valuable a skill as any other – and not “coming up with something no one is happy with.”
- #24 Questions?