Content Strategy and User Experience

and the benefits of providing great content for your visitors

What is Content Strategy?

The term “Content Strategy” emerged around 1997 and was defined in the early 2000’s. Larger web-based service agencies such as Sapient Razorfish hired content strategists as early as 1998. Companies and writers began exploring the idea behind Content Strategy from the mid to late 2000’s by writing books and offering content strategy services. The term has experienced exponential growth from the late 2000’s to today, especially during it’s breakout year where the term sharply rose in interest from 286,000 in 2008 to 4,210,000 in 2009 (statistics from Google Trends). This was the same time that Facebook opened a new role in it’s company called a “Content Strategist” and the first edition of Kristina Halvorsen’s book Content Strategy for the Web was released. It was around this point that the field began to really take shape and as technology continued to evolve, so did the field of Content Strategy. Like other fields, best practices and methods began to take form that would help guide Content Strategy to become what it is today- a strategic consideration for content across every medium, platform and device.

How does Content Strategy relate to UX?

As a UX designer I think it’s important to understand that User Experience Design and Content Strategy are complimentary fields. Content Strategy is very much a part of the wide spectrum of disciplines that is UX. This can be traced back Jakob Nielsen speaking about content tips and content strategy with regards to usability as early as 1995. Kristina Halvorsen stated in Content Strategy for the Web that:

“Delivering great content requires some kind of investment: user research, strategic planning, meaningful data, web writing skills, and editorial oversight. It requires real people and real people to get it right, and that’s not easy.”

I find this quote interesting because it highlights some of the parallels between Content Strategy and User Experience Design in practice including human-centered design, research methods, and strategy/process. Both fields also work alongside other departments like business, marketing, advertising, and IT to communicate their needs. Ultimately as a User Experience Designer it’s important to understand how content can be used to meet user and business needs. This understanding of content and content strategy guides plans for the creation, delivery and governance of content which, if practiced correctly, can carry out through a brand or product’s lifespan for many years.

Content management lifecycle can help organizations plan and iterate on what content is the most important for their website and users.

How is Content Strategy implemented?

One model for understanding Content Strategy is The Quad (UXBooth) This model looks at the strategy as it relates to content and the people that govern it. The core message that the model communicates is that without a balance of people and content, the core content strategy will not be able to thrive. That is, content strategy requires a balance of substance, workflow, structure and content governance.

The Core Strategy informs what the content will be and how it is structured. This model includes two content components: Substance answers the question “what kind of content do we need and how do we communicate it?” Structure involves how content is prioritized, organized, formatted, and displayed. Then there are two people components: Workflow involves the processes, tools, and human resources that are required for content initiatives to launch successfully and maintain ongoing quality. Governance describes how key decisions about content and content strategy are made including both initiation and delivery.

Content Strategy and Human-Centered Design

Like any form of design it’s good to consider the expectations that a user might have for your website. What sort of content do they expect to find? Where would they expect to find it? How easy or difficult should it be to access specific information? When will different content be made available? Why does some content need to be regularly groomed, while others are static? These sorts of questions are open-ended for a reason, the answers vary from user base to user base. For example, the needs of a potential student visiting a school’s website are much different than that of someone trying to navigate NASA’s website.

In order to understand the needs of our user groups, we employ personas. Personas help to build an empathetic lens so that we can see things from the perspective of the users our content is built to support.

Persona model from Content Company — Persona data provided from myself

By modeling our user’s aspirations, motivations, fears, concerns and frustrations, it is possible to tailor our content accordingly. This leads to a much better chance of satisfying our users with the content we provide. That being said, content is only one part of the picture. Without usability and a solid site structure, our user’s may not even be able to find the content they are looking for, let alone use it.

Content R.O.T.

One model for understanding content governance is content R.O.T. Content ROT stands for Redundant, Outdated and Trivial content and you need to employ some heavy content weeding in order to keep ROT under control. Like weeds, ROT is unavoidable- it’s a byproduct of putting content on the web- much like soil in the ground to grow plants… and even if you have a system programmed to remove the ROT, it’s still going to creep in some way or another.

What’s really important for organizations is figuring out who is responsible for not only creating new content, but removing content as well. Content Hoarding is one cause of Content ROT. That is when an organization keeps articles on their site for so long that they become not only irrelevant, but friction between users finding content that is relevant. Therefore, it’s important for organizations to develop a strategy that balances the creation of content that is helpful for their visitors while removing ROT.

Conclusion

Content Strategy differs between the type of visitors a site is likely to attract as well as the organization for which it’s employed. It is a combination of content components and people components which, when combined, form a core strategy. Providing content that meets user needs can increase user satisfaction and brand image on the web. Employing the right people for content governance allows organizations to communicate the right message to their customers in a way that meets customer expectations.

Below are more sources about Content Strategy that you might find helpful.