No content? No problem.

When designing content-first, a good place to start is by bringing together all possible content that may go into your end product. However, it’s not always clear where this content may come from, especially in the early stages of a design process. Here are a couple of approaches to gathering this content:

1. Proto-content

One way is to use content that’s similar to what you may expect to be in your end product. This isn’t the exact content you’ll use, but close to it — it’s often referred to as ‘proto-content’. As highlighted by Content Strategist Rob Mills, the context proto-content provides is so valuable that it helps us make better informed design decisions, more accurate user journeys, and also improves functionality overall:

“Proto-content allows designs and functionality to be tested at a point where issues can be resolved and changes made, prior to launch of the site.”

If you’re wondering where to start with gathering proto-content, there are a few simple approaches. You could:

Reuse existing or draft content

Copy a competitor’s content

Produce your own sample content

Proto-content can also go beyond text to include any media that may appear in a UI. Here is a great resource that goes into more details of each approach:

2. Content Audits

Another way to generate proto-content (as suggested by UX and Service Designer, Linn Vizard) is to carry out a content audit. Collating a spreadsheet of existing (or a competitor’s) information through an audit builds up a more accurate picture to guide your prototypes and design decisions. After a content audit, you may end up with something like this:

Content audits uncover information such as:

Page titles

Content types

Subjects and Topics

Categories

With this information, relationships between terms can be formed, and new avenues for your design can be revealed that may not otherwise have been considered. This can also be seen as a type of proto-content, and is very useful to populate prototypes, as we’ll see with our XD file in the next section.

For more on content audits and how to conduct them, check out this article on UX Mastery by Donna Spencer: