Define content elements

Write out each piece of content you want to include on each screen or page. List them in a spreadsheet, jot them down in a Sketch file, or for more complicated scenarios, use a tool like Mindmeister.

Example of how to define content elements

Pro tip: You don’t need to do all these activities for each project. It all depends on the problems you’re solving, the timelines you’ve got, and the scope of your project. Use these activities to help you build thoughtful experiences.

As designs progress, content strategists also write and edit content. I won’t go into this topic too much because there are already lots of great posts about writing interface content, but what I will say is that to have a greater impact, teach designers and developers how to write their own content. Pair with them, explain what you’re thinking about at each stage, and provide detailed rationale when you edit their work (e.g. “I chose this word because…”). The goal is to help them understand how content affects an experience. It also helps to have detailed content guidelines for them to reference.

While you most likely want to edit what designers and developers write, it’s also important to get your own work critiqued. If you work with other content strategists or writers, sit down with them or jump on a video call. The best way to keep improving your craft is to seek feedback from the most critical person you know! As Julie Zhuo points out in unintuitive lessons on being a designer, “It takes a certain amount of courage to take your work to a person you know will pick it apart.”

At regular intervals throughout the explore stage, make sure to loop in stakeholders from marketing, documentation, and support. Brainstorm feature names with product managers and marketing. Get feedback from the documentation and support teams about areas they think users will get stuck. Set up a monthly reminder to send these people a quick update.

Building the feature

The build stage is where we iteratively build and ship what we’ve been designing. At this stage we aren’t changing any fundamental workflows. We’re mainly tweaking content to make it as clear as possible. As developers start to build the experience, we work through any edge cases that slipped through the cracks in the explore stage. This gives us a chance to craft error messages for every situation. Alongside that, we plan (or finalize) the onboarding experience with designers and researchers so users know how to find and use our new feature.

It’s also time to chat with documentation and support teams again! We make sure technical writers have all the information they need to write documentation for the Shopify Help Center, and support teams are ready to answer questions from users about the new feature. We try to do this well before launching so there’s enough time to communicate and document these changes. Because these teams were involved during the explore stage, they’re already in the loop and aren’t going from 0 to 100.

Loop marketing back in too and make sure everyone’s on the same page. Finalize the feature’s name, talk about user benefits and positioning, and demo how the feature works. Content strategists can also help review or prepare materials.

Doing a polish review

And now, my favourite part… polish reviews! After content and design is finalized, and it’s been implemented by a front-end developer, our team sits down to do what we call a polish review (polish as in make a surface shiny, not people from Poland 🇵🇱). Product managers, designers, content strategists, researchers, developers, and anyone else who was involved with creating the experience is invited. We review the final product we want to ship and look for any UX improvements or fixes that need to be made.

From a content perspective, I look for old versions of content that snuck in, incorrect punctuation, and inconsistencies with our design system. Assign someone to take notes during a polish review, then follow up with the front-end developer to make sure everything gets updated. If a lot of changes need to be made, we usually schedule another polish review a week or so later. We want what we ship to be high quality and something everyone’s proud of. ❤️

When everything is finalized and built, I add new terms to our vocabulary list. Keeping this list up to date is essential if we want people to trust and use it.

Launching the feature

It’s here! The launch stage is when we publicly release the feature we’ve been building. We work closely with product management, engineering, design, marketing, and support to make sure everything is ready to ship. We test the live feature and monitor user feedback to make sure everything goes as expected.

Hopefully this stage is pretty quiet for content strategists.

Tweaking after launch

In some companies, it might be common to skip the tweak stage — don’t fall into this trap! Iterate on your feature based on user feedback, qualitative research, and metrics that illustrate how people are using it. For larger feature launches, we put a banner with a form inside the new feature to collect feedback from users. Watch for any phrasing or terms users find confusing and make updates. We might need to add a description to a section that didn’t have one, or adjust the call to action on a button. We work with our wonderful support team to understand what issues are coming up, and we make conscious decisions to act, or not act, on what we learn.

Feedback we get after launch can also be helpful for defining future roadmaps. For example, when we launched the ability to buy and print shipping labels in bulk, our users told us it was a super valuable feature, but it would be even more helpful to be able to print packing slips in bulk too.

If there were any issues that were out of scope for the first version, now’s the time to work on those. Always be iterating. ✌️

Do what makes sense

In the real world, things are messier than a step-by-step process. I’m constantly prioritizing what to spend my time on and adjusting these techniques to suit my project’s needs. In short, do what’s right for the problems you’re trying to solve. I’d love to hear what your process looks like throughout the lifecycle of a project. What type of content strategy activities do you do? What do you find most helpful at each stage?

If this type of work is interesting to you, we’re always looking for awesome people to join our team! Feel free to leave a comment or reach out on twitter @bizsanford.

Cheat sheet

A shorter version of all the stuff I talked about in this article.