More information available at: https://uxpa.org/. Content Strategy: A Guide for UX Designers How to create great user experiences through great content. The CAT crawls a public site, pulls the pages into an excel document, and delivers it in a usable form to the strategist. Content Strategy and UX Writing Produce User-Centered Products. The answer is a UX Strategy. He has written five books on how the Web has facilitated the rise of customer power, including, Karen McGrane is a user experience professional, content strategist, information architect, and interaction designer. Still, there’s a lot we can learn from content marketing, and there are certainly a lot of content marketers who build and use content strategies. Without this, the content and the business it supports will fail. In traditional print environments, everything from page size to press pressure and distribution numbers could be tightly controlled. The best B2B marketers know to prioritize directing the right content to the right person at the right time. Each strategist explains a different content strategy term, leaving the reader with a wealth of information that (at a pace of 1 per week) could easily take a year to explore. The overlap between content strategy and UX writing can make it tricky to know which job is right for you. Our most common publishing mediums have evolved from static to dynamic, and our process needs to reflect that. Author; Recent Posts; Marie Barnes . When she’s not training in-house teams, facilitating workshops, or working on projects, she’s speaking at conferences or writing about content strategy, Noz Urbina explains omni-channel publishing, Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits, Content Strategy at Work: Real-world Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project, The Digital Crown: Winning at Content on the Web, Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works, Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content, Beginner’s Guide to Information Architecture, How to Sell Content Strategy to Management. While this is by no means an exhaustive list, these five are all books we just can’t live without. The conference avoids taking on specific themes or forcing talks into tracks, preferring instead to focus on the state of content strategy and the most up-to-date topics at any given time. Google Analytics is the self–described enterprise-class web analytics solution. The small bits of copy you see sprinkled throughout apps and websites are called microcopy. - Content strategy is the art of bringing the right content to the right person and the right place at the right time and in the right context. Read writing about Content Strategy in Shopify UX. Content strategy is a huge piece of creating a user experience, and to that end content strategists play a large role in UXPA. What Else Should UX Professionals Know About Content Strategy? Content strategy is here to stay. That’s the beauty of it: search “content strategy” in your city on the Meetup interface, and you’ll find any number of networking groups, educational groups, and social groups. Having a plan that creates a bridge between user needs and business goals is essential, not only from the content perspective but also for the UX and design team. It’s not sexy, but it’s true. UX writing and content strategy both need to take into account a broad view of the entire experience with their product, no matter if the “product” is software/SaaS, ecommerce/retail, or a media site. Here are a few things to keep in mind if you are looking around for opportunities: Pay attention to the job advert or job description rather than the job title for details. As UX professionals, one of our most common deliverables is the humble wireframe. Content + UX. Content strategy focuses on the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content for websites or apps to ensure that you have useful and usable content, that is well structured and easily found. A good brand is simultaneously complex enough to have meaning, yet simple enough to stick in people’s minds. One thing that the two have in common is that the final outcome is always user-centred. Explore the library Getting Started with Content Strategy. Content Strategy at Work, by Margot Bloomstein A content strategist typically comes into the UX project during the Discovery or Research phrase. For example, tweaking the design of … Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a web designer and developer with a passion for open-source software like WordPress. The focus on user needs and expectations is crucial for user experience. In her book entitled The Elements of Content Strategy Erin Kissane uses the example of James Bond to illustrate good content strategy. SEO Landing Pages. This can be a little overwhelming, even for an insider. At minimum, it requires a fundamental understanding of digital sociology and the principles of storytelling and website design. For example, the UX and content strategy team might work together, and design a product page with an image and caption, a short description of the product, and then a call to action. The truth about UX strategy is probably a little less glamorous, but just as empowering. Content without strategy is just data. Betsy Mikel November 11, 2020. A content strategist’s tasks include conducting content audits, CMS research, content mapping, creating voice and tone guidelines, and of course developing content strategies. The event, hosted in Vancouver in August, brings together well-known content strategists and designers and encourages conversation, collaboration, and cross-team discussion. A new addition to the conference circuit, the Design and Content Conference is making a point of highlighting the collaborative nature of content strategy and UX design. Married with web analytics and measurement, this enables content strategists to gauge content’s efficacy. What does this mean to you? Download the exercise files for this course. Pro tip: when looking for a new CMS most content strategists will want to at least check that it has a WYSIWYG editor! While conducting the audit itself can feel tedious and tiresome, the deliverable is so versatile and valuable it’s well worth the time. The simple tool is essentially a build-it-yourself template, where a content strategist (or copywriter) can define content needs and constraints, and then establish roles for other users to edit, approve, or comment on content. Letting Go of the Words addresses an area of content strategy that is too often overlooked: everything that isn’t copy! Content strategy work now typically falls into one of two groups: content design or system design. Just as companies use a style guide to ensure blog content is in sync, a UX strategy is used to harmonize your approach to UX development for every product you create. Content strategy lays out the materials and basic layout for the “house” so UX can take over in the next stage. Even experienced content strategists will learn something new in this guide, since we can all do with a reminder of the basics. (Around the time I was born, incidentally).Thus began the Cambrian explosion of content Whether the end product is a marketing website, an Apple Watch app, or a mobile-friendly site, the end user expects certain things. Rahel Anne Bailie is the principal of Intentional Design, a Content Strategy consultancy. Many chapters host individual conferences, as well as meetings and events. Thoughts and philosophies on defining UX, content strategy definitions, the meaning of accessibility, empathic design, design thinking frameworks, and more. Does it matter which comes first? How does in-house work differ? The role of the content strategist is to be an advocate, both for the content and its audience. Brands are both visual, shown in logos and color palettes, and verbal, coming across in language and style of speech. It was a response to how content publication has evolved. Some are more technical in nature, and focus on tech writing and CMS work, where others speak more to those doing branding and messaging work. More information available at: http://contentstrategyalliance.com/. The conference tends to attract a mix of DITA users and CMS users as well as some stray marketing folk. Join more than 8,000 content and content-adjacent professionals who support each other, share knowledge and understanding, and help shape the field of content strategy. Although UX design consists of many details such as content messaging, visual design, and how easy it is for a user to find what is looking for. This hands-on guide for all UXers explores the intersection of content strategy and UX design on a website design project. Read writing about Content Strategy in UX Planet. While many content strategists will specialize in only one quadrant, such as “Messaging” or “CMS implementation,” it’s important for anyone getting started in the field to understand how the four fit together. As a former journalist, she never lost her love to write. What Does A UX Designer Do? Another essential component of content strategy is the process. While UX designers are often exceptionally intelligent people, there are always ways in which they can improve their overall output. For example, buying relevant backlinks is an integral part of a successful content strategy as well. This strategy should be clearly defined and documented, outlining how and when a business produces content (such as articles, infographics, and videos), shares it, … While much of content strategy may seem highly technical, the field has also evolved—to some extent—from the world of marketing. While content strategy and the content strategist can be a distinct position within a team, the role is just as often assumed by an information architect, user experience designer, marketer, or other team members, and all of these roles can benefit from an in-depth understanding of a content strategy. It can also pull screenshots, analytics data, and page-level details. For some, the “content strategy” is the whole process. Content strategy has to be executed before the design phase begins. While they approach this matter differently, content strategists and UX writers seek to place a user’s interests at the centre of their projects. She’s on a never-ending quest to understand how people make sense of information, and how to make it easier for them. Users, motivations, and goals for the project, Guides, templates, and workflows for the project. The final quadrant, process design, looks at the content lifecycle, governance, and content measurements. Phillip Thune believes building directories are a highly valuable strategy for websites that update their content nearly every single day. Awareness and interest in content strategy continues to grow: Every company has a business model…whether it knows it or not. Content strategy refers to planning and managing content —not just text—for websites, apps or digital services or products. Information architecture is a field of its own, and we’ve written a Complete Beginner’s Guide to explain its many intricacies. If the project includes a new site backend, they might research and develop a migration plan for a content management system. Content Strategy Forum (CSF) is an open community for people interested in content strategy, at all levels of experience. What is UX Strategy? Sounds similar to user experience? They encourage content strategy understanding and adoption through discussion, collaboration, production of public resources, and their international conference, also called Content Strategy Forum. - Content strategy is the art of bringing the right content to the right person and the right place at the right time and in the right context. So there are many, many books available on content strategy. Understanding content strategy from a UX perspective concept of writing was conceived (circa 3400 BC), it took thousands of years until Gutenberg invented movable type (circa 1450). Content strategy makes it clear who is the message for, what we are trying to achieve and how we can effectively articulate that in our content. “How do I explain what I do at a party? Co-authored with Betsy Mikel Hello. Omnichannel is about understanding and optimizing for the entire journey across all channels.” A content strategist is essentially a publisher at times, responsible for considering omnichannel publishing needs, and working through the implications with the larger design team. For this to happen, a communication of ideas must take place, requiring an in-depth understanding of an audience, their needs, and their communication style. A content strategist’s tasks include conducting content audits, CMS research, content mapping, creating voice and tone guidelines, and of course developing content strategies. The Content Strategy … That depends on the content strategy. Of course, it’s clear that content strategy is more than just copy (otherwise we’d call it copy strategy), but in this book Ginny Redish gives insights into how to use other content types to best communicate with end users. UXPA has chapters in nearly every major city across the United States, and many internationally. Content strategists come from all over. Let me explain the differences between the disciplines I specialise in: content design, UX writing and content strategy. She both explains the problem in an easy to understand format, and talks through some of the ways content strategists can make the overwhelming world of omnichannel content into a manageable project. For more information, see our Cookie Policy. Good marketing is built off good communication, and content strategists can use those same skills to learn how to communicate with users. Systems design is “the process of defining the architecture, modules, interfaces, and data for a system to satisfy specified requirements” (via Brain Traffic). Follow along and learn by watching, listening and practicing. Learn more about content management systems. It’s also the process that plans ahead for content that needs to appear in multiple places, sometimes at specific times, so that information can be personalized be audience. 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