Adventures in Content Design, Part 1: The Course
I had a sneaking suspicion I had been doing ‘Content Design’ for years without knowing what it was called.
I’ve just completed Content Design London’s foundation course and now I know it for sure. The principles of Content Design have been there throughout my whole career. Like an undercurrent I wasn’t really aware of, quietly guiding me along my way.
Sarah Winters says that Content Design is “about using data and evidence to give the audience what they need, at the time they need it and in a way they expect.” And she would know, she invented it.
I cut my teeth in ecommerce so this made perfect sense to me. While I left that career in 2019 to become a freelance copywriter and content strategist, I never really left. Everything I’d learnt about UX – from researching your audience to testing and improving – it all got carried along in the undercurrent.
Quite a lot of the course felt familiar to me. But that’s no bad thing. It validated my existing approach, and strengthened it into a tried-and-tested methodology.
The course introduced me to plenty of new ideas too. I wanted to share the ones I geeked out on the most.
The 3 most exciting things I learnt on the course
1. Using mental models to understand your audience
A mental model is the thoughts, beliefs and perceptions your audience already has about a topic. The next time I build personas for a client, I’m definitely going to use them to add a deeper layer of understanding. In an ideal world, you’d interview your audience, but you can learn about their mental models just by doing a bit of desk research: observing what people say about the topic on socials, blogs and forums.
The next step is to think about how you engage with these mental models. This is where it gets interesting. You may want to reflect users’ mental models, to show them that you ‘get it’ and to create a connection with them. But you may need to rebut their mental models and gently re-educate them.
The course gave an example that showcased this brilliantly. If someone’s suffering from domestic abuse, they may not realise it. They’ve developed a mental model that doesn’t recognise what they’re experiencing as “abuse”. So if they go to a website offering support, and it asks, “Are you being abused?”, they’re not going to get very far. Instead, a website that asks, “Do you feel like you’re walking on eggshells?”, reflects their experience, and can start to help them.
(For more geekery about mental models, Nielsen Norman’s got you.)
2. Accessibility is essential
Anyone who writes knows that content needs to be accessible. If it can’t be understood, it’s fallen at the first hurdle. I like to think I can write clearly and use language that’s appropriate for my audience. And I know I can hit a low readability grade level if I have to.
But accessibility goes so far beyond that. The course taught me about the different spectrums of disability – seeing, thinking and moving – and how people might experience them. Take seeing. Your reader could be registered blind, or their sight could be impaired if they’re distracted by something (“Squirrel!”), or if they’re having a migraine. Check out the NoCoffee simulator to see how people with different visual impairments experience your website.
Ultimately, the course says, “short sentences help everybody”. As a writer, I’m not going to make all my sentences 11 words or less (the threshold for ‘easy to read’). I’m going to keep mixing it up. But I will be conscious of the extra cognitive load I’m lumping onto my reader with longer sentences. And I’ll think about whether that’s a cognitive load they can bear, or if I’m going to lose them.
3. How to set a writer’s ego aside
Content Designers do a thing called a “content crit”. This is where they bring the team together for a few minutes to share what they’ve been working on. They get feedback early, they get feedback often, and everything moves along a lot quicker.
The course doesn’t say how not to do it, but it’s implied. Don’t wait until you have something so nearly perfect and so very precious to you that any critique will feel like a small stab wound. (Guilty as charged.)
The course made the case that writing can be a collaborative process. For writers, this can feel a little scary. Our preference may be to write alone, in an ivory tower if possible. But it might be worth coming down from the tower. I know when I work with talented people I trust – experts in UX or design or product – and we develop content together, we can produce something better than I could alone.
Where should I go next?
If you work in Content Design, I want to hear from you!
What are the resources, events, books I should know about for the next stage of my adventure in Content Design?
Drop me a line: alex@alex-woodward.co.uk
Thank you!