Content Strategy
Don’t simplify the UX, curate!
Within the design profession, terms like "synthesize, reduce, minimize, and simplify" symbolize one of the core tenets to improved usability and interaction design. Taken at face value, simplification is a worthy tenet to embrace, and the UX community holds this idea in high regard because we believe it results in greater functionality and consumption of content for the user.
However, the negative connotation and misapplication of exercises associated with simplification often put UX designers in a defensive position with clients and content writers. As a result of this, I have been trying to position this aspect of the design process within the context of content curation rather than in the context of content elimination. In the end, elimination or synthesis of content is likely inevitable regardless of the exercise, but I think the notion of curating content is a more accurately framed description of our role as user experience designers. I have also found that this approach promotes positive communication while building immeasurable trust and confidence with our clients.
Cage Match: UX vs. SEO
In the UX world we talk a lot of smack about SEO. It's not just us, though. It seems like everyone I talk to has something bad to say about it: it's a scam, it's sleazy, it's black-hat, it's just a buzzword. We all tend to think that our disciplines are morally superior to SEO, and not without reason. SEO seems like it's about gaming the system to give your site an advantage (see this recent NYTimes article on gaming the system if you need convincing). Lots of SEO practices like link farming and keyword stuffing are cheap tricks that inflate page rank at the expense of more deserving sites and end users, but even honest SEOs using legitimate techniques get our hackles up.
When you do a search for UX and SEO you get a lot of crap. And I mean A LOT of crap. But amongst the crap are a decent number of articles that argue that SEO and UX not only should get along, but when done correctly, get along without trying. So why does it seem like every time UX and SEO get together it sounds like your peace-activist sister arguing with your pro-business father over Thanksgiving dinner? I think it's a problem of perspective.
Improve your site maps with page archetypes
Here's a pretty typical site map: boxes and arrows, a decision point, and a conditional section. If you're the person who diagrammed it, you already have a good sense about how the system will work. You know the major interaction paths and what type of content will be present. You know the purpose for each of those pages.
Yet those generic little boxes betray that knowledge. To those who weren't part of the creation process, it takes a leap of faith (and a lot of questions usually) to really understand what is occurring. These boxes don't communicate the context of the interaction. The intent and purpose of each page is a bit nebulous.
Page archetypes help you better express what's going on in your site maps and user flows.
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Plan a Content Strategy and Go Places
Now that the web world has largely bought into information architecture and interaction design, we're starting to realize what we've always known: content is king. Coming up with a good information architecture is critical for any site, but you can't design a great information architecture without having a solid handle on the information you're architecting.
It seems pretty obvious, right? Unfortunately not everyone gets it – yet. It's not like these people don't think content is important. They know it is; they just haven't been convinced that there's any reason to put structure around the process of defining it. So, how do you convince someone that content strategy is important?
I've started likening developing a content strategy to planning a trip. Whether you're going on a honeymoon or creating a site about bicycle maintenance, you're planning to be somewhere you're not right now.
When planning a trip there are three high-level questions that need to be answered:
- Where are we going?
- How will we get there?
- What will we do once we're there?
Let's give the analogy a little workout.