It\u2019s easy to see design in terms of how pretty things look. And yet I think people are intuitively aware that something is well designed only\u00a0when it\u00a0fits what they need it to do. If you\u00a0need it to look good, that\u2019s good design. If you\u00a0need it to be functional, that\u2019s good design too.<\/p>\n
Good web content is no exception. It can be designed well, to fit both the needs of the person using\u00a0it and the needs of the person or business\u00a0providing it.<\/p>\n
This blog post lists some tools and techniques that I\u2019ve found helpful in making well-designed content. It\u2019s not an exhaustive list, and may even be overkill for your needs.<\/p>\n
A lot of the ideas here were inspired by Meghan Casey\u2019s excellent Content Strategy Toolkit<\/a>, and a brilliant UX London 2016 workshop<\/a> by Ellen de Vries.<\/p>\n Understanding your users is one of the keys to great content.<\/p>\n And yet understanding the world from another person\u2019s point of view is one of the hardest things we ever have to do in life. This is what makes design and UX so interesting, and why we need techniques and tools to help us take a step back.<\/p>\n Central to thinking about users is building up a picture of a typical set of imaginary users – personas.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At Kent we have 7 primary personas, although you could make up more for specific types of content. For example, you could have several prospect personas for content focussed on undergraduate courses and lifestyle.<\/p>\n Key things to think about when you make your own persona are:<\/p>\n Here are 5 questions to ask yourself when you think about your users. Obviously in reality everyone is coming to your website for subtly different reasons, but this exercise will really help you try to view things from someone else\u2019s point of view.<\/p>\n Great content also needs to fulfil certain business needs. After all your site is ultimately going to be \u201cselling\u201d something.<\/p>\n The content compass helps us to start to look at the relationship between the business and the users, and\u00a0helps us define in broad terms where we stand, and how we want our users to think of us.<\/p>\n I’ve written a blog post about the content compass<\/a>\u00a0if you’d like to find out more.<\/p>\n Assuming you already have a website or some kind of online presence, you\u2019ll need to know what people make of your existing content.<\/p>\n Some easy and useful data you can pull out from google analytics would be\u2026<\/p>\n Drawing too many conclusions from data alone can be dangerous<\/strong>. A common mistake is to assume that pageviews = value<\/em>. It absolutely does not.<\/p>\n A page with relatively low visibility but rich in information for an important sub-group of users could be a key\u00a0goal.<\/p>\n Another common mistake is to ask people what they want, and assume they know the answer<\/a>.\u00a0Very often people only pretend to know what they want. They are actually desperate for someone to help them figure this one out!<\/p>\n Ultimately you\u2019ll need to do three things to get well-designed content:<\/p>\n So by now you\u2019re starting to understand your users, and you\u2019re clearer about how you want them to see you.<\/p>\n The next step is to think about what you want your website to achieve<\/em><\/strong>, and what your users want to get out of your website. There may be lots of different needs here, so how do you prioritise them?<\/p>\n You can use key goals in a series of user scenarios to start to really tie together your personas, users, and data.<\/p>\n At all times, keep asking yourself: \u201cWho are these people and what are they trying to do?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Now you have a really good idea of who your users are, what kinds of tasks they\u2019re trying to do, how they view your business and how your business wants to be viewed. You even know the sorts of content that you need to prioritise.<\/p>\n Time to build a core model. This is a really great tool presented\u00a0by Are Halland\u00a0at the IA Summit 2007<\/a>. Ida Aalen has provided\u00a0a really nice discussion of the core model<\/a>\u00a0on A List Apart.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You can start to focus on content with the core model. It\u00a0helps you think about:<\/p>\n I’ve shown a process you can go through to help you create better content. You can apply some or all of these steps to your content. They don’t have to work sequentially, although I’ve tried to present them in an order that makes sense to me!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Good content can be designed well, to fit both the needs of the person consuming it and the needs of the business providing it. Here are some tools to help you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2487,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[79447,79395],"tags":[569,79464,521,79463,23153,79392],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2485"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2485"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2765,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2485\/revisions\/2765"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Personas – who are your users?<\/h2>\n
![\"Kent's](\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/files\/2016\/06\/Screenshot-2016-06-10-10.14.54-1024x618.png\")
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Users – the 5 golden questions<\/h2>\n
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Content compass – what do we want users to think about us?<\/h2>\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/files\/2015\/07\/Screenshot-2015-07-17-16.37.24-300x164.png\")
<\/a>Data analysis – what are our users actually doing?<\/h2>\n
Quick stats<\/h3>\n
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Journeys<\/h3>\n
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Key goals<\/h2>\n
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User scenarios<\/h2>\n
![\"user](\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/files\/2016\/06\/Screenshot-2016-06-10-10.15.28-1024x621.png\")
<\/a>Core model<\/h2>\n
![\"core](\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/files\/2016\/06\/Screenshot-2016-06-10-10.15.38-1024x704.png\")
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Summary<\/h2>\n
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