Monday 28 November 2016

When UX is the King and Content is His Queen!





What is content strategy?

As a formal definition, we can say content strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.
Imagine a situation where the content is utterly confusing. Will it worth an amazing UX experience?
Well, the answer is a straight NO.  Even if your designers burn their midnight’s oil to deliver some aesthetically pleasing and functionally comfortable apps or platforms, the poor content will completely kill the user experience and satisfaction. Content Strategy is like a lady love to UX Design, who ensures that UX efforts are actually paid off by being a great couple duo.

Principles of content strategy

Content strategy generally works on the five principles of – Core Strategy, Substance, Structure, Workflow and Governance, as described by the framework of Melissa Rach, Vice President of Content Strategy in Bain Traffic.
With core strategy in the middle, substance and structure form the content components while workflow and governance are the people side of the content framework.


Core Strategy:

It generally starts with the core strategy which helps us to plan the content as per the business goals. During this stage we create a macro view of the content keeping the business ideas into perspective.

Substance:

Next we come to the planning and execution of the content. It starts with substance, which deals in detail about the messages, videos, text, picture that need to be implemented to make sure the core strategy is fulfilling the business objectives. Understanding the target users is very important to design the message architecture in the lines of the user tones and interests.

Structure:

Structures stems out of the information architecture phase of UX Design which focuses on how the content need to organized, prioritized and visible in front of the users. This structuring of the content determines which parts will be highlighted in front of the users and which parts need to be a bit subdued from the user’s interest and conversion point of view. You can check out Fortune Cookie UX Design to know how they conduct this stage for their clients.

Workflow:

In the third stage, we enter into the people side of the content strategy which divides the responsibility of managing the content and tools associated with it to different people. It starts with the users and goes to the internal team explaining the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder to maintain the content workflow.

Governance:

Finally governance implies how the organization needs to map its policies and guidelines to the content and evolve them as they grow.

Content Strategy and UX!

Typically content strategy is not a part of the UX process; however a content strategist will ensure that the UX design is speaking the ideas in a proper manner.

UX and content don’t need to cling to each other, but they should definitely complement each other. The design needs to be done in a manner that the user can relate with the substance at one go. Similarly the content needs to be structured in a way which will actually make the user experience more pleasing and seamless.



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