Why design of content is as important as quality

Until now, we’ve shared a lot of tips on how to put together great content for your website, blogs and social platforms. The one part that all of us tend to conveniently skip is the design around the content.   Here’s some food for thought: Content is UX.  The purpose of good content is to deliver a smooth experience to the user. For this, it is not only the quality of the content that matters but the way you present it too. If you use the wrong colours and font, it may drive the user away despite you offering some valuable insights via your text content. Quality content packaged well then becomes important for your overall user experience.   Here’s the problem: Content strategists and UX designers work in separate worlds.  UX designers and content strategists are given briefs separately. As a result, UX designers tend to deliver some great designs that are filled with Lorem Ipsum Dolor. Content writers now work hard to ‘fit’ the content into the design. Enter multi-lingual content websites and you have a just ordered the best headache available in the shop. Another scenario emerges if you use a content management system like WordPress which comes with many ‘themes’ that will promise to make your life easy. When you start reviewing themes, you visualize to fit your content into the available design and then select one that offers the best fit. This is a problem if you are doing content writing to fit rather than solve a user problem or meet a website goal.   So how do we rectify this? In some ways, the problem lies in the inherent way we have been working with content and design as two separate units. This method may have worked in the past but the user today needs a more cohesive experience. To do this, the design and content team need to come together right in the beginning to chart out the user experience. In this blog, we will take you through the points that we generally use as a team when designing important pages of a client website. We will also share an example case study below that shows how design and content can work together to get a great UX that solves a user problem.   Don’t design with Lorem Ipsum Dolor Did you know that Lorem Ipsum – the dummy text used in the printing and typesetting industry has been used for five centuries! That’s right! It was invented in the 1500s by an unknown printer. Contrary to popular belief, this isn’t random text. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. Imagine that we continue to design with that text as a base! Lorem Ipsum is used to plug gaps quickly to get you a feel of the design. It forces you to work backward on plugging content into the design space available. It also diverts you from your content goals – on making design and content work together to solve a user problem or even improve the user experience. Most content marketers do a lot of re-writes until they get to perfection and then plug it into the design, only to realize that they now need to edit it to fit the available space. This mindset of adding content to the site only when it is ‘final’ is a problem area. What if you could add your first draft to the site? Designing with a reference to the actual content will give give UX designers a holistic understanding of the context of their design. They’ll be able to make room for targeted CTAs and estimate the length of content which the design needs to embody. Obviously, this need not be perfect. A professional content strategist will work on improving it later.   Use existing content as a first draft Getting your hands on the first prototype of new content can be time-consuming or a bit tedious. Instead, you can take real content from the existing website and use it in the design. While you can factor in the re-writes, it’ll allow you to understand the context around the design better. Putting real content in placeholders will allow the content team to ideate better on how to improve the content to make it more relevant.   Use competitor content If you neither have an existing website or time for proto content then you can steal a little content from your competitors to be used as dummy content. This method has a pro and con. The pro is that you’ll get to directly improvise on your competitors content, automatically making it better. The con is that you’ll have to ensure you change all the content fully and accurately to avoid copyright and plagiarism claims. Let’s take an example of why real proto content will work better than lorem ipsum during the draft design and content phase of a website. This example by GatherContent demonstrates the point effectively. During the design phase, the designer uses the Lorem Ipsum format to design a sample box depicting a note on the upcoming event. When the same box is filled with real content, you’ll notice that the event title is much longer. The design will have to factor titles of different lengths with a max count defined realistically. Similarly, the time, date and venue format changes dramatically in the actual version. If you pre-design this keeping actual/proto content, it’ll save a design iteration in the future.   Design with content insights Though it almost sounds like a broken record now, we are still quite hung up on defining our goals before anything else and then making sure everyone including the designer and content strategist is working towards achieving the same goal. For any re-design work, we do a thorough content audit to first understand the reasons behind the process. What is it that the client really wants to achieve