When crafting your UX design content strategy, you should always aim to deliver quality content in the best way possible. To be precise, you should provide the right content to the right users at the right time in an intuitive, engaging, and helpful manner.
The question is, how to achieve all of that for a remarkable user experience? After all, a good UX always guarantees better engagement, more conversion, and high ROI.
Why You Need a Killer UX Design Content Strategy
Clear communication
A proper UX content strategy should be able to convey messages to a user in a concise and easy-to-understand manner. This means when creating content designs, make sure the main information is delivered in a way the intended audience can easily understand.
This way, users will get what they want without feeling overwhelmed with anything they find complex.
Enhanced usability and findability
By combining information architecture and content strategy, you can make your content easy to discover. Information architecture (IA) deals with how you arrange your information. UX design content strategy urges you to optimize your IA, which helps users easily find what they are looking for within your product.
Improves consistency
It is important to create a sense of consistency with your product, and that applies to content as well. Users who engage with your content will start getting ideas on what type and tone they can expect. Make sure that they become comfortable with the style you are putting out and maintain it so that visitors come back for more.
Increased user engagement and conversion rates
If the audience can easily find what they are looking for, then more people will engage with your content. And with more engagement, more customers will come in which will naturally increase your chances of increasing your conversion rates.
Result evaluation
One of the most important parts of any strategy is measuring results to take corrective actions. UX content strategy involves testing and evaluating all of their actions by various means to increase the effectiveness regarding UX writing and designs. Based on the results, you can make the necessary adjustments that can help you with your goals.
Key Elements
There are four elements to consider to get great results from UX content strategy. They are
- Editorial strategy
- Experience design
- Structure engineering
- Process design
Here, the first two steps deal with the design and presentation of the content itself, while the next two steps are more concerned with the workflow and creation process behind them.
Editorial strategy
Editorial strategy deals with the creation of content itself, both text and visuals. In this phase, teams come together to decide on topics, subject matters, branding, voice, and tone of the content. Content evaluation also falls under this element, working and revising old content while creating new ones that align with the vision of the company.
Content writers and the UX team work together here. The UX team finds optimal strategies and subject matters that appeal to the audience via user research. The content team creates content that matches the findings of user research.
Some key things determined here are:
- Target audience
- Perspective
- Voice and tone
- Brand persona
- Language Standards
Experience Design
Experience design is crucial because it tries to analyze users and determine their needs. User persona interaction testing, user journey maps, heat mapping, and other techniques are utilized here to get the most accurate findings.
This phase dictates what types of content to create, where audiences would engage with them, and how they will be received by the target. This will tell you how crucial experience design is to the whole process of content strategy.
The main factors determined are:
- User needs and preferences
- Competition
- Customer journey
- Content Format
- Design pattern
Structure Engineering
Structure engineering is concerned with designing a content structure that best suits the product and is easy to understand for everyone. This allows both UX designers and writers to center their work around a specified format that matches the goals of the project.
It also provides a baseline on how to recycle old content and make adjustments based on feedback from users. Having a structure makes it easier to create content that meets the needs and expectations of the users.
Some important activities are:
- Organizing and categorizing content
- Finding intuitive tags
- Finding ways to reuse content
- Factors for personalization, dynamic delivery, and information architecture
Process Design
Process design is more about structuring the content team arrangement than anything else. The goal is to have a hierarchy where the content goes through various levels to be the best it can be. The common structure followed is one creates the content, one edits it, and one approves it.
The idea is to have a solid group structure that promotes teamwork to optimize workflow and get the best output. It should also make sure the right person is at the right post and responsibilities are divided according to the abilities of each member. Finally, there should be trust among members and a clear authority.
Some things that need to be defined are:
- Content lifecycle
- Tools
- Team synergy
- Authority and division of responsibilities
- Quality control parameters
How to Create UX Design Content Strategy
User research
Just like with any UX-related activity, user research is one of the first steps to UX content strategy. Various tests are run during user research to understand the needs and wants of the target audience. Some common techniques used to collect user data include user surveys, user personas, user group testing, and many more.
UX content strategies will have to interact with users to collect data and interpret them. Not only do they need to understand what users want, but they will also have to present the information gathered to creators in a manner that tells them of the best changes they can make for the user.
Market research
After you have conducted thorough user research, you will need to conduct market research too. You need to learn about the market you are entering and the competition you will be facing.
Knowing about the market will help ensure that your content reaches the right audience. This will also help you understand standard practices and audience expectations to create your content around.
You should also be aware of what your competition is like. In order to succeed with your business, you will need to stand out from the crowd. Market research will help you find unfulfilled demands in the market. This will help you carve out a niche for yourself and design your products that can cater to such a market.
By prioritizing business goals and conducting market research, you should be able to find a unique selling point and use that to your advantage for your UX content strategy.
User journey mapping
Mapping your user’s journey will help you understand how to design your product in a way that enhances UX. During the research phase, you should have user personas created based on their demographic, behavior, psychology, and many other things.
Your user personas will help you map out your user’s journey. A user’s journey map tries to understand how they will interact with your brand. This includes how they will find you, how they will act at various interactions, and what actions they might take after engaging with your product or company.
It is useful in determining optimal strategies for drawing in customers based on what phase of their journey they are on.
Tools like Adobe Experience, Hubspot, Woopra, and many others can create journey maps for you based on user data.
Audit
While starting your project with user research will give you a head start, you will still need to audit and review everything to understand if everything is working as intended or not. Conducting a UX audit helps to confirm if every piece of information presented in your system is useful and up-to-date.
The main goal of audits is to find issues in your product or services before a user does, so that you may fix them to save them from frustrations and help them use your products more efficiently. Audits should be performed at regular intervals so that you can uphold the quality of your products and services.
Planning of Information Architecture
How you design information architecture will determine how simple it is for users to find the content they are looking for. As a UX strategist, it is important to create an optimal information structure (IA) to increase the findability of content.
You should create prototypes and run user tests to understand how effective they are and make necessary changes.
A good IA helps users navigate through websites and applications seamlessly, which is a good sign for your digital product.
Content creation
Most of your activities will usually revolve around this one point, content creation. Everything you do is to make users engage with content that meets their needs. Both textual and visual content need to be designed with the end user in mind.
Here, the UX team and the content team need to work together to figure out how to create the best content. The UX team should be thorough with their instructions and the creation team must adhere to them to ensure maximum engagement.
Maintenance
You must update and maintain the quality of your content if you want your product to be always relevant. You can make the process simple by putting in a system that helps in making changes post-launch easier. It is important to keep your posts updated with all the recent information and adapt them to ever-changing guidelines.
Common Practices
Understand user needs
Almost every business requires a deep understanding of its audience to be successful. You will need to determine key factors like their needs, expectations, pain points, comprehension levels, and many more.
Activities like user research, persona, journey mapping, and user tests will keep you informed on which of your activities resonate with your design choices. Play into the needs and preferences of your audience to capture their minds.
Decide upon a tone
Brand voice and tone help convey to the audience the type of company it is. It is very important to select the right tone based on who your audience is. It is especially important if you have a younger demographic, who prefer a more casual or informal tone.
UX designers should fix a tone based on research that appeals to users and consistently applies it across all communication channels. Mind you, inconsistent tone and voice can be confusing to audiences, so you should stick to one style. Your brand persona should be created with that selected tone.
Create quality content
Content is king. This is the backbone of all your efforts. Even if all your other efforts are not up to par, quality content can save you. If your content is not useful, no amount of promotion, optimized information structure, or any other optimized factor can dig you out.
Make sure your content is unique and has solid and updated information in a manner that is easily understandable to your audiences.
Create a style guide
We have mentioned how important consistency of the content is for UX design strategy. It gives audiences an idea of what type of content to expect from you. One of the best ways to maintain consistency is to create a style guide.
A style guide is a set of guidelines that helps creators shape their content that aligns with the brand personality. They usually have indicators on what type of tone or voice one is going for along with specific advice that are unique to the company or industry.
They will also provide visual guides like typography to use or what color palette to stick to for creators. Make sure to have a guideline that keeps creators within your patterns while also allowing them the freedom to experiment.
Here is a guideline about color palettes used by renowned supermarket chain, Walmart. While this only covers colors, you can view their whole style guide to understand how they created their one so that you may be inspired to make your own.
Conclusion
UX design content strategy is a very important aspect of UX design that must not be overlooked. Going through this article, you should understand its importance and how you may apply them to your own projects. We wish you success on your journey.
If you require a helping hand, feel free to contact us for consultation, or even our services. Our team of experts has tons of valuable experience you can utilize for yourself to help make your product run smoothly and make your life easier.
