Week 10: Content

This week I explored the realms of content strategy and UX writing. I feel that content management typically relates to organising content presented to customers or users within a digital experience. I’ve explored it in relation to managing copy and assets while using Figma; a graphic design and prototyping tool. Throughout my design journey, I’ve focussed on learning the basics of Figma and how I can digitise my wireframe sketches, thus creating vector graphics and an interactive prototype. Resultantly, the organisation of my content has taken somewhat of a back seat which has created some challenges in itself. My efforts have sometimes been inefficient due to forgoing a content library or management system to call upon or update as needed.

Having read about Content Management Systems (CMSs), I appreciate the benefits they offer in providing non-web-developers with a means of storing, organising, altering and creating digital content (Martinez-Caro et al. 2018). I looked into creating an inventory of my app’s content by listing the various pieces of text, images and assets used throughout my design. Unfortunately, I ran out of time to do this in full, but can absolutely see the benefit of doing so and how I could manage content with this high-level approach. An inventory or CMS would allow me an overview of my content where I could inspect individual elements or conduct wide-scale strategic changes before implementing them in my designs (Halvorson and Rach 2012). For future projects, I intend to invest time during the planning phase to create an inventory system for the purposes outlined above. As I reach the final stage of this project, in retrospect, I’ve identified a need for such an inventory and believe this would’ve greatly increased my efficiency throughout.

With the short time in which to consider an inventory and what I might have included in it, I did complete a review of my UX copy where I identified some areas in need of further development. To begin the review, I inspected various screens and empathised with the user’s needs at each point of their journey. This allowed me to consider what they needed to know in each moment, and then look at how their journey could be improved with different wording. Below are two examples of changes I made:

Need for clarity: It might be helpful to have more prominent copy indicating what users should do on this screen. For example, prompting them to select activities they’ll need to pack for.

Clarity achieved: Through empathising with the user’s stage in the flow, I asked myself why they were selecting categories for their packing list; my previous version didn’t make this clear. I added an information icon and prompted the user to choose activities they’d like to pack for. I also made some accessibility improvements by making the category items appear clickable, as well as altering the background colour to further emphasise the buttons.

Need for succinct labels: Each progress indicator has two lines of text underneath. This could be reduced to one line and any instructions about their meanings covered via onboarding or tooltips. Need for clarity: This screen refers to the outbound element of a return trip, but this isn’t obvious to the user.

Labels more succinct: The labels were renamed and usability testing confirmed that users still knew what each meant. Clarity achieved: The font size and weight of the date text have been increased and an enclosed purple textbox indicating the journey leg has been added.

I’ve always found myself inspecting writing styles and how different meanings could be drawn from the copy on signs, instructions and newsletters, for example. This instilled fascination shone through when learning about UX Writing and has encouraged me to explore the field in more depth henceforth. Carranza Minor (2019) suggests that UX Writers should be able to iterate with copy, maintain an open mind, ask questions, simplify complexities, be empathetic and work closely with others. I feel that my skills and experience align with these requirements, and I’m going to explore opportunities in my job where I could practice improving copy for the benefit of our users.

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References

CARRANZA MINOR, Sergio. 2019. ‘7 Skills Every UX Writer Should Have’. Medium [online]. Available at: https://medium.com/@sergio.carranzam/the-ux-writer-the-digital-content-guardian-2f4b12212654 [accessed 15 May 2022].

HALVORSON, Kristina and Melissa RACH. 2012. Content Strategy for the Web. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

MARTINEZ-CARO, Jose-Manuel et al. 2018. ‘A Comparative Study of Web Content Management Systems’. Information 9(2), 27.

UNSPLASH. 2017. Person Typing on a Typewriter. Available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/FTNGfpYCpGM [accessed 16 May 2022].