Strategy: Content Strategy

As UX professionals, we’re all familiar with the need to test user experience designs. Testing content, however, might be a different story. Most companies haven’t given testing content the attention it deserves—partly because it’s challenging. One challenge is that time and budget usually do not allow us to test every single piece of content. Another challenge is that gathering too much unfocused feedback can freeze our projects in analysis paralysis. To meet these challenges, try testing your content concepts—and start testing them early in your projects.

I have found surprisingly little advice about testing content that is integral to rather than supportive of the user experience. Also scarce is advice about testing content for more than usability. A good starting point for understanding the need to test content is a blog post by Ginny Redish, “Usability Testing: Be Sure to Test Content as Well as Navigation.” According to Redish:

“Too many usability tests focus only on finding information—not on how the information itself works for people.”—Ginny Redish

This column explains the value of testing content with real people and offers tips on evaluating content concepts. Read More

Wouldn’t it be great to experiment with a new user experience method at a company that truly needs it—with people who are not only great UX colleagues, but also great friends? Sounds like an ideal situation doesn’t it? Well, that is the situation in which we found ourselves back in November 2013. A nonprofit based in New York City hired us to help them figure out their long-term strategy. Without hesitation, we jumped on board.

The Problem

The nonprofit needed help solving a common problem that many companies and organizations face. With a nonprofit program nearing the end of its grant, they were looking for a way to disseminate the content from that program once the money ran out. Ultimately, the nonprofit wanted to be able apply whatever solution we came up with to their other programs as well. They asked us to create a digital product of some kind that would enable the intended users of the programs’ content to continue reaping its benefits. Read More

In Part 2 of our series on using narrative storymapping to create a high-level content strategy, we told you about our narrative approach and how we extracted storymapping from it. This let us get our work finished in a short amount of time, using few resources—just like MacGyver. We also described in detail how our storymapping process works. Now, in Part 3—the final part of this series—we’ll tell you about the results we got from using our narrative storymapping approach. We’ll explain what worked, what did’t, and what this means for those of you wanting to try the same or a similar approach, and let you know how we’ve moved forward. So let’s jump right in!

What Worked

The narrative story map that we created with our client helped us to see things that would otherwise have been difficult, time consuming, and perhaps even impossible to discover by conducting a traditional content audit. Visually mapping content on a wall, along a giant narrative arc, let us quickly and clearly identify what we now recognize were glaring gaps in the EASE program content. For example, we had only one piece of content that led users into the EASE story: a video that introduced the program. This would have to change. Our narrative story map showed us that we needed some additional content—for example, a short description of the program and photographs of educators and students using the program in the classroom—to fill out the beginning and develop a full exposition of our story. Read More