Great content and a great user experience don’t just work together—some might argue they’re even the same thing.
Imagine you go to a website with amazing design. A beautiful logo, nice color scheme, and it’s even optimized to load in the blink of an eye. But the content of the site is just gibberish—strings of letters and numbers, sentences that have no meaning, and videos that are just streams of stock footage that has nothing to do with anything else.
Does that sound like you would be having a good experience? No! It sounds more like a nightmare. Even when the design of a digital product lends itself to a great user experience (UX), that doesn’t mean the user will have one.
Ultimately, the user’s experience relies on the content provided. How easy is it to understand? Do they learn what they need to know? And does the content get them excited to take next steps?
Before we get to how content and user experience are linked, let’s first talk about what content is in UX.
You may find yourself asking, is content part of user experience? The answer is unequivocally “Yes!” Take a moment and think about how much content is included in every design. Consider how horrible it would be to read a huge block of text with no design elements. This is why it makes so much sense to talk about content and design together.
Content in UX is essentially any text on your website that can be used creatively and displayed beautifully. UX content examples include:
What are user experience principles? According to the Interaction Design Foundation, UX principles are “fundamental points of advice for making easy-to-use, pleasurable designs as we select, create and organize elements and features in our work.”
So here we see out of the gate, that design, not content, is considered foundational to user experience principles.
But the purpose of an easy-to-use, pleasurable design, isn’t just decoration. It’s to make content easier to access, consume, and understand.
Let’s examine some more specific user experience principles:
It’s not surprising that these are all principles that would be equally important in a content strategy template.
With so many shared principles and goals, it’s downright counterproductive to think of UX design and content as happening in two different spheres. How can that be possible when they share the goal of providing information to audiences in a streamlined, clear, and compelling fashion?
The reality is that sharing information and working together to create content and design in tandem will result in better outcomes for everyone—especially the end user.
Let’s go back to the earlier example of a well-designed website full of nonsense. Part of the challenge of improving this product is deciding what content is most important, and how to organize everything else.
Think about what audiences are looking for when they come to your website. Whether they arrive through a Google search or by clicking a link on social media, both content creators and UX designers can assume several things are important:
As both the design and content for the website are created, it’s important to consider how all the essential information is distributed across these pages. Your homepage doesn’t have to do as much storytelling if you have a robust “About” page—so what design elements can you use to catch a visitors attention and make them want to learn more? This is just one example of the opportunities that can be maximized when design and content work together.
A content strategy in UX is the marriage of good content with good design. As we’ve discussed, content and design share similar goals and work together to give visitors a good user experience. Creating a high-level strategy that incorporates both content and design is a great way to make sure that these departments are not siloed. This strategy can outline shared principles and goals.
Soon, with content and designers working together, the website full of gibberish can become a well-organized brochure that teaches audiences everything they need to know to get excited about doing business with the company.
Content creation and user experience design are also alike in another way: audience research is vital to both. DemandJump is a platform created to help these creatives do their jobs more efficiently by automating content strategy and keyword research while - saving over 50% of your team’s time.
Centralizing audience behavior insights, competitor analysis, and keyword research in one platform lets these teams better-understand their users and the market in one stop. If you’re creating any sort of content, start saving time today while creating better content. Don’t take our word for, try it yourself - for free.