Content Strategy Articles & Videos

  • Reading Content on Mobile Devices

    Readers can understand short, simple text content on mobile devices just as well as on computers, but they slow down when reading difficult text on mobile.

  • Top 10 Enduring Web-Design Mistakes

    A large-scale usability study revealed the most common and damaging web-design mistakes of today. They aren't surprising or new - they're enduring issues that continue to hurt website usability.

  • International B2B Audiences: Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Site for Global Users

    International B2B sites should demonstrate regional presence, adapt to local conventions, and ensure that localized sites are consistent with a main site.

  • The Impact of Tone of Voice on Users' Brand Perception

    Different tones of voice have measurable impacts on users’ perceptions of a brand’s friendliness, trustworthiness, and desirability. Casual, conversational, and enthusiastic tones performed best.

  • The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice

    A product's tone of voice communicates how an organization feels about its message. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.

  • 3 Ways to Inspire Intranet Content Authors

    Organizational, group and individual support for content creators is necessary to encourage and create strong intranet content.

  • What Spoilers Teach Us About Designing for Different User Tasks

    Designers must aim to understand and accommodate different user goals. When accommodations aren’t feasible, choose designs that support the most common user scenarios. For example, subscribers to online TV streaming services have different viewing preferences, and designs need to take those into consideration.

  • Which Comes First? Layout or Content?

    Avoid awkward and difficult page layouts by fitting flexible templates to content whenever possible. Test often during design, and plan to scale up.

  • When to Hide Content Behind Forms and When to Give Content Away

    Understand your users’ intents and stage in the sales funnel before you gate content.

  • Content Migration Alone Is Not An Effective Content Strategy

    While fairly popular, “lift and shift” is not a viable content strategy. It is a folly fueled by fear, limited resources, inexperience, and politics. There are better ways to ensure high-quality intranet content, and two award-winning designers offer their insights, proving that a bright attitude makes all the difference.

  • An FAQ’s User Experience Deconstructed

    Good FAQ pages use legible typography, chunking, appropriate spacing, easy navigation to individual questions, and reflect the current questions of the site users.

  • FAQs Still Deliver Great Value

    A usable website FAQ can improve products, services, information, and user experience as part of your knowledge management process.

  • Related Content Boosts Pageviews, When Done Right

    Links that follow up on the user’s current interest encourage site exploration and reduce bounce rates. With the proper invitation, people will stay longer on your site.

  • Avoid Format-Based Primary Navigation

    Format-based navigation, such as links to Videos, at the top levels of a website’s information architecture lacks sufficient context and information scent for topic-focused users.

  • Accordions Are Not Always the Answer for Complex Content on Desktops

    Longer pages can benefit users. Accordions shorten pages and reduce scrolling, but they increase the interaction cost by requiring people to decide on topic headings.

  • User-centric vs. Maker-centric Language: 3 Essential Guidelines

    To engage users, website copy must speak to readers and not at them. Include words people can relate to, and avoid jargon, business speak, and feature-driven language.

  • SEO and Usability

    What makes a website good will also give it a high SERP rank, but overly tricky search engine optimization can undermine the user experience.

  • Photos as Web Content

    Users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to "jazz up" web pages.

  • Corporate Blogs: Front Page Structure

    Showing summaries of many articles is more likely to draw in users than providing full articles, which can quickly exhaust reader interest.

  • Velocity of Media Consumption: TV vs. the Web

    The granularity of user decisions is much finer on the Web, which is dominated by the instant gratification of the user's needs in any given instant. Content must cater to this rapid pace.