Structured content allows for flexible information presentation across channels. It supports consistency, efficient content operations, and adaptability with UI design changes.
Content inventories and audits shift a team's mindset from content quantity to content quality. They reveal relationships between content to resolve problems and support new content creation.
Content involves 4 phases: planning, creation, maintenance, and removal. Done right, this enhances the business value of digital content and its impact on the user experience.
Content writers should always avoid jargon, but what counts as jargon depends on your audience. Determine whether a specific word is meaningless jargon or meaningful terminology.
There are 3 ways to structure digital content production in an organization: centralized (a single team owns creation, management, and publication) or decentralized (domain experts manage their own content), as well as hybrids between these two.
The reciprocity principle states that people, when given something upfront, tend to feel a sense of obligation to repay what has been provided. Login walls reverse this sequence and require users to disclose personal info before allowing access to content. People often resent this, and may not be as forthcoming or cooperative as a result.
Coming from a traditional content/writing background, Michelle Blake presents her case study of broadening her remit to a fuller range of user-experience issues and improving the design of her organization's website.
Usability testing can yield valuable insights about your content. Make sure you test with the correct users, carefully craft the tasks, and ask the right follow-up questions.
Many best practices for high-quality content creation and management will inevitably be skipped over, unless they are explicitly planned for as user stories within any Agile development project.
Information foraging explains how users behave on the web and why they click certain links and not others. Information scent can be used to analyze how people assess a link and the page context surrounding the link to judge what's on the other end of the link.
Demanding that users create a new account before they are able to access a website or mobile app is only justified in rare cases. Usually, people go away, rather than scale a wall placed between them and your offerings.
Before you write any content for the web, you should clearly define who will read it, what the reader’s goals are, and what impact you want your content to have on the reader.
Top Tasks are a tool used to focus a design team on the same, best set of user tasks. It comprises a list of 10 or fewer activities that users should be able to achieve using a design. If people can’t do these things, the design has failed. It takes a small amount of effort to create Top Tasks lists, but their impact is great.
The words in your interface can help establish your product’s personality. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.
4 guidelines for writing the link texts on websites to ensure users click the right options. Links should be Specific, Sincere, Substantial, and Succinct.
