Effective content creation: content design training (5 of 7)
This is the fifth in a series of 7 blogs about Scroll’s new content design training modules. It’s about making content creation more efficient and effective, including thinking like a user, quality assurance and co-developing content.
By Andrew Charlesworth
Andrew Charlesworth is a content strategist and Scroll consultant. He specialises in helping organisations measure and improve the impact of their content and efficiently manage its life cycle. He's trained content designers from public and private sector, journalists, and PR execs.
Three of Scroll’s new content design training modules concern the processes and techniques around creating content. They are:
thinking like a user
quality assurance (in a GOV.UK context this covers discuss and review, and 2i, but the principles apply universally)
co-developing content
User thinking
None of these modules are about writing per se. There’s little about grammar, length of sentences or style guides, other than to say that these are subservient to thinking like a user.
If an imaginative, creative aspect of content design exists, then this is it: imagining yourself into the position of the user; indeed, becoming the user.
What questions would you need answered? What reassurances would you need? What information would you need - in what order - to complete your task? What is the journey, the steps you would take to complete your task?
As part of this module I use a reverse psychology exercise (“What would we do if we wanted to make life hard for our users?”) to tease out of the content team a Kurt Lewin-style force field analysis (opens in new tab).
User journeys - whether complex, comprising several on and offline interactions, or a simple one-page access - are more important than adherence to the style guide. How so? If the user journey is broken, the user won’t find the content. If the page structure is broken, the user won’t be able to make sense of the content.
The first fundamental misunderstanding of content design is that it is an add-on to factual information, a seasoning that can be sprinkled on a draft to make it oven-ready for the website.
In truth, all this structural work has to pre-empt drafting.
Quality assurance
The next fundamental misunderstanding of content design is to think that quality assurance (QA) - checking the content (2i in GOV.UK-speak) - is the last step before publishing.
In terms of QA, creating content is no different to any other manufacturing process, be it software or hardware. And anyone schooled in modern manufacturing will tell you that QA is not an end-of-build step. It is built into design.
Any product - content included - must be designed from the outset to pass QA tests (also known as acceptance criteria). For content, that means ensuring it fulfils user needs, fits the user journey and integrates with the existing digital estate.
These are design-stage, structural matters - not something that can be left to a pre-publishing check against the style guide. A style guide exists only to enforce uniform experience, not to fulfil fundamental user needs.
This thinking has transformed hardware manufacturing processes from failure rates of up to 10 percent of finished products to 100th of a percent. It can do the same for content.
Part of this module comprises building customised checklists with the content team. Checklists are fundamental, not just to manufacturing, but to life-and-death sectors, such as aviation, and critical operations like nuclear energy.
Obviously, this module impacts on the content process module, and it’s difficult to do one without the other.
Content partners
Co-developing content is another module which overlaps with the content process module and its workshops. It also overlaps with stakeholder management. It brings stakeholders right into the heart of creating content.
Co-developing content with stakeholders is the next step in making sure content is designed, not just drafted. If nothing else, it brings stakeholders’ fact-checking into the design stage too.
However, in practice, I have found co-developing content has a profound impact on the relationships between a content team and its business-side stakeholders.
When an author drafts content, they invest in it some of their ego. Unless, as is the case in journalism, a writer has the daily experience of seeing their drafts fundamentally changed, the author often interprets changes to the draft as challenges to their ego. They defend their draft. They truly believe their draft is more correct than the proposed changes, even in the face of clear evidence.
If Yoda were a content strategist, he might have said: drafting leads to ownership. Ownership leads to resistance to change. Resistance to change leads to conflict. Conflict leads to poor user experience.
Joint drafting creates joint ownership. It resolves ‘them and us’ conflicts between content team and subject experts and other stakeholders. It puts all parties on the same side.
The techniques for achieving this are covered in the co-developing content training module. Techniques for changing the publishing processes to accommodate this way of working are dealt with in the content process module.
When I’ve introduced content co-development, some content teams say they don’t have time. But when we’ve examined their content process, they were spending days stuck in a review and amendment spin cycle which vanished when stakeholders were more closely involved.
The lack of co-development was the cause of their misery. They didn’t have time not to co-develop content.
Scroll’s new modular training
The focus of Scroll’s new modular training is on developing skills that content teams struggle to acquire:
Content design basics
The role of user research
Content process design
Stakeholder management
Taking a brief
Thinking like a user
Accessibility
Discussion, review, and 2i
Co-developing content
Measuring content and audit
Content lifecycle management
Read more about Scroll’s content design training.
Talk to us about improving user experience by upskilling your content team.