Imagine, you are given the task of designing the package for a Soap brand. The first set of questions you would ask are, “Is it a soap bar or gel?”, “What is the quantity?”, “What kind of fragrance does the soap have?”, “What is its shape if it is a bar?”, etc. Now if the client says, “The fragrance and shape haven’t been decided yet. But let’s make the packaging first keeping a generic soap bar in mind. We can think of these things, later.” In this scenario, where would you start? What colours will you use? What will be the messaging on the packaging? What kind of visuals would you use? Will you be able to come up with a design for the packaging without any of these coherent details? The answer is a resounding ‘NO’!
While designing the UX of a website, the content is like the ‘Soap bar’ and the packaging, the UX design you come up with. Here are some of the reasons why UX designers and product owners need to start adopting a content-first approach –
1. Content helps shape the design
When it comes to designing meaningful, functional interfaces that solve the need of your user, content reigns supreme. The problem with Lorem Ipsum text is that it fills the space you allot it, but it remains meaningless. Also, the number of characters of the real-time content is not known. Therefore, when you replace the placeholder text with final content in the HTML/CSS stage, there is a high probability that the number of characters may exceed or not fit into the allotted space, and this could break the layout.
In the context of designing interfaces, content includes the text to be shown on the page as well as visuals like images and videos that need to go on the website. When you lock the content, it becomes easier to create a customized look for your website keeping the user and his/her needs in mind – the colours to be used, the design elements such as call-to-action buttons, vectors, etc. The style of the content – the tone of voice of the text, and visuals helps with the style of the UI Design as well.
2. Content helps chart out the user journey efficiently
Although, aesthetics and visuals of a site have the ability to impress a user when they first visit a website, or use a mobile application, what determines whether the user will complete the task they came for, and then become a repeated user depends upon the value he is provided, and that is decided by the messaging on the website. Charting out a customer journey with placeholder text is therefore, a near-impossible, highly flawed approach. Content is what keeps a user hooked.
3. Content-first approach helps in effective responsive design
Deciding on content prior to starting the design helps decide on break-points in text layout, while designing for various device-sizes. Using Lorem Ipsum initially, and then replacing with final content later usually, ends up in the designer having to re-structure the entire design to suit various screen sizes. This is akin to a complete re-design, in most cases! Trimming content blindly, from a desktop-design to fit into smaller screen-sizes, in the last minute results in a lot of meaningful content being scraped away. This during times when 80–90% of users visit your website through Mobile devices is a highly erroneous method.
What if finalizing content is a long and tedious task for the product owner, especially in Startups?
The agile UX practices encourage quick prototyping, testing and iterating. Even, if the content created is not the final draft decided upon by the content team, it is still meaningful. This draft will help design quick prototypes for testing out the product. Number of characters and context of the content should be finalized at this stage. The final content can then be a variation of this draft, within the stipulated character limit. This is a flexible approach and helps in quick testing of prototypes, provided it is agreed upon, before the design process starts, that the final content will not be drastically different from the draft used to design the wire-frames.
At the end of the day, how ‘beautiful’ a website looks doesn’t guarantee users, or end customers for the product or service. Decide on the business goal and conduct your initial User research based on it. Chart out user personas, decide on tone of voice of the interface, and start working on the content that helps your target user accomplish their goals, in the most efficient manner. Content really is King. The sooner designers as well as product owners understand this, the better.
Have you been given a Design brief by a client without meaningful content and want to talk about it? The best thing to do is follow me on twitter and send a DM.
Designfully yours,
Surya Pillai