Let’s learn about the principles that drive how Senior Content Designer Lauren Tormey enhances material and ensures clarity and accessibility for university students.
By Jon Matheson for Product Coalition
Content design as a user experience (UX) discipline has faced its own unique challenges. And in its quest for indispensability — at the University of Edinburgh, Lauren Tormey, a Senior Content Designer, is a leader in this evolving field.
Lauren holds Master of Arts with Honours in Linguistics from The University of Edinburgh, and with a background in content design and user research, she works with teams to shape the ways that information and educational material are presented to university students.
At a UX research event in Scotland, Lauren explains what is content strategy and content design, and how do these areas work together and generate impact within the world of user experience design. Lauren also discussed her lessons learned and the principles one needs to consider when crafting an effective content strategy.
“Content Strategy” is reportedly viewed by many as how digital product teams respond to customers when they want to find something online.
It’s all about understanding the customer enough to know how to guide them to the content they want when they want, and to show them the content in a way that works best for them.
And how does ‘content strategy’ influence UX research and design activities? Lauren feels that it depends on how UX is defined within a given organisation, and ‘content strategy’ as a role actually sits above the level of the UX and/or content designer. More about that later.
With respect to the work she performs at the university, Lauren shares that her approach to content design is deeply intertwined with the overall UX discipline. “UX is the broad discipline that we’re all working under,” She said. “So anyone who has ‘design’ in their title is working towards creating a better experience for the users.”
She also elaborated in regard to the holistic and collaborative nature of UX, where various specialists, from interaction designers to user interface designers, work in unison to enhance user experience.
“As a content designer, I see myself on the same level as interaction designers and user interface designers. We’re all people following a design process to create a better experience for our users, and we all have different specialisms in that,” She said.
Content design is not a siloed discipline but one that overlaps significantly with UX research, according to Lauren. “All of our work needs research for us to be able to carry out the things we need to carry out. There can be some overlap between what a Content Designer and a UX or user researcher might be doing,” she said.
At the University of Edinburgh, limited resources necessitate that Lauren sometimes took on user research activities herself, illustrating the versatility required in her role.
“We have one user research on my team, but she can’t [always] do all the user research that we need to do. So as a Content Designer, I’m often having to do user research activities,” She said.
“Trying to do that user research is a bit of everyone’s role, because that’s the way we’re staffed. But in other organisations, you might have a full suite of content designers, interface designers, user researchers that really dig into their niche specialism.”
When asked about who takes the lead on content design projects, Lauren clarified the roles within the team. “Content strategy, I would say, would sit one level above the Content Designer,” she explained.
“A Content Designer would be working to an overall content strategy. I would see a content strategist as someone, as a more senior version of a Content Designer. In the sense that the content designer is carrying out more of the practical work, whereas the strategist is carrying out the strategic work.”
A strong content strategy is necessary in guiding the work of content designers, which is one of the reasons why Lauren drew upon the foundational principles and framework laid out by Kristina Halverson in “Content Strategy for the Web.”
The framework, known as the Content Strategy Quad, divides the work itself into four quadrants: editorial strategy, experience design, structure, and process design. And within the quadrants are questions designed to help teams create the content strategy, as Lauren explains further:
“There’s a bunch of questions within these quadrants they have to answer, and once you answer those, that’s how you develop your strategy. The four quadrants are divided into two halves. The first is the content design half, and that gets into the editorial design. And then there’s the experience design, which is more like the UX end of it.”
“And at the bottom half of the quad is the systems design. This gets into things like structure, or sometimes known as content engineering. And what that quadrant wants to answer is questions around how do we design content by way that it’s in manageable chunks that makes managing content more efficient.”
In regard to the quad, content strategy activities have gone through many adaptations with respect to organisation size, culture, and operations. That’s why there are various forms of recommendations for optimising workflow and strengthening governance when developing content.
There are also deeper forms of content planning that are required in order to optimise an entire user journey. And by saying ‘deeper forms’, it’s a way saying that quality content planning now requires a strategy that goes beyond merely scheduling posts. It starts with understanding your audience’s needs and preferences, establishing themes that align with your brand, and incorporating features such as SEO to make sure that your audience gets many opportunities to see access points to your content.
Deeper forms of content planning also suggest that you’ll need to diversify content types, select the right platforms, and consider relevant trends and dates and use a content calendar to navigate the plan ahead. Encouraging engagement and setting clear goals for how content performs will always be needed, because we’ll always need ways to ensure content is interesting, purposeful, and supports your organisational objectives.
However, no matter the recommendations or adaptions — the following questions that need to be addressed, at their core, remain the same.
According to the Content Strategy Quad, editorial strategy answers the following questions:
- What is our editorial mission?
- Who are our target audiences?
- What is our point of view?
- What is our voice and tone?
- What brand and language standards do we need to comply with?
Experience design answers the following:
- What are our users’ needs and preferences?
- What does our content ecosystem look like?
- What are our customers’ journeys?
- What formats will our content take?
- How will design patterns shape our content on mobile and beyond?
Structure (or, content engineering) addresses the following topics:
- How will we organise content for browse-and-find?
- What tags are most intuitive for users?
- How will we categorise content for efficient management?
- How will we structure our content for future reuse?
- What are the requirements for personalisation, dynamic delivery, AI?
Process design answers the following questions:
- How will content move through its lifecycle?
- What tools will we use to create, deliver, and maintain content?
- Who is responsible and accountable for content? Who needs to be consulted and informed along the way?
- What standards and metrics will we use to measure our content quality and performance?
- How and when do we care for our existing content?
- Who gets to say no?
This approach ensures that every aspect of content creation and management is meticulously planned and executed. And with these questions now part of a content strategist’s toolkit, one logically has to consider what the content type could be — for it can range from text-based material to social media posts and digital ads.
So it makes one wonder, as a Content Designer, how do they determine which of these content types work best?
One of the challenges in content design is identifying the most effective content types for various purposes. Lauren points out this is where the role comes into play, “So that really gets into the job of what a Content Designer is looking and meant to do.”
She explains, “The definition of content design is about using data and evidence to give an audience what they want at the time they need it and in a way they expect.”
“So when we’re looking at the times when someone needs content and in the ways they expect — this is where user research becomes incredibly important.”
By interviewing users and creating customer journey maps, she believes that designers can understand their interactions and preferred mediums. She elaborates, “We can gain some insight into what medium might be best or what channel might be best for presenting our content to them to get them to do what it is they’re looking to do.”
And in the second phase of the design process, once content is live, testing becomes essential. “It’s a great way to get into what channel works more effectively.” She said.
As content designers like Lauren and their teams work to discover the best content types of use, and the best channels to deliver the material — by comparing the user responses between platforms like social media, email campaigns, and others — the data they gather empowers them to generate valuable insights about how users consume content. It also helps content strategy teams discover what ultimately works best for their audiences.
