This week we learnt about content strategy in theory and in practice with Big Motive coming in to tell us about how they use content strategy. We also learnt about user personas, and had a placement talk. We primarily learnt how we can transform our content from just looking cool to be useful.
When displaying content, it is important to consider how the content is going to be seen and used by the user, and this means that we as designers need to be strategic in what we are showing on each screen to control the content. Good content is appropriate, and appropriate content is when it helps users achieve their goals. There are 3 questions we need to ask ourselves before we start designing new product:
Our content needs to be adaptable. This is because different people have different needs, so it is important to understand how the specific user we are targeting speaks, what language they use, whether they are familiar with technology. Good content is also supported, meaning that for people who aren’t as confident with technology and UI’s can have a place where they can go to get help and guidance how to use it. Content strategy is like being a point man, as we link together all the different people with their own needs and skills to make an adaptable, cohesive product.
As designers we must be aware that we are designing for users, and not ourselves. We can’t design for everybody as then we would be designing for nobody, but what we can do is design for specific people. One way we can understand this better is user personas. A user persona is a made-up person that we use to represent a larger subset of people that are considered our target audience. Creating a user persona helps us remember who we are designing for and works as a visual aid as someone we can keep in our head and think about. To create a user persona we need to find out and understand the users situation. This includes their needs, physically, emotionally and cognitively.
A user persona is usually presented as a one page document, with some details about how the person is, an image of them, and a backstory of who they are. It should also include some of their goals, needs, and frustrations so that we can understand and tailor towards their specific needs. This person should always be on our mind when we are designing, as it is them we are designing for, not us. To gather the information for user personas, we can use different techniques to collect and display the information. This could be interviews, Chat GTP, or just general patterns in the industry that we have picked up on.
The Nielson Norman Group website was recommended for us to read once again, and this time it looked into user personas in more in-depth. There was links to further articles about user personas so I looked at one of them and learnt a lot. The one that I looked at was ‘Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members’. This article was a basically 101 of personas, and talked about how it is so important when creating user personas that they are based of user research, and the data that is included in the user persona is from that research and not just what we think the target user would look like. Another point it was making is that user personas should be realistic, and the information that is included in it should be functional and not just to fill space. For example, including what someones favourite coffee is won’t be useful for 99% of projects, but will be useful for designing an online cafe ordering service. This article was super helpful to learn a bit more about user personas and how to make them effective and not just look good.
Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members
We then Rachel from Big Motive in to tell us a bit more about content strategy, and especially how it works in real company. This talk was to enhance our understanding of what techniques and practices that actually are used when doing content strategy.
We learnt about the key phases of content strategy, which is: