New Design, Old Content

Reimagine your content strategy for a new design system

Your interface design is only as good as the content that populates it. Here are a few recommendations to help you along the way.

Know your capacity

Understand your team’s ability to generate and manage informational pages, text, images, and video assets internally.

Learn from your users

Solicit user feedback to identify what content resonates with your audience and where they may be gaps. Use these insights to create content that better meets user expectations.

Prioritize content strategy

Defining a content strategy aligns stakeholders and design teams around your objectives and future-state vision.

Audit existing content

Evaluate which content is performing well and what might be outdated. This helps you to curate and preserve high-quality content during the redesign process.

Standardize content types

Users have a more cohesive experience when content is treated consistently and behaves in ways they would expect. Standardized content also ensures efficiency and scalability in content creation and maintenance.

Multilingual considerations

If you plan to offer content in several languages, consider how that content may need to adapt, shift, or be presented in entirely different formats.

Content governance

Determining workflows for scheduling, creating, approving, and publishing content helps teams stay organized and cohesive.

Accessible content

Know the guidelines for creating and maintaining accessible content so that all users, including those with disabilities, can understand, navigate, and interact with your content effectively.

Content Migration

Create a plan for migrating content early on in the project- including who will be responsible, how much content will be migrated, and whether or not that content will need to be changed in any way.

Unlock siloed content

Lifting valuable content out of PDFs and into live pages means they can be more easily searched for, accessed, and translated.

Bites, snacks, meals

Create content for varying attention spans and audience types. Remember to provide both high-level summaries and opportunities to go deeper.

Revisit, Rethink, Reshape.

  1. Identify your content team and involve them in the process early on.
  2. Talk to real customers about what type of content they need and how they want it delivered to them.
    Review your existing content with the needs of your customers in mind.
  3. Work with designers and content creators to imagine new ways of delivering content for your unique customers.
  4. Audit your current ability to gather, produce, and maintain assets and content. Be realistic about your internal capacity to live into the design system being developed.
  5. Content creation and asset management is a significant undertaking. Identify your long-term vision and short-term wins for launch.
  6. Moving to a new design system is like moving into a new house. It’s a great time to make strategic decisions about what content should be preserved, edited, or thrown away.
  7. Work with your designers and content teams to re-imagine how existing content can work within a new format.
  8. Make a plan for migrating existing content and creating new content.

Tips + Tricks.

Talk with your content creators about any anticipated changes.

Use content gathering tools to establish a template for formatting different types of content.

Conduct a GAP Analysis to understand how your site(s) and page(s) are changing.

Define your tone of voice, audience, and reading levels.

Practice by populating pages and testing them with real users.

Ask your designers to mock up examples of pages using real content. Use this to demonstrate the new approach to content creation teams.

Bring content creators and designers together throughout the design process to collaborate on new solutions.

Methods

Thoughtful work begins with clearly defined objectives and selecting the right methods.

Prototypes and usability testing

Human-centered UX/UI/CX

Information architecture and navigation

Content strategy

Content audits and analysis

Content guidelines

UX writing

Tone, voice, and reading levels

Accessibility compliance

Content governance and workflows

Content migration strategy

Design systems

Scalable information architecture and navigation

Visual design and branding schemas

Documentation and usage guidelines

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Related Field Notes

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