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Hii there! 👋
This week in the Workshop, we’ve Lizzie Bruce from Cake Consultancy talking about content design. Trust me, I debate having a cupcake every time I read Lizzie’s consultancy name 😄
Anyway, back to content design — a reaaally fancy term for the process of researching your target audience’s needs and language to use the insights for creating content using the right (more relevant and clearer):
Words
Format
Structure
Layout
All this helps with “presenting relevant information in the most usable way; accessible, inclusive, concise and clear manner” as Lizzie explains it.
Put simply: today’s agenda is to help you create more usable, clear, and accessible content.
As is the drill, I asked Lizzie the following:
A mistake she’s made that you can learn from.
An actionable tip to get you one step closer to creating more useful content.
And, a secret tip to leverage content design the right way.
Let’s get on with it.
👉 Learn from Lizzie: Creating accessible content isn’t a one-person job. It’s multidisciplinary. You need the developer to tweak the blog’s font size and include the right amount of whitespace, for example.
Don’t have all those resources? Lizzie suggests: “If the developers are in another company, keep in regular touch anyway. No delivery manager or product owner to bring you information? Ask lots of questions yourself and keep asking! No user researchers? Make friends with the customer services team, and do some desktop research.”
👉 Do this today: Group all the content on your site as either helpful or a hindrance in helping a site visitor complete a task. Then, work on improving hindrance-causing content (example: content that uses abbreviations).
“People go online to do something, be that grocery shopping, treating themselves, or feeling they’ve made a difference by donating to a cause,” explains Lizzie.
“But they don’t have a lot of time to spare, so fancy language is better off on a metro platform poster, where they’ll have more available minutes. Support them to complete tasks in the time they have!”
👉 The secret tip you need to know to write engaging content: Don’t ignore content design anymore — you need it to step up your SEO game and rank better.
Lizzie recommends: “Research user language, structure your site simply, clear, relevant navigation and category labels, and meaningful link text, plus provide alt text, captions and transcripts.”
Plus, “keep content up to date and relevant to help your search ranking.”
In short, today’s takeaways are:
Always use simple language over big or fancy words.
Make things easy for site visitors. View everything as a help or hindrance.
Add alt text to site images, captions to video content, and transcripts for podcasts.
🎁 Resource: Short content-focused design courses [free & paid].
That’s all, folks. I’ll leave you with a question: what’s the one thing you’ll do today to improve your content design?
Until next week, buddies!
Masooma
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Nice one Masooma! Your write up of our interview reads really well, and presents the points I was making as highly actionable. Hope people enjoy it, and thanks so much for featuring me. 😊