For creating the best user interface, the role of both content strategy and UX are equally important. No one can choose between both. For many years, there is a significant shift towards creative UI/UX for websites and mobile apps where the focus on providing quality and standard information has not been a priority. Both the designers and developers were carried away by the magic of User experience design. This thing sets up a more challenging environment while designing wireframes for the respective websites and applications. However, this approach may last short-term in case you are targeting something better. Focusing specifically on the user experience is not going to help in the long run.
Influence Of Content Strategy and UX In UI Design
Content is still the king. Yes, you must have heard it a thousand times before but it’s true, content is still the king from every perspective. Be it an end user or the Search Engine, the importance of good quality content can never be denied.
Although things have changed a lot and valuable content creation and distribution is not helping alone; we also need to work on things like interaction design, usability, information architecture etc. But if these components are not powered by quality content, there is no use working hard on the UX.
Also Read: HOW A UI/UX WEB DESIGN IMPACTS THE OVERALL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Defining Content Strategy:
Well, you don’t know what content strategy you need to follow or what exactly defines a good content strategy. One definition that I find easy and clear is that content strategy is a long-term plan of creating and delivering useful and worthy content for the users or target audience.
Content strategy can be a framework or certain guidelines for copywriters and content curators that define the primary themes and topics, content length and several other parameters based on the objective and the target audience. This strategy clearly aims to the message readers, what are the targets etc.
Importance Of User Experience (UX):
User experience can be referred to as an umbrella term that counts to everything such as how users feel or what state of mind they have adopted while interacting with a product. It necessarily need not to be the digital interface. UX and content strategy seem to have similar objectives, so they often have too many conflicts when it comes to creating a balance between both. UX encompasses almost every department of the product from a small button design and to the navigation, information architecture etc.
To Make Them Work Together:
Both user experience designers and the content strategists might have similar objectives, so they often have too much of conflicts when we talk about the execution part. They often battle, when it comes to the design process. Content strategists and SEO experts focus on adding keyword optimized content to the webpage while designers find it difficult to execute long stretched out content in a well-designed manner. This is what makes it quite difficult to carry out both the tasks together.
However, there is a solution to this problem. With a combined expertise and mindsets of usability, creative designers, and content strategists can easily solve the problem and produce better outcomes.
Also Read: A Proper Information Architecture Is The Need Of Every Website
Some of the best ways to achieve this are:
Clarity And Readability
Having a proper user interaction is the aim of a UX. To compensate it with large content, you don’t need to shorten your content. Instead, the focus should be on creating that long text content in an engaging way. The aim should be to make it more readable, easy to understand and scannable. Additionally, instead of highlighting every part of the content, focus on using headers and splitting the content, as not all readers might read the whole text.
Improved Information Architecture
One way to get the most out of the content strategy and UX is to define a proper information architecture which is a prime need of every design out there. This can help UI/UX designers to coordinate with the content part and carry out the design easily
Emphasizing More On User Need
Content strategy can help achieve the most important principle of the UX. Having your user at the center of the subject is a great way to go. More often, designers get so carried away by the content research and the art of copywriting that they actually forget the target audience. So, focus on creating user-centric UI with the mutual collaboration of both content strategy and UX team.
