This week was our introduction to content design. We looked at the background of content design and the workflows and processes that designers have to use.
Sarah Richards is a designer who created “content design” at the UK Government Digital Service (GDS). She worked on the GOV.UK website and made sure that the website was: findable, usable and understandable. “Content design is a way of thinking,” “It’s about using data and evidence to give the audience what they need, at the time they need it and in a way that they expect.” throughout the interview Sarah talks about the government website redesign and how they had to improve upon the Directgov site as no one wanted to use it. Later in the article Sarah talks about how as designers we should constantly develop and evolve your content: “You still need a review process, maybe every six months,” “You need to check if your content is still fulfilling the need, because humans change their minds. And yet some people just publish something and leave it for five years. You really need to try and keep on top of it, as the user intentions and the user behaviour change.”
I found an article on why content design is important and why it matters. it says that content design is a customer-centric approach to solving problems by providing your audience with the information they need, when they need it. The goal to designing content is to define the problem come up with the right solution and then convey it. To do this content designers need to:
Content design isn’t only for writing text based on a finished design or for filling the whitespace on a page. Its to appeal to the users emotions and needs.