Design rationale, content quality and UX integrity
How does content quality contribute to the quality of user experience, and what can IA and UX professionals do to improve it?
You can’t have a good experience of bad content. Relevance, accuracy, freshness, detail, voice, tone – quality is critical to UX.
It’s also critical to making IA really work. Findability and navigation throughout a site depend on creating user pathways paved with quality content (much of it microcontent).
So, if we care about the user’s experience we must care about the substance of content, not just the structure of it. And if we’re not going to create the content ourselves, we have to work with the people who do.
There are simple, practical steps that IAs and UX professionals can take to create awareness, muster support, and boost an organisation’s ability to produce good-quality content. This can happen as a natural progression from existing UX design and documentation.
I’ll describe two particular techniques we’ve used during website refresh and redesign projects to bring content quality into the scope of the UX effort:
- IA Showtime: Where the card sorting stops
- Page Briefs: Where the wireframes get filled
I’ll describe our experiences with these techniques (good and bad) and give practical advice about why, when and how to use them.