Insight

"Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration." – Jeffrey Zeldman

In order to design the most effective user experience possible, a website’s content needs to be considered early in the project.  This seems like an obvious enough statement, but with rapid deadlines and numerous other items to attend to, it is often difficult for clients to make decisions on content early enough to influence design.  Luckily, our talented team of strategists, designers, and developers are experts at evaluating and prioritizing content, but when we work to craft a message with our client, that is when we create our best work.

One of our greatest assets at AD is our powerful content management system that gives our clients complete control over their own messaging even after the site is launched.  Although having a robust CMS is crucial to the ongoing success of our websites, it takes a little more planning from the outset to design an effective, intuitive website. 

 I recently read an article by Stephanie Hay entitled Designing for Content: Creating a Message Hierarchy which I highly recommend for anyone undertaking the design and development of a new web project.  The article does an excellent job describing why it is so important to not only establish goals, but also determine three to five “primary messages” that the website can be designed around.  Finalizing a few core messages in the research phase of the project allows the designer to incorporate those themes into the visual layout, which ultimately results in a more engaging and satisfying experience for the user.

As a client, here’s how you can get the creative process going in the right direction (credit: Stephanie Hay):

1)  Capture your Goals in an Excel table, with the headings as labeled below. The left column is the message a user reads; the middle column is the business purpose for that user message; and the right column is the underlying business outcome expected from that message.  Feel free to replace “business” with campaign, cause, etc.  Fill in the boxes with basic ideas, don’t worry about perfect sentences.  Also don’t worry about what you think the user needs to see or the functionality that your ideas will require – We’ll handle that.

2)  Write your primary messages in complete sentences based on your findings from the above exercise.  Make sure your messages capture the voice of your organization, align with the project objectives, and resonate with your audience.

3)  Edit or eliminate any messages that seem redundant with one another.  Ideally, you would end up with 3-5 primary messages that should be communicated to a user.

4)  Prioritize the primary messages hierarchically according to your best recommendation for what will be most successful in facilitating a clear, coherent, and goal-oriented user experience.

Once you are satisfied with your primary messages, contact your project manager with a copy of your list (prioritized from top to bottom) so that we can evaluate your goals and the relationships between messages.  Once finalized it is important that these messages remain unchanged so that all decisions regarding layout, theme, functionality, etc. can be weighed against whether or not they reinforce the core goals of the project.

As I mentioned above, our team will be happy to work with you in defining and refining these core messages.  We have great experience leading the content creation for political campaigns, startups, small businesses, and non-profits.  Although, as small business owners ourselves, we appreciate a client’s vision for their own product or cause and value their voice as much as possible when assembling content for a website.  After all, no one understands the needs of an organization better than the people who run it.  Hopefully this technique can help our clients better communicate the content that drives our design.