This week we looked at content design and all that entails, which as everything is content is a whole lot of different things. We started by looking at text both typography and crafting the words themselves, the importance of writing content is often overlooked and is something I will look at in more detail later in this blog. We spent time looking and comparing the websites of different countries governments, with gov.uk being seen as the standard for its content design purely focused on user needs, it is always a good place to start. We also looked at techniques used by the likes of Uber to delight users and keep them engaged with content, such as idleness aversion, operational transparency and the goal gradient effect. We then moved on to looking at journey mapping including a group exercise to create a journey map for a undergraduate student looking for a postgraduate degree. We also discussed touchpoints and thinking about what touchpoints our digital product may have. Finally we looked at design systems and the importance of them before looking at some trailblazer for inspiration.
We also took our weekly look at a UX law this week looking at the Peak-End Rule which tells us how users will remember how they felt at the peak and end of an user experience more than any other point of the experience. We also considered how as people remember negative experiences much more vividly than positive ones the importance of ensuring a positive experience at the end and peak of our designs.
As part of this week’s lecture, we looked at UX writing and its place in the overall content design of our digital product. As part of this we looked at Mailchimp and how they place a huge importance on their UX writing, going as far as having a dedicated content style guide. This content style guide includes very detailed instructions on how their content should be written.
As I would identify UX writing as one of my weaker points I wanted to look at this guide and other resources to see what ideas and insights I could take, to help me improve my own UX writing skills.
You can find Mailchimp’s Content Style Guide here: https://styleguide.mailchimp.com/ and it is shared under a Creative Commons Licence.
Mailchimp start their content guide with Writing Goals and Principles before setting any hard and fast rules they look at the overall intention and feeling they want to create with their writing. These overarching goals are to:
To all readers of the content. I find this refreshing to see a company talking about how they communicate with people in this way, a way that treats them as humans and considers their needs before that of the business. This is not what I would expect from a for-profit business whose main goal you would expect to be to increase customers and profits. For myself, this is how I would like to be communicated with and how I wish to communicate with others from a place of respect and truth, so maintaining these standards is something I would like to include in my own work.
To achieve these goals Mailchimp also offers four key writing principles:
These principles have explanations attached and reading through them the clear intention is to communicate like a person, almost write as if you were speaking to the person directly. It is impossible to truly write as we speak but Mailchimp’s idea is clearly to get as close as possible to give their content the meaning and feeling of being human.