This is the 7th part of this series which began this Tuesday (13th January 2015) on the UX Daily; there will be a continuation next week with a few more – so keep your eyes peeled. If you’ve missed any parts of the series click on the UX Daily tab at the top to find them. We’re continuing to look at content UX today:
Learn to Recycle and Refresh Content
Take it from me; it’s hard to keep writing material over and over again on the same subject. It’s fun but it’s hard work. If you keep going forever – you’re going to burnout. That means there are going to be times when it’s best to reach back into the archive and use the material again. You can republish classic material, rewrite stale material (much easier than starting afresh), or adapt material (create an Infographic or a video around it). That can make your content go much farther and save the sanity of the content creation team too.
Don’t Say Just Words to Me
Excuse the humble nod of the hat to Paradise Lost; your content doesn’t have to be written. You can create music, spoken word, tables, graphics, etc. and you should. If you don’t – people are going to get bored with your material in the long run. If you don’t have time or money to do this – you can always look for quality copyright free or royalty free material to boost your own content. If you lack time but have money – why not commission some?
Error Text Matters
The dreaded 404 error can be genuinely baffling for inexperience users as can a ton of other errors if they’re not explained. How hard is it to tell a user that the page they were looking for isn’t available at that moment and that they can search for the data or go back to the homepage? In our experience it must be very hard considering how few sites have decent 404 error explanations.
Try to Provide Real Content for Testing
Loremipsum may be an awesomely easy way to fill space but it doesn’t tell anyone anything useful. We know of at least one case where a failure to test with real content cost a designer their client. If you must use loremipsum – explain why but ideally; get some real example text and put it in place. It makes your tests much more meaningful too.
Test Content Like You Test Design
If you want to know what works best content-wise; you need to test your content with your users. A-B testing is perfect for this as it lets you see if content is generating sales and what kind of content generates the most sales.
