Freelance content designer and founder of Clear Language Club.
96 postsI'm still working on a service for NHS England, so my nose is constantly in and out of the service manual and design system. There is lots of good guidance on this page about accessibility and content, but I particularly enjoyed this nugget:
Clear content helps everyone and it's the most important thing you can do to make things accessible. It will help more people than any other accessibility requirement.
Too right.
Rachel Malic on the importance of trust online:
We can get hung up on how long a service takes to use, but a slightly
longer journey can feel more reassuring for users, and help reduce the
feeling of urgency that fraudsters try to create.
I think it's worth taking this approach with your content too. For years, I would probably advocate for maximum brevity to try and make things as clear and succinct as possible. Over time, I've learnt that actually, a word or two more in a sentence can make all the difference.
This post by Ellen Harvey on how to do an effective content audit without spending a fortune or taking ages is pretty great.
You can do a content audit without tools. A spreadsheet, your top 50 pages by traffic, and one sharp question will land most of the decisions an audit exists to make.
I have seen content audits and audit templates that have so many columns and data points. And I think a lot of those data points are next to useless.
A content audit can sometimes turn into the work itself. Slowly, perhaps unnoticed, the act of creating a large and delightfully detailed spreadsheet becomes the point. Months fly by and though the audit looks increasingly splendid, the content and all of its issues remain the same.
Most content audits do not require a many-columned spreadsheet. They need good questions, accurate data and clear actions. In fact, in this piece, Harvey lays out a simple method where an audit requires just one good question.
One question, held steady across 50 pages, produces a defensible pattern. Five questions produce five half-finished audits.
I can get behind this notion. Doing this should give you the most important, effective actions to take to improve your content, most likely in half the time. Sure, your spreadsheet might not look as sweet. But your content will get better, faster.
I'm sure you know the difference between a noun and a verb. And I'm sure that you never sometimes forget and have to quickly Google it to make sure you've not got it completely wrong. But anyway, if you or, you know, someone else needs a clear language explanation of all the different types of noun and verb, this is a great post.
Ray Newman on the pursuit of content perfection often sought by stakeholder types, especially in government:
The antithesis of content design is the old skool Civil Service idea that, if you just try hard enough, you can find “a form of words” that will make everybody happy, nobody sad, and nobody angry.
Or, at least, obfuscate the unpopular policy sufficiently that nobody will realise they should be mad about it.
And then towards the end of the post:
But sometimes, you need to hold the detail back; or disappoint some people to make it clearer for most people; or clearly and directly tell people something they won't want to hear.
It’s rarely easy to balance these, and the many other concerns in the mix. But that’s why the content needs to be designed – not just knocked out, banged together, or scribbled on the back of a napkin.
I think there is also something here about research, constraints and making informed decisions.
You need research to understand who your content is for and how it might affect them, either positively or negatively. But you also have the internal pressure of deadlines and budgets – these are frustrating, but very real content constraints. They too affect your decision making.
As Ray says, this is why many of us call ourselves designers these days and not copywriters. Our choices are based on the situation in front of us. We take all that we know about our users and design the best content we can at any given time.
In my experience, good content design is rarely about finding the ideal 'form of words'. It's about listening, compromise and pragmatism. Writing good content is a messy, movable feast, not a meal to be cooked to perfection.