Public services

Consumer

Healthtech

Without content, what would be the purpose of your digital product? Your content is of strategic importance. It must serve your organisation’s goals and add value to your users. When creating and curating your content, always stay relevant and useful to your target audience. Make sure your content supports the tasks they are trying to solve by using your product. Your content must be useful, usable, effective, correct, consistent, and trustworthy. That requires a strategic approach and careful content management. Content that does not add value is clutter and digital waste – revise or remove.

1. All content should add value 

With physical content, such as a newspaper or a magazine, the space and format have clear, and often rigid, limitations. The content must adjust to these limitations. This is not the case with digital content – text, images, videos, infographics, data et cetera can be presented in an infinite variation of ways.

Still, we often start with designing the visual presentation, and at the same time – unintentionally – set up restrictive frameworks and generic publishing templates for the content. We end up with publishing tools where we must alter and force the content to fit the framework, even when it is a poor fit.

Generic content management tools make it harder to ensure valuable content. So, instead of focusing too early on the visual presentation, you should start with analysing your users’ information and content needs, and your organisation’s current and future communication- and editorial needs. Then you should build your content management system and publishing templates to tailor those specific needs. Only after this, should you design the visual presentation.

2. Start with the content – not the frontend

For most digital products, the most fundamental content is text. Our texts can serve many different purposes, have many different goals, and be used in many different contexts. Still, we often treat our texts as just – well – text. We cram large chunks of it into huge, generic fields called “article body” or “free text” and miss out on opportunities to reuse and reconfigure the content when user needs or business needs change.

If you start to look at your content as data, break text apart into smaller pieces, structure them in specific fields with semantic, descriptive labels, and define the relations between the content pieces, you will get more metadata about our content, and more flexibility to use, reuse and redistribute it.

3. Treat your content as data

If you are a professional organisation of some size, you probably have quite a lot content. You also may have several communication channels and user interfaces, and several content editors. The likelihood of duplicated content is high, and with that, the risk of forgotten, outdated and inconsistent content.

If you opt for a content management solution with headless capabilities, you separate the content layer from the presentation layer. This means that your content is free to be presented in many ways, and in different interfaces or front ends. It becomes reusable as it is no longer fixed to its presentation. With reusable content, you only need to add a piece of content (or data) once to publish it everywhere it is relevant, regardless of context or channel. You can have one, single source of truth, avoid duplications, reduce time spent on double work, and improve content quality.

   4. Make your content reusable

How can we plan, structure, and develop our digital content separated from the presentation and as reusable data? We make a content model. Picture a content model as the skeleton of your content. What are the big bones, the smaller bones, what are their purposes, their attributes, and how are they connected? When defining a content model, you start by analysing your domain, your field of business. Mapping out your domain will help define what content types (schemas or templates) your content management solution needs.

You specify content types that reflect the semantics of your business. Let’s say your business is a university. Instead of fitting most of your content into a generic template called “article”, you have specific content types called “class”, “subject”, “professor”, and “curriculum”. These content types are connected. A professor can teach several classes in several subjects. A piece of curriculum can be relevant in several subjects. A class can have several professors. The relations and connections can be many. 

5. Define a content model 

The potential for reuse when treating content as data and structuring it as semantic building blocks instead of fixed text articles, is huge. 

The same content elements can be connected and displayed in different ways according to specific user needs in different contexts. The webpage for recruiting new students, the student intranet, and the information boards on campus can all have a tailored user experience, but with the same content as its foundation and single point of truth.

With a semantic content model as the foundation of your content management system and your front-end presentations, you are better equipped for offering valuable and consistent user experiences.  

Design better digital experiences with structured content