Content-Centered Experience — The Next Big Thing in UX

Creating a content-centered experience is the key to making digital products appealing to their targeted users. It involves highlighting content by design or content itself creating the design. The main goal of creating a content-centered experience is to provide users easy access to content on the website or application.

It is extremely important that the message is communicated to the users easily. To achieve this, the page should have a clear and easily understandable visual hierarchy. To provide a content-centered experience, you should eliminate unnecessary visuals and content to focus on the essence of the message.

Visual features of content-centered experience:

• Specific visual order — A great design enables and increases a user’s ability to understand the content. Strong visuals are great means of directing a user’s focus on particular interactive features and crucial information.

• Operative decluttering — Removing insignificant and pointless details helps in enhancing crucial information leading to a more focused experience.

Whitespace — Keeping a good amount of space between content provides room to breathe and enhances user experience.

Importance of content-centered experience:

• Users don’t visit a website or application for attractive designs, but to obtain information.

• A website or application with great design and rich content provides an overall delightful experience to the users.

• Bringing the content in pictures from the initial stage of the project is necessary since it eliminates rework if the content doesn’t fit the templates.

• Designing wireframes and building interactive prototypes with content lead to reduced or no risks.

Creating content-centered experiences saves time and money invested in a project.

Bridging gap between content and UX design

It is extremely important to bridge the gap between content strategy and UX design in order to provide a great product experience to the users. Designers should be involved in the content discussion and vice versa. This helps designers to understand what, why and for whom they are designing; also helps content strategists to understand what, for whom and how they should write the content.

The gap between content and UX design can be bridged by asking questions from design and content point of view:

“When content and design go hand in hand, great experiences are created.”

Thus, for making projects successful, teams need to bridge the gap between content and UX design. A UX designer should know the ways in which content is utilized by users and how content should be planned and maintained. If everyone understands the product’s design and content in the initial stage, decisions regarding content, design process, system, and documentation can be taken easily. This ensures that the website’s or application’s content is consistent and the design, as well as the content, is created relevant and useful to users.

If the gap between content and UX design is bridged:

• Design helps the story of the content to develop in a certain way.

• The design provides context, intention, trust and helps in bringing content to life.

• Design helps the content without getting in its way and vice versa.

• Design is created with real content, which results in great user experience.

• Content provides some context, which facilitates the design team to make better decisions.

Wrapping Up

The outcome of both business goals and user goals is user experience, and content should be at the heart of that user experience. For providing a great user experience, content should be useful and its presentation should also be usable. Ultimately, content is what brings users to the website or application. Therefore, the content-centered experience is the next big and important thing in UX.

“The more content strategy is embedded in the design process, the better the user experience is.”

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