When you’re working on web content, these are the two questions you should ask yourself.
- Who is it for?
- What do they need?
You could write a user story, like this:
- As a…. [type of user]
- I need to… [action]
- So that I can… [goal they’re trying to achieve]
You can read more about user stories on the Content Design London site.
Even if you don’t write a user story, it’s essential that you keep in mind who you’re writing for and what they need from your content.
Asking yourself these questions will help you guard against:
- creating content that doesn’t need to exist
- structuring the content to reflect your priorities, or those of your organisation, instead of your users’ priorities
- leaving important things out
- presenting things in the wrong order (like inserting a call to action before you’ve told the user what they need to know).
Who is it for?
No content is for everyone. Your intended user might:
- do a certain job
- have bought a particular product
- be in a certain age range.
Or they might be in a particular situation, like:
- travelling to Spain
- taking their driving test
- having a baby
- looking for a job.
The more specific you can be, the easier it is to create content that helps them.
What do they need?
Writing a user story will help you focus on the task the user’s trying to get done.
Nobody visits a website for the sake of it. There’s always some kind of outcome in mind, even if that outcome is distraction or entertainment.
But it’s also helpful to think about:
- what they need to know before they can decide what to do next
- what reassurance they might need from you.
Then there are things that you always need to think about, like accessibility and making sure your content works on different devices.
User needs versus business needs
I find that asking myself these two questions helps me focus on the user’s needs rather than on my needs or those of the organisation I’m working for.
Here are a few things that content publishers might do when they’re not focusing on their users’ needs:
- bung a PDF up instead of creating proper usable web content (see Why PDFs are (usually) bad)
- boast or brag about what ‘we’, the company, are doing, rather than saying what ‘you’, the user, can do
- hide away the useful information inside a wall of text (see Make web content easy to scan).
When you work on a bit of content, it’s worth asking yourself these two questions at various stages in the production process. It’ll help you keep focused on helping your user.