Structuring content in an evolving designElizabeth McGuane, Content Strategist

— Context for the discussion - Honda website

— First steps

– Figure out platform

– Backbone - what kind of content? manually generated? feeds? etc

– Where are the gaps?

— Stop thinking about layouts - focus on content delivery

— Create structure to support content delivery

@emguane

— As a UX/UI designer, you have to find the interesting story in everything

— Build awareness of all user types and what they want to see (interviews)

— The template would have to work across multi products

— Built up stories for each product

— Using this created “The story arc” - mapping out the users experience

through interactions with the site

Building up the story of a product

@emguane

— Created a structure that would tell the story of the brand in a sequence

— Broadly categorised the content as follows

Sequential story telling

Content modelling

— Content modelling process

– What formats should we build?

– How much content variety does one site really need?

— How do you communicate these decisions?

– Keep clear documentation

– Own your own IA

— Tools - create page description diagram

Don’t be afraid to reduce

— Narrowed it down to

– Price

– Rate

– Service

— It worked because its

– Precise

– Reusable

– Needs based

Structure without goals or needs is useless.

Structure and the CMS

— Structure and the CMS

— Working together

– Let the developers in on the aims of art direction

– Focus on immediate user rather than universal accessibility

— Structure is a common thread between disciplines

Structuring content in an evolving designElizabeth McGuane, Content Strategist

— Where they went wrong

– Didn’t consider mobile at an early enough stage

– Wrote words early and looked to words already written

Content modeling is “the practice by which disciplines collaborate on the design of

structured content”.- Cleve Gibbon & Rachel Lovinger

Telling stories through designMike Kus - Graphic/Web Designer & Illustrator

@mikekus

— “The greatest commandment of a story is ‘make me care’

— Storytelling as a powerful design tool to guide you in the design process

IBM Smart ideas for smarter citiesIt tells a story about IBM that they are clever, creative and thoughtful

Olly Moss

Squarespace

— The re-design of Squarespace

— How often do you see a site with a list of benefits

— They created stories around a product

— Visualised the use cases for each user in the homepage

— Need to ask yourself “how can I reduce the complexity?”

MIXD

The process - MIXD

— Conducted interviews, looked for recurring themes in outcomes

— Look for hook/concept from which to capture the essence

— Created a strap line to sum up

– “Beautiful form, perfect function”

— Use of classic objects to encapsulate the concept

To sum up

— Storytelling is a powerful tool that we have at our disposal

— A good story is a perfect base from which to create a meaningful design

— Look at the storytelling masters for inspiration

– Advertising

– Photographers

— Strong and meaningful copy is the core of a good story

Making things is messyMark Boulton

— Redesign of the Cern site lessons learned

— A product which will in 18months help people to understand the universe.

— How can they translate this online?

Lessons learned

— Redesign of the Cern site lessons learned

– Don’t hide from content

– Understand what your content is made from

– Have continuous conversations with clients

– Good work is what happens when you work closely with clients

– When working with difficult people and inflated egos, just sit back and

let time take its course. Don’t speak up you will win out in the end.

Digital is our playgroundSid Lawrence

— Play is a path to fun and profit

— Instac.at - fun idea that generated business

— You need to break something up to know it’s limitations

— Every agency should allocate 20% time to discovery and learning

— Hackdays are important

What can we learn from this?