You know the business cliche, “The customer is always right.” Well, whether that’s true or not, here’s one maxim to live by online: The customer is always in mind.
Putting customer experience — also known as user experience or UX — at the center of your business ensures that every facet of your products and services works to serve and convert your target audience. This is especially important in a digital-first society.
But that’s only half the equation. If UX is the pint glass, your content is the draft beer; one isn’t much good without the other.
In that sense, content and UX both address the who, what, when, where, why, and how of your business.
Marrying content and UX not only gives your customer what they want but delivers it in the way they want it; building trust, loyalty, and sales along the way.
These two disciplines intersect in a plethora of ways. But let’s examine three user experience and content strategy principles applicable to any company.
If UX is the pint glass, your content is the draft beer; one isn’t much good without the other.
Keep your design and voice consistent
Every page on your site — from your blog to your contact page — should feel at one with the whole.
Seamless, consistent experiences foster comfort and trust with your audience. Rely on a system of consistent design elements instead of a mix of styles so users will not feel jarred from page to page. Visual consistency in UX strategy will relay something about your brand as well: that you’re steadfast and dependable.
Content should build on that design consistency. The voice and tone of your copy should feel the same on your blog as on your content pages. Let readers sense the same voice from page to page, even on technical material.
The same is true for visuals. All photo and video elements across your site should align with your design and copy elements. Will your imagery feel authentic and untouched or stylized and posed? Whichever you choose, your content strategy should include visuals that stay consistent and ladder up to your brand with a distinctive, identifiable approach.
Don’t waste your user’s time
You want users to engage with your site as much as possible. They want to spend as little time on your site as necessary.
But when UX strategy and content strategy click, users don’t spend time. They invest it.
But when UX strategy and content strategy click, users don’t spend time. They invest it.
Quality content gives users what they want to make informed decisions. It can also reveal what they didn’t realize they wanted — inspiring them to discover more. Quality UX delivers that content in effortless ways your users expect and in intuitive ways they never imagined.
This all starts with knowing your audience.
User interviews, questionnaires, and on-site observation are a few UX-related activities that can be combined with keyword research to inform your content efforts so you’re not only creating with your ideal customers in mind, but also attracting them with rich search-optimized words, video, and images.
Quality content begins with the right topics and finishes with the right tone. That consistent voice across all your content should speak to your brand but sound like your customers.
Personas, developed from qualitative UX insights, can ground your writers on this. Don’t talk like your product engineers talk; talk like your customers do. It’ll feel far more human without sacrificing substance. Visually optimize your content as well, keeping in mind mobile audiences.
If your SEO is attracting time-pressed visitors quickly seeking an answer, make sure your content loads quickly and is scannable. This can be done by chunking content using subheadings, lists, and summary box elements that make skimming easy. For deep-dive visitors, suggest related content via a tagging system and provide a search bar with sharp filters. Provide clear CTAs at intuitive places to move them along the funnel.
Keep it simple
What you use to break up your content is just as important as how you break it up.
Consider a long piece of text on your site. Sure, sharp subheads can break up that daunting copy block. But so can images, charts, interactive features, video, and key pull quotes.
The result? Text that feels more digestible, scrollable, and approachable — especially on mobile.
Also consider spacing. Your content stands out when you give it room to breathe.
Put another way: The less a page is occupied by content, the more your visitors can be occupied by that content. And that starts with an emphasis on the user experience. Cramming a site with sidebars, dropdowns, and pop-ups feels like endless billboards on a highway. What we want is a serene country drive … with helpful road signs along the way. This kind of a user experience feels focused, uncluttered, and unrushed.
We’ve all seen random videos, bad stock images, and spammy CTAs. Ensure that every piece of content complements and expands upon anything placed around it.
In short: Be the site you want to see in the world. A collaborative UX design and content strategy can make that happen.
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By Two Rivers Marketing
