Last week Josua Porter posted a thought provoking post The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for. It suggested looking at existing designs for the cause of unwanted user behaviour. This made sense to me, but the debate in the comments and some follow up tweets from Joshua reminded me that designers have a tendency to get caught up in the interface/interaction design & neglect the “design” & utility of delivered content or service.

This relisation caused me to take note of some recent posts on the issue of content design & track down some older helpful items.

• Christopher Detzi writes an excellent post on The Content Conundrum, “The content that sits inside of our design framework is often the final arbiter of success, yet we sometimes diminish its importance and separate ourselves from it. The more we separate our design activities from content development, the greater the risk of design failure.” He puts forwars some great ideas for dealing with the problem chief amongs themfor me “(Really) Collaborate with your content partners”
• Karen McGrane has a presentation on SlideShare called Content Strategy: Content is King! “Why do users visit a website? Most likely it’s for the content. Then why is content strategy the most neglected aspect of user experience design?”
• Erin Kissane writes about Content Templates “A content template is a simple document that serves two purposes: it’s a paragraph-level companion to your website’s wireframes (or other IA blueprints), and it’s a simple, effective means of getting useful information from your experts to your writers.”