Creativity and usability are two essential aspects of UX writing and content strategy. They help you craft engaging and effective content that meets the needs and expectations of your users. But how do you balance them and prioritize them in your content projects? In this article, you will learn some tips and best practices to achieve this goal.
Before you start writing or designing any content, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and who you are writing for. This will help you align your creativity and usability with your content goals and user needs. You can use tools like user personas, user journeys, and content audits to understand your audience and their pain points, motivations, and preferences. You can also use SMART criteria to define your content objectives and measure your success.
Documenting principles and strategy before the creative work begins also helps designers demonstrate how we can be partners at every stage of product development. Talk to your PMs and engineers. Align and discuss early. It will clear up misunderstandings that eat up design time and free you up to do the truly creative (and fun) work!
This is a key part of the discovery process and by doing this correctly ensures the right environment for your team. I always like to make it goal of discovery to complete these activities before you move into design.
UX writing is the practice of crafting content that guides and supports users throughout their interactions with a product or service. To improve content usability and enhance user experience, it's important to adhere to UX writing principles. These include using plain language that matches your user's level of understanding and tone of voice, writing in an active and positive voice to empower and motivate users, structuring your content with headings, subheadings, bullets, and white space, providing clear and relevant feedback, instructions, and error messages to help users complete their tasks and avoid frustration, and testing and iterating your content based on user feedback and data.
A UX OG once told me that "clarity beats creativity." I agree for the most part, but I think the UX OG looked at creativity (particularly in ux writing) as being ostentatious and using "flowery" language instead of being straightforward. I'd argue that creativity is key to simple, clear, concise, and effective ux writing.
Creativity is the power to conceive of and produce original and valuable ideas that can address problems or meet needs. To make your content more engaging and memorable for your users, you can use creativity techniques such as brainstorming, SCAMPER, mind mapping, and storytelling. Brainstorming is a group or individual activity that encourages the creation of many ideas without judgment or filtering. SCAMPER is a method that prompts seven questions (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Reverse) to modify or improve an existing idea or product. Mind mapping is a visual technique that illustrates the connections and relationships between different concepts or topics. Lastly, storytelling is a technique that creates a narrative that captures the emotions, motivations, and actions of your users or characters.
These are some of the best methods in helping that creative process. I once saw someone storyboard out there content like a movie. It was incredible to see it set out that way and really helped visual the content needed.
After you have created your content, it's important to evaluate it and make sure it meets your criteria for creativity and usability. To do so, you can use content scoring, testing, analysis, and optimization. Content scoring is a quantitative method that involves assigning points or ratings to your content based on predefined criteria or metrics. Content testing is a qualitative method that involves testing your content with real or potential users and collecting their feedback and reactions. Content analysis requires examining your content and comparing it with your competitors, best practices, or benchmarks. Finally, content optimization involves using SEO techniques, keywords, and analytics to improve your content visibility, ranking, and performance.
Evaluating content is a crucial step in the content creation process. It's important not only to create great content initially but also to continually improve it. By scoring and testing content, we can identify hidden gems and areas for improvement. Content analysis is a fantastic way to stay ahead of the competition and align with industry best practices. Additionally, content optimization ensures that our content receives the visibility it deserves. Thanks for sharing these valuable tips!
Clarify when creativity adds value to UX and when it does not. For example, consistent terms for key concepts are vital for making an entire platform feel clean and easy to use. Document key terms and examples so you protect the meaning! But once you and your team are clear about the meaning of a term, you can use that term in creative ways, like adding tooltips or illustrations that heighten the meaning to your users!