Content Experience: Creating Meaningful Information Structures in Experience Thinking

Have you ever visited a website and struggled to find the information you needed? Or perhaps you’ve used an app where content felt disconnected from what you were trying to accomplish? These are classic content experience challenges that organizations face daily.

Tedde van Gelderen’s book, Experience Thinking: Creating Connected Experiences introduces us to a framework that transforms the design process into a more holistic view on experience design. At the heart are four key experiences: Brand Experience, Content Experience, Product Experience, and Service Experience. In this framework, the Content Experience quadrant addresses how information is structured, presented, and managed across your digital and physical touch-points.

What is Content Experience?

Content Experience focuses on the information managed and delivered by your website, app, service, or product. This includes text, images, video, audio, and other media that users interact with throughout their journey.

While each experience quadrant has its own purpose, for example, Brand Experience establishes emotional connections, Content Experience ensures the right information is available at the right time in a structure that makes sense to your audience.

In today’s information-rich world, organizations must be strategic about managing their content. Even physical spaces benefit from Content Experience design—think about how grocery stores organize products by placing peanut butter next to jelly, matching how shoppers naturally think about these items.

So how do you ensure that your content is intentionally considered, planned, structured, created, and maintained? Following the Experience Thinking framework, the Content Experience process flows through three main phases: strategy, design, and management.

Content Strategy

The content experience process begins with establishing a strong strategic foundation. During this phase, you'll define your content vision and goals, create a governance framework for content creation and approval, and plan content updates through careful analysis. Your content strategy will align with and enable your brand, product, and service vision, but still requires its own distinct direction.

From a content perspective, what voice, tone, and positioning do you want? How does the content enhance the experience?

The strategy phase concludes with thorough content planning, where you conduct a content audit to review current content from a relevancy perspective and develop a content migration plan to determine the size and scope of any content updates.

Activity to Try: Content Audit

The content audit is central to effective content strategy, and is a comprehensive review process:

1. Review current content from a relevancy perspective
2. Assess the importance, relevance, and popularity of all content in the experience
3. Identify what content to enhance, reposition, or remove
4. Include findings from call centre logs, web traffic analytics, search analytics, customer service interactions, social media ratings, and user recommendations in the audit.

This fundamental activity helps you understand what you have and where improvements are needed, ensuring your resources are focused on content that truly serves your audience.

Content Design

With your strategy in place, this stage focuses on creating the actual structure and substance of your content. This phase includes key activities, such as content architecture and content creation.

With your strategy in place, content design transforms strategic directions into tangible information structures. The choice of terminology is particularly crucial, as using 'factually correct' labels that have a high degree of jargon built in creates a risk that content will not be discovered, which can have serious consequences particularly in the areas of taxes or health information.

Collaborative stakeholder involvement forms the backbone of effective content design. As part of this process, you'll conduct a thorough content review to identify redundant, outdated, or trivial content (ROT), making decisions about what to keep, update, or remove. Involve the right content owners and stakeholders throughout this process, with content vetting happening across multiple departments, ensures your content meets both user needs and organizational requirements.

A content style guide helps maintain consistency in tone and approach. One key focus of the content style guide is to document how your team can continue to make content findable, relevant, and valuable to users.

The writing is usually done by content owners–the teams that know it best and can write for their audience–but hired copywriters or specialized technical writers may supplement the team.

Content Architecture: The Foundation to Content Design

At the heart of Content Experience is information architecture—how you structure information and the labels you use. This crucial element determines whether users can easily find what they're looking for.

Content architecture isn't just about organization; it's about developing a detailed structure that matches the mental models of your users. As van Gelderen explains, this architecture must be written to match the knowledge and language skills of the intended end user, serving as the blueprint for where different types of information will reside and how they relate to each other. Through research methods like card sorting, you can discover how your audience naturally groups information, allowing you to create structures that feel intuitive to them.

Activity to Try: Content Mapping

Content mapping as an essential activity in the content design phase. In conjunction with the content audit, the team can now map all the content that needs to move from its old location in the architecture to the new location based on the redesigned content architecture. This content mapping is sometimes extensive in the case of an intranet or large corporate website.

To conduct effective content mapping:

1. Create a spreadsheet that inventories all content to be migrated
2. Document the current location of each content item
3. Identify its destination in the new content architecture
4. Note any transformations needed (rewrite, format change, etc.)
5. Assign ownership and deadlines for content updates

This process ensures that your content transition is organized and thorough, with nothing falling through the cracks during implementation.

Content Management

The final stage focuses on implementing your content plan and maintaining its quality over time. This phase is divided into content migration, ongoing content management, and retention policies.

Content migration involves making sure the newly written and/or rewritten content ends up in the right spot in the final implementation of your product or website. Once content is in place, ongoing management ensures it stays relevant and effective. Establishing content retention policies that determine how long the content stays active, completes the content lifecycle management approach.

Activity to Try: Content QA and Testing

Moved content needs several rounds of QA. A content QA helps validate your content in context, as well as ensures grammar, spelling, and consistent nomenclature, style user experience and structure throughout the content. Business stakeholders and subject-matter experts participate in this review process.

1. Create realistic scenarios that includes interactions with your content
2. Walk through the scenarios step by step with stakeholders and users
3. Observe how participants find, interpret, and use the content
4. Document issues and opportunities for improvement

Finally, a specific type of compliance testing is used to scan the content for certain phrases, statements, or information that may be harmful to the organization due to confidentiality or privacy concerns.

This practical assessment ensures your content performs effectively within the broader user journey.

Why Content Experience Matters

Implementing strong Content Experience practices offers numerous benefits. Improved findability helps users quickly locate information, and consistency ensures that your communication remains aligned and predictable. This approach also minimizes the risk of outdated or inaccurate information reaching your audience, maintaining the credibility and trust of your organization. It also creates operational efficiencies within your organization by reducing the duplication of effort across teams.

Content and Experience Thinking - Key Takeaways

• Content requires its own strategy, design, and maintenance process distinct from product and service design
• Information architecture must match the knowledge and language skills of the intended end user to be effective
• Without proper governance, websites grow unmanageable very quickly
• Content experiences must work harmoniously with brand, product, and service experiences to create a cohesive end-to-end journey

Content Experience is just one piece of the Experience Thinking framework, which offers much deeper insights into creating connected experiences across your brand, products, and services. By understanding the basics of content experience design, you've taken an important first step toward more intentional, user-centered information structures.

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