How to start to write… screens
One of the most terrible moments in a writer's life is starting a text, no matter the type it is. The bar blinking on the white screen is terrifying and can paralyze you. To run off that complete chaos moment it's important to organize your writing, especially, when we are talking about writing for the experience.
To start, it's important to point out that Content is design. Creating content is the first step to making great and powerful experiences that serve users.
It's like cooking, obviously, you will need a pan to hold the ingredients you want to prepare, but before choosing the pan, you probably decide what you want for dinner. After all, you don't catch a frying pan if you want to cook beans… At least, you shouldn't.
Content is a little like that. Before starting to draw a screen, you need to know what is going to be in there.
It is here the Content Designer enter.
My point in that article is telling a little bit about my organizing process and how the content first and modeling content methods help me to build a Landing Page in a simple and functional way.
Content Modelling
Content modeling is the process that preceded all the steps of creating a wireframe, design, usability, and development. In that step, you will study, research and define important points of the content experience which you need to conduct. In the final, you will have a complete structure that will serve as a foundation for your writing.
To start to create that structure, you will need to answer some questions:
- What is the objective of this project?
- What are the interests of the business?
- What is the problem we are solving?
- What are the benefits or functionalities we are offering for the users?
- Which moment of that journey the user it is impacted by that screen?
- How other players are talking about the same theme?
To answer all that questions, talk to other people who are involved in this project, directly and indirectly. It's important to enjoy all available material, even so, the focus was not on content. If you have the opportunity to participate in user interviews you should be really patient with all the vocabulary that user use, which will be to enrich and contextualize your writing.
Doing that, organize all the information in a simple and visual way for you to keep it all organized in one place, which is facilitated for the moment you have to start writing.
At the final of this process you probably already know the definitions you need as a hypothesis and how the problems can be solved from the content design point of view, now you can start to work on the structure.
Defining structure
The whole process of defining a structure in a page is nothing more as translate strategy in content. I used to analyze this step as the moment when you have already collected all the pieces of the puzzle and now you have to start setting up.
That it's time to prioritize content and organize your structure to build a thought flow for the user to get all the necessary information to realize the function we need him to do. In my case, especially, is doing a feature activation.
Start to think about how to translate all definitions you already do in the last step to structured content e start to set up the page with that pieces.
In this step is important to you talk with your partners, so you can enrich the debate about the structure before you start writing.
Some interesting points to discuss in that conversation is:
- Does the structure tell the story of who we want?
- Have any important content which we forgot to put?
- Have any content which is irrelevant and can we remove it?
- Does that structure solve the pains we found in the previous steps?
- Have any variation in the form we set up the page that would you want to suggest?
When all that information was aligned is time to unroll the content.
Unrolling the content
Now, you have the structure defined and can start to develop the texts. Start writing in a free way, put everything on the paper (or the screen) as a big draft. The only thing you have to be concerned it is the way you want to give the information to users. Don't worry about the perfect text, that's not the moment.
Take a break
Yes, you have to stop. Constantly, writers don't give their texts rest and lose big opportunities to evolve their ideas. If you can, stop. Leave your text behind for one or two days. You will see your job in other eyes.
Refine the content
The refinement isn't a fast process. Always will have ways to get better, but you need to know the time to stop. A lot of writers be extremely anguished because they don't know the time to stop refining the text.
My tip is to do a checklist. Note everything you need to solve and you will know the correct moment to finish.
For example:
- Correct grammar errors.
- Align voice and tone
- Verify the value purpose
- Verify data and statistics
- Validate with the SEO team.
After that, when the text will be applied in the visual by the designer, you will know the things work or not. Finally is time to combine visual elements with text, talk with your pair and explore all the possibilities you have together. That will make a difference in the final result.
Improve your text
Everything we did until now is based on hypotheses and for validating them not even be possible to talk with users. In this case, some tools can help you:
The method for approving your text depends on the context of the project, but the basic I ever do is use the Hemingway App or Cloze Test. Is a simple method that can help you to make your text better.
There are infinite methods and tests, everything depends on your necessity and the resource available.
That's not the end
The text never finishes, that's a big truth. Even with so many steps, probably you will have a lot of changes to do. And It's fine. One of the most things I have to learn as a Content Designer is not to be affectionate for the texts.
In the end, the objective is to make the user experience the best as possible and that means not even the text you like is perfect for the user person.
Well… It's not just a text, isn't it? rs
That's the way how I organize my writing, but depending to the context some things always change, the secret is adapting the methods to the challenges.
And you? How do in there?
