If you talk about content as something separate from design, you separate content from design. Content strategy is part of a holistic design process.
Your design process should account for every part of the design system, including:
- Story
- Structure
- Behavior
I wrote about this in Writing is Design. Let me back up and tell you why I’m bringing this up again.
This article disappoints me. I’ll focus on the conclusion:
Content strategy needs to develop its own brand of design thinking and action in order to truly come into its own as an essential part of a holistic UX design process.
This illustrates that people see content as something separate from design—because content strategists often talk about it that way.
It goes against our principles to describe content strategy as something apart from design. Defining a practice separately doesn’t make it more essential. Clearly communicating and demonstrating value does.
As people who care about words and stories, we have to be able to verbalize what we do, how we do it, and why it matters.
Content strategists have to call what they do design to integrate themselves. Working together, we can achieve the kind of quality our products, services, and clients deserve.
| 
4 comments so far. Add yours below.
Dan Saffer says:
Yes, but how? It's great to say it should be part of the overall design process, but where are the integration points? What should be developed when? That's the missing piece here that would make this claim more substantial.
June 28, 2010 6:27 PM
Mike Monteiro says:
I believe what Nicole is saying here is that content strategy, while a very valuable tool, is part of the design process; and not a thing unto itself. That hardly feels like a contentious statement. And as far as I know, and granted I went to a public college, there are no integration points for common sense. You either have it or you don’t.
June 28, 2010 11:07 PM
Erika Hall says:
Yes. Step 1 is to agree the practices should be integrated, and maybe that isn't so obvious to everyone.
If you'll forgive my self-linking, a little while back I shared my bemusement at our industry's content-strategy amnesia. So, yeah, we're in a situation where people ask for more detail on what used to be standard practice.
We're working on more materials around this, including what I hope will be a delightful talk at Web 2.0 Expo in NY.
In the meantime, since I'm sure others share Dan's question, here is a quick, rough shorthand for where a sample of content-related tasks should fall within a basic, traditional interface design process:
Research/Discovery: Requirements gathering, audience definition, workflow analysis
Branding/Overall look and feel: Voice and tone guidelines, early stage sample copy
Concept: Content model
Information Architecture/Interaction Design: Navigational nomenclature, interface language, instructional copy, additional sample content, content launch set definition and schedule, and migration plan if applicable
Detailed interface design: Complete content parameters, begin content development
Implementation: Complete content development and migration
This is by no means exhaustive. Proposed nomenclature and any necessary sample copy should of course be included in usability testing. And there are many forms of documentation I've left out, but I hope that conveys the general idea.
June 28, 2010 11:39 PM
Nicole Jones says:
Dan:
The fact that you think there are "integration points" speaks to my point. As a commenter on my blog said: "IA, [visual] design, and content do not operate independently and cannot live on their own."
Erika answered your second question; I'll write about this more in the future.
June 29, 2010 9:28 AM