Free 63 page guide

Content Strategy: A Guide for UX Designers

How to create great user experiences through great content.

About this guide

This hands-on guide for all UXers explores the intersection of content strategy and UX design on a website design project. We’ll show you how to embed content-first thinking into popular UX design techniques to reveal powerful insights about the content, that lead to a better user experience. We’ve worked up lots of example outputs so you can see it all in action.

Learning outcomes

This guide is full of practical advice based on many years of experience.

You’ll learn:

  • What user stories are.
  • How user stories can help to define your content needs.
  • How to complete an effective competitor analysis.
  • How to map user flows.
  • How to design content models including concept sketching.
  • The difference between templates and content types.
  • How to prototype with proto-content (and why).
  • How to validate your content.
  • How to user test your content.

Who is the guide for?

This guide has been written with UX designers in mind, but the information, advice and examples will also interest content folk who work with designers, developers and other UX professionals.

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Table of Contents

1 Define content

Get started with defining your content, creating user stories, completing a competitor analysis and mapping user flows.

2 Design content models

From concept sketching, presenting and critiquing, this chapter outlines how you can start to define your content model.

3 Prototyping with proto-content

It’s time to wave goodbye to lorum ipsum and start prototyping with proto-content to add context to your work.

4 Validate content

In the final chapter we delve into usability testing.

Here’s a peek at what some industry experts think about the topic:

Sophie Dennis

You may not be a content strategist, but that doesn’t mean you can’t steal all our best ideas and start putting them to use. In doing so, you’ll be able to influence the content that eventually gets put into the ‘boxes’ so it’s better aligned with the experience you’re trying to create, help authors understand what works and what doesn’t for users, and deliver great experiences with content that moves seamlessly across multiple channels, platforms and devices.

Sophie Dennis
Freelance Consultant
Jerry Cao

Content strategy is the origin of the experience. Users want content, they don’t care about design, so you must always start with the content and build around it.

Jerry Cao
UX Content Strategist, UX Pin
Alex Morris

Design has to work hard to help the narrative of your content play out. Design provides context, inferred intent, trust and helps brings content to life. It’s a tricky balance to find where design helps that narrative without getting in the way. To nail that level of nuance you absolutely have to be designing with real content rather than faking it.

Alex Morris
UX and Product Designer

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About the author

Liam King

Liam is Founder of Lagom Strategy, a UK consultancy specialising in digital user research and sustainable content strategy.

With over 15 years of content production and strategy experience in the UK and Australia, Liam has built up a wealth of practical knowledge on how to put content back at the heart of web projects.

He has led content strategy work for many organisations including the Royal Air Force, Health Education England, University of New South Wales, University of Technology Sydney, UK Department of Health and Social Care, UK Parliament, and the UK Foreign Office.

Liam also has a Master's degree in Web Journalism.