Week 10
Abstract Our learning objectives for the week are:
Post 1: Content Strategy
As products and sites grow, businesses (can) let content organisation slip. The ones that have, lack cohesive, unified approaches to maintaining and organising content as new pieces are developed. Leading to confusion in the marketplace about what products and services you offer.
Content organisation is so important because it is essentially the story you're trying to tell. As a brand, a business or an individual, you need to let people know who you are, what you do, why they should trust you and what you'd like them to do next.
There's only one central principle of good content, and that is: it should be appropriate for your business, for your users, and its context (King, 2021).
Content Audit A content audit is a great task to undertake to determine whether your content is appropriate. Useful at any stage, an audit will reveal underperforming content, routes and gives you the ability to fix it. With the findings, you can boost your engagement, conversion rates and provide a superior customer experience.
Content audits are relatively easy to do these days as many tools have appeared on the market to make this task less laborious and time-consuming.
For example, I used Siteliner (Siteliner, 2021), to produce the new CNN style website, and for a project, I did with Opus energy.
Most of them uncover duplicate content that can lower a site's search engine ranking and broken links that can damage your site's experience and again lower SEO rankings (Su et al., 2010).
Substance What these tools can't do, however, is figure out whether your content is any good and whether your content has any substance.
Substance is evaluated by asking these simple yet vital questions.
Is this content important? Does it provide any information that helps us accomplish our business goals?
Is this content meaningful? Does it provide any reason to believe, feel invested or relatable to our target audience?
Is this content useful?
Effective content design requires knowing your audience needs, preferences and expectations. When you balance these with your business goals, you can identify content design requirements that deliver useful and usable content people love.
References
King, L. (2021). Content Strategy: A Guide for UX Designers. [online] gathercontent.com. Available at: https://gathercontent.com/guides/content-strategy-a-guide-for-ux-designers [Accessed 12 Apr. 2021].
Siteliner (2021). Siteliner - Find Duplicate Content on your site. [online] www.siteliner.com. Available at: https://www.siteliner.com/.
Su, A.-J., Hu, Y.C., Kuzmanovic, A. and Koh, C.-K. (2010). How to Improve Your Google Ranking: Myths and Reality. 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology. [online] Available at: https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/how-to-improve-your-google-ranking-myths-and-reality [Accessed 27 Nov. 2019].
Post 2: UX Prototype - Reset
Reset. I took a break from working on my project and think it helped a lot.
I became confused by the motives of the app and thought it needed more focus, so I started to look at my data again and hit the reset button.
With the spectrum of Mental Health being so wide, I tried to narrow down my search a little and looked at mental health treatments rather than mental health prevention. In addition to that, I studied behaviour and what made relationships thrive, intending to determine whether there were any causal links.
After analysing the data again, I concluded that my product would need to provide two main features:
Participate in and create physical group activities with people they know and people they don't know.
The ability to log mood and symptoms and possibly journal about everything they're feeling.
I concluded as both Physical activity and Talking have been proven to be treatments for mental health problems.
Physical activity - releases feel-good hormones that make you feel better about yourself and give you more energy.
This activity also helps manage stress, anxiety, and racing thoughts, releasing cortisol.
Being physically active also gives your brain something to focus on and can be a positive coping strategy for difficult times.
Self-reflection - For men, it's hard to reach out, many can't find the words to describe what they're feeling, but once it is out, we soon realise we're not alone and integrate better back into society.
Self-reflection and journaling about how we're feeling can help us get a clearer idea of what we want to say—working as a guide for future conversations.
Daily symptoms check and pauses can help us understand what we're feeling and give us a place to start talking to others.
Making yourself available, giving people a simple heads-up or excuse to talk to people has also proven to work; serious conversations start with casual ones. As you begin to spend more scheduled time with people, we feel we can open up.
These two main features helped me frame the product better and clear my head a little.
Prompting me to recreate my Behavioural archetypes.
Refreshed Behavioural archetypes. The new four I came up with were:
Active | Passive |
I want to participate in physical activities with people I know and people I don't know. | I want to be aware of people's activities and be prompted to join if they match my interests. |
I want to be able to gather my thoughts and be prompted to think about my feelings. | I want to be notified of when people want to engage in conversations with me and need help. |
With the archetypes set, I listed out a set of tasks that would need incompleted to fulfil the goal of each archetype.
I then started to rework my screens and created a new application flow to see how users would navigate through the app.
User-types With all the rework I was able to simplify my user flows into four user types. - Managers - Player-managers - Players - Guests
I asked people to emulate one of the above user types. Consolidating the screens so each user type could cohesively use the app to complete their task and switch mindset/profile to complete another task easily.
For example, a participant might want to start their own game if they find out the game has been cancelled that week.
Or a person may only use the self-reflection features and veer away from playing in games.
The core features were rolled up into: - Join and create games - Collect fees and book venues - Chat to and find players - Complete missions and track progress
These had multiple subtasks below and would also be conditional based on the user type.
Last updated
