Strategic Content Design Cover

Strategic Content Design

Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX

By Erica Jorgensen

To be published: April 2023
Paperback: 320 pages
ISBN: 978-1-959029-57-1
Digital ISBN: 978-1-959029-89-2

In Strategic Content Design, you’ll learn how content research can transform your content team—bringing new energy and enthusiasm for their work and gaining attention and respect from teams of all types across your company (product management, product design, user research, operations, and engineering). You’ll also get a toolbox with hard-won methods, best practices, and proven tips for conducting quantitative and qualitative content-focused research and testing.

Use this book to:

  • Create a strong content research program that builds positive energy, inspires your team, and draws attention to the importance of content to your products and business.
  • Determine which methods and tools are ideal for your team’s content research needs.
  • Identify which specific words or content elements to test. Efficiently analyze your research results to uncover valuable insights about your audience that will contribute to a measurably improved customer experience (and therefore improved business results).
  • Show why content research is worth the time and effort.
  • Elevate the role of content design in your company, proving that content is key to creating an outstanding customer experience—and to improving your company’s bottom line by saving your company on costs and increasing revenue.
  • Get buy-in and support from colleagues inside and outside of content, leading to improved relationships across teams.

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About Erica Jorgensen

Erica Jorgensen is Director, Product Content Strategy at Slack. Previously, she was a senior content design manager at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington whose work focuses on content research, analytics, and optimization. She’s determined to bring greater respect to the content field. To that end, she speaks frequently at conferences including UXDX, the Design & Content Conference, LavaCon, and Button and also mentors content designers through Hexagon UX and the University of Washington.

Erica earned her undergraduate degree in English and creative writing at the University of Connecticut and a graduate degree in journalism at the University of Missouri. Before content design, her career spanned newspaper journalism, book publishing, e-commerce, and content marketing. She survived Amazon’s startup years as one of its first editorial hires, back when the company sold only books. Beyond reviewing books and interviewing authors, she convinced publishers to create their first digital rights to “reprint” book excerpts online.

She lives with her family and dog in Seattle. She can often be found kayaking, wine tasting, attending live music shows, and rooting for the Red Sox, her hometown baseball team.

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More about Strategic Content Design

Testimonials Table of Contents Illustrations

Testimonials

This is me, shouting from the rooftops: Strategic Content Design belongs in the hands of absolutely anyone who cares about content in UX—by which I mean EVERYONE. Erica Jorgensen shows you how to create actionable content standards, put together an effective research plan for better content outcomes, and share your work across your organization

—Kristina Halvorson, CEO and Founder, Brain Traffic

Reading Strategic Content Design is like having a personal mentor quickly teach you the most important aspects of content creation and content research. While it would be ideal to have a dedicated user researcher on our projects, it’s extremely valuable for digital teams to know how to gather customer feedback. Many of the insights that Erica shares would take years of experimentation and on-the-job analysis to learn on your own. If you would like to skip ahead to better content, then read this book.

—Michelle Mazurek, Senior Manager, User Experience at Amazon

I’m using this book immediately. Its fresh examples and focused research techniques will help my team serve our customers better than ever.

—Torrey Podmajersky, author, Strategic Writing for UX

If you’ve been looking for ways to make sure that your content is customer-centered and has real business impact, this is a must-have field guide for content evaluation and testing.

—Sheila O’Hara, Head of Content Design, Slack

Yes! This is the book about content design and research I’ve always wanted. From strategy to execution, Erica shows you everything you need to create content that solves real problems for real people.

—Jonathon Colman, Content Design Practice Lead at HubSpot

Good content answers our questions. But good content comes from good research—and in Strategic Content Design, Erica Jorgensen brings an astute and unflinching eye to research and testing techniques to engage the people, planning, and processes that shape content. Ready to ask tough questions? Roll up your sleeves; this is a book that prepares you to do the work.

—Margot Bloomstein, brand and content strategist and author of Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap

If you’re writing words for a user experience without understanding their impact on your audience, you might as well be writing in a language they don’t understand! Erica Jorgensen’s book gives you all the tools you need to understand your users, measure your writing’s effectiveness, and create clarity and quality. Read this book and go forth to make your users’ lives better through effective content!

—Andy Welfle, Coauthor of Writing Is Designing

Erica’s book helps you get actionable insights to write truly user-obsessed content for your digital thing. The guidance and practices she outlines to get those insights and craft useful, usable, even delightful, content will be an indispensable resource … the kind that sits on your desk always at-the-ready when you need it.

—Meghan Casey, Owner, Do Better Content Consulting and author of The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right

Erica Jorgensen’s guide to research-driven content is packed with ways to get the best out of everyone whose work touches content. It will help any content professional build a strong foundation, navigate past content’s biggest obstacle—unwelcome opinions—and toward content as a team sport that helps a whole organization win.

—Jane Ruffino, content design consultant and UX writing course director, Berghs School of Communication, Stockholm, Sweden

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Power of Content Research
Chapter 2: Leverage the Power of Clear Content
Chapter 3: Identify Your Content Quality Principles
Chapter 4: Evaluate the State of Your Content
Chapter 5: Identify Your Content Research Goals
Chapter 6: Research Planning and Stakeholder Management
Chapter 7: Craft Your Content Research Questions
Chapter 8: Analyze Content Research Results
Chapter 9: Share Results from Content Research Studies
Chapter 10: More Content Research Techniques
Chapter 11: Apply Insights and Share Business Results
Chapter 12: Build Momentum with Content Research

Illustrations

  • SCD000: Front Cover
  • SCD001: Figure i.1
  • SCD002: Figure i.2
  • SCD003: Figure 1.1
  • SCD004: Figure 1.2
  • SCD005: Figure 1.3
  • SCD006: Figure 1.4
  • SCD007: Table 1.1