A Design-Thinking Process for Content Creation
While design thinking is typically applied in the context of visual design, it’s really just a problem-solving process that can be applied in many different contexts. One of those is content.
Whether you need to plan and prioritize pages within your website, or figure out what kind of marketing content to create, design thinking can help you make smart decisions based on evidence and empathy for your customer.
In this article, we’ll explore what design thinking is and how it can be applied to plan and create winning content.
What is design thinking anyways?
Design thinking is a methodology and process used to find solutions to complex problems by prioritizing user needs.
As a methodology, the core of design thinking is about putting people first. The design thinking process is series of steps that anyone can follow to a people-first mentality into practice.
Design thinking is often used by product designers to discover what people need, how they behave, and what their environments are like so that the product can solve real human problems. Without thinking about the people who will actually use the product, designers run the risk of creating something that no one actually wants or needs. On the other hand, following a design thinking process helps product teams quickly and efficiently understand the people their product is for.
Design thinking is largely credited to the 1990s and Tim Brown at IDEO, but it has a much longer history. You can read all about that here. But what you need to know is that at some point, a smart human named Herbert Simon defined a 5-phase design thinking process, and it’s been a big success ever since.
This process is the most widely used today, and can be applied to solving content challenges just as effectively as it’s used in visual or product design.
The design thinking process
The most widely used design thinking process has anywhere from 4 to 6 steps, depending on who you ask. When followed, the process allows teams to quickly understand, ideate, solve problems, and improve on ideas without a lot of risk.
For example, Standford’s d.school Design Thinking process has 5 steps:
Empathize: Understand your target audience, also called your “users.”
Define: Synthesize what you learned in the empathize phase.
Ideate: Start generating ideas and potential solutions based on what you learned and prioritize those potential solutions to find the best ones.
Prototype: Take those best ideas and implement them, but think of it as a first draft and not the final design.
Test: Take your prototype and get it in front of real users, so that they can give you feedback on it and you can improve before you launch your final design into the world.
Nielsen Norman Group explains the design thinking process as an overall 3 step flow of understand, explore, and materialize, and breaks out their process into 6 steps within these 3 core phases.
One think you’ll probably notice is that the last phase doesn’t really feel like an ending. That’s because it’s not supposed to be. Design thinking is intentionally iterative, or cyclical, because after testing you might go back to one of the earlier stages.
Many organizations visualize the process as a circle or loop for this reason. The reasoning for the circle is to visualize that it’s not a linear process, and rather an ongoing process that enables you to constantly learn and improve based on feedback from your users. Working iteratively is central to the design thinking process.
Traditional use cases for design thinking
Let’s say a team is designing a mobile application. They would first seek to understand their users by conducting user research; then, they’d define what they learned and create things like personas and journey maps; then, they would ideate on the kinds of features and functionalities the app might have; next, they’d take their best ideas and create a simple prototype of the app; finally, they’d ask people to use their prototype to find ways to improve, and then go back to the ideate phase.
Design thinking and content creation: a perfect match
As a consumer, you can probably relate to the incredible abundance of content out there. We see ads, blogs, and influencer campaigns all day on social media and our email inboxes nonstop. And visit the website of any large corporate and you’ll be hit with — yup—tons and tons of content.
To rise above the noise and digital clutter, startups and entrepreneurs desperately need a design thinking approach to content creation. People don’t need more content; they need better, human-centered content. The kind that meets their needs, speaks their language, and helps people do the things they care about.
By using a 5-phase design thinking process to plan and create content for a brand or website, you can confidently launch a website that will work. Here’s how to adapt each phase in the process to content strategy.
Phase 1: Discovery
To figure out what content to create, start with your users. Even if you think you know who they are, it’s important to validate your assumptions with research.
Things you could in this phase
Workshops: stakeholder alignment workshops, content strategy workshops, or internal team workshops help kickoff projects and get people on the same page. You can get a lot of problem-solving and decision making done, especially on the messaging side of things, through workshops with stakeholders.
User interviews: conduct guided conversations with your target audience to learn about how they think, feel, and speak. This is a qualitative method, meaning you won’t get hard data about what people do, but you will gain insight into what people think they do and what they care about. To learn more, read: The Writers Guide to User Interviews, and 6 Tips for Better User Interviews
User surveys: if you already have a data base of people you can contact, like a large email list, you can send current users a survey.
Ethnographic research: ethnography is when you study your users in their natural environment, doing things that relate to your product or service. This helps you understand what their life and pain points are really like.
Data analysis: you can look at website or mobile analytics to find patterns of user behavior. You could also look at things like email analytics, social media, data from a customer service platform like ZenDesk, and anywhere else your users are doing things you can measure.
Competitive analysis or market research: this entails an intentional evaluation of what other brands are doing. They can be direct competitors to you, or influencers—brands who target the same customer base, but have a different service or product than you. Check out my in-depth guide on how to do competitive analysis for content.
Why this matters for web content
It won’t matter how much your internal team loves your website if potential customers don’t like your website. You can’t meet user needs if you don’t understand them.
These research activities can help you define user needs, content requirements, choose which publication channels to focus on, define key messages, nail your brand voice, and mirror the terms and phrases your audience uses.
Phase 2: Content Strategy
This phase is where you step back, look at your research, make sense of it, and create a set of strategic decisions or guidelines for your project. Really, this phase is two parts—synthesis and content strategy—because you need to synthesize your research in order to define the strategy.
Things you could make in this phase
User Personas: an evidence-based description of a fictional person who represents a large subset of your audience. Most organizations have 2–5 personas.
User journey map: an evidence-based visualization of the steps someone takes as a customer/user of your business. Includes the actions they do, where they do these things, how they feel, pain points, etc. along the journey.
Messaging framework: a visualized framework or hierarchy of what messages will guide the content; typically starts at the highest level brand promise statement, then gets more specific with proof points at the lowest level.
Brand voice and tone guidelines: explains the guiding principles for how the brand will sound (brand voice), and how that voice will change depending on context (tone of voice).
Editorial style guidelines (grammar and mechanics): decisions on the minutia, like whether or not you’ll use the oxford comma, and what format you’ll use when writing out a date and time.
Site map: the site map is a visualization/plan for how the pages of the website will be organized, and how the navigation will appear to users.
Page tables: page tables are repeatable collections of content attributes. Put simply, these are like content outlines you can repeat over time. For example, you might have a “services page” content type, which will tell you what kind of information will go on the services page and in what order. Here’s a guide to page tables with examples.
Terminology library: if you’ve got a lot of unique terms or jargon that might be used on your website, terminology libraries help keep track of what terms you will use, which you won’t use, and what they mean.
When I put all these things together, I deliver this as a comprehensive content style guide. It serves as a strategic “one source of truth” for the rest of the project, and can also be used longterm to guide future content projects.
Why this matters for web content
Making these strategic decisions BEFORE you start writing or designing for the website helps avoid a lot of headache later. It means your whole team is aligned, there’s a clear plan, and all your creative team needs to do is implement it. There will be less revision and confusion, and the end user experience will be more strategic. Everyone wins.
Phase 3: Prototype
Now, designers and writers can get to work. Because you’ve got such a clear strategy, the age old question of “what comes first, content or design?” is solved. They happen at the same time, collaboratively.
Because you have content types, your writers have an outline of what content to write for each page. They also know what the brand voice and messaging should be. And because you have content types, your designers don’t need to wait for copy to start designing—they have an outline of of what content will go where, and how much content there will be.
Things that happen in this phase
Writing: copywriters or UX writers create copy docs and collaborate with the designers to put it all together.
Wireframes: designers create wireframes and collaborate with the writers to put it all together.
Internal critique and revision: writers and designers present the work to stakeholders/internal team together, get feedback, and make some revisions before you go to user testing.
Phase 4: Test
Once you have your working prototype, or at least wireframes and draft copy, you have the opportunity to test it with real users before launching. Realistically, this is the part of the process that is most often skipped, which isn’t the end of the world. But ideally, you have time and budget to do a handful of user tests before hitting publish on your new website.
If you’ve never done this before, here’s a step-by-step guide to user testing for web content projects.
Why this matters for web content
User testing your content is a great opportunity to identify issues with messaging, comprehension or usability before your website goes live.
Alternatively, you can launch the website without testing but plan on revisiting it in a few months, to review web analytics and see if you actually need to do further testing and iteration.