On creating content in a huddle instead of on a production line

By now, everyone agrees that designers and developers ought to collaborate with content creators from the early stages of a project.

And it’s common ground that developers shouldn’t just create a bucket to drop content into, and designers shouldn’t design first then fit the content around the design.

Unfortunately, content creators – writers, website editors and commissioners, web managers – sometimes treat this as a victory in a battle for territory. The phrase Content is King is bandied around in the belief that everything should revolve around the work of content creators.

But that belief implies that developers, designers and content creators are workers on a factory production line, and that content can be bashed into shape in a series of specialised stages. So by the time a site is launched, writers and designers are already working on the next project or the one after that, and barely even recognise (or notice) the finished product.

Better then, that writers, developers and designers should work in a huddle and create content together and iteratively. Content creators should aim to understand the possibilities and limitations of the proposed technology, and developers need to understand what creators are trying to achieve. That can only be done if all the factory workers are involved at all stages.

But what does collaboration mean in practice?

Mention collaboration and people will quickly agree it’s a good thing. Effectiveness through working together is an article of faith of the post-heroic wikinomics age.

But understanding when and how developers, designers and content creators should collaborate is less easy to pin down. It all depends on the project and the context, so the rule book may never be written.

Instead, here are some examples of contexts showing that a collaborative approach makes more sense now than ever.

Layout influences content. Content influences layout.

The 37signals home page is an example of designers and writers working together effectively.

One reason why the 37 signals homepage is clever is because it deals with the problem of smooth pursuit well. Smooth pursuit is the eye’s ability to follow a moving target very closely. The smaller and faster the target, the more difficult is smooth pursuit and the more likely the eye will jump in saccades.

When you scroll a block of text, the eye has trouble catching up and it becomes difficult to read without interruption. That creates a cognitive burden (see my previous article on eyetracking). But like many other designs nowadays, the 37signals site turns the text into chunks effectively. Crucially, it uses icons which the eye finds very helpful when trying to orientate itself again after a page has scrolled.

So even though the page carries a lot of text and it takes a lot of scrolling to reach the bottom, design and content have been harmonised to good effect.

Content isn’t only text

Everywhere you look, there are graphs, infographics, dashboards, icons, animations and new ways of combining text information with graphical information.

And technology (particularly processing power and bandwidth) means we now deal with massive amounts of data. Very often, the best way to summarise and present it is through pictorial representation. Turning that data into something understandable takes the expertise of developers to explain the technical possibilities, designers to… design, and writers to comment, caption, analyse and contextualise.

The journey and the task

Website users are often described as going on “journeys” to achieve “tasks”. That immediately implies the involvement of people who understand how users think and act – information architects and UX designers.

And it means that copywriters cannot simply dump their work onto a web development conveyor belt to be shaped by other workers. The purpose of a site – its key messages and how it seeks to help its audience – need to be fashioned at the same time as its content.

Psychology and testing

We’re improving our ability to understand the emotional and psychological effect of design. It’s still pretty primitive, but we’re getting some empirical knowledge of what makes people click, why they like some designs and not others, which colours they like and so on.

Books like Neuro Web Design are relevant not only to designers, but to developers and content creators too. Sites such as www.abtests.com and whichtestwon.com are showing that content can be adapted to form in order to improve conversion on clickthrough rates, sales and subscriptions.

Responsive web content

Developers are working to adapt their code to the current fragmentation of standards and new devices such as iPads and smart phones, but the evolution is also affecting the type and format of content.  The responsive web design (a method for adapting site design so that it fits many devices) needs to be matched by responsive content.

Content creators need to be aware of these changes, and particularly of the migration to mobile. Ten or fifteen years ago, the web was a collection of pages and it looked quite like a book. But in recent years, it’s exploded. Content now has to fit different devices, and creators have to be prepared for their work to be dismantled and reassembled by users, copied, quoted, summarised in 140 characters, linked to and liked.