“A good content designer understands a bit about the involuntary mechanics that govern how humans intake information.”
To start this module off, I read Sarah Richard’s “Content Design” book to get an understanding of the basics of Content Design. The most important point about Content Design that I felt the book explained was that good content comes down to 3 things;
While the ease of use and push or pull of content made sense to me, the idea of content trust was interesting to me. I think trust comes from a lot of aspects of content design, such as the content itself, where it’s displayed, and how it’s displayed. The idea of how content is displayed leading to trust was interesting to me as I feel it’s an important thing for me to consider. It comes back to the idea of following design conventions, because that’s what users expect to see, so when you deviate from this it can cause user distrust. I think it’s important for me to consider design conventions for this module to explore content trust, and will help me overall understand more about design.
Reading how Richards defines “good content” was interesting to me and a good starting point for this module. It’s something I want to consider and find out more about going forward. Especially given today's culture of bitesized content I feel it’s even more important to understand what content works and what doesn’t. Overall the book was a good introduction and has given me a lot to look further into.
I found this really interesting article from Jakob Nielsen which I feel shows the importance of good Content Design. The article is mainly about a study which found that users generally only read 20-28% of the text on a webpage. At first, I found this number staggeringly low, however, when I considered how I would generally read a webpage, I realised this seemed accurate. Because of how little users are engaging with webpages, I think I’ll need to consider ways to work around it. I think there are two main things we as designers have to do when working around this statistic;
To back up these ideas I had, I did some research into current attention spans which returned some frightening results. Gen Z has an average attention span of **1.3 seconds**, which is insanely short. I’ve noticed with myself how Tiktok, in particular, has obliterated my attention span, and how I find myself bored when watching long-form content now. In an ideal world, we would be able to take steps to rebuild attention spans, for example, by government-imposed restrictions on addictive content. However, as a designer on my own, I feel I have to realise that I’m going to have to work around these statistics rather than directly combat them. As it always has been, prioritisation of content will remain an incredibly important factor in retaining attention, and while condensing content has also been important, I think the challenge I’ll face will be discovering new ways to condense and present content to retain attention.
This article has been incredibly interesting for me to read, as I feel it’s given me a sense of the challenges I’ll face when designing content. I think keeping this in mind will help me improve my content design as it will help me to focus on the current issues surrounding retaining attention. This idea of researching the current issues around the weekly topic has interested me this week and is something I intend to continue within the coming weeks as I feel it improves my work by considering how things have to change now.
