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This was originally created for internal use by our design community. It is not a complete overview of content design, but rather documentation that was used previously to support onboarding, find alignment and spark conversations about our practice and standards within the Canadian Digital Service (CDS).

Content design is a user experience (UX) practice focused on meeting the information needs of users, and how to best organize and present that information in English and French. Content design helps people find what they need, understand what they find and use it to meet their needs.

“Content design is concerned with what things mean, not with making the words sound pretty. Content design is concept design.” — Jonathon Colman

• Researching the vocabulary and mental models people use to achieve their goals in both official languages.
• Clarifying the purpose of every element of an experience.
• Focusing on the context of what is relevant and eliminating “noise”.
• Creating the least amount of content and user interface (UI) for an experience to make sense.
• Iterating on language and processes based on data and qualitative insights.
• Championing readability and accessibility of information.

• We approach content design by understanding who will use the product.
• We learn how the service works, what the product can and cannot do, and what the user needs to know and do.
• We challenge biases, assumptions, opinions, and conventions.
• We recognize that our need to tell does not equal the user’s need to know.
• We take this approach to get to the work of crafting a concept that can be structured, ordered and put into words the user can understand and apply to reach their goals.

“Sometimes the best value a content designer adds to a project is finding ways to
avoid adding more content” — Kate Wilhelm

• We design for users first and foremost — by relying on user research and anchoring our methods in design best practices for readability, accessibility and inclusivity.
• The user experiences we design clearly support our users’ goals — by offering the right information at the right time and seamlessly guiding users through our experiences so they can more effectively reach their goals.
• If information isn’t essential to users’ goals, we remove it — by eliminating duplicate information, removing ambiguity and confusion and keeping explanations to a minimum.
• The content and experience are just as good in French — by giving French content the same amount of care and consideration as we do with English; with regard to context, culture and language.
• The human touch is indispensable — by having a human crafting and overseeing all content, we ensure concepts, structure and words are clear, relatable and succinct.

Content design involves a lot of writing – such as crafting microcopy, headers and navigation items – but it’s not limited to words. Our content designers work on all 5 layers of a designed experience as defined by Jesse James Garrett: Surface, Skeleton, Structure, Scope and Strategy. In this way, content design often overlaps more with service design in the early stages of a project and then interaction design in the later stages.

• Help define the problem to solve.
• Work closely with subject matter experts and policy to understand policy constraints.
• Analyze policy to identify unmet user needs.
• Recommend changes to policy and processes to make them better for users.
• Understand the information needs of users.
• Make decisions on voice, tone and messaging across the whole service or system.

• Contribute to service blueprinting and user journey mapping.
• Work with developers to define content management systems (if applicable).
• Create and maintain content governance processes in collaboration with the team.
• Research and standardize common vocabulary for the team and service.
• Create content standards for service governance.

• Understand and document user flows.
• Organize content to meet user needs with content modeling.
• Define information architecture for the service with designers and developers.
• Create interface concepts, possibly through conversational design scripts, wireframes, content priority guides or mockups.
• Recommend non-text design interventions to serve information needs.

• Take responsibility for all the user-facing words in a service.
• Ensure bilingual parity of the experience.
• Make decisions with interaction designers on hierarchy.
• Follow best practices and the latest research on readability, accessibility and cognition.

While every product we work on is slightly different, we’ve put together a general sequence of events that we consider when creating content, including when to engage in a content critique. In an ideal situation, critiques will occur at the end of a two-week sprint.

• Articulate the purpose of content and user needs you’re trying to meet.
• Know your users — where are they coming from, what do they know, what do they need to know or do, what are their goals.
• Understand subject matter facts, and legal and technical constraints.
• Research the terminology that people use.
• Audit current content to reveal gaps in the information available.
• Consider possible differences between English and French contexts.

• Document assumptions and principles used to make content decisions.
• Set up a version control system with your team’s designers.
• Set up screens for bilingual iteration with both English and French side-by-side.

• Explore options and flows.
• Create a content hierarchy, structure or outline.
• Create the first version of content in English or French.
• Get critique from fellow content designers to improve version 1.
• Demo and get feedback from the product team.
• Refine design and layout.

• Freeze content for translation and localization.
• Ensure wireframes in both official languages are equivalent and in sync.

• Test with real users.
• Iterate a new version of content in English and in French.

• Request fact check from a subject matter expert.
• Do an inclusive design review.

• Implement changes from reviews and feedback from translation.
• Get final fresh eyes on content to ensure English and French match.

• Freeze content and consolidate it in one place for developer implementation.
• Create a GitHub issue links to designs or update content directly in code.
• Review and proofread in code.
• Release and evaluate.

Content critiques offer an opportunity for content designers to show work in progress and ask for specific feedback. They can be a chance to review work, come up with different options and get help when stuck.

Sharing unfinished work is naturally uncomfortable. However, it’s nearly impossible to improve the design without feedback. Input from others helps avoid mistakes and increases the quality of the work.

• Make products better
• Write and edit consistently
• Develop common understanding and approaches
• Work toward standards and principles
• Create and iterate a style guide
• Work faster by leveraging the superpowers of others, and avoiding rework
• Get feedback efficiently from different people
• Build our skills as a team and learn together

This is a final second pair of eyes checklist used by our content designers. It is not meant to be sub-editing. We try to resist the temptation to rewrite content how we’d each write it.

• Check for spelling and grammar, as well as typos.
• Check that the content is aimed at the userby using the second person perspective. For example, “you must answer this”, not “this must be answered”.
• Check that there is no jargon, technical language and acronyms. Always spell out an acronym the first time it’s used, unless data shows it’s widely known.
• Check for content choices based on research, if there is any available research.
• Check there are no unnecessary references to the organization.
• Check that it’s obvious who ‘we’ is when it is used, make sure that it’s applied consistently. Also check that ‘you’ always refers to the same person.
• Check links to make sure they make sense out of context. Also make sure there are no “click here”s and make it clear when they open in a new tab.
• Check there are no references to “above” or “below” in terms of page layout
  (It’s not great for people using assistive tech, and responsive page design means it isn’t always true.)
• Check there are no phrasal verbs such as “check out” or “go ahead”, or any metaphors.
• Make sure there are no nominalizations (using a verb as a noun) or noun strings (e.g., “draft regulations to prevent cybercrime”, not “draft cybercrime prevention regulations”).
• Check for an English and French version.
• Check for and remove negative contractions.
• Check to make sure that sentences beginning with a conditional ‘if’ are the exception rather than the rule. They can be avoided by swapping clauses, “Do Y if you are X”, not “If you are X then do Y”. They should only contain one condition, eg. “If you are X then…” if possible.