User Stories in Content Strategy: Marketing with Empathy

I have a confession to make.

Content strategy and user personas work together to create effective digital experiences. I spend a lot of time talking to clients about website content, and that’s a good thing.
But something that has become a critical issue for seasoned content strategists has less to do with website content and more to do with who the content is for.

While we should be thinking and talking about website content, we should also be talking about user experience in a real-world way.

The Evolution of User Experience in Content Strategy

Understanding user experience strategy (UX) is something content strategists need to take very seriously. User experience research helps designers, developers and owners gain a straightforward understanding of the website users’ intent, state and behaviour. Customer journey mapping helps validate user stories and improve the overall user experience.

Content strategists in the early days

Content strategists in the early days approached UX differently. The content strategy team would commit to an audit of the current site, and once we began planning the new site structure, user experience would be implemented by design.

Designers used to be the ones responsible for flagging it, so the average content strategist of the era didn’t give it too much thought. In the days of siloed departments, user experience came when design came, which was after we did our heavy lifting.

Looking back, it seems unfair that content strategists thought about content before users, especially when content serves users.

We want our website content to be well structured

Content strategists followed this approach, which surprises modern practitioners. I bring up the past to give us a reference to where we are today: fundamentally, website users should be the focus here. Yes, as content strategists, we want our website content to be well structured, optimized for search and complete with language, images, labels, titles and tags that work. But we should have a strong sense of our buyer before we start those layers of effort. As a content strategist, my role is to defend the needs of the website user, so perhaps I should start by entering them into the equation first.

Transforming Content Strategy with Modern UX Research Principles

Over the last 2 years in my industry, this conversation went from a whisper to a scream. So I took a few months to re-examine my approach to user experience research principles and how I can better incorporate them into content strategy at Top Draw. The results have been excellent.

So what is user experience exactly?

User experience is a process of using frameworks and tools that help creative teams think through a project from the perspective of the website user. Fundamentally, user research is the difference between creating what a business thinks their customers want and creating something that we prove that our customers want. User research is chock full of surprises, because it helps to eliminate a lot of the assumptions marketers make about their customers. User flow diagrams and information architecture support the implementation of user stories. The user experience tool that I am especially fond of are user stories.

What are user stories?

User stories are a tool that comes from the agile software development framework. A bunch of clever coders and project managers found a way to build a workflow that puts emphasis on putting out projects quickly and collaboratively. User stories are one of the results of this work. They are simple sentences that define who a website user is and what they want to do. But they take into account a lot of previous user research, including project objectives, project scope, competition, business requirements, etc.

User stories clarify the intention of a user and removes a lot of the extraneous but important information.

My favourite format is the following:

As a ___________, I want to ___________ so that I can __________.

At first glance, breaking a website down into singular tasks like this might seem unnatural. It does get easier the more you do it. You will discover that on larger sites and systems, you will create a library of user stories, and these can give a clear picture of which website user needs what function and where that function needs to reside. This ground-level understanding makes your content audits easier and faster, and these user stories can influence the new site structure and help you simplify the experience for your identified users.

When I talk to our customers about user stories, I sometimes watch their eyes light up as they shout, “Well, that’s easy, I want (this thing) on the home page and that thing (and that other thing) everywhere else on the website—and on the home page!”

User stories require a more structured approach

However, user stories require a more structured approach.

The content strategy team has to ask ourselves, based on the user research, if a user story defines a true intention of the website user. This guarantees the immediate death of website features that are not in the best service of the user.

And I should also mention that user stories are one part of the user experience toolkit. We bring a number of other tools to the workshop, depending on the project, but user stories remain the one constant for any new web development.

Content and design teams spent months integrating evidence-based decisions

Our content and design teams spent months integrating evidence-based decisions with technical expertise. We aligned these elements with a deep understanding of site users and their needs. Creating a balance of these influences ensures that whatever the purpose of the website or web property we create, we are confident that the site’s primary users are well considered while we build what they ultimately want.

Interested in learning more about content strategy and user experience research? Give us a shout, we love talking about this stuff!