Useful looking talk this Friday: ‘How to create content-informed personas for better UX’ — covering: • Look at personas from a content lens • Break down user tasks into content needs • Identify content gaps H/t @maredwards.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy #contentDesign #UX

How to Create Content-Informed...
How to Create Content-Informed Personas for Better UX

UX and content strategists are struggling to be more relevant in the era of AI. This lightning lesson gives participants an immediate and useful way to show how UX research becomes tangible content that makes a difference to the user.

AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part sound like it was written by ChatGPT trying to impress an algorithm. Great insight—just wish it didn’t come stapled to a URL like a forgotten footnote. 🤖📎 #AI #contentdesign
How is your day going so far? I sent a colleague this classic GDS #contentDesign poster after a ministerial stakeholder argued that against “every coarsening and simplification of language, because the state should use correct (and, where applicable, legal) terms” 1/X

A little app that takes the mangled URLs generated by Microsoft 365’s Safelinks link checking service and decodes them to recover the original target.

#contentDesign

https://design.scotentblog.co.uk/toolbox/safelinks-original-url-decoder/

Safelinks URL decoder

A little app that takes the mangled URLs generated by Microsoft 365’s Safelinks link checking service and decodes them to recover the original target.

Scottish Enterprise Design blog
Diagonal Billing (or Staggered Billing)

A solution for equal movie star billing The 1974 disaster movie The Towering Inferno had the advantage of two huge stars: Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. Supposedly, neither of them wanted to be portrayed as second to the other. So the studio had a problem: whose name should go first on the movie poster and in the credits? What is Diagonal Billing? Diagonal billing, sometimes called staggered billing, is a way of arranging the names of movie stars to give them equal prominence. Instead of listing one above or in line with the other, the names are placed diagonally: • one name in the bottom-left, • the other in the top-right. This balances the natural reading hierarchy—left to right, top to bottom—so that either name can be read first. It was the clever compromise used for McQueen and Newman in The Towering Inferno, and it has been repeated in many Hollywood films since. Why Diagonal Billing Works In English, we naturally read from left to right and top to bottom. We start reading this way in articles like this, but also posters, adverts, and web pages. Which means what we see top-left is naturally emphasised compared to what we encounter towards the end in the bottom-right. It's also why my sketches typically have a title in the top-left and a logo in the bottom-right: you're meant to see them in that order. Diagonal billing cancels out a name on the left by placing it at the bottom, and emphasises the name on the right by placing it at the top. Examples of Diagonal Billing Balancing Steve McQueen and Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno is how I first learned of staggered but equal billing (from my Dad, though he denies it). You can see the staggering of names in the original movie poster. Other examples include: Cheers TV credits: Ted Danson and Shelley Long Scenes from a Marriage (2021): Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac Chicago (2002): Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones Westworld (1973): James Brolin, Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004): Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow Righteous Kill (2008): Robert De Niro, Al Pacino Keep an eye out for it in movie posters and opening credits, and help me add to the examples! Related Ideas to Diagonal Billing Also see: The Gestalt principles of visual perception The Blur Your Eyes Test F-Shaped Reading The Rule of Thirds Use styling instead of colons Design for a Glance, a Look, a Read Information Radiator The real shape of a crossing (diagonal!) The site TV Tropes also discusses diagonal billing.

Sketchplanations
Hold the Line: Designing Ethically in a Broken System

“Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chances at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. … I burn my decency for…

Medium
Becoming Gods of Gaps is problem I fell over delivering talk on #ContentDesign and #AI. That pointing out how human capacities get framed as being in the (temporary) gaps between AI capabilities. It minimises people while seeming positive about them. It’s not a good thing.
#ContentDesign fun in Canada: “Citing the Canadian Press stylebook, they highlight an aversion to the British variant of certain words (preferring tire instead of tyre, and jail over gaol) but also a rejection for some US versions (using cheque instead of check, and manoeuvre instead of maneuver).”

Mark Carney criticised for usi...
Mark Carney criticised for using British spellings in Canadian documents

Linguists say the prime minister’s use of ‘s’ instead of ‘z’ breaks national English conventions

The Guardian

I see people asking "I have #UI skills, how do I get better at #UXDesign?" My answer is: learn #ContentDesign.

You can't hide behind whizbang styling when your medium is text. It becomes obvious that the copy is the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the work is in the information architecture that lies beneath. You stop thinking in screens, and start thinking in systems.

UI/copy is just a touchpoint of the system. You still have to design the system underneath and between the touchpoints.