Design Process: 11) Final Content Call
One of the more important things that many people leave to the last minute is finalizing content for their project.
They believe that picking out the right photography or massaging text is trivial, but in actuality, it is one of the more important aspects of the design.
Knowing what kind of messaging the text contains or what kind of imagery is necessary helps aid in design and development. Many times, a designer will only allow for a certain amount of characters for a headline or snippet of text, or they won’t have enough space for what the content staff wants to convey. This often will result in problems down the road. Who wins this battle? Is the visual design more important than what it says? Of course not.
But on the flip side of that, I’ve also been presented with titles of scientific papers that were longer than most paragraphs, and were virtually impossible to accommodate in either print advertising or displaying on the web.
Knowing what available categories content can be classified into helps define what the end result of the UI is. If the designer planned for a single dropdown of seven links, that is fine. If what the designer gets is a dropdown with three levels of subcategories, each with 20 links, then that won’t work.
This is where the content staff has to have input and their ducks in a row when it comes to the structure of the site and the way a user will navigate the content. Oftentimes, the content staff will expand or deviate from their initial projection of content, thinking it isn’t important to work within the specifications.
By this point, however, that ship has sailed.
The designers need actual titles, actual copy, and actual photos to be able to do their job and make the site look as close as it can to the finished product in order to set expectations correctly.
Now, the designer can move on to working on refining the look and feel once prototypes are finalized and styles are set.
Potential Pitfalls
Failure to do this will result in constant rework. There has to be a cut-off point for content so that the site can launch. Continuing with changes in content means someone isn’t doing their job and is – whether they know it or not – sabotaging the entire project.