The 3Ps of content strategy: People, processes, and policies
Imagine this: You’re designing a beautiful new app, but the instructions are confusing and the labels are unclear. Or, your wireframes and prototypes are full of lorem ipsum (that’s Latin for “pain itself” and design-speak for “we don’t know what to say here yet”).
That’s the power of content — it can make or break your user experience. Kristina Halvorson (2011) even argued it’s impossible to create a good experience without good content in the first place.
Think of it like building a house. You wouldn’t start with the wallpaper, would you? You’d figure out the floor plan first. A content strategy is your blueprint. It’s a clear plan for how to use words, images, and other design elements to craft a design that keeps users happy. It’s about bringing the right people together, setting clear goals, and making sure your content and designs are coherent and unified.
Without a strategy, your content can quickly turn into a messy pile of words — confusing for users to navigate and frustrating for employees to manage. Everybody’s tired, nobody wins.
So, how do you get strategic content? It’s not magic; it’s about collaboration and relationships (people), clear processes, and adaptable policies. But that’s just the foundation.
People
This likely goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway… hire a content strategist and involve them in the design process from the jump. Twenty years ago, Peter Morville visualized UX as an interconnected honeycomb. And no matter how great your designs are, if the content is bad, the honeycomb crumbles (Kristina Halvorson, 2011).
Despite the importance of content, it’s often viewed as the last step in the design process, or worse — the last role on the team to be filled. But investing in good content strategists (content designers, UX writers…whatever your HR department wants to call them!), can benefit your bottom line.
Once you’ve hired a content strategist (or five), it’s time to invest in your people. For a project to be successful, the designers on your team need to have strong relationships. In short, they need to trust each other’s expertise, understand where their responsibilities begin/end, and develop a clear working cadence (e.g., workshops, meetings, reviews, sprints).
I’ve worked on amazing teams, terrible ones, and everything in between. Do you know what made the difference? Taking the time to get to know each other, understand one another’s working habits, and establish working patterns that meet everyone’s needs.
Give your team some time to communicate and align on working preferences. For example, my most recent team created a FigJam and invited each team member to talk about their lives outside of work (I excluded that part here for privacy.) and outline how they prefer to collaborate.
In my section, I chose to focus on four aspects:
Communication preferences (and habits): I love to see Schitt’s Creek and Sesame Street GIFs in my Teams chats. ❤ You also might see me online after 5pm, but that’s because my brain works best after 2pm. I’m usually writing or doing heads-down work at this time, so please don’t ping me to chat.
What makes me a super star (I didn’t pick this term; it was in the template): I’m a systems thinker, and I’m great at remembering details and managing complex projects. I also have lots of experience with UX research, specifically focus groups, user testing, and quant/qual analysis.
What you should and shouldn’t do when working with me: I prefer to be brought into projects early and often. Content strategy is not an afterthought; it’s part of the design process. Don’t ask me to “fix your words” after the project is done. Invite me to collaborate!
When and how to give me space: I often do my best work when I have time to work quietly outside of a noisy meeting. I will sometimes say “I need to noodle on that.” What I mean is: I need to get away from my screen and think about that idea while I’m doing something else (e.g., drawing, walking, biking, cooking, cleaning, playing with my dog, listening to a podcast).
The TLDR on people:
Fostering good UX teams requires an investment in individual growth and team development. That’s corporate-speak for: Carve out time for personal connections, team alignment and preference integration, and clear process documentation. (Read more about maximizing your UX team’s potential).
Processes
Often roadblocks rather than fresh pavement, processes can make or break a design team. We’ve all heard the phrases: “That’s just our process” or “It’s just the way we’ve always done things.” But a good process provides clear instructions and a tangible end point that results in a desired outcome (e.g., an executive approval, a user research result, or a design deliverable).
When you’re developing content for a new user experience, content frames are a great process to try. They create opportunities for the team to consider the content strategy first and the high fidelity designs second.
There are five steps in the content frame process:
- Draw a simple wireframe. Create containers for each section of the page. State the purpose of the page or mobile screen by writing the name and goal of the page at the top.
- Think through what your users will need in the content itself. What questions should the content answer? Use research, journey maps, and personas to help you design the content.
- With your whole team, compile a list of topics the page should include. You can use a FigJam or Miro board for this exercise.
4. Use the list of topics to create the actual content frame. Arrange the post-it notes in order of importance based on what you know about the UX and its intended outcomes.
5. Test the content frame with users, and use their feedback to validate the content information and order. Refer to your content frames throughout the design and development process.
The TLDR on processes:
Content processes should be established to ensure content development and maintenance are integrated into the design process. For example, content frames can ensure that real, viable content is used from the outset.
Policies
Content and design policies vary by industry, tech tools, and team preferences. Content strategy policies usually align with the phases of the content process: Planning, creation, maintenance, and removal.
While UX content is usually centered in the product space, it often intersects with other types of content (e.g., marketing emails, legal disclosures). Because of these intersections, UX content also involves a lot of stakeholders: Executives, product, engineering, legal, compliance, marketing (Shall I go on?).
If you can establish a clear policy for UX content, it will be easier to align with other teams’ policies and procedures. If you don’t have clear content policies or frameworks, you’ll be governed by someone else’s…
More often than not, UX content policies focus on the process of content planning and creation, but they don’t give adequate consideration to maintenance and removal. We’re designers, after all; we like to make things. But if we only focus on the planning and creation of new content, the maintenance and removal of existing content is inadvertently outsourced to other stakeholders. For example, product partners may identify voice of the customer (VOC) data that demonstrates a CTA failure. A regular content audit process could have caught the CTA issue before a customer complained.
The TLDR on policies:
Sustaining an established content strategy is tricky. You can adhere to the voice, tone, and style of your organization all day long, but if you’re being strategic on the front end (planning, creation) and tactical on the back end (maintenance, removal), your backlog for “hot content fixes” will grow exponentially. Establishing a content strategy that attends to both the creation of new content and the sustainability of existing content will yield happy customers and design teams.
The TLDR on the 3Ps of content strategy:
If given the time and the resources, design teams can develop an end-to-end content practice that accounts for the 3Ps of content strategy:
- People: The development of a UX team that centers on trust, values each person’s expertise, and delivers top-notch designs and content
- Processes: The inclusion of content as part of the design process and the creation of sustainable content processes for each phase of a project
- Policies: The establishment of clear policies that govern every phase of the content process: planning, creation, maintenance, removal
Author’s note:
I’ve also co-authored a lot of papers about a different 3Ps: Positionality, privilege, and power — a triad that was originally developed by Kristen Moore, Natasha Jones, and Rebecca Walton. More on those 3Ps later. :)
References
- Anna Kaley. 2022. Content Strategy 101 (Video)
- Anna Kaley. 2022. Content Strategy 101 (Article)
- Anna Kaley. 2023. Using Content Frames in the Design Process (Video)
- Kristina Halvorson. 2011. Content Strategy and UX: A Modern Love Story
- Peter Morville. 2004. User Experience Design
- Uxcel blog. 2024. 7 Strategies to Improve Your UX Team and Maximize Potential (Yes, they’re selling something, but this blog has good advice!)
Erica Stone has more than 10 years of technical communication experience with a focus on UX writing, content design, and user research.
