Future-Friendly Content

We can say that design is about managing relationships between elements. This is where we say that visual design is C.R.A.P.

Contrast. One of these kids is doing his own thing–contrast in colour, size, material, motion. When something is different to other things we want to show it as different.

Repetition. When things are the same, they should look the same. Creating patterns to convey consistency of meaning, so we can learn quickly through pattern repetition that things belong together.

Alignment. Things aligned suggest a consistent linear progression, but when something is out of alignment it calls attention as being different - we understand it has a different relationship to the aligned elements.

Proximity. Things close together are more thematically-related than things further apart.

From visual design theory we know how different design elements, information, or physical materials can be represented to show similarity, hierarchy, or difference. Design therefore is about how we manage those inter-relationships to convey our intent.

Successful design starts from sharing a common language with those we design for. We often think of design as primarily visual, but really everything starts with words.

Briefs from clients. Interviews with users. We’re first trying to understand either a problem space, or a subject domain. The space and context we are designing for has terms, relationships, and rules. These conceptual spaces exist as mental models in peoples heads, and our role as researchers and designers is to extract them, write them down and make sense of them.

Design is building understanding through that shared language; the vocabulary and relationships of the ‘subject domain’. Eventually our intent is to represent this information space through some kind of interface, but to do that successfully we need to first understand and agree on how that world fits together.

Every interface we then design is an expression of the things and relationships in that subject domain.

This is a screenshot from the Midwest UX website interface. This design conveys that there’s the concept of a ‘speaker’ (and that is broken down into smaller pieces of information) . And also the concept of a ‘session’ (again broken into smaller pieces of information). The designer here has made some decisions about how these pieces of information should be represented to show the speaker and the session, and the relationship between them. They’ve also made a decision about how much of that information will be shown on this page.

These concepts and relationships don’t just exist on this page. They exist in a database, far beyond the interface. We’re just using an interface to connect us to a conceptual content structure that when you think about it, is what ‘interface’ means.

Guess what? By defining concepts and meaningfully connecting them we even did some pretty hardcore information architecture!

Information architect Dan Klyn talks about IA having three main components.

Ontology is where we define what our concepts mean within the context of a subject domain.

Taxonomy is putting those concepts into some kind of order. Traditionally you might have done that with hierarchy when you plan a site map. The relationship mapping we’ve done today is also taxonomy.

Choreography refers to the logic we can impose in structure or display. If we say that one conference event has multiple sessions, each with either one, or more than one, presenter, that’s choreography. If we decide our speaker biographies can be no more than 200 words and must include a photo, that’s choreography too.

We have touched on about how this approach makes your content available, not just from your website or app, but from third-party services like Google or Facebook. To me that’s a catalyst for thinking of your offering as being part of a wider conversation.

We use the whole web as our resource, cherry-picking information from all over the place. So when you’re publishing ask not just ‘what is this doing for my customers?’ but ‘what is this adding to the web as a whole?’. Take that wider view in your modeling.

A domain model doesn’t care what content you have. It only cares about the subject. And that’s true of people too. Their interest in a subject doesn’t begin and end with your content inventory.

So model their whole world. It’s good for users and good for your brand.