In her excellent 2017 book, Sarah Richards coined the term content design to describe the process of thinking about the design behind the content first: with a specific focus on how to serve the audience with information they need. This is fundamentally important to businesses and individuals whose goals are to communicate information through content to their audience. Without first understanding the needs of the audience, they cannot effectively and efficiently produce content for them. This shift in the way content is design pitches users needs as more important than the business' needs.
If you respect your readers you will make your content work for them -Sarah Richards
By Researching your audience and their needs you will, by nature, discover more about several aspects of your business, and the line of communicate to your audiences.
This research can be undertaken internally and on your own organisations platforms by analytics, as well as through wider demographics that you can observe of your intended audience.
Why do you need to put so much effort into your content? -Sarah Richards
Once Thorough research has been undertaken, you should now have a clear enough picture of who your audience are, and what their wants and needs are from your content. User stories are simple ways to document the journey that your audience will go on to consume your content. They look like the following:
As a [person in a particular role] I want to [perform an action or find something out] So that [I can achieve my goal of..] For instance, reading this article now, your user story may be something along the lines of:
As a Front End Developer/Designer, I want to learn the basics of what is meant by 'content design', so that I can produce better mock-ups for my project.
This approach makes it clear who your audience are, what they want, and what your content will need to aim to achieve.
When you publish content, it is there forever. -Sarah Richards
While Content Design can seem a scary and heuristic approach to working, it basically just means putting the customer first, and changing your perspective towards the content you write. I would highly recommend reading 'Content Design' by Sarah Richards to learn more about this topic.