Want to use analytics and other user data to improve your content design system and make it more data-driven? ✨

A while back I wrote about how you can use questions you receive about content guidelines to help with the often overwhelming decision of where to focus your efforts as you and your team use your limited time and resources to build out content design system materials. Here’s Part 2, with tips for leveraging analytics and other types of user data that you may already have access to in order to help prioritize which sections, components, and templates to build or expand. 

What are the practical applications for a “General Content Principles” section in a style guide? Do we add this section for largely performative reasons? Can it be leveraged in a way that provides real impact and value for a content design practice?

I recently reread Erica Jorgensen’s fantastic book Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX, and I wanted to share some amazing and actionable ideas she offers to leverage the power of content heuristics.

When you’re building a content design system you might occasionally get stuck and not know where to focus next. There are so many components you could create and you likely have limited time to devote to the project. It can be difficult to know what to prioritize next.

The solution? Use questions from your colleagues as user data!

Conway’s law tells us that organizations typically design systems that reproduce the org structure and siloes of the teams that created them. Obviously we don’t want to ship products that mirror our org charts, but what are the implications of Conway’s law for internal tools like content design systems?