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.

It’s often said that content design functions as a connective tissue between all the teams and roles involved in designing a product. Like a fungal mycelium, content designers are great connectors. We can take this analogy a step further, as content design ops is a critical part of that connective tissue.

Starting the work of designing and creating a content design system is like planting and tending to a fruit tree sapling that is tiny now, but will eventually yield an abundant harvest. The saying goes that the best time to plant a fruit tree was years ago, but the second best time is now.