If you’d like to improve user experience, content design can help. But how? We have a few tricks up our sleeve, so I’d like to share with you a reference list of ways we can give users an experience which feels more intuitive and caters better to their needs.

Opening links, whether they are to the same website or another, in a new tab can pose a variety of issues for users, especially as web traffic from mobile devices continues to increase.

Carefully examine the user’s context, task at hand, and next steps when deciding whether to open links to documents and external sites in the same or a new browser tab.

Bad writing can be avoided by following Orwell’s 6 little rules. The problem is the absolute nature of Orwell’s rules. The first five all include either a “never” or an “always”. That's why Orwell himself doesn’t always obey them and The Economist's Johnson revised them.

Share Post Share Email Print They can be paper or click-through, but designing successful digital experiences involves making prototypes of your interfaces.

Step-by-step instructions to systematically review your product to find potential usability and experience problems. Download a free heuristic evaluation template. A heuristic evaluation is a method for identifying design problems in a user interface. Evaluators judge the design against a set of guidelines (called heuristics) that make systems ea…

Boost your SEO with effective header tag usage. Learn how to optimize header tags to improve content scannability, search engine visibility, and user experience.

Websites and apps are our modern equivalent of phones. You create them so that people can serve themselves. Make your site or app a good conversational partner.

A UI/UX designer focuses on the appearance of an interface and how users will use said interface. A content-first designer, a.k.a., a content designer or UX writer, will focus on the content users will interact with.

Content standards in design systems support a holistically consistent user experience and efficient collaboration between writers, content, and UI designers.

A few relevant, high-quality visuals placed next to associated text can boost users’ comprehension of your content and its memorability.

Cookie permissions need to follow the law and strike the balance between respecting user privacy and being user-friendly.

Example page (landing page)Innovation, training and toolsURL: https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/tools-and-laboratories_en (may have been updated since May 2023)On the basis of our open data principles we publish tools and databases. The tools and databases are categorised by name and acronym.LaboratoriesThe JRC maintains a wide range of l…

"Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) programme" section, copy written and maintained in cooperation with the JRC programme manager for the CDP.

"Facts4EUFuture" section, copy written for a campaign to promote a series of 11 reports 2018-2019 to inform the incoming EC presidency on upcoming trends. After relaunch of the Science Hub in 2022, the initial landing pages have been replaced with direct links to the "JRC Publications Repository".

People often remember visuals better than words. Designers can leverage the picture-superiority effect to make their products memorable and learnable.

Scrolling, scanning, skipping: How do users consume content online? Here’s what you need to know about reading behavior and design strategies to prevent harmful scanning patterns.

"Working with us" section, copy written in January/February 2023 in cooperation with JRC HR colleagues.

About page, copy written in March 2023 based on JRC documents: - Revitalising the JRC Strategy 2030; - JRC strategy 2030; - JRC work programme 2023 - 2024: Brochure; - JRC Work Programme 2023 -2024: Factsheets; - JRC portfolio cards

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that can have anywhere from three to seven phases, depending on whom you talk to. The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the d.school) proposes the five-stage design thinking model: Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test.

The root of the problem lies in our desire to impress. Thesaurus carpet-bombings and long-winded sentences are commonly mistaken for fine writing because they feel authoritative and intellectual. But they’re just masks; effective writing is lean, clean, and easy to read.

From providing accurate context to creating a cohesive structure, each of these key principles can elevate your content designs and ensure you’re communicating effectively with your audience

How to communicate effectively when users fail and succeed (shared on LinkedIn by Vitaly Friedman)

What users believe they know about a user interface impacts how they use it. Mismatched mental models are common, especially with designs that try something new.

If you're a marketer, manager, developer, designer or writer wanting to up your UX writing game, then these guides are right up your alley.

Techniques like summaries, bullet points, callouts, bolding, and helpful visuals improve comprehension and engagement with content exceeding 1,000 words.

How writing reframes our knowledge and drives our decisions. Our message is effectively drowning in a sea of organizational and semantic noise that is part and parcel of the product itself. how do we make this easier on the user? Nope… not empathy. Writing. Writing about anything presupposes some degree of understanding of the context.

This blog post was submitted to online course "Professional Communication: Business Writing and Storytelling" (Economist Education) . It was then adapted and used on an intranet. "Easy writing makes hard reading" - Ernest Hemingway "The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty" - John Steinbeck

ProPublica’s plain language experiment is a first for a mainstream news organization. Disability experts say it shouldn’t be the last.

An examination of translating text to make it as accessible as possible. Looking at how to make writing easier to read