Being able to design for different perspectives and preferences is a real skill, and it’s extremely difficult. It can become even harder when designing for neurodiverse audiences, where people are hard-wired in unique ways. However, being able to cater to neurodiverse preferences is extremely important.

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Designer Kalina Tyrkiel says between 15-20% of people around the world are neurodiverse, which is a significant proportion. Various conditions such as dyslexia, attention deficit disorders, and autism can have considerable impacts on how people interact with interfaces and platforms. By considering these implications, designers can dramatically improve the accessibility of their work and improve engagement for neurodiverse individuals. Even simple tweaks like using an actual number instead of writing it out (i.e., 1 instead of “one”) can make a huge difference. 

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Kalina explores universal tips and techniques that allow designers to cater for neurodiverse audiences.

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Kalina’s background 

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Kalina Tyrkiel is a content designer with a unique background that spans both technical UX skills and a human-centric approach to design. She primarily works as a designer for Polish healthtech company DocPlanner, connecting users with relevant health services. Her background as a trained psychologist significantly supports her work and provides a deeper understanding into how people think.  She is also a UX writing trainer and university lecturer, which further speaks to her expertise.

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Contact Details:

You can find Kalina on LinkedIn.

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Words that welcome: content design with neurodiversity in mind 📖

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Neurodiversity is often misunderstood by society at large. Neurodiverse conditions often exist on a spectrum, and solutions that work for one person don’t necessarily work for someone else. Similarly, neurodiversity often comes in batches. Kalina outlines how 60% of people with ADHD also have traits of autism. This further complicates their perspectives and needs.

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So this leaves us with a pressing question. How can designers cater for all people with such different needs? Kalina describes how designing for a neurodiverse audience is actually not much different from designing for a neurotypical audience. For example, on any given day, individuals experience varying levels of stress or relaxation which impacts their energy and attention levels. 

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What to keep in mind when designing for neurodiverse audiences 

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1. Provide clear instructions

• Use bullet points and lists for better scannability
• For different options, use if/then tables
• Reduce the probability of displaying an error message. For example, when requiring a new password, outline password requirements up front.

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2. Make the purpose clear

For example, ensure the title aligns with the content the user can expect. Misalignment can create significant confusion for neurodiverse audiences.

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3. Don’t justify text

Justifying text and varying the spacing between words makes it harder to read, particularly for dyslexic users.

4. Include different ways to access content

For example, some people may prefer voice search, others may prefer content that’s not in a video. Again, this is no different from neurotypical audiences.

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5. Keep it simple 

The simpler the interface and the simpler the copy, the better. Pay attention to consistency too - if a platform or site varies a lot, this can be confusing. 

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Why it matters 💥

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Considering neurodiverse audiences in the design process is critical in making platforms easy to use for all people. The needs of neurodiverse users can amplify problems or create critical issues out of something that’s a minor inconvenience for someone else. Again, a 15-20% audience is not insignificant, so it pays to be mindful of their needs. So how can you actually do it?

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Hire for diversity 🌍

Having diverse teams can bring a broad array of perspectives to the design process. Just remember that not all neurodiverse people think the same. Dr Stephen Shore said “when you know one person with autism, you know one person with autism”.  Think about diversity as creating preferences, rather than labels. Ask respectfully about someone’s preferences and don’t judge them (or others) based on their condition.

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Tools and techniques 🛠️

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• In videos, use closed captions, not just subtitles - they can be much more user-friendly. Keep them to 40 characters per line, and up to two lines of similar length. 

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Interestingly, closed captions and subtitles are also being more and more preferred by younger generations. 

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• Kalina recommends Hemingway as a tool to keep language simple and consistent.
  
• Neurodiversity.design is a website that enables designers to get insights about fonts, typography, interfaces and other general design elements with an eye to neurodiverse audiences.

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Tania Hockings is the Senior Digital Content Advisor at ACC and has a passion for creating content that caters to users (not the business). Co-presenter and co-author Amy Stoks is a Senior Experience Designer at PwC’s Experience Centre and possesses a love of empathy and collaboration. Ahead of their presentation at UX New Zealand 2017, Tania and Amy share their experience creating a content strategy while working on a project for the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC’s no-fault scheme helps pay the cost of care for everyone in New Zealand if they’re injured in an accident).It’s a truth universally acknowledged that before you start writing content you’re supposed to have a content strategy. Three months out from launch of the new acc.co.nz beta site, we did not have one. Nor did we have a lot of time, very much resource or a completed content audit.However, we did have:

• Some pretty good design principles, based on user research
• A list of the 37 priority tasks that our users needed to do on the acc.co.nz website
• One content writer (Tania) and one part-time content consultant (Amy)
• A deadline
• Freedom to do whatever we needed to do to get content live for the beta launch.

Here’s a quick look into how we created a content strategy for acc.co.nz without actually realizing it.

Content principles are a great starting point

We needed more direction than those 37 tasks to get writing, so inspired by our design principles, we wrote some equivalent principles for the content. We decided to start with the tried and tested principles already in play by Govt.nz and GOV.UK — we didn’t have time to reinvent the wheel. We ended up with eight principles for how we would write our content:

1. Do less: only create what is needed and what we can maintain
2. Always have an evidence-based user need: we know why a piece of content is needed and have the evidence to back it up
3. Ask for constant feedback: we use feedback and analytics to understand what people want and need to know, as well as what they don’t
4. Provide a consistent customer experience: our voice is the same across all platforms and our content is accessible for every kind of user
5. Create seamless customer journeys: no dead ends or broken links, no unnecessary information
6. Improve how ACC writes: we build good relationships with content contributors and proactively offer content support and training
7. Ensure transparent ownership for all content: every piece of content has an owner, a business group and a digital advisor assigned
8. Accept that not everything has to live on acc.co.nz: other channels share ACC content, so if ACC isn’t the source of truth for information we don’t put it on acc.co.nz

We made a checklist of what would and wouldn’t live on acc.co.nz according to the principles...and that was pretty much it. We really didn’t have time to do much else because the design of the site was running ahead of us. We also needed to get some content in front of users at our weekly testing sessions.

Sometimes you’ve just gotta get writing

We got stuck into writing those 37 tasks using our pair writing approach, which was also an experiment, but more on that in our UX New Zealand talk. While we wrote, we were living and breathing the content principles: we introduced them to our internal subject experts while we were writing and constantly referred back to the principles to help structure the content.After the beta launch, we had a few more content writers on the team and a bit of time to breathe (but not much!). We actually wrote the principles down and put them into a visual briefing pack to give to the subject experts ahead of our pair writing sessions. This pack covered:

• our principles
• the goal of the project
• the process
• the usual best practice webby stuff.

As we wrote more content, the briefing pack and our process evolved based on what we learned and feedback from our subject experts about what was and wasn’t working.During the same brief intermission, we also had a chance to revisit the content strategy. However, in practice we just did a brainstorm on a whiteboard of what the strategy might be. It looked like this:

And it stayed like that for another six months.We can’t remember if we ever looked at it much, but we felt good knowing it was there.

Seriously, we really need a content strategy...don’t we?

We finally got to the end of the project. The launch date was looming, but still no content strategy. So we booked a room. Three of us agreed to meet to nut it out and finally write our formal content strategy. We talked for a bit, going around in circles, until we realized we’d already done it. The briefing pack was the content strategy. Less a formal document and more a living set of principles of how we had and would continue to work.

Would we do it again?

Yeah, we would. In fact, the ACC digital team is already following the same approach on a new project. Content principles are key: they’re simple, practical to socialize and easy to stick to. We found it really valuable to evolve the strategy as we learned more from user research and subject matter expertise.Of course, it wasn’t all rosy — these projects never are! Some governance and muscle behind what we were doing would have really helped. We found ourselves in some intense stakeholder meetings where we were the first line of defence for the content principles. Unsurprisingly, not everybody agrees with doing less! But we’re pretty sure that having a longer strategy formalized in an official document still wouldn’t have helped us much.The next piece of work for the digital team at ACC is defining that governance and building a collaborative process to design digital products within the organization. The plan is to run informal, regular catch-ups with internal stakeholders to make sure the content strategy is still relevant and working for ACC’s users and the organization itself.

If you remember anything from this blog post, remember this:

Treat your content strategy less like a formal document and more like a working hypothesis that changes and grows as you learn.A formal document might make you feel good, but it’s likely no one is reading it.Whatever format you choose for your content strategy/working hypothesis, make sure you get it signed off and endorsed by the people who matter. You’ll need back up in those inevitably tense project meetings!The acc.co.nz content strategy looks awesome these days — very visual and easy to read. Tania always has a copy in her notebook and carries it with her everywhere. If you’re lucky enough to run into her on the streets of Wellington, she might just show it to you.

Want to hear more? Come to UX New Zealand!

If you'd like to hear more about designing content, plus a bunch of other cool UX-related talks, head along to UX New Zealand 2017 hosted by Optimal Workshop. The conference runs from 11-13 October including a day of fantastic workshops, and you can get your tickets here.

Summary: In this post, David goes through the process of running an audit of Optimal Workshop’s content – and why you should probably think about doing your own.

When was the last time you ran a website content audit? If the answer’s either ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Never’, then it’s probably high time you did one. There are few activities that can give you the same level of insight into how your content is performing as a deep dive into every blog post, case study and video on your website.

What is a content audit?

At a very high level, a website content audit is a qualitative analysis of all blogs, landing pages, support articles and guides on your website. It’s like taking inventory or stock-taking. In real terms, a content audit will often be a spreadsheet with fields for things like content type, URL, title, view count and category – the fields differ depending on your own needs and the types of content you’re auditing.

Why conduct a content audit?

There’s really no better way to understand how all of your content is performing than a comprehensive audit. You’re able to see which articles and pages are driving the most traffic and which ones aren’t really contributing anything.

You can also see if there are any major gaps in your content strategy to date. For example, is there a particular area of your business that you’re not supporting with guides or blog articles?

A holistic understanding of your website’s content allows you to create more effective content strategies and better serve your audience.

Auditing Optimal Workshop

Content had grown organically at Optimal Workshop. In the 10 years since we started countless people had a hand in creating blog articles, landing pages, videos and other types of content – much of it often created without following a clear content strategy. That’s often fine for a small startup, but not the right direction to stay on for a rapidly growing business.

When I started to scope the task of auditing everything content-related, I first took note of where all of our content currently sat. The ‘learn hub’ section of our website was just a fairly convoluted landing page pointing off to different sub-landing pages, while the blog was a simply a reverse-chronological order display of every blog post and far too many categories. There was clearly room for significant improvement, but taking stock of everything was a critical first step.

With a rough idea of where all of our content was located – including the many live pages that weren’t accessible through the sitemap – I could begin the process of collating everything. I’d decided on a spreadsheet as it allowed me to achieve quite a high information density and arrange the data in a few different ways.

I came up with several fields based on the type of content I was auditing. For the blog, I wanted:

• Article title
• Categories/tags
• Author
• View count
• Average time on page
• Average bounce rate

At an individual level, these categories gave me a good idea as to whether or not a piece of content was performing well. When looking at all of the blog posts in my finished audit, I could also quickly identify any factors that the best-performing pieces of content had in common.

One of the most interesting, although not entirely surprising, learnings from this audit was that our more practical and pragmatic content (regardless of channel) always performed better than the lighter or fluffier content we occasionally produced. The headline was almost certainly the deciding factor here. For example, articles like ‘A guide to conducting a heuristic evaluation’ and ‘How to create use cases’ attracted view counts and read times well above articles like ‘From A to UX’ and ‘Researching the researchers and designing for designers’. Interestingly, content written to support the use of our tools also often attracted high view counts and read times.

Intuitively, this makes sense. We’re a software company writing for a community of researchers, designers and professionals, many of whom will have come to our blog as a result of some interaction with our tools. It makes sense they’d see more value in content that can help them accomplish a specific task – even better if it supports their use of the tools.

Auditing the learn hub

Following my audit of the blog, I moved onto the other areas of the learn hub. I created an entirely new spreadsheet that contained everything that wasn’t a blog post, with a set of different fields:

• Page name
• Content type (landing page, case study, video or guide)
• Description
• Owner (which product/marketing team)
• Page views
• Average time on page
• Bounce rate

I knew before even starting the audit that our series of 101 guides received a significant share of our learn hub page traffic, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just much they attracted. Each guide received far and away more traffic than the other learning resources. It’s results like these that serve to really highlight the value of frequent content audits. Few other exercises can provide such informative insights into content strategy.

At some point in the past, we’d also run a short video series called ‘UX Picnic’, where we’d asked different guest user researchers to share interesting stories. Similarly, we had two case studies live on the website, with a third one delisted but still available (as long as you knew the URL!). We hadn’t seen spectacular traffic with any of these pieces of content and all were good candidates for further investigation. Seeing as we had big plans for future case studies, analyzing what worked and what didn’t with these earlier versions would prove a useful exercise.

A product demo page, information architecture guide page and how to pick the right tool page made up the final pieces of our audit puzzle, and I popped these last 2 on a third ‘other pages’ spreadsheet. Interestingly, both the information architecture guide page and how to pick the right tool page had received decent traffic.

Identifying gaps in our content ‘tree’

An important function of a content audit is to identify ways to improve the content strategy moving forward. As I made my way through the blog articles, guides and case studies, I was finding that while we’d seen great results with a number of different topics, we’d often move onto another topic instead of producing follow-up content.

Keyword research revealed other content gaps – basically areas where there was an opportunity for us to produce more relevant content for our audience.

Categorizing our content audit

Once I’d finished the initial content pull from the website, we (the Community Education team) realized that we wanted to add another layer of categorization.

With a focus specifically on the blog (due to the sheer quantity of content), we came up with another tagging system that could help us when it came time to move to a new blogging platform. I went back through the spreadsheet containing every blog post, and tagged posts with the following system:

• Green: Valuable - The post could be moved across with no changes.
• Red: Delete - The post contains information that’s wildly out of date or doesn’t fit in with our current tone and style.
• Yellow: Outdated - The post is outdated, but worth updating and moving across. It needs significant work.
• Purple: Unfinished series - The post is part of an unfinished series of blog posts.
• Orange: Minor change - The post is worth moving across and only needs a minor change.
• Blue: Feature article - The article is about a feature or product release.

This system meant we had a much better idea of how we’d approach moving our blog content to a new platform. Specifically, what we could bring across and the content we’d need to improve.

The document that keeps on giving

Auditing everything ‘content’ at Optimal Workshop proved to be a pretty useful exercise, allowing me to see what content was performing well (and why) and the major gaps in our content strategy. It also set us up for the next stage of our blog project (more coming soon), which was to look at how we’d recategorize and re-tag content to make it easier to find.

How to do a content audit

If you’ve just jumped down straight down here without reading the introduction at the top of the page, this section outlines how to run your own content audit. To recap, a content audit is a qualitative assessment of your website’s content. Running one will enable you to better understand the pros and cons of your current content strategy and help you to better map out your future content strategy.

To do a content audit, it’s best to start with a clear list of categories or metrics. Commonly, these are things like:

• Page visits
• Average time on page
• Social shares
• Publication date
• Word count

The sky’s the limit here. Just note that the more categories you add, the more time you’ll have to spend gathering data for each piece of content. With your categories defined, open a new spreadsheet and begin the process of auditing each and every piece of content. Once you’ve finished your audit, socialize your insights with your team and any other relevant individuals.

Then, you can move onto actually putting your content audit into practice. Look for gaps in your content strategy – are there any clear areas that you haven’t written about yet? Are there any topics that could be revisited. Ideally, a content audit should be kept updated and used whenever the topic of “content strategy” comes up.