Context, Content, Context, Design

Why you need context before content

Those who know me well know that I’m a sucker for a good analogy, so I’ll use one here; imagine you’re a builder, your client says “I want a building”, that’s all the information you get. So you draw up designs, you think “most buildings will need somewhere for food to be prepared, some toilets and some general rooms/spaces – that way no matter what kind of building it is it’ll work”.

Now you show your client, “oh it’s actually a house that we need, this is too general”. So again you go back to your computer and you shuffle things around, change the toilets to bathrooms, make the general rooms more functional, lounge, dining room, you keep the kitchen, add a few bedrooms…. wait how many people is this for?

Turns out that this house is an HMO with 10 bedrooms. Scrub out the 2 bathrooms, each bedroom now has an en-suite, you’ve had to double the size of the building and now you’ve doubled the time you’ve worked on it.

You get the picture. Context is needed from the very beginning. Context is actually needed throughout a project, it’s the absolute base of the user’s experience when they use your website or app.

Renaming navigational labels is a clear contextual example. You don’t want the user to be wondering if the button they’re about to press is going to take them to the information they want, you want them to know that it is. Likewise you don’t want to have an image of a cute little kitty next to some information that has nothing to do with cats.

Content

One of the biggest issues designers face is getting content for what they’re designing. We require it to set the tone of page layout, content design and flow. Without it we have no clue what it is we’re trying to say, what we’re trying to achieve with the page/site and that also leads to no way of measuring the success of what we’re creating.

Content without context is just decoration

It’s one of the biggest reasons projects drift, pages feel awkward or products end up solving the wrong problem entirely. Designers are often asked to “make a page”, “design a flow” or “improve the experience” before anyone has properly explained what the user is trying to do, why they’re doing it or what success actually looks like.

Without context, we default to assumptions

We fill gaps with patterns we’ve seen before. We rely on generic layouts, lorem ipsum, placeholder imagery and safe design decisions that feel universally acceptable but rarely feel truly right. It’s the equivalent of trying to write a speech before knowing who the audience is.

I once came out of a meeting with my team and a UX designer from an agency we were working with. A colleague said to me afterwards “wow, you really went after that UXer in there” – for clarity here, he was being slightly facetious as I was known for being quite passive in meetings, listening deeply and only really speaking if I felt something it added to the conversation, but I got a bit of a bee in my bonnet after they said “we’ve put a video here because no one scrolls down this far”. “Then why are we putting anything there? Do we not have research on what users need from this page?”. We should have a plan for everything on that page, nothing should be there because no one will scroll that far. Know thy user.

A mortgage application journey and a festival ticket checkout might technically share similar UI patterns, but the emotional context is completely different. One user may be stressed, cautious and looking for reassurance. The other might be excited, impulsive and moving quickly. The same structure with different context produces entirely different experiences.

I’ve seen, time and time again, content designers and copywriters, be drafted in so late in projects, only to be told “we only have this much space” or “we need it to perform this action” when the scaffolding to hold it up is not there.

That’s why content should never arrive at the end of a project as a final “copy drop”. Content is context.

The words people use tell us:

• what matters most
• what questions users have
• what terminology feels natural
• how much detail is needed
• what order information should appear in
• where confusion might happen

Good content exposes bad UX incredibly quickly. Placeholder copy hides it.

You can usually tell when a design has been created without context because it feels visually polished but emotionally empty. The hierarchy feels off, the imagery feels disconnected and the journey feels like it was built for “a user” rather than this user.

Context also isn’t something gathered once in a kickoff meeting and forgotten about. It evolves constantly.

Research gives context. Analytics give context. Customer support tickets give context. Stakeholder conversations, regulations, business goals, technical limitations and even market conditions all contribute towards it. Every decision sits inside a wider system of understanding.

The best designers, writers, engineers and product teams don’t just ask “what are we building?”, they ask:

• who is this for?
• what problem are they trying to solve?
• what emotional state are they in?
• what constraints exist?
• what happens before this moment?
• what happens after it?

Because only when you understand the context, you understand how to shape the content.

And more importantly, make it feel meaningful.