- Where Do We Begin?
- Deconstructing Subjects
- Getting Started
- Talking to the Users
- Overcoming Objections
- Defining Problems Before Solutions
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Deconstructing Subjects
Maybe you have mortgage amortization charts, a 10,000-page website on the history of art, or a smartwatch app that tracks your run. Your “content” might be as rich as long-form articles and expensive-looking videos or as simple as button labels or headings in an interface. But content is always about something. That something is a subject. A specialism or field of interest. Something researchable, like accountancy or organic food. Running. Fishing. Collecting retro video game consoles. Through content and code, your product and content strategy supports a subject domain.
That domain has structure. It has key concepts and relationships. For example, exploring art means studying artists, movements, styles, media, and, of course, the artworks themselves. Artists influence other artists, or sometimes an entire movement. They may work in paint or clay or marble, or any other medium. Artworks may hang in museums, galleries, or private collections around the world. Having interest in art means having interest in the things in that domain. To understand art is to understand how those things connect (FIGURE 4.1).
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FIGURE 4.1 Rodin’s The Thinker contemplating a mental model of the subject of art.
We made a case in previous chapters for using structured content in your digital projects—that is, to consider how pieces of content should hang together outside a user interface. All the interfaces built later represent some or all of that inherent content structure. How then do we go about designing the structure itself?
We begin our design process by studying and mapping the subject domain. Making cool smartphone and voice-controlled interfaces is great, but what’s guiding your design decisions? Our premise is simple: Design your content and interfaces around the things people care about and you’ll better serve those people’s needs. There’s a network of concepts and relationships inherent in any subject domain. Together, these provide an infrastructure to underpin all current and future work. It is the design behind the design.
What’s My Domain?
What’s your content about? We’ve worked on all kinds of projects, from a catalog for a paper manufacturer to a website for a civil engineering society. And always, there was an underlying subject of interest. People who buy paper in bulk want to know grade, grammage, weight, coating, and environmental certificates. This stuff doesn’t just grow on trees, you know.
So, design content around that underlying subject. People’s needs and interests don’t begin and end with your business. They lie somewhere in the broader subject domain. People use Zillow and Rightmove because they’re interested in real estate. They visit IMDb when they’re curious about movie trivia. Think about your favorite apps and websites. What underlying subject domain do they serve?
Airbnb—Travel
Spotify—Music
Instagram—Photography
REI—The outdoors
Shopify—Retail
Understanding the subject domain helps you develop a structure that supports your content. If people’s interests really are rooted in that broader subject area, then it pays to use their mental model to connect your content together.
Through research, you’ll figure out what your domain looks like and where its boundaries lie. It could be that it’s incredibly broad, like “world history” or “marine biology.” More likely, though, it’s a little more focused—say, “World War II” or “tropical fish.” As you get deeper into your research, you’ll gain a clearer understanding of what’s most interesting to your audience and what your content can best serve.
Exploring the Domain
Remember when you started at a new job? The exhilarating terror of parachuting into unfamiliar territory? Especially if you’ve worked in a digital agency or as a consultant (we’ve done both). Suddenly you’re charged with delivering an app for car finance, health insurance, or bonsai care—or something else you know nothing about.
Scrabbling around, you turn to Google and start down a rabbit hole. Wikipedia articles. Blog posts. YouTube explainer videos. Piece by piece, you start to figure out just how this subject works. Don’t look now, but you just did some domain research.
Research should be at the heart of any design project. Before you race headlong into making a solution, take the time to understand the problem. As Abraham Lincoln probably never said:
Give me six hours to cut down a tree, and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe.
Sharpening your subject knowledge empowers you to design better content and build finer products. You’ll base your content inventory and navigation on the things people care about. You’ll connect ideas in a way that helps people learn and understand. You’ll give concepts the right names. You’ll generally look like you know what you’re talking about.
There’s an old saying that still bounces around LinkedIn: “If you think hiring a professional was expensive, you should try hiring an amateur!” If you think doing up-front research costs time and money, try changing the course of a project once it hits engineering.
The start of any project is full of possibility. It could go in almost any direction. But back to Abe Lincoln and his axe-sharpening—do all the prep you can to set off on the right foot.
Early in the project you’ll make a lot of mistakes. You’ll have assumptions that aren’t valid. Left unchecked, wrong thinking ends up codified in software. Once that happens, change management is expensive and time consuming, so much so that it often just doesn’t happen. At that point, you can end up with a well-built product that fails to meet the needs of its audience—what research guru Tomer Sharon describes as “perfectly executing the wrong plan.”
The start of the project is when it’s cheapest to change your mind. During those early days, you’ll change your mind a lot. Teams move faster when they’re confident they’re working on the right stuff. The domain research you’ll carry out will set them up for success.
