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CATALOGUING CONTENT PATTERNS
Cataloguing content patterns is a critical step in scoping how to pay back content debt. By developing a list of all content elements that your team needs to work with, you can more easily prioritise, share and discuss product content with designers, researchers, developers and others. If you have a design system for recording design patterns, the content catalog can be incorporated to do the same.
People's brains look for patterns
Eyes and brains look for patterns everywhere. That's how we make sense of the world. It's the same in the little content ecosystem of a software application. People look for what they have seen and done before, and when they find familiar things it soothes them, and when things are unfamiliar, it adds friction. Content patterns work hand in hand with design patterns to help users easily know what to do, when to click, how to choose.
Examples of content patterns
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Page and heading case: Sentence case, lowercase or initial caps only? Plural, singular? Parallel.
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Recurring actions: Save / Cancel or Update / Close. Create New or just Create.
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Navigation items: Parallel language, verbs, nouns, gerunds. And does that work for breadcrumbs?
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Error formulas: Heading says what went wrong. First sentence clarifies. Second sentence tells you how to fix.
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Warning: All possible actions have a clear button.
Warning actions
Filter / form style content pattern
Screen name parallels
The content catalog legacy
Like a design system, the main advantage of cataloguing content patterns is that it becomes an efficient library of consistency that all content team members and designers can draw on to make the user's experience smoother and better. And when updating the whole product, say for new brand voice or design changes, all the patterns are documented and available for discussion and change.
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Steve Jobs