What is human-centered content strategy?
By: Linda Eckerud
Tags: Content Creation, Design, UX, Design Thinking, Content Strategy

“Don’t you dare use that tone with me, young lady!” “Watch your tone!” “I don’t like your tone!”

Let’s face it; we all experienced tonal corrections as kids. Aside from stating the obvious (you messed up), they had one thing in common: they let us know that what we did wasn’t appreciated but could be mended by a simple shift in tone. As an experiment, I ask you to hold on to that analogy as you carry on reading.

Let’s now fast forward to the spring of 2020 — emergency response content became a priority, and many of us identified that we needed to adjust our tone of crafting content. Shifting from an inclusive product lens to a calming, “we are in this together” lens. For many, it was a striking shift in focus, and many of us within the communication fields began to challenge: did a human-centered design strategy need a global pandemic to learn how to focus on humans? What is human-centered design thinking if we’ve only been scratching the surface until now? Will writing in an optimistic and informative tone be changed forever because of COVID-19?

When the virus reached its first significant peak, Grammarly released an analysis gathered from their tone detector — yes, I know, those little smiley faces help analyze tone trends, how cool is that? *mind blown*

As the outbreak rapidly emerged into a pandemic, Grammarly saw a 75% drop in people writing with an optimistic tone in the US. Yet saw a ~70% rise in people implementing an informative tone, indicating that effective content included facts and inspired calm.

Let’s break that down. Regardless of field, the pandemic shifted content writers’ priorities to implement a company-wide calming tone in every customer-facing piece of content, from long-format articles to push notifications, and product launch content.

Do you mean that content writers started using common sense? Not quite! But it’s an excellent guess.

To better understand the difference, let’s define what it means to use common sense in writing. I want to refer to a brilliant post by Jim Taylor Ph.D., a writer at Psychology Today:

“Common sense, defined as — sound judgment derived from experience rather than study — is one of the most revered qualities in America… But here’s the catch. Common sense is neither common nor sense. Heck, I think common sense is a contradiction in terms. Real sense can rarely be derived from experience alone because most people’s experiences are limited.”

Taylor truly hits the nail on the head; using common sense in writing will naturally hit home goes right into the paper shredder — writing content related to COVID-19 is troublesome by merely implementing common sense. Thankfully, COVID-19 is many writers’ first-time, hands-on experience writing emergency content for a health crisis at this scale.

Being a content strategist in finance, I couldn’t find any guidelines to follow and connect with an SME (subject matter expert) to advise writing calming yet informative content during this global pandemic. Because how can we be calming if we don’t know how to put out the fire?