Understanding the client is one of the most important aspects of design. Every design project will have a different client, with different wants, needs and ideas.
A client questionnaire can be an effective way of understanding these at the beginning of a project. We looked at an example of what a designer may include on a client questionnaire, which included questions like ‘What emotions do you want to convey?’, ‘What was do you want your brand to be perceived?’ and ‘Do you need to write new content for your website?’. I can see how a questionnaire like this would be a really effective way of understanding the client and uncovering things that you likely wouldn’t discuss in an ordinary conversation.
However, client wants will often differ from their needs. I can understand this, as clients are unfamiliar with UX design, so they simply base what they want from their own emotions. As designers, it is our place to interpret their wants and execute it in the right way. For example, a client wanting their website redesigned may want you to place a 500 word body text on their home page that they think is important. Of course, this wouldn’t make a successful design as nobody will want to read all that as a body text. I found this example really good as it links back to what we discussed last week about ‘wants vs needs’, and seeing an example of this has helped me to understand how important it is to recognise this as a designer.
Clients are emotionally connected to their own brand, passionately believing that ‘our audience need to see this powerpoint’ or ‘all this text needs to be highlighted on the Home Screen’. As the designer, you should listen to their wants and be able to make them into a good design regardless of what the existing content is like. Sometimes, a clients existing features/products may be really bad, a good designer should be able to curate it into a good design.
Blogging content is much more informal, and usually written by a person for their own site.
Wikipedia and third party sources of information are often used as references to create more content. I always try to avoid wikipedia and be wary of third party couches, however, as I’m aware that anyone with no real knowledge of a subject could publish incorrect information.
User generated content is an increasingly common form of contact that we see in daily life, due to the rise of social networking platforms. People can now post their own content quicker than ever.
We looked at the structure of user generated content in the form of an instagram post, which really helped me to picture how much of what we see of content on screens is user generated. With Instagram, I initially just thought go the main picture post as content. However, we spent some time in our lecture discussing how many forms of content you see in an Instagram post aside from the main image, including username, profile picture, likes, comments, number of comments, timestamp and more. Almost everything on social media screen is content of some from that users can create, contribute or use in some way.
Content curation is how we manage content; this includes what we decide to show and not show, when, who to, what for etc. It is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a structured, meaningful way for a specific purpose. Essentially, it is sifting through content and organising it in a meaningful way.
As the internet is increasingly growing, there is so much content that we almost have a content overload. This makes the process of sifting and sorting particularly important.
I found it interesting doing some research on just how large the internet is to put this into scale. I looked at some statistics and found that the annual internet traffic is generated from landlines the most, followed by mobile traffic. There is so much traffic now that a new unit of measuring ‘Zettabye’ was created and first reached in 2012, and as of 2025 landline traffic was over 7zB. This docent sound like a lot, but I found out that this is over 1 trillion GB and 1 billion TB, which puts it into perspective a lot more. Understanding this has really helped me to picture how much content there truly is on the internet, highlighting why curation is so important. There is so much content on the internet that we now have algorithms such as on YouTube, which push content to users based on their activity, quite like an automatic curation system.
Content can be reused and reused. for example, BBC often republish stories from their 16 million asset archive. This shows that content doesn’t always need to be brand new, it just needs to be appealing.
Daring Fireball is a good example of this in content curation. I had heard of this but never really looked into it; essentially, it’s a website where the creator has always and continues to discuss Apple products. The content here hasn’t changed since the site first began, but it still holds the attention of the audience as it remains consistent and engaging to them.