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Your content is data

Content designers, we need to talk, and you might not like what I have to say.

Just over ten years ago, I wrote a piece on how to reduce visits to your website.

Even then the concept wasn't new, but with the emergence of large language models over the past year, it's become even more relevant today.

Over the past decade years, you probably found an increasing number of people obtained information about your organisation online via a third party. First through the growth of social media, and then personal assistants, mainly on smartphones and speakers. As a result we've had to think about how content will be delivered through different media and therefore design it differently.

For example, here's Richard Copley asking Google Assistant about school term dates in West Berkshire in 2017.

In the next few years, this will become even more of a factor in content design as people who use your information and services use artificial intelligence and other services built on top of large language models.

So in 2024 if you haven't already, you really do need to start to think about content as data; as a reusable asset that describes something about your organisation and makes sense completely out of context of any other.content.

And here's an idea some content designers really might not like. 

Perhaps frequently asked questions are a good thing, or rather succinct answers to questions that are frequently asked.

Think of the way we start and sometimes complete a successful conversation with large language models through artificial intelligence.

It's mainly by asking a question, "Alexa, when...", "Google, why...", asking chatbot on a website, ChatGPT, or another AI a question.

Through these media, your users are asking questions and expecting succinct answers. If your content doesn't do that, then they won't get an answer, or perhaps someone else will answer their question for them.

I'm not saying it's the end of traditional content design, websites will be around in their current form for a while yet, but it's time to rethink content design, because even if you don't, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and OpenAI already think your content is data.

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