Content Design Exercises

What are these exercises? What are they for?

These exercises are a set of language-based, low fidelity Content Design exercises that help teams design an experience intentionally in a goal-oriented way. There are 4 exercises:

• Priority Guide: Make a list of prioritized content for your design
• Intent Frame: Use words and intent to make a rough layout of your design
• Story in Beats: Create a quick story about your user’s experience of the product
• Conversation Design: Write a script walking through a design flow

Who should do these exercises?

Anyone designing user experiences at Workday can do these exercises, including designers, researchers, PMs, developers, and more! Below, we have instructions, examples, and templates that you can use to try these exercises out for yourselves as part of your design process.

When should I do these exercises?

We’ve provided a suggested timeline for when each exercise might be most helpful. You can do multiple Content Design exercises during your design process, depending on your needs.

Priority Guide

Use a Priority Guide to make a list of content to go on your page or in your product, in order of priority to the user.

Try It Out

To try the priority guide for yourself, or with your team, copy and paste this FigJam template. Instructions are included in the template.

Note: This exercise pairs well with an Intent Frame. We recommend starting with a Priority Guide, then following up with an Intent Frame that follows the hierarchy and intents you decided on in your priority guide.

More Resources

Simone Ehrlich (Director, Product Management, Workday) wrote an in-depth article about how and when to use priority guides. She also wrote another article about using priority guides to analyze existing designs.

Intent Frame

Use this method to create a lo-fi wireframe focused on the intent, or purpose, of each element in the design. An intent frame is a great time to ask yourself “why”? Why should I include this CTA, image, icon, or content, and what purpose is it serving in my design? Is it helping me achieve my overall user experience goal?

Try It Out

To try the intent frame for yourself, or with your team, copy and paste this FigJam template. Instructions are included in the template.

Note: This exercise pairs well with the priority guide (we recommend doing the priority guide first) so you can define the order of importance of the content on a page before you lay out the wireframe.

More Resources

Simone Ehrlich (Director, Product Management, Workday) wrote an in-depth article about how and when to use intent frames.

Story in Beats

Use this Content Early exercise to create a quick story to inform the structure of a presentation or a prototype. You can think of this exercise as writing a movie about your user’s experience, and each “beat” is like a scene in that movie. Just like in a movie, we want to make sure to keep our audience engaged, and make sure they walk away satisfied with our story.

Try It Out

To try the Story in Beats for yourself, or with your team, make a copy of this Google docs template. Instructions are included in the template.

Conversational Design

Use this Content Early exercise to imagine and script a conversation between the user and the product. Not to be confused with writing for a chatbot–in this exercise, you’ll personify the product and give them a voice with which to speak to the user. This can be a really helpful tool to work through the details of a flow from end to end, and can be an alternative to a flowchart when you want to focus on the user’s emotions and experience.

Try It Out

To try the conversational design exercise for yourself, or with your team, make a copy of this Google docs template. Instructions are included in the template.