The key question to ask when writing web content

I’ve recently helped rewrite a local authority’s online content, and it’s been a powerful lesson in what matters most. Previously their website was mostly written by the people who delivered the services. Which would seem to make sense, as they’re the experts. But actually it was the website’s single biggest problem.

Experts, oddly enough, are the worst people to write about what they provide. They suffer from the curse of knowledge. They know their subject too well, so they don’t notice when they haven’t explained things clearly or fully, or where they’ve used little bits of jargon which to them are as natural and unnoticed as breathing.

That’s not all. The experts are also stuck in the perspective of the provider, not the user. When experts describe a service, they think in terms of the teams involved and the processes they use to deliver the services. They may also think in terms of strategic goals, or of the reorganisation they recently went through.

Users don’t care about any of that. Users care about how to solve their problem, find the answer to their question, get the help they need.

What’s even worse is that many of the service providers don’t want to tell the users clearly how to get the help they need.

Take this example: free travel to school. Basically, you get it if you’re below a certain age and live over a certain distance from the school, or if your parents are on a low income and you live over a certain distance from school. Simple really. You get a free bus ride to school.

But the people in charge of the service don’t like saying it’s free. They really, truly, don’t, even though that’s exactly what it is. Why not? Because if they said it was free then people who weren’t entitled to it might think it was free too. So instead they called it ‘school travel support’. And on the entire page about it, they never once said it was free or even defined what support meant. (They didn’t even use one of those delightful bureaucratic phrases such as ‘cost-focused transport support’ or perhaps ‘reduced impact transport service cost structures’.)

School travel support. What does that sound like to you? It sounds to me like help getting to school, aka the school bus. Or maybe it means help for disabled students. What it doesn’t sound like is ‘Free school bus services’.

It’s remarkable. The root cause is putting the service providers’ interests first: or, put another way, failing to put the users’ interests first.

So the single most important question to ask when creating web content is this:

What does the user need?

This small, innocuous question delivers dramatic results. It can change an entire mentality. It can revolutionise the usefulness of a website. Simply by thinking about what the people coming to the site actually want to know and want to do.

People will become less and less patient with websites that fail to answer this question.