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Set UX and content strategy

Design is about to start, and you want the experience and content direction fixed first — so the journey maps and screens that follow have a vision to serve rather than inventing one per surface. This guide covers the two skills that set that direction: define-ux-strategy and define-content-strategy.

It assumes the pack is installed. It also assumes you know the line this guide draws hard: strategy here sets the system, not the surface. Per-surface content design is out of scope, and this guide says exactly where that boundary sits.

Set the experience direction: define-ux-strategy

Run this before journey mapping, not after.

Define the UX strategy for the onboarding redesign.

define-ux-strategy sets the experience vision, the goals and measures, and the plan to get there, committing ux-strategy.md to docs/product/shaping/. It draws on three sources at once:

  • the NN/g three-layer model — separating the durable experience vision from the goals beneath it and the plan beneath those;
  • Jaime Levy's four tenets of UX strategy — the business-strategy, value-innovation, validated-user-research, and killer-UX framing;
  • Gothelf/Seiden — linking UX outcomes to OKRs so the strategy has measures, not aspirations alone.

The failure mode is a UX strategy that is really a design brief — screen-level opinions dressed as vision. Keep it at the altitude of what kind of experience this is and how we'll know it worked. If the OKR cascade has run, link the UX measures to those objectives rather than inventing parallel ones; the point of the Gothelf/Seiden framing is that experience outcomes and company objectives share a spine.

Set the content system: define-content-strategy

Run this alongside UX strategy when content is a first-class part of the product.

Define the content strategy for the help centre.

define-content-strategy works Halvorson's content-strategy quad — Purpose, Process, Structure, Governance — and commits content-strategy.md to docs/product/shaping/. The quad is the whole point: it forces you to decide not only what content is for (Purpose) but how it gets made (Process), how it's organized (Structure), and how it stays true over time (Governance). A content strategy that only covers Purpose is a mission statement; the value is in the Process and Governance halves that most teams skip.

The boundary: this is not content design

Be explicit with yourself and your reviewers about the line. define-content-strategy sets the organizational and governance layer — the system content lives in. It does not write the copy for any one surface. That is the content-design skill in the experience-design pack, which decides what a specific landing page or help article says.

Same split on the UX side. define-ux-strategy sets the experience vision; the journey maps, screen flows, and service blueprints that realize it are the experience-design pack's work. If you find yourself specifying a screen or writing a headline, you've crossed out of this pack.

Sequencing with the rest of the seat

UX and content strategy usually run after the market picture and the OKR cascade, because the experience vision should serve objectives strategy already committed. But they don't depend on those artifacts to run — each commits independently. Run them when design is the next thing that will happen and you want it pointed in one direction.

See also