The LavaCon Content Strategy Conference | 27–30 October 2024 | Portland, OR
Crystal Szabo

Crystal Szabo is a Senior Content Strategist at Google, based in New York City. With more than 10 years of content strategy experience, she’s well-versed in finding new ways to improve the user experience. Prior to Google, she led content strategy initiatives at PR, real estate, and finance associations and marketing agencies. Her passions include user research and testing, enterprise level CMS implementation, website redesign, and establishing top notch content strategies. But most importantly she serves as the website user advocate, making sure that information and resources are presented in a clear, compelling, and easy-to-use way.

Don’t Forget the Art: The Importance of Qualitative Research
in Content Strategy

Although it can be difficult to argue qualitative data, we should, because metrics need context to be informative. For example: Imagine you’ve redesigned the company website, and users are spending more time on article pages. You smile and report victory to the team of a job well done. Wrong. You can’t assume to know what’s actually going on with your article pages. The simple fact that users are spending more time there doesn’t eliminate negative explanations, such as a lack of intuitive navigation to additional content. For this reason, qualitative research and testing is crucial to allowing you to better understand your data and avoid problems early on. Qualitative research and testing also provide you with a story, empathy, and an actionable plan to go along with your quantitative data.

In this session you will learn:

  • The importance of integrating qualitative user research and testing in your content strategy
  • A walkthrough of user research and testing examples and how the lessons learned can be applied to your strategy
  • The role a content strategist should play in qualitative research
  • How to get stakeholder buy-in for user research and testing