Priority guides

A priority guide is a way to structure (pages of) a digital product based on the importance of content, without lay-out or visual design. Making priority guides aids a content first approach. It is suited for responsive design, because the hierarchy of importance is made independent of available screen space. How this translates to lay-out is determined later on, and the lay-out is formed around the content. Priority guides should be made before templates or screens are designed.

How to

1. Collect all content that should be covered in an application. Collect topics, not all copy.
2. Create a high-level priority guide, determining which content should be one which page.
3. Create a detailed priority guide, structuring the order of importance of content on each page.
4. Use the priority guides as a basis to structure the flow through the application and to design templates for each page.

Tips

• This can de done individually as an interaction designer (or team of interaction designers) or as a workshop together with stakeholders. Making the priority guides together with stakeholders can be useful, because stakeholders probably have more knowledge on the content than you.
• Priority guides are especially helpful in content-rich applications.
• How detailed the content in the priority guides should be depends on the scope of the application and available content. If you are making priority guides for a content-rich application, for example for the entire tax authority website (Belastingdienst), you can stick to topics to represent the content. If you are making a priority guide for one page, for example for the landing page of the tax authority website, be as detailed & realistic as possible in the content you use.
• Never use lorem ipsum when making priority guides. Always use real content, or at least dummy content.
• Sometimes (actually, often) clients have a hard time prioritising one topic over the other. They would prefer to have all content in one screen, at the top of the page. It can be helpful to make priority guides together with your client or stakeholders, so they gain a sense of ownership over the project. Moreover, you can always refer back to ‘when we decided together …’ if the issue is brought back up later.

Learn more

• Priority guides: a content-first alternative to wireframes on A List Apart
• Design Process in the responsive age on Smashing Magazine