How will Apple summarise your web content?
I just watched the latest Apple WWDC keynote, and I am excited! The Apple ecosystem’s handling of words and images is changing in a way that will positively impact how you do your job.
I think it will help us manage content better and, really importantly, further reinforce to your senior stakeholders that:
users want clean, crisp content
tech tools - like those just announced by Apple - are increasingly delivering on that desire even if the original authors are not - and if you want to retain a brand voice and tone and other areas of distinction, you are going to need to meet those wants.
The WWDC keynote had lots of content implications, but two elements that stood out to me immediately were:
Writing tools
It’s nice to see such an elegant implementation of natural language modelling in what Apple is calling ‘Writing Tools”. I really like the emphasis on tone adjustment and clarity. In saying that, there is nothing really new here for us comms experts, as we are already using tools like ChatGPT, Grammarly, and even Gmail smart compose. Our challenge will be to retain a unique brand voice in a universe of cheap, easy, AI-generated content. Apple’s presser on Writing Tools.
Website summaries
Safari will allow users to summarise web pages. Again - this function has been around for a while in reader view, but the summary interstitials shown at WWDC are interesting.
They go beyond simply stripping out a distracting UI and start pulling out content related to tasks - or, more specifically, the answers to tasks. They really put the focus on key actions on any given webpage.
They are a prompt to our authors to ask - what does a user need to do here? What are the tasks I can support with content, and how do I make that more apparent?
Still from WWDC keynote June 11 2024
How this helps content strategists and designers.
Senior content professionals always have two jobs:
Getting on with our jobs of communicating clearly
Helping senior stakeholders understand why that is important and its impact on business outcomes
These new changes from Apple help us steer the conversation from a ‘boring, nerdy’ one of - let’s make our content clear and easy for users to act on, to a ‘sexy and compelling’ one of - what will Apple intelligence and Siri search pull from our content?
The ultimate outcome is clear concise, actionable content (not boring and nerdy at all!); we are just using a different narrative to sell that need :)
How to start preparing for these changes
“What would Apple intelligence scrape and suggest as the most important answers on this page?”
I’m going to add the above question to the content writing courses I teach, and I think you should start doing it for your key web pages ASAP. If there aren’t any answers, then maybe the page should not exist.
