Summary: Encapsulated content gives users the clarity and confidence to complete an informational task without wondering what they might have missed. Encapsulated content has three qualities: clear purpose (users know what they're getting before they start), observable size and boundaries (users can see how much there is), and a feeling of completion (users know when they're done). The opposite – leaky content – leaves users uncertain and exhausted.
As I was leading usability tests, something unexpected kept happening. Participants would land on a web page, squint at it for a moment, and say: ‘You know what, I’d rather just download this as a PDF’.
As I’ve written about before, we all know the problems with PDFs. But users seem to keep reaching for them because of something the PDF offers that the web page doesn’t. It’s something like a sense of completeness – users feel confident they’ve got everything they need, without being sent down endless rabbit holes.
That observation about PDFs led me to think more broadly about a set of qualities that digital content should have, but often doesn’t. It’s what I’ve been calling encapsulated content.
Encapsulated content can be summed up in three attributes:
Why are these attributes important? Because they give users the confidence to complete a task without being plagued by low-level anxiety that they’re in the wrong place, haven’t got the full picture, or have more work to do.
Everyone benefits from this confidence, but neurodivergent friends and colleagues tell me it’s especially important for them. For some people, ambiguity about where an informational task begins and ends doesn’t just lead to niggling uncertainty – it can prevent them from concentrating on anything else. (For more on this, see Rebekah Barry’s book Considerate Content.)
Much of the content we create online doesn’t give users this confidence. Instead, it’s what I call leaky content – content with no clear purpose, hidden size or boundaries, or a nagging sense that there’s something more you need to do or read.
We don’t create leaky content on purpose. Often it comes from good intentions: being thorough, surfacing related content, linking to supporting pages. But the cumulative effect can leave users feeling uncertain and exhausted.
Here are some examples of what leaky content looks like in practice, and ideas about what to do instead.
We’ve all seen plenty of content without clear purpose. Think of all those government pages that are dumping grounds of information about a topic, with vague headings, a mixture of content and navigation, and links off to a dozen other pages. You can’t tell what the page is actually offering, what you’ll know when you leave it, or whether you’ve even landed in the right place.
Solving this is one of the hardest problems in content design, because content has to have a purpose before we can make that purpose clear. The best place to start is developing a meaning-based information model. Then, we need to be rigorous about page-level content design so that all our content meets genuine user needs.
If every piece of content has a place in the information model, it then becomes much easier to make its purpose clear. A meaningful labelling system that fits in with users’ existing mental models can do wonders. Think about labels like ‘guide’, ‘how-to’, ‘explainer’, ‘article’ and ‘event’. The important thing is that our users instantly understand not just what the content is about, but what it is, what value it offers them.
Some content patterns make it impossible for users to see at a glance how much content there is. Accordions are a prime culprit, especially when they’re used as a junk drawer to hide away untidy content. They can turn a simple-looking page into a TARDIS: users have no way to know how deep it goes until they’re already in it.
If we’re going to allow patterns like accordions, we need strong, enforceable guidelines in place about when, why and how to use them.
We should also consider patterns that proactively communicate the size and boundaries of a page, such as a table of contents or a word count. (Please don’t give an estimated reading time – people read at different speeds.)
When content doesn’t feel like enough, it’s often because we want to be helpful, so we link off to everything that could possible be relevant. But this makes users feel their task is never done.
There’s a contrast here to our treatment of transactional tasks. Think about how eager we are to tell users when an enrolment, signup or purchase is done: ‘You’re in!’ ’You’re all set!’ ‘Congratulations, your toilet paper is on its way!’
But we rarely give users the same confidence that they’ve completed an informational task. Instead, it’s ‘read more’, ‘see also’, ‘download this’, ‘watch this’. The verbs are imperative, the implication is ‘you’ve got homework’.
Here’s a real-life example from a recent client project.
One page on the client’s website had a section at the bottom headed ’Help guides’, with a line of text reading: ’You can use these guides to help you [complete the task]’, followed by links to several PDFs.
Think about the questions this triggers for the user: Do I need to read these? Will I miss something important if I don’t? How are they different from what I just read? Which of these half-dozen PDFs is the actually useful one?
That cluster of doubt – the sense that you might not be quite done – is classic leaky content.
Here’s what the same website did on a different page. At the bottom of the page was another PDF link with the heading ’Download as a fact sheet’, and a text explanation: ’You can also download the information from this page as a fact sheet’.
The difference in wording is simple, but the second version tells users exactly what the PDF contains, that it’s optional, and that it’s there for the type of person who just likes to download a PDF (a common preference, it turns out). No doubt, no nagging uncertainty.
Once you start thinking about encapsulated and leaky content, you see examples everywhere. As content designers, we’re already fine-tuned to the need for content to be clear, concise, and focused on user needs. Encapsulation just gives us another set of qualities to aim for in our mission to help our users get what they need, then get on with their lives.
This article is based on a talk I gave at DrupalSouth Wellington in May 2026. Watch the full talk on YouTube and see the slides for more detail and examples.
I haven’t talked about AI here, but it’s a safe bet that well-encapsulated content is also content that LLMs can process more easily and accurately. Once you’ve finished watching my talk, check out Ruth Hendry’s talk from the same conference on content in the age of AI.
The need for content to have a defined purpose that’s clear to the user is inspired in part by the object-oriented UX approach, especially the insight that people need to grasp the things in an environment before they can take meaningful action.
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