“What’s going on with Content Design right now?” We’ve all heard our colleagues discuss this in the last few years. It takes a few forms:
- “We aren’t taken seriously.”
- “We’re not called on until the last minute.”
- “Why do we get laid off first?”
- “There are no job for Content Designers these days.”
These are different facets of an underlying crisis. It’s a complex issue. Yet nobody has an answer for it. I don’t see many people who can articulate it, either. Even more concerning is that I don’t see a lot of self-awareness about this problem plaguing our industry.
Here’s what I do see pretty frequently, though:
- Departmental acceptance that content just “writes in the boxes” of finished designs.
- Refusal to engage in UX sessions due to a fear of Figma.
- LinkedIn posts proclaiming that “putting character into the product” is the immeasurable value of Content Design.
- Long, unhelpful discussions about minor grammatical conventions instead of user or business needs.
It’s a bad look, and I think it’s contributing to our current lack of job prospects.
Failure to articulate value
I’ve seen a disturbing number of LinkedIn posts and comments that misrepresent the value of Content Design. They try to paint the discipline as some sort of creative je ne sais quoi that defies measurement.
Most commonly, I see those people point to some innocuous flavour text (often in Slack), proclaiming “this is the value of Content Design. It adds character.”
I’m sorry, but.. what? That is not the value of Content Design.
- It’s vague and unhelpful.
- It doesn’t support a business goal.
- It doesn’t support user needs, either.
What do these people think goes through the minds of design directors and executive leaders who read stuff like that? It makes us all look like business-illiterate rubes.
It’s not hard to imagine why so many design leaders don’t understand Content Design, or why business leaders simply don’t value it. So many Content Designers seem unable to articulate the value of our work. That’s bad enough on its own, but it’s actually a compound problem for a craft that specializes in conveying ideas through writing.
Think about what that means in a period of mass layoffs. Put yourself into the shoes of decision-makers unfamiliar with Content Design:
- Can you explain to an executive the cold, hard ROI of adding “hidden magic” to a digital product?
- Will design directors, struggling to maintain head count, fight for a role that doesn’t design independently?
- Are Product Managers in a position to advocate for a role that doesn’t know how to measure its own impact?
The answer to all three questions is, “no, probably not.”
We aren’t responsible for this era of mass layoffs or the corporate greed that drives them, of course. I’ve been on the receiving end of it, so please don’t misconstrue this as victim-blaming. But we need to take responsibility for how we present our discipline to the world. The tendency for Content Designers to treat their own craft like a mystery box of creativity sends signals to decision-makers that this is not a serious line of work.
Entrenched in “just the words”
Most Content Designers lament being included so late in projects, myself included. On the other hand, many of those same Content Designers also shy away from the deep work that makes the craft valuable in the first place.
They draw demarcation lines where the words begin and end. I see this a lot at banks and with old hands who worked in big tech during the golden age of UX. You’ve probably seen this behaviour:
- Fixating on style guide compliance instead of business goals and user research.
- Hiding behind accessibility text compliance, reducing content work to a cost center.
- Parroting legal and marketing stakeholders instead of positioning products with critical thinking.
- A concerning inability to distinguish between copywriting and UX writing.
They also tend to focus on surface-level writing activities:
- Voice and tone
- Terminology compliance
- Proofreading.
Anyone who thinks that represents the full breadth of Content Design has a lot of growing to do. Not only do those things represent a narrow slice of the work, but focusing on them exclusively reduces our craft to a cost center.
Cost centers are commodities that get carved up and outsourced for cheap labour. It’s already happened to a huge number of customer support jobs. I’ve seen a major bank do it with coding jobs, too.
Not only is that bad for existing Content Designers, but it would be a comically bad outcome for the very companies tempted to do it. Why? Their products will get worse, and we’ve already seen it happening across the board on major tech platforms. It’s called “enshittification,” and the lack of effective Content Design has contributed to it.
This is all the other work that Content Designers do, for the record:
- Information architecture
- Managing systems-level language
- Language patterns
- Progressive disclosure techniques
- Accessibility
- Product and feature positioning
- Qualitative and competitive research
- Conversion optimization
It’s clear that a lot of people who call themselves Content Designers lack experience with these important skills. That’s a shame, because those skills pay serious dividends. Those skills also unlock the real value of Content Design. That is why our discipline cannot hide behind excuses of “just being the wordsmiths.”
It’s well past time that we started articulating—hell, flat-out flaunting—the business value of all that deep work. And we need to normalize it. “Products and web pages without typos” just isn’t cutting it anymore.
Articulating Content Design’s value
Before we even start talking about how to package our work, we need to have a serious chat about how we articulate it. The craft already has a serious branding problem. Executives and, sadly, plenty within the design field think that Content Design is just a nice-to-have.
“Hidden magic that makes products great” only exacerbates the perception problem. Substance is what we need to demonstrate.
Measurement is the language of people who hold the purse strings, from CEOs all the way down to hiring managers. Product Managers also live and breath quantifiable performance, and their opinions carry considerable weight. Why don’t more of us find ways to measure our work alongside them?
That’s why it’s time to quantify our work.
I have a few measurable UX accomplishments on my resume, and I’m by no means the most experienced Content Designer out there.
- Saving tens of millions of dollars (recurring annually) for a tech company with product troubleshooting content.
- Increasing mortgage renewals by 150% over an existing product page.
- Saving $7,000 in translation costs per month with a content repo.
- Improved a product page’s conversion rate by 20% with a pricing calculator.
Why don’t more of us strut our stuff like that? I’m reasonably good at my job, but plenty of others have worked in Content Design longer than me. I’m confident the success stories are out there to add legitimacy to the discipline.
Yet the vast majority of Content Designers I know don’t engage with data at all—rarely in private, and almost never in public. That includes managers and seniors of the craft that I’ve met at highly recognizable companies.
It’s so strange to me. I’ve been doing this since I started in UX because it brought me success in my previous career in content marketing and SEO. Even measuring the basics was just considered common sense. Nothing fancy. Just basic metrics:
- Keyword search volume
- Page traffic
- Time on page
- Click-through rate
- Channel attribution
Why don’t more of us measure our work? I’m hesitant to jump to conclusions here. There could be any number of reasons for any number of people:
- Work might be confidential.
- Project results weren’t measured or analyzed.
- Analytics weren’t shared with the Content Designer.
- The Content Designer might not feel comfortable measuring their work.
Fine. We don’t have to break rules to demonstrate our work, though. We can bend them.
- Always ask about metrics at the project kickoff.
- Hound product owners until they cough up the project analytics.
- Get comfortable measuring success.
- Discuss a page, product, or feature after it launches.
- Discuss projects anonymously.
To quote Lawrence Fishburne in one of my favourite movies:
“We have survived by hiding from them, by running from them… but they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors. They are holding all the keys.
We can no longer shy away from the business world’s attitude about our craft. Let’s use our communication skills to translate our work into obvious and measurable business gains for everyone involved in hiring us.
Repositioning the discipline
After we’ve measured our work to convince decision-makers that our craft matters, how do we broadcast it more effectively? A few ideas come to mind:
- Pick up the valuable, old-school UX skills in short supply these days.
- Add case studies to the public narrative.
Bringing back classic UX
Content Design is becoming commodified as a role that fills in mock-ups from Product Designers. Many organizations don’t know how to use content effectively, so they turn it into a cost center in which people “make the words pretty” in the empty boxes left for us by our Product Designer partners.
It’s grim, but it’s not the worst part.
The worst part is that many gainfully employed Content Designers out there don’t seem to realize this, either. They cling to proofreading and comically dense style guides instead of grappling with UX principles. They couldn’t tell you much about UX research, mobile app design, language patterns, or even classic “positioning.”
That’s a key loss for the discipline, not to mention a huge blunder in the face of countless executives who think they can replace writers with AI slop.
Other disciplines have this problem, too. My Product Designer friends have told me that many of their peers are really Graphic Designers who learned Figma, but not UX fundamentals. Product Designers are widely considered to be necessities, though. Content Designers don’t have the technical design skills to operate at the same level of independence, so they are treated mostly as support roles with a dangerous “nice to have” label.
That’s our first opportunity: Content Designers can become champions of classic UX skills that are disappearing from the industry. I’ve listed a lot of these skills already:
- Information architecture
- Systems thinking (especially for language and content repos)
- Research and analysis
- Progressive disclosure with journey maps
Why bring them back? They’re profitable, not to mention crucial for a good user experience.
- Information architecture reduces cost-prohibitive product restructuring.
- Good systems thinking for language reduces manual content creation for every interaction.
- Research (especially qualitative research) uncovers deeper opportunities to provide customer value, and to avoid brutal missteps.
- Understanding journey maps, jobs to be done, and progressive disclosure improves product usage and retention.
Let’s bring back these skills and make sure businesses understand that they improve that ever-important bottom line. Incidentally, this would make Content Design a crucial role for early and mid-stage work, rather than a late-stage checkbox to fill out boxes of “lorem ipsum.”
Changing the public narrative
My friends in UX have pointed out that Content Design faces the same problem now that Product Design did only a decade earlier: many coworkers, managers, and leaders don’t understand it. Decision-makers can’t value, prioritize, or justify spending money on what they don’t understand.
We can’t wait out the clock on this problem, though. Even the most ignorant out there understand that Product Designers are required to design software because they have the hard skills to turn ideas into concepts and then prototypes. Content Designers don’t receive that benefit, though. They aren’t the primary driver in UX teams. Most people see the role as an auxiliary function at best, or a “nice to have” at worst.
That’s why we need to demonstrate the business impact of the discipline in a more public manner—and yes, I’m afraid it’s our responsibility to get the ball rolling. We already use case studies to showcase our thinking in the hiring process, so why not bring that practice into public discourse?
And we should do it with data, being the language of decision-makers.
Publishing case studies with reasonable data—even older ones that keep the client anonymous—would help the discipline prove its standing. Here’s where we could publish them, collectively speaking:
- Our portfolio websites
- UX publications
- LinkedIn posts
- Company blogs (also good for shareholder confidence!)
That’s how it starts.
Individuals can raise the bar on public discourse by showing exactly how much they affected the project’s success or the company’s bottom line. Hiring managers get educated on what Content Design can really do for them, and they request larger budgets for that skill set. They have conversations with their leaders to make that happen. It’ll create a positive effect over time.
I hope that doesn’t sound naive. It won’t solve the bad job market, and it won’t work immediately. But I think it will give Content Design the footing it needs to establish itself in the increasingly competitive UX job market.
