#57 The Value of Good Content Design

Written By Christian Strunk

I don't care who does the work; I do care that we solve the problem! That was one of the great quotes from Jonathon talking about what content design is and why it's so important to think about it.

In this episode, the Product Bakers and Jonathon discussed how to establish content design in a company and what positive impact it has on the UX and success of a product/business.

Follow Jonathon: 

 

 

Podcast Minutes

Table of Contents

  • 00:30 - Episode Summary

  • 01:40 - Intro Jonathon

  • 02:55 - The definition of content design

  • 08:25 - Collaborating with product people

  • 11:05 - Adding content designers to teams

  • 13:10 - Measuring the impact of content design

  • 16:00 - The role & responsibilities of a CD

  • 19:15 - Desing principles

  • 25:25 - When and how to hire a CD (team)

  • 33:15 - Dealing with languages & internationalization

  • 35:10 - Branding & Marketing

  • 41:05 - The future of content design

What is Content Design about?

Jonathon: Most people work in product if they've worked with content designers or if they have a sense of content design, they usually have this conceived notion, a preconceived notion that content design is essentially writing the language that appears in the interface it's UI or what's sometimes called UX writing or interface, copywriting, things like that.

I don't see it that way. And most content designers if you asked them wouldn't see it that way either. We think that content design isn't just writing the same way that say product design isn't just about making things pretty.

Donald Norman talked about design as being concerned with how things work and if that's true then I would say that content design is concerned with what things mean. So beyond the words on the surface of her product, that UX, and I mentioned earlier content design involves things like conceptual design or designing concepts that appear in a product and determine how it functions.

Content design also is quite, therefore, focused on system design. Which is breaking down all the elements of the system, understanding how they're linked to each other, and determining how those links can provide the most value in terms of solving problems. Content design is also concerned with narrative.

What's the story the product tells, how does it fit into the users of the customer story, or the business's story? So there's quite a lot more there under the surface than just simply writing the words that you see in a product.

Is this something that someone should consider a separate function?

Answer: Let's talk about how it's usually handled and then go into some very strong opinions I have on how to handle it better. So, how it's usually handled is as a specialist role where you have one content designer who's usually split across a series of different product teams or even organizations. And that content designer is essentially asked to just write the words in the interface that might include things like labels or calls to action, or a tooltip text, or information architecture. Things like menus or navigation and so on.

I think content design can be a lot more impactful than that. Don't get me wrong. That work is impactful and it's necessary. It has a huge impact on the user experience of the customer experience, but an Intercom, we set up content design differently by rethinking it from the ground up because we wanted to see what we could do to maximize product impact from this specialist discipline.

First of all, content design is a young discipline that has not been around all that long, which is why many folks enough familiar with it. But what we did at Intercom was essentially to rewrite all the rules under which content designers usually work. So rather than have content designers split across five or six or 10 or 20, which is a real thing, 20 teams at one time.

I knew this one content designer who worked for a very well-known company who worked with over a hundred different product teams! I don't even know how that works. What does that look like? So instead of spreading content designers thin across many teams, we dedicated them to just one team. And because of that, they worked on that one team just like all of their product peers.

The product manager worked on just that one team, the product designer worked on just that one team, all the engineers worked on just that one team, and so on. And that's where the magic happened because when you work with someone day in, day out, you see them do their work. They're right there alongside you.

They attend all of your team's rituals so that there are stand-ups and planning and retros and everything. When you spend that much dedicated time with colleagues, you begin to understand what they do. How they do it and why it's important, how does it solve the problem or provide more value either for the user or the business.

And that's the magic landlocked by having our content designers work this way. And because of that, we found that they could do a lot more when they were dedicated to just one team partially because the team, one of them to do more and saw that they had the capacity to do more but also because our content designers were no longer context switching across five teams or 10 teams or more.

So they had time, they had focus, they had deep context and lots of opportunities. So to finally get back to answering your question what we did at Intercom is set up our content desires to work under the exact same expectations as our product designers did. So a team with a product designer and a content designer essentially had two product designers.

It's just that one was a little bit more focused on things like narrative concepts, systems, and UX writing, and information architecture.

How do product managers collaborate with a content designer?

… tune in to learn more 🎧

Christian Strunk
Previous

#58 We are All Biased
Next

#56 Landing a Job in Product (PM & PD)