Do you have content designers in your organisation? Have you heard of content designers, but aren’t really sure what they do? Maybe you’re a content designer that’s struggling to advocate for your profession and explain the value you can add.

Whether you know it or not, content designers do an amazing job.

Before I start singing their praises, let’s take a quick look at who content designers work with.

Content designers put the dream in team

Content designers tend to work:

• as part of a multidisciplinary delivery team

• in a team of other content designers

• on their own

In a multidisciplinary team working on a transactional service, a content designer works with everybody - and particularly closely with the user researcher and the designer.

They use insights from user research to inform what they write and the language they use, and they work with the designer to put the content in the right place on the page and the right page in the journey.

Whether working on their own or in a team of other content designers, they always work with subject matter experts so they can understand what it is they’re trying to communicate.

But what is it that content designers bring to the table that can have wider benefits for an organisation?

Content designers create a story

We use stories to make sense of our world and to share that understanding with others. Stories contain patterns and in those patterns we find meaning.

Content designers can look at problems and projects and create a story to explain how it will be solved. That might be, for example, the story of why a digital transformation project will change an organisation for the better.

Explaining the transition to GOV.UK

There were a few stories used during the launch of GOV.UK to help departments understand why they needed to rework their content.

One was: ‘simpler, clearer, faster’. This story:

• echoes the Olympic motto of ‘faster, higher, stronger’

• uses the rule of 3 for impact and memorability

• uses the comparative adjective (simpLER) to show that it’s an improvement on what was there before

It was so effective internally that it was also used on the public facing website.

Another story was: ‘the strategy is delivery’, which was used to help explain agile methodology. This way of working was new to many, and it helped people focus on ‘delivering’ small parcels of work often, making progress until the project was done.

A story shows change. Content designers can explain the change your organisation is going through to staff and the audience in a way that makes sense to them.

Content designers represent users

The following 2 examples show how different banks displayed coronavirus information on their homepages in June 2020.

Santander wanted its customers to know that it was doing something about it. The main message ‘We’re working hard to help you during coronavirus’ takes up the top half of the page. It’s reassuring, but it’s not very specific.

A customer experiencing a problem would not be able to know what exactly Santander is doing to help them.

‘Payment holiday ending’ and ‘Coronavirus help’ are also slightly vague.

‘Do your banking online’ is more promising, but the customer has had to work hard to get there. Especially considering a typical webpage scanning pattern is to read in an ‘F’ shape.

It’s important to remember that a company’s organisational model rarely matches a person’s mental model of a situation.

This tension - balancing what the organisation wants to say with what the customer wants to know or do - is something content designers negotiate.

In comparison, the main area of HSBC’s homepage tells customers they can ‘Cancel payments easily’.

The content has been created to focus on the user and their pain point, for example, ‘I need to cut my outgoings right now’.

Content designers articulate user pain points as user needs and write content that meets them, and allows your organisation to meet them.

This could:

• give your organisation a competitive advantage

• keep customers loyal and stop them leaving

• result in fewer expensive support enquiries

Designing content around the needs of users makes sense for users and organisations.

Content designers empathise

A content designer gets to know a user - through analytics, data or research - and tries to put themselves in their position. If they read this text, what will it mean to them? Do they have enough information to complete this task? What happens next after they answer ‘no’ to this question?

Content design is about more than just words. But words are important.

In this car insurance quote form the company asks a lot of questions but doesn’t say why it needs the information.

What if I don’t identify as male or female? What if I’m in the process of buying a house but haven’t completed yet? What if I’m single because I’m separated? Do my partner's children count as mine?

A content designer knows the power of words and how confusing and disorientating it can be when they’re not relevant to you. And how frustrating a badly designed online transaction can be. They consider the emotional wellbeing of users.

This empathy - this willingness to understand the frustrations of customers - can be the difference between users buying your goods or services online or going elsewhere.

Content designers mediate between user and organisation

As we’ve seen, content designers interpret the needs of customers and then shape the words an organisation uses to try to meet them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t aware of, or don’t care about, what the organisation is trying to achieve.

Balancing the needs of an organisation with the needs of its users can be tricky. But it’s fundamental and something that a content designer does, day in, day out.

A user needs the right amount of useful and relevant information to complete a task, but the subject matter expert has to feel confident that what’s being said carries the meaning they intended, particularly if it’s a complicated or legal subject. Otherwise they won’t let the content be published.

This is crucial. If content isn’t published then no one ‘wins’ - the user, organisation or content designer. Publishing something that isn’t perfect at least allows for collecting feedback and analytics which can be used when iterating and improving.

Content designers are pragmatic negotiators when navigating this tricky tension.

Content designers reveal deeper issues

Content designers are often asked to ‘just do the words’. The implication is that you can fix a complex process or confused user journey with words. This can’t be done.

In trying to explain a complex process, you have to understand it. And once you understand it, you can identify what doesn't make sense and see ways to make it simpler.

If someone asked you to explain how a fridge works, would you be able to? I’d certainly struggle, after mumbling something about plugging it in and keeping the door closed. It's not that I don’t have the right words exactly, or that I’m bad at explaining. It’s that I don't have the knowledge about heat transfer and evaporation at my fingertips.

The words become irrelevant if you don’t know what you're trying to say.

By ‘just doing the words’, content designers have to dig deeper and in the process often end up finding and fixing much more than they expected to.

Content designers write for others

Content design is about understanding:

• problems

• issues

• solutions

• processes

• history

• culture

With that understanding, content designers can work out how to explain what’s relevant to a specific audience at a particular time, in a way that makes sense to them.

They don’t write for themselves. They write to help others understand.

Content designers are problem solving machines. Their superpowers include:

• getting to the heart of a problem

• understanding complicated information

• putting themselves in others’ positions

• using clear language to explain concepts and instructions

Calling them superheroes might be a stretch, but I think we can agree that they do have extraordinary abilities.

This blog post is based on a talk that Christine Cawthorne gave a few years ago for Digital Leaders.