Piece #9: Content + Design
Why should writers have a seat at the table, too
Writing and designing are two sides of the same coin.
These disciplines should be perceived and understood as inseparable parts of product development. Whatever the product may be – a website, app, digital platform, print magazine, marketing brochure, business card, wedding invitation, you name it. Content and design go hand in hand.
While I was working at a web design agency a couple of years ago, part of my job was to write several blog posts a week for the agency's blog. As I'm truly passionate about design, I wholeheartedly embraced it and immersed myself in the design community. I started reading and following every relevant publication, magazine, blog, newsletter, podcast…
At one point, I realized that everyone started talking about the importance of design as a business asset. Designers wanted the seat at the table. They surely deserved it! And they did get it.
It's our turn now.
Writers should definitely have a seat at the table, as well. And content, too, should be valued as one of the most important business assets. Because it is.
Creating valuable, relevant, and engaging content can be so useful in terms of business growth.
Anyone who has ever written copy for a product launch knows what I’m talking about.
There are landing pages, product descriptions, features, benefits, signup messages, email sequences, announcements, Q&As, posts, stories, tweets, ads, articles, promotions...
And that’s before the launch even happened 😂
Not to mention the post-launch onboarding flows, help docs, tutorials, feedback, reflections, measures, tweaks, revisions, studies, reports, insights, new features...
Without all these well thought-through content pieces, a product wouldn’t really attract many people.
If you jump in with the copy a day before the launch, you risk writing unclear content, non-engaging emails, and vague, fluffy announcements without actually explaining the benefits users will get from your product. You risk sending a majority of prospective users straight to competitors because they won't understand the real value of your product.
That's why content should enter the scene at the opening session of every project and never leave the stage until the very end.
Actually, content should stay there even after the curtain has fallen.
Make it a high-quality, clear, understandable, and usable content, and it will serve your audience always and forever. Well, okay, maybe not forever forever. You should perform new audits, revisions, checks, and iterations when needed.
I know that managing all that content may feel like Perpetuum Contentille (I just made that phrase up, but you know what I mean 😊).
It can be too much to constantly juggle between, especially if you work in a small team or as a sole writer. You could easily lose track of what has been published, what is yet to be published, when, where, how, by whom, where are those drafts, have any of those been approved, when are they going to be published...
Is there a way to avoid such overwhelm?
There is.
You can use digital tools for project management, automation, planning, scheduling, and managing content workflow to organize everything.
But there’s something even more important than mastering these tools.
It’s having a clearly defined content strategy to back it all up. Plus, having a strategic mindset and the ability to think in systems, understand the data, and walk in users’ shoes.
Knowing exactly what the goal is for every piece of content, copy, or microcopy that you write is a life-saver. It is.
Knowing who the audience is, what they need to know, what they need to do, and how they’ll interact with the product is of the utmost importance, too.
And, of course, knowing who owns which piece of content, who will edit, revise, and approve, what are the channels for publishing, and what are the reasons and data behind the words, will make the content production a lot easier.
When you start writing content from the beginning of the project, it's easier to develop a meaningful copy that will be helpful to users.
If there are UX researchers in your team (or if you do the research yourself as a content team-of-one), you can get the insights from the users' feedback and the opportunity to revise everything that isn't clear. Right from the start.
Just like designers develop the product through sketches, wireframes, low-fidelity mockups, high-fidelity mockups, prototypes, tests, and iterations, you'll get the chance to develop content through first drafts, storyframes, proto-content, proto-copy, and revisions.
The end result: a synchronized development process + an excellent user experience.
That’s why product teams should quit the content-last approach and start including the writers and strategists from the very beginning of every project.
A flip-side case
That is also why designers should stop using Lorem Ipsum or any other dummy text in their wireframes and prototypes. Once and for all.
Because clients or stakeholders aren’t dummies, right?
No one likes receiving a design of their website, app, or a web app, without any actual content within. It’s like taking a half-baked bread out of the oven and putting it into the client’s plate. They could only imagine what would have the fully-baked bread taste like.
Let’s turn this around a bit and see what we’ll get.
Imagine this.
A client asks a writer to write the copy for their new website. There is no design yet, the site doesn’t exist. It’s in the making, but the content is going up first.
So, the copywriter does what needs to be done. They talk to the client and do the research to learn everything about their business, audience, competitors, brand personality, style preferences, specific personas, their journeys, and the website's purpose, functionalities, pages, sections, forms...
The writer then delivers the copy to the client in a wireframe with notes all over the place.
Notes read:
“This is the Home page content.”
“This should be followed by a picture.”
“This is a CTA button copy.”
"This is an error message copy for Step 2 of the checkout process."
“This is where the white space should fit in to make content breathe a bit.”
“These are page names for the navigation bar.”
“These are feature descriptions. Should be squeezed in as is, without cutting a word.”
The client is very pleased with the copy.
Now it’s time for a designer to jump in. They call a designer and say: “Please, design the website according to the content wireframe. Put in some nice colors, shapes, and effects. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to do it”.
This sounds a bit absurd, don’t you think? A bit offensive, too.
Yet, somehow, this is exactly what many writers are (still!) dealing with daily. They’re expected to put in some words – any words – by following the design wireframes their colleagues have created without ever consulting them. And, of course, “it shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes to write it”.
This is an extreme flip-side case of a design process.
I’m not saying that anyone should start doing it this way. But I am saying that product teams should quit introducing a writer to the project at its very end. Once and for all.
Embrace the content-first approach
To make things clear: the content-first approach doesn’t mean that the writer should write the copy first and that designers should design upon it.
No.
The content-first approach means that writers and designers should collaborate on the project right from the start, together with stakeholders, researchers, developers, managers, marketers, testers, and other team members.
In a nutshell, what I'm saying is this:
Words add real value to every project, even to a low-fidelity wireframe sketch, so please stop ignoring them.
Instead of putting squiggly lines, Lorem Ipsum, or placeholder text wherever there is a need for words, discuss it with a writer, brief them, explain the reasoning behind new elements or features you want to develop. Ask them to come up with a meaningful copy for every element.
Better yet – ask a writer to join the initial (and every other important) meeting with product owners, designers, and engineers.
That way, everyone will get the chance to gain insights, get feedback, and understand everything in order to make a better product.
It could save time and effort, and let everyone focus on their expertise right from the start.
Read, Watch, and Learn
“Browsing a well-crafted interface is like reading a great story. As designers, why are we not incorporating screenwriting techniques more often into our process?” This is how Fabricio Teixeira, a designer and a co-founder of UX Collective, starts his article Storyframes before wireframes. The article is from 2017. It’s an oldie but a goodie, and it’s still oh-so-relevant today. You’ll find great tips for starting the design process with a text editor and low-fidelity storyframes.
GatherContent is one of the all-in-one platforms for content operations that could help you efficiently execute your content strategy and create a smooth content production workflow. Although it is a bit pricey, there are many free resources available. One such piece of invaluable free content is a Content Project Brief template. You can use it to understand and define content goals, key performance indicators, audience, messaging, risks, scope, execution timeline, and more for every writing project.
One of the latest free books from the GatherContent is Lead With Content: How to Put Content at the Centre of Digital Transformation by Padma Gillen. As described on the website, this book is an antidote to the content-last way of working. It discusses the processes, systems, and principles of making an organization capable of producing high-quality, sustainable content.
Speaking of systems, Patrick Stafford, a co-founder of UX Writers Collective and the host of the Writers of Silicon Valley podcast, recently wrote a notable Twitter thread about UX writing, thinking in systems, and implementing a company-wide change. “More UX writers and content strategists need to act like product managers”, wrote Patrick Stafford. Read the whole thread and learn the tips on how to implement new processes throughout your organization and level up the production flow.
Another book I recommend is the free eBook Business Thinking for Designers by Ryan Rumsey, published by InVision. Believe me (or read it yourself and see 😊), you can replace the word 'design' with the word 'content' throughout the book and it will perfectly resonate with content teams, too. Because, well, let me say it again: content and design are two sides of the same coin.
Writers and designers are not the only ones who need to collaborate within an organization. Researchers play an important role, too. Read all about the relationship between a content designer and a user researcher and why it's critical to the success of a digital project. The article is published on the GatherContent blog.
“Lorem Ipsum is a result of fear. Fear to put words on the page.” I couldn't agree more with this statement and this whole article by copywriter Paige Toomes. Again, it's one of the articles from the GatherContent blog. Learn how (and why!) to include content from the beginning of every project. Plus, there's a handy checklist to download for free at the end.
“The same way a sitemap helps us visualize the flow of navigation, a content map gives us a guide for the flow of content.” This quote is from the article by Jeff Cardello on the Webflow blog. It's a good read about designing with content first and learning more about content maps that show which content goes on each page and how it relates to the bigger picture.
“Design works around the content. The content is what users need to help achieve their goals and it is what breathes life into the design. Designers, UX writers, and content strategists are the stewards to curating and making that content accessible.” Find more insights on this in the Medium post by Tiffany Eaton for the UX Planet publication.
To learn about conversational prototyping, tonality mapping, and writing a narrative product requirements document, go to this article from the Google Design publication on Medium.
If you are interested in learning more about the content marketing strategy, here is a helpful article by Nadya Khoja for the Content Marketing Institute. It's about creating visuals to keep your content marketing strategy more engaging and easier to comprehend, as well as to keep everyone on the same page.
A bit more from the content marketing perspective, here is a great episode of the Content Strategy podcast with the host Kristina Halvorson and her guest Ryan Skinner, the principal analyst at Forrester. Ryan talks about his experience in leading the research on content marketing, content strategy, customer engagement, and content intelligence for marketers, as well as his take on why content strategy is an important business asset and how to treat it like one.
UX Salon WORDS 2020 is an online conference for UX writers, content managers, user experience specialists, product managers, interactive and visual designers, marketers, and other product development professionals. It's happening on June 22-24. Among other great sessions, there will be a panel discussion Why UX Writers Need 'A Seat at the Table' – And How to Get One. The stage for this discussion is going to be shared with Jessica Pease, director of content at PayPal, Michelle Savage, lead content strategist at PayPal, Matt Hayes, senior UX writer at LinkedIn, and Yossi Nachemi, UX writer at Google/Waze. Now, that’s something to look forward to.
And that's all for today.
Thank you for reading, and enjoy the weekend 😎
Oh, and let me know what you think about this topic in the comments below. Do you work at a content-matured organization? Or do you still struggle with explaining the value of the content-first approach to your teammates and stakeholders? And, should we perhaps start calling it a content-always approach?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Bye, bye for now 👋
Nadja