Content crits should be a regular part of your team
By: Dolly Garland
Tags: UX Research, User Experience, UX Design, Product Design, Content Strategy

Content crits should be a regular part of your team

For content designers to do some real-life testing, and for growing

Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash

Content design can sometimes be quite solitary, especially if you are not working on a service. A service usually needs an interdisciplinary team to work together, and iterate things quickly, including content.

When working on services, a content designer is in the middle of things, talking to developers, technical architects, user researchers, interaction designers etc. But there is a great deal of content work that is not on transactional services.

Content designers also work on transforming long pieces of guidance and documents, updating websites, creating and transforming content that probably hasn’t been touched since before Content Design existed as an official profession.

When you are working on those longer pieces, a lot of the times, you are working on your own. You may have meetings or chats with your subject matter expert, and catch-up with the team at stand-ups about what you are doing, but by and large, the job is sitting at your desk, transforming — often, painfully — large pieces of text that make you wonder if a human, did indeed, write it.

So when you are finally done with that piece of work, you know it’s better than what was there. But is it good enough? Is it as good as it can be? Should you now inflict this version upon your users?

That’s where a content crit comes in. (By the way, content crits can also be massively useful for service content because often on services, what a content designer does not have, are other content designers.)

What is a content crit?

To put it simply, it’s a critique session with other content designers, where you share a piece of work to be critiqued in advance. You get together (physically or virtually), and go around the room, asking each person’s honest feedback. Ideally, constructive criticism. Because the point of the crit is to make your content even better. That means you need to know what you can improve.

At the very least, a good content crit will challenge you on your decisions.

Why did you decide to use a callout? Do you really need that long sentence or can it be put in bullet points? Can you simplify the language?

Sometimes, the content crit may ask even more fundamental questions such as — do we even need this content? Where is the user need? Is this content duplicated?

Hopefully, you would have addressed those questions before spending a lot of time working on a particular piece of content.

What are the benefits of doing a content crit?

You may think: we don’t need a content crit. We are all experienced content designers. We know how to do our job.

Even experienced content designers need another perspective. When we work with a piece of content for a while, we absorb it. We become used to it, and we stop seeing it with fresh eyes. Another content designer, without background or context or personal attachment, can come in with fresh eyes and tell you whether or not it’s clear.

Also, every content designer is different. No two people will rewrite a piece exactly the same way. By doing a content crit you also get to hear alternative ways you could do something. It may or may not be better than your approach.

Content crits give you options and opinions that should result in the content being better for the end-user, and that is what we ultimately strive for: to serve our users as best as we can.