We’ve been content designers for a while — but now it’s official
By: Amy Lipner
Tags: Product Design, Product, Ux Writing, Content Strategy, Content Design

We’ve been content designers for a while — but now it’s official

Illustration by Hannah Chen

As writers, there’s few things we love more than finding the “the right word.” And finding the “right phrase” to describe our work? Even better.

👏👏 That’s why we’re enthusiastically changing our team name from UX Writing to Content Design 👏👏

Yes, meet your newest (official!) Content Designers! We’re the first to admit that no one is as excited about the title change as we are, but hear us out — it better represents the work we do and helps others understand how to collaborate with us. What could be better!?

If you’ve been keeping up with the content design world, you may have noticed that there’s a sea change afoot. The discipline of ‘content design’ is having a moment. Our colleagues across the industry have renamed their teams, sharing what’s behind their decisions (check out Facebook, Uber, Firefox, and Shopify, to name a few.) Needless to say, we’re on board.

But you might be thinking, “There go those writers. Always coming up with new names and getting into the trenches of semantics.” Annnnnd…look, we get it. Choosing (and re-choosing) words is literally our bread and butter. But the reason you’re seeing all these public proclamations about title changes is because our practice has become better defined, so it makes sense that the name for our role evolves too.

Rather than rehash other well-written justifications for the title change, we wanted to do something a little different. We wanted to explore how this discipline-wide struggle to find the “right name” for our practice actually parallels the work we do.

What we’re doing all day: using content to shape user experiences

By changing our title to Content Design we’re centering our work in design thinking and strategy. As we’ve evolved from a practice that passively receives product writing requests to a partnership model where we work alongside designers and product managers, we’ve come to better understand where our real value lies — designing user experiences through precise and clear content. It looks like understanding what information users need and finding the right way to present it. It’s collaborating with research to hear what our users are struggling with and translating those dilemmas into helpful experiences. It’s partnering with our legal teams to really understand the limitations of the content. It’s dancing with our product designers, knowing that some problems are best solved with good interaction design, while others rest on language and information architecture.

Looking back: how our work evolved from fill-in-the-blank to UX strategy

Let’s rewind 15 years: words were often treated as an after-thought in tech. They were a fill-in-the-blank problem to be solved at the end of a product build. But as time wore on, it became increasingly apparent that treating content in this ad hoc way diminished the overall user experience. Just as the visuals and interaction patterns of any experience should be considered end-to-end, so should the content (words, video, etc.).

Since the words were an afterthought, intrepid copywriters and technical writers were often saddled with the task of “zhushing up” the product content when they “had a spare minute.” Steadily, these writers began to understand that product content is a fundamentally different skill from copywriting and technical writing. So much so that a new writing discipline began to emerge.

Still, many of these writers continued to handle marketing copy or technical documentation — so companies developed more expansive names for their writing practices (content strategy, product writing, etc.) to cover a wider range of writing. But as those of us who now have the title of Content Designer have known for a while, we are integral to the process of shaping products; our craft goes well beyond adding words to an already-developed idea on the eve of shipment.

Content design evolved from this necessity — a discipline that thinks about language and content in a systematic and strategic way to support the overall product experience. The irony is that many ‘seasoned’ writers — now newly minted ‘Content Designers’ — were always designing experiences with words. It just took this shift in our vocabulary to fully embrace the title.

Let’s get meta for a minute

Over at virtual Lyft HQ, we’ve been chatting about how finding the “right” name for our discipline parallels the work we do as Content Designers. You see, we’re often asked to come up with a name or single word to describe something that’s complex or contradictory. For example, we’re often asked to name a product feature when the feature’s functionality hasn’t been fully fleshed out (e.g., “here’s what we have in mind, but not quite sure how it will impact all of our customers.”). More often than not, it’s in those situations where the name or phrasing we come up with never feels quite right.

It’s ironic that the content design discipline has spent over a decade waffling on the “right” term for our practice. We’ve called ourselves Product Writers, Content Strategists, UX Writers, and even Word Gurus (yikes). None of these are “wrong” titles, they’re just imprecise explanations of what we’re doing in the trenches.

But, wait. As writers, shouldn’t we nail this whole naming thing!? Especially when titles like Product Designer and User Researcher have become industry-standard?

From the outside, this naming and renaming appears indecisive at best, and at worst, an indictment on the discipline itself (“if you can’t even name your own work, how can you write this flow?”). But thinking this way overlooks an unavoidable truth — language (especially in UX) is most useful when it’s accurate. And accuracy requires a robust understanding of… nearly everything. Okay, not EVERYTHING per se, but as much as possible.

That’s why it can often feel like you’re being deposed by a content designer when they’re brought in mid or late project, rattling off questions about audience, use cases, emotion, etc.

Because in order to find the right words to describe anything, content designers need to understand the experience we’re trying to write about as best we can.

With this in mind, it makes sense that our title has gone through a number of evolutions, since the practice itself has evolved. And as the discipline has become more clear, we may have finally landed on a name that reflects what we’re doing all day.

What this means going forward

So, will this name change affect how content designers collaborate across the organization? Yes, a bit. But it’s more of a continuation of the role’s evolution than an overhaul of our process. At Lyft, the move to Content Design allows us to be even more involved in shaping the full product experience. That means we’ll be digging into end-to-end experiences with even more gusto from the start. We’ll be creating language systems and information architectures that scale to help empower our colleagues. And yes, of course, we’ll still be there racking our brains to find the ‘right word’ for every situation. Even when that word evolves.