Why content design is crucial for building great products

Educating people on what content design actually is is one of the biggest challenges of working in this field. The worst case scenario is being commodified as a copyediting and polishing/tweaking/wordsmithing service when you have so much more to offer your team. That said, it's our responsibility as content designers to educate the team on the full scope of this discipline and show where we can add value.

Content design is about more than just the words on a screen. It covers the whole product strategy, thinking about everything from the end user, and getting involved in the research stage. Essentially, content designers are storytellers, creating stories in their most compact form. People don't read, and they read even less on screens. So sometimes, the role of the content designer is often to strip copy from the UI – not add more.

A good content designer needs to have a good understanding of design principles, and be able to speak the language of product and design. Since content design’s biggest partners are in product (product managers, product designers, product marketers), we need to be able to collaborate with those teams to really bring a product to life. And having all these creative disciplines working in collaboration and thinking about the end-to-end journey builds a strong team culture, and only strengthens the resulting product.

The bottom line

Content designers have the power to shape narratives, systems, frameworks, and products that result in better, more unified user experiences across all touch points. When content designers work in collaboration with product and design teams, it builds a really special culture – one that gets every creative discipline in the room, aligned on the same end goal: a great experience for the user.