How content helps you keep your users first

Angela Browne
Jul 24, 2017 · 5 min read

We’re little bees, buzzing in your ear about customer needs and desires.

There have been more times than I can count that I’ve been in a design review or just looking at a design on the fly and I pull out my favorite question: “Is this really for our customer? Because it looks like it’s more for us. For our business.”

I’m sure my co-workers are slightly irritated by my passive aggressive question and I’m entirely positive that leadership is over it. The truth is that this is something I feel strongly about, and I’ll shout it on high:

Your customer’s needs and desires should come first — not the business goals.

So you may be asking “How does content help with this problem?” Well gosh darn it, I’m going to tell you right now!

Storytelling

Most writers will tell you that they love stories. My brain is constantly churning with ideas for them.

I’ve got this bad/good habit of crafting stories about complete strangers. Man on corner in suit? He’s for sure a savvy business-man who has a drawer full of splendidly striped socks, aspires to work at Bank of America, and has a Corgi named Melon.

And that’s just made up in a minute and I have no idea who that person is. This habit morphs into a design weapon when you’re able to use it to defend someone you know things about (like a customer).

When it comes to knowing your customer, each person on the team should be able to identify key points about them: what their pain points are, what business they run, how many employees do they have, etc. But data points about a customer can only get you so far. What a content designer can do is craft an entire narrative around those data points.

When customer empathy goes from bullets points to best-seller, you’ve got gold in them there hills.

Sometimes, leadership (with good intentions) gets wrapped up in the metrics and interaction needs to complete a set a of requirements, so the content designer can ground everyone in the story. A (brief) story is an engaging way to get everyone back to users needs and desires.

It doesn’t have to be a novel. It doesn’t even have to be a novella. To be honest, it could be a paragraph. Lean on your content designer to craft that narrative for your customer. It’s also a refreshing break from UI — we like to take a breather from button text and headers for a brief, more creative content venture.

Spanning across teams

From what I’ve witnessed, content designers tend to work across teams and projects in a way that interaction designers may not (or do less of). From big to small organizations, your content designer can be an asset when it comes to customer perspectives.

Let’s say you have one over-arching customer type: a small business owner. As a content designer, I’m working on multiple projects that intersect different pain points and realities for that small business owner.

That means that I have multiple points of view on a customer. As I’m working on one project, I have the thought “Well, this person has potentially been working on another part of the product for 2 hours, so they may feel x, y, and z. I only know this because as a content designer, I’ve been interacting with other groups, solving other customer problems.

It’s an ideal way to bring fresh perspective to your own teams.

FOR THE RECORD I am not advocating for you to spread your content designers really thin. Utilize them where they are. Stress does not equal good content .

Sponging up knowledge

I don’t know about everyone else, but in college, I was an absorption machine. The life of an English major included writing down all the notes from my professor’s lectures and applying them to my papers. I was there to memorize and chew bubble gum, but I was all out of bubble gum.

The most useful thing I learned in college (listen up kiddies) is that I have a knack for absorbing and comprehending things. That means I can retain knowledge and pull it out of nowhere. Maybe at random times! Maybe in a design review! Maybe when we’re talking about requirements!

I drink and I know things

If you can rely on your content designer to pull customer knowledge or perspective from their brains, then you’re on your way to making sure that you keep in line with what the customer actually wants. It’s just a weird way that our brains work. I had to memorize lots of poems and lines in college, so FINALLY I can put my degree to good use. THIS IS MY TIME.

Final thoughts

So basically, your content designer can really help you nail the customer perspective and keep you on track to creating something really cool that the customer will love. All the designers I’ve ever met love the customer problem and you can fall even more in love with it when you’ve got a content designer on tap.

Angela Browne

Written by

75% potato person, 25% content reaper

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