So long “UX Writing”, hello “Content Design”

Why have we changed our team name?

Terminology and the research around it is an important part of our work. We spend time reflecting on how we name our offers, our features, and even the smallest elements that make them up. We do all this while respecting our principles: be clear, conversational, accessible, and purposeful.

So why not apply what we know about building and defining our product terminology to our team?

What do we know about terminology? We know that it should reflect and provide an understanding of what this terminology means, does, or represents.

We realized that “UX Writing” no longer reflects what we are and what we do.

We identified 4 main questions to help us confirm if our intuition was right:

1. Is our title always aligned with our competency grid? (Thanks to Audrey Hacq, you know all about our competency grids 😉)
2. Does it carry a good level of understanding of our role within OpenClassrooms teams?
3. Does our title help us to recruit and improve the outreach of the team externally?
4. Does it help the team to gain confidence by also showing our ambitions?

What did we find?

We are part of a design team

We are integrated with the Product Design team alongside Product Designers and UX Researchers.

We work with design processes

We create clear, concise, consistent, user-centered copy obviously, but that’s not all we do…

We work with design processes to deliver content that has not only a business value, but also value for our users. It will meet a real need and we ensure this value/quality by working according to principles, with guidelines, and with tools that we share with Product Designers.

We recruit internationally

The UX Writing team (as it was known then) was born in 2020 with Louise Thurlwell, English native, and Hélène Legendre, French native.

I joined the team a year ago, and to our delight, Helen Frith joined the team as an English UX Writer at the beginning of the year.

As we are part of a company with international development ambition, we’ll continue to recruit internationally.

We have ambition for the team

And what about our level of contribution? We work at a higher, more strategic level, with a larger impact on the product than “just” creating copy. For example, we’re involved in:

• information architecture
• navigation
• accessibility
• user & business goals
• metrics
• user research
• definition of concept/terminology…

and our ambition is to go even further!

Introducing “Content Design”

The word “design” appears 9 times so far in this article. As this term is so essential to our team, shouldn’t it appear in our title? Yes, it should. Absolutely.

It became clear that Content Designer is a solid alternative to UX Writer for us.

What we do, where we are, and what we stand for are more aligned with Sarah Richard’s Content Design definition.

So say goodbye to the “UX Writing team” and please welcome the “Content Design” team.

Here we are: the same, not different. But with a team name that’s fully aligned with our competency grid and helps others, such as co-workers and future candidates, understand what we do.

And most importantly, it allows us to fully be who we are: designers.

A year ago Louise told you about the foundations of UX Writing at OpenClassrooms. Stay tuned, the next “episode” is coming soon!