My UX Content Design focus areas in 2024
Shifting my focus for UX Writing/Content Design to scale
Lots of people are writing about UX trends for the year. And while trend forecasting is exciting, I prefer reading what exactly individual UX leaders are looking to focus on as they’re shaping their yearly design strategy.
I recently revised my Content Design agenda for the year and have some clear focus areas when it comes to continuing to scale the practice.
Here they are.
Focus 1: Work AI into the process
While I’ve started to embrace AI already in 2023, there’s still some work to be done to best understand how to fit it into our Content Design process. While how-to-use-AI guidelines have been created, this year I want to figure out:
- how to write better prompts
- how to re-use prompts and make them accessible to non-writers
- how to build my team’s (writers, designers, translators) confidence in AI
- how to feed the AI ever-changing Content Design guidelines
- proper quality control; this has been a tough cookie that I really want to nail this year
I believe the above points are the key to scaling a small UX Writing team across a big company with various verticals and markets.
Focus 2: Revisit the Content Design team setup
Let’s be honest, lots of us got a bit overexcited during the hypergrowth years of the pandemic and had the pleasure of collaborating with many other content designers in growing teams. Now, the reality looks different for many content designers and UX writers, especially outside of big tech.
I’ve been saying this for a while, but I think for our field to survive we need to figure out how to do impactful work with smaller teams or even as sole specialists.
How I’m aiming to do this? Here are a few things:
- make sure my team members have clear responsibilities, with their own focus area each so that they can feel full ownership for
- plan out central tasks as early as possible, to make it easy for everyone to weigh in
- over-communicate Content Design efforts and successes across the whole company
- support highest-impact projects and processes as a priority; e.g. I’d like for us to have a strong mandate in naming products or tone of voice in all languages
- use tooling to scale; I already started looking into tooling last year, this year I aim to bring in a tool to help us scale guidelines, components, and copy across more teams
Focus 3: Delightful documentation
A personal pet peeve of mine is that content designers usually have great, usable documentation that nobody uses. This can be due to a lot of reasons: unclear where the documentation should live (e.g. design system or Confluence?), people aren’t sure it’s even relevant for them, or people aren’t aware the documentation exists in the first place.
In the past, I’ve tried to mitigate this by hardcore pinning documentation in every relevant Slack channel and sharing it again and again in Figma comments, pings, and meetings. But this is cumbersome and hasn’t had a long-term effect. So this year, I want to take a close look at our documentation and ensure it’s delightful.
A few ideas I want to test out are:
- ensuring each document starts with who it’s for and what it entails
- ensuring each document is as short as it can be
- ensuring each document can be searched efficiently
- ensuring everything lives somewhere it’s findable, easily
- adding examples of how everything can be used in practice, for various teams and roles
- just making the docs look nicer: tables, do’s and don’ts, screenshots, colors…
Focus 4: Figuring out how to drive Content Design-driven initiatives
I’ll be honest: In many places I’ve worked the success of what I call a Content-Design driven initiative has been hit or miss and often dependent on how in love stakeholders were with content design in the first place.
What are examples of Content-Design driven (or iniatiated) projects?
- Glossaries, and adapting them across the entire company
- Taxonomy-related projects
- Naming conventions
- Ensuring changes to the tone and voice are reflected in live copy
- Removing emojis from product copy
This year, I want to dig into how to best manage efforts that require buy-in from various stakeholders and teams, and space on the roadmap, which may not look like a big priority at first glance (because ya know, it’s just copy, duh).
I think tackling this is all about organizing the Content Design team and demonstrating its impact (as mentioned earlier) but it’s also about clarifying efforts and timelines and demonstrating possible benefits to the user experience before issues with said experience first arise. How to best visualize this and get it across? I’ll keep you posted if I figure it out.
Focus 5: Be the leader I want to see
This is a more personal goal. We have some great, prominent leaders within Content Design but not everyone shares insights into what their leadership looks like beyond their take on the craft.
As a relatively new leader, I’ve spent the last year reading about and talking to leaders, trying to figure out my leadership style and take on things. Doing this, I’ve realized that leading Content Design requires different leadership traits than other fields. And I’m hoping to practice and potentially share more of what I’m doing that might stick out here.
And that’s it. Five focus areas are plenty, but I’m confident I’ll at least make some meaningful progress across all of them this year.
Follow along if you like.
Nicole is a Content Design Lead and host of the Content Rookie pod. She lives in Sweden, where she writes poetry and chases her 1-year-old around her clover lawn. Website. Twitter.