More than Words: Content Design at Chewy
By Allison Bland, Senior Content Designer @ Chewy and Samantha Chaves, Content Designer @ Chewy
Our content design team at Chewy is new and growing. We’re here to share our team’s mission and talk about how content makes our product experiences come to life.
Our Team’s Mission
We bring out the voice of Chewy in our product experiences. We plan, create, and implement digital products that use the language our customers use at the right time and in the right place. As members of our cross-functional teams, we collaborate, write the words, and guide our customers through their shopping experience.
Why it Matters
Our customers come to Chewy for content: without the words, icons, and images on our site or mobile apps, there wouldn’t be much to see. Content can make or break the experience customers have when they interact with Chewy. That’s why, as content designers, we treat every email, error message, or headline as a chance for us to communicate who we are and give our customers a smooth, thoughtful experience. Words may be our strong suit, but content designers do so much more than write words.
How We Work
Have you ever tried to shove your foot into a shoe and realized it just won’t fit? That’s similar to how content designers feel when someone asks us to come up with words to fit a predefined space.
A big part of content design is understanding a user’s context so we can plan and write better content. So, we ask a lot of questions: Where is the user coming from? What goal are they trying to accomplish? Where does the user go next? Would icons make sense here? Is this content better listed as bullet points, rather than a paragraph?
We get our best work done by almost never working alone. On any given day, we work with product designers, UX researchers, product managers and engineers. Here are some of the ways we collaborate and bring content into the product design process.
Research: To create content that resonates with customers, we want to understand their needs and the words they use. We work with our UX research partners to learn all we can about our customers.
Strategy: We think about the big picture: how we organize content, how customers navigate our site, and the hierarchy of content on a page. Using content, we can connect the dots between every step of a customer’s journey.
Design process: We get involved in the process early, working with designers to create wireframes with actual content — no lorem ipsum here! We stick with it until copy is implemented.
Guidelines and standards: To create a more consistent experience, we’re defining voice and tone for our products and developing a style guide. We’ll share how tos for the content we create over and over again and plenty of examples to bring the guidelines to life. All this guidance will be part of Chewy’s design system.
What comes out of all this collaboration? We contribute copy — the words you see on the page — and so much more:
- Audits to understand the language our competitors use
- Journey maps and user flows to connect pieces of an experience
- Wireframes with real content
- Analysis of search data from our SEO partners
- Email templates and strategy around what channels we use to communicate with customers
- Copy documentation so that copy is implemented accurately
- Internal tools
- New tools for customers
In the end, customers don’t view their experience as design and content separately. They evaluate the experience as a whole, which is why we work closely with our product teams and product design partners. When you put all these pieces together, you get a beautiful thing.
by Allison Bland and Samantha Chaves
Content Design @ Chewy
If you have any questions about careers at Chewy, please visit https://www.chewy.com/jobs
