From UX Writer to Content Designer, Let’s Be Clear About What We’re Asking For
By Chloe Tsang
I’ve seen dozens of job postings for content professionals. The titles are wide-ranging, from UX Writer to Copywriter (even the occasional UX Copywriter), Content Designer to Content Strategist and beyond. Some organisations do a good job of precisely identifying and defining the responsibilities of each title. The problem arises when a company tries to expand the concept of one role — say, a UX Writer — to encompass the activities of another, like a Content Strategist.
In academia, there’s a name for this: It’s called conceptual stretching, and it describes the distortion that occurs when you try to apply a concept to more and more diverse cases without taking context into account. When that happens, the concept loses its meaning and significance.
When it comes to conceiving and hiring for content-related roles, organisations have a serious conceptual stretching problem.
Despite increasing demand for digital content skills in the marketplace, job descriptions for roles in this sphere remain broadly ill-defined. Some organisations are unknowingly conflating the responsibilities of multiple roles into one job description; others are more explicit about this, mashing together different job titles to create a single hybrid role (for example, I recently saw a job opening for a ‘Copywriter/Content Designer’).
The consequences of this are not insignificant. At best, adding every single content-related responsibility under the sun to one person’s role risks internal confusion about who does what on your content team. At worst, it creates burnout and contributes to the (often misguided) case for reducing headcount. Blanca Rego put it best in her piece UX Writing, UX Copywriting, Content Strategy, and Content Design are not the same job:
If someone is asking you to do content strategy, content design, UX writing, and copywriting, he or she is asking you to be a unicorn! 🦄
In that spirit, here’s my own attempt at defining each of these concepts.
Content Strategists
As their title suggests, Content Strategists develop the strategies, systems and governance for their organisation’s digital and non-digital content. In practice, this means they set the overarching vision and parameters for their organisation’s tone of voice and content priorities based on ROI data, analytics and business objectives. They will also lead content audits and quality analyses to identify gaps and areas for improvement. Though Content Strategists probably cut their teeth creating content and writing copy during their careers, this should not be part of their remit — that’s what writers on their team are for!
Content Managers
Content Managers maintain an organisation’s content portfolio by working with individual content writers to keep content up-to-date, and by identifying content that should be repurposed or deleted in line with business requirements. Their primary skills include fluency in SEO and web analytics, information architecture and content management systems. Like Content Strategists, Content Managers should be concerned with the planning and overseeing of content rather than the direct creation of new content.
Content Designers
Content Designers sit firmly within the design team, working with researchers and other designers to identify user needs and create end-to-end solutions to meet those needs. Sometimes the best solution involves writing copy, and other times it may not: As staunch advocates for the user, Content Designers should feel comfortable raising their hand if they think copy is not the best way to solve a particular problem. Other key responsibilities include ensuring consistency across different product pages, paying close attention to how content is structured on a page and understanding how to make content accessible from a design perspective.
UX Writers
UX Writers are also members of the design team: When ideating and prototyping solutions, their primary focus is on the way copy looks and sounds. They are responsible for translating an organisation’s tone of voice into clear and concise copy that facilitates the user experience. Taking insights from user research, UX Writers iterate and refine all customer-facing copy — from large blocks of text all the way down to microcopy (buttons, error messages and more).
Copywriters
In my view, the key distinction between Content Designers and UX Writers on the one hand and Copywriters on the other is that the former sit within design teams while the latter report into marketing. Copywriters write marketing materials to engage and attract new customers. They can also edit, refresh and update existing material to ensure it remains timely and relevant. Their main goal is to prompt people to take an action, such as buying, downloading or subscribing to something. None of this is to say that Copywriters don’t share similar skillsets to Content Designers or UX Writers; they simply have different business priorities.
Content Marketers
Content Marketers create original pieces of content with the goal of establishing trust with an audience. They’ll use storytelling and subject matter expertise to drive an organisation’s eminence within a space and measure the success of their content through metrics and analytics. While Copywriters create material with sales and immediate calls to action in mind, Content Marketers do so with the aim of increasing overall brand awareness.
How can organisations maximise the value of their content-related people and processes?
Recruitment teams should spend time with business leaders and existing members of the organisation’s content team to map out all the content needs of their organisation. From there, they can start to build out specific job descriptions that are realistic and achievable for a single person (pro tip: if an organisation is adding a forward slash to its job titles, it probably needs to re-assess its expectations for the role).
Defining content roles in precise ways ensures that the people with the right expertise are matched up to the right position. In doing so, your organisation benefits from more focused, impactful outputs. Content professionals inherently know this — by virtue of their chosen careers, they are acutely aware of the impact that language and word choice have on products and services. When that same level of precision is reflected in the hiring process, your content team can focus on doing what they do best: enhancing your organisation through the power of great content.
By Chloe Tsang — Content Designer, Deloitte Digital
