The rise of UX content in 2021
Today most product organizations have UX Designers, Product Designers, or something similar as part of their cross-functional teams. Though, the smallest amount of these companies already invests in a specialization for UX content and UX writing. Here’s why you should change that thinking in 2021.
UX Design was just the beginning
Coming from a graphic design background, turning into an interface designer and then moving to design experiences and managing UX teams, I’ve witnessed the rise of UX design as a specialized discipline. The first teams I’ve worked with did not incorporate designers. They had frontend developers also filling this role.
Over the past decade or so the product scene has learned that an investment in specialists for designing the user experience has a direct and significant return on their investment. What once were generalists in designing experience are now often dedicated product designers, working closely with their counterparts in UX research. The specialists have even more specialized skills.
What is often still missing is the corresponding counterpart in the area of content. Content is still seen as part of the design progress, part of the visual design, or product management. Content decisions are either not discussed at all or handled in design tools, like Sketch or Figma.
There’s nothing wrong with having designers take care of your content. But back in the day, frontend developers also took care of the design and we now know better. — Oliver Pitsch
There’s nothing wrong with having designers take care of the content. But that also was true for frontend developers taking care of the design, until it outgrew the role and became a specialized discipline on its own.
Today we are witnessing the same shift and professionalization in how we deal with content. Content Designers, Content Strategists, Content Managers, and UX Writers are entering the scene to focus on the content of sites and apps, rather than the visuals.
If you are living this change right now the, following paragraphs might help you cope with the situation a bit better.
Specializing content means investing in consistency and a better tone of voice
Hiring your first Content Manager will most likely mean hiring competencies that you are not familiar with. When we did, no one in the entire company knew about the exact skillset we were hiring for. You are striving to specialize your content. You want to offer a certain quality of content that your existing product and design experts are not able to produce, but you might struggle to express what exactly you are searching for.
The missing term in your vocabulary is “strategy”. What might be missing from your existing content approach is this very content strategy. Back in the day, our content was not bad by any means, but it lacked consistency, it did not feature a coherent or even consciously chosen tone of voice.
What you say matters, and how you say it can make all the difference
- Susan Gray Blue
By hiring content managers we were able to fundamentally change this. But as with every change, it produces friction that needs to be managed.
Lesson learned: Hire for attitude when you struggle to spot the skills right away
Some of the best content people I’ve met have not been content managers or UX writers in their past. But they’ve impressed in the interviews with the right attitude towards product content and leveraged this to find their way into the product world.
As they say “hire for attitude, train for skill”.
Take it out of the teams’ hands, with kid gloves.
Many of your product team members will appreciate the move to professionalize content. Some will struggle with it. They may feel that you are taking away parts of their responsibilities, taking away parts of their current roles.
Make sure to handle this situation with kid gloves and provide transparency about the change, the friction in finding new processes, and the benefits of having dedicated content specialists on the team. Building great products is a team sport and every member on this team needs to understand the role of every other player on the field.
The dollar is in the details
When talking about content and content strategy it’s always easy to think about improving the big picture. Yes, your newly hired content managers and strategists will help you to define the strategy behind your content, shape content processes, and unify your product’s tone of voice. All of this will enrich your product’s user experience, but where content managers really shine and improve your business is the microcopy. We are talking about the smallest texts in your product, like the text on a button, the fine print next to a conversion-relevant form.
These small content details can often be decisive in determining how well the corresponding interface converts at the end of the day.
My tip would be to start with the big picture but move quickly to the detail level, as the decisions made on this level will most-likely also affect and change your view on the strategy.
Technical Writing for the Developer Experience
There’s one special discipline in managing and producing content that is different from most others. Producing content for CTOs, developers, the techies of the world.
Developing and managing user-centric products is kind of the norm today. But does this also hold true for your APIs, SDKs, and documentation?
For this part of your content landscape, you should hire a great Technical Writer. Your developers might be the best in the field to develop your APIs, but they might not be the best at documenting them, describing their benefits and usage to other developers that want to utilize these interfaces.
The keyword is developer experience. In the same way, you can optimize your user experience through research and testing, you can also improve the experience of your developer-facing content. Technical Writers specialize in this field, they are bridging the gap between the developers and the developing users, they understand the tech-part and know how to catalyze the information into digestible, implementation-focused content.
Hiring a technical writer will be even harder, than hiring content managers as you will most likely be even less familiar with their required skills. It might be tempting to not position the technical writers within the UX or content team, but within the engineering department, but that would be wrong. They are part of the UX department, they are at the helm of shaping your developer experience. Both internally, as well as externally.
On Managing Localizations
At last and surely not least I want to shed some light on the importance of good localization in the context of UX content. While your content might be great in your native language, there is a high chance that your product is offered in a variety of other languages. Good management of this non-native content has a direct impact on the user experience.
Anyone who has ever tried to use a microwave with a badly translated manual knows the pain. But translation alone does not suffice here. It is about localizations and even transcreation to really adapt your content to the users’ market, their requirements, and needs.
In case these words sound like Latin to you, you should dive deeper into the topic. Localization and even transcreation is the process of not only translating your content into a different language but transforming and adapting it to the given traditions, social norms, and standards. In Finland, for example, it is standard to approach your users in a way more informal way, than in Germany. Just translating your formal copy would offer an experience to your users from Finland that might even harm your business.
One-Size-fits-all does not exist in user experience design and it does surely not exist in user experience content.
Conclusion
If you have not yet started to professionalize the production and management of your product content, 2021 should be the year you shift gears. Hire your first content manager and make them a crucial part of your UX team. You will not regret it.
