Why technical writers may already be content designers
Content design is fast becoming a role and skill set that companies are embracing. Product teams are recognizing how critical this design expertise is for creating an optimal and holistic user experience, equal to the other design disciplines. You can find articles about how content is an integral part of the user experience and how imperative it is to have content designers create that content and be an advocate for the user. You can also find articles about technical writers who made the career switch to content design, as if they’re two very different roles. And it’s true that for some technical writers, content design can be a very different role. But for many technical writers, content design is what you’ve been doing for your entire career.
From my very first role as a technical writer, I was fortunate to be on an information development team that instilled the importance of understanding the target user of our content, collecting and listening to user feedback, and putting the user experience first in our content strategy and writing. This was before people were talking at length about putting design first and teaching design thinking. Even though I was in a group that produced technical content for a mostly technical audience, this early mindset and way of working launched my content design career.
Many talented technical writers who have been designing content for their entire careers don’t think of themselves as content designers, even though they’re skilled at turning something complex into a simple, clear, and easy-to-understand experience for their user. Some writers believe that content design is really focused on user interface (UI) content, giving users what they need directly in the product. Yes, that is one important aspect of content design, but there are many ways to deliver clear and effective content for your user.
Writers serve the user, and the user experience that writers design content for can be very broad. How content is delivered to the user doesn’t determine whether or not a writer is a content designer. Content designers design content for the entire end-to-end user experience and can serve multiple user types at any touch point. They design targeted, easy-to-consume content and deliver it in the most effective way for their user, whether it’s in the UI; through progressive disclosure; in a traditional knowledge base; in an interactive learning module; in technical reference documentation; in tutorials, product tours, or videos; through general communications and announcements; or even in mobile application notification messages.
It has also taken a long time, and is still a work in progress, for writers to be recognized as designers, especially if they aren’t part of a design organization or don’t work on UI content. But, if you’ve ever written for a complex product or content strategy, you know that not all critical user content fits perfectly into a UI, nor should it, regardless of the user’s technical background.
So, if you’re a technical writer wondering if you’re qualified to take on content design projects, or if you’re thinking about making a career switch to content design, ask yourself if you do these five critical things that content designers do on a regular basis:
1. Understand your users and how they work
2. Create or follow a content strategy
3. Obsess over words and how they’re presented
4. Collect feedback
5. Iterate and continuously improve
1. Understand your users and how they work
If you understand your users and how they work, you’re off to a great start. It’s critical for a content designer to understand their user, their goals for using the product or reason why they need to receive a communication, and the tasks they need to accomplish to have a successful user experience.
How do you get to know your target users? The best way is to start getting information directly from them. It’s ideal if you have the opportunity to interact directly with your users through one-on-one interviews or focus groups. If you can watch them work, complete tasks, and see their workflow process, you can really gain an understanding of what’s most important to them. Other ways you can connect to users are through surveys, emails, or other types of communication channels.
If you don’t have access to your users, connect with people who have similar roles and responsibilities to get an understanding of their tasks. You can also ask people on your team who may know more about the goals of your users and what’s important to them. It may not seem like it at first, but if you start thinking about the resources that are readily available to you, you’ll find options that will enable you to learn about your target users.
Once you know your users, you can build personas to more deeply define your target user. Personas tend to include an entire profile about who they are, what their role is, what tasks they do on a daily basis, what they want to learn, their pain points, and what they do and don’t need to know for their role.
From personas come empathy maps, which are a great way to get a deeper understanding of what’s valuable to the user — what your user thinks, feels, says, and does. You’ll discover what level and type of information is most valuable to them and why, so you can design and present your content in the most effective way.
When you take the time to understand your user and the tasks they need to accomplish, you put the user first and start to design content in a task-oriented way instead of a feature-oriented way.
2. Create or follow a content strategy
Once you understand your user, do you start content projects asking why and what? Why does the user need to know about a capability, a product update, an announcement, and so on? Why is this information important to the user? What’s the intended outcome for the user? What does the user not need to know?
Developing a content strategy forces you to ask why and what. When you create or follow a content strategy, you’re able to identify why users need information, what they need to know, and where they will need it, which helps you create an optimal user experience. Once you know the why and what, then you can plan the how — what’s the best way to deliver this content given what you know? Content strategy also gets you to think about the end-to-end touch points the user will access so you don’t just focus on one point in the user journey, but all points throughout the journey.
Content strategy is important to content design, and unfortunately it isn’t done enough. It takes resources, time, and planning to focus on strategy. When you’re under a deadline or receive a late request to communicate new capabilities, you tend to take the path you’re familiar with, such as adding text to the UI, documenting the new feature in a knowledge base, or even sending an email or newsletter without taking the time to determine if that’s the best choice for the user. When you take the time to build a content strategy and plan, you design better content and deliver content in a more effective way.
3. Obsess over words and how they’re presented
Content designers design with words. They get rid of the fluff, think about design presentation, and focus on user value. They simplify complexity and make concepts simple to understand. They determine how to best deliver information for the user who needs it. They know what not to write. These content design tasks are done for all types of users, for all types of content, and for all ways to deliver content in order to create an optimal user experience.
Do you spend several minutes obsessing over one word in a sentence, trying to decide if that’s the best word to use, hoping the user will understand what you’re trying to say? Do you spend a long time thinking about how to best present content and what the best flow and information structure should be; should it be a long document with specific details, a short document that has only basic information, several topics that build on each other with a specific flow, contextual help in a UI, a video, an interactive tutorial, or an email, and so on? If you answered yes, this is your design craft. The strategy and decisions you make around words, how they’re presented and where, based on an understanding of who your users are and how they work, is content design.
4. Collect feedback
Up to this point, you took the time to understand your user, create personas and empathy, build a strategy, and design a content experience that should make the user successful in their tasks. But how do you know for sure that your content works for the user? You need to ask. If you already collect feedback on your content, you know that it allows you to learn more about what content works and doesn’t work for the user.
Feedback is a gift that will only make you a stronger content designer. This circles back to knowing your user — find out if your user is successful in their tasks, what content works well, what’s missing, what’s confusing, where is the user blocked, what can be done to improve their experience? It’s important to remember that what you think works well in the content may not be ideal for the user. Collecting feedback on drafts, minimum viable products (MVPs), and production releases will help you keep up with growing user needs and make you a better content designer.
There are many ways to collect feedback on content. For example, you can observe how it’s used for learning or completing tasks; you can send surveys to collect comments, satisfaction ratings, or a net promoter score (NPS); and you can ask users to keep a journal while using your content, or have a discussion with them. If it’s not possible to connect with your users directly, you could try asking user support teams or other client-facing roles what content feedback they may receive.
5. Iterate and continuously improve
If you think there’s always room for improvement, and you embrace that needs constantly change and evolve, you’re designing content with the user in mind. When you collect user feedback, it’s important that you not only do something with it, but also close the loop and let users know how they helped improve your content. You shouldn’t collect data that will be left sitting on the side. If your users provide feedback and see no change in the content, it can cause a bad user experience. Let users know how their feedback is being used on an individual basis or at a more general level in release news, blog posts, emails, or even in a content deliverable the users will see during their user journey.
Every project will have timelines and constraints on what can be updated when. But, if you use feedback to iterate on your content to continuously improve your designs, you’ll be driving toward an optimal user experience.
Summary
Content design is about designing an optimal experience for your users. It’s about designing words, layout, and flow, and determining the best method to deliver content. To design the best content, it’s important to understand your users, follow a content strategy, design your content to address the needs of the users, and collect feedback so you can iterate and improve. If you’re a technical writer who is already doing these things for your content projects, you’re designing content.
If you aren’t doing these things in your technical writing role yet, start small and gradually build these practices into your projects. You don’t have to do everything at once. The first place to start is understanding your users — above everything else, this really is the foundation of content design and it will naturally drive the rest of these practices. If it’s not possible to connect with your users, first try reaching out to people on either your team or your extended teams who may be able to provide some information. Find out more about who will be reading your content, what their roles are, what their needs are, and what’s important for them to know, even if it’s high-level information. Then, start asking why and what — why do your users need to do their tasks, why do they need to know certain details, what do they need to know at each point in their user journey to complete their task, and so on. When you keep asking why, you’ll get to the heart of what you should include in your content, where it should be surfaced, and what you should leave out. Even having a little bit of knowledge about your users, and why they need specific information, will go a long way.
Cara Viktorov is a Content Strategist at IBM. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
