Noone says they ‘need’ a content designer… until they get one
Noone says they ‘need’ a content designer… until they get one, then they want a content designer on every project.
It’s true that a lot of people and teams don’t understand the true value content design brings to a product team. It’s not their fault — they’ve just never had the opportunity to work closely with a content designer. Many conversations with engineering leads or product managers go something like this:
Engineering lead/Product manager: We’ll be fine, there’s not really any design or content work needed on this project.
Me: Are you sure? I might get <insert content designer> to join your team meetings anyway, just to keep them in the loop.
Sometime later…
Engineering lead/Product manager: It’s been so great to have <insert content designer> in the meetings! There are so many things we didn’t realize we needed to do and now we are covered. We need them to be more involved in the project moving forward, can you make that happen?
Me: Sure thing, do you have the budget?
Why do content designers have this effect? Because content designers need to consider the information experience, they are often looking more broadly across the end-to-end journey. They need to consider things like product discoverability, navigation, comprehension, ease of use, technical support, and troubleshooting on top of general UI designs and flows. Through this lens, they often uncover issues that other cross-functional peers do not see. They operate similar to service designers, looking across systems and journeys.
For a product team with a narrow focus and limited visibility outside their area, this can bring a completely different perspective into the larger team — which is important for collaboration… and product teams love it. Once a product team gets a feel for how a content designer could work with their team, they just want more.
This becomes a resourcing challenge and we need content design to be across everything to ensure our customers are receiving a great experience through our products. But when content design skills are not yet widely available across the organization there is a mismatch between available resourcing for content designers and projects needing content design.
It’s a tricky balancing act.
If you say yes to all the projects, the content designer will have an impact more broadly but they will be stretched so thin that their impact is very shallow. They’ll be able to do a lot of the visible things but not operate strategically.
If you say ‘No’ to some projects, the software will be shipped anyway with a less than excellent customer experience. But for the projects that you say ‘Yes’ to, they will have content designers who can spend deep focus time solving customer problems and leverage all their skills resulting in deeper impact.
Saying ‘Yes’ to everything isn’t good for the customer, and is worse for the content designer. Saying ‘No’ is better for the content designer and creates a better experience for customers.
Once product teams work with a content designer, saying ‘No’ can often trigger a bigger conversation around resource allocation and hopefully more support for content design in the future.
No design leader wants to say that they don’t care about the customer’s product experience. Saying ‘No’ is one of the hardest things, but it’s also one of the most valuable things you can do.
I have never seen the ‘say Yes to everything’ scenario leads to more content design resourcing. On the other hand, the ‘say No to some things’ tactic often leads to better resourcing, better experiences, and better work satisfaction for content designers.
So when thinking about resourcing for content design, consider the impact of spreading content designers as thin as Vegemite on toast — is it really the best use of our talented people?
Special thanks to Linette Voller for the perfect image, as always.
