Content design and UX writing - what’s the difference?

I’m a content designer here at Kainos. In other organisations where I did the same job, I was a UX writer.

I believe that ‘content design’ and ‘UX writing’ are similar enough to be used interchangeably in this way. They’re looking to achieve the same aim — giving users the content they need to get through a digital journey as easily as possible.

But the detail of that, what it means to put the right content in the right place, will vary. With each project, a content designer or UX writer calls on a range of skills and processes to produce different types of content.

And the two terms are useful in telling us more about those skills and processes, about the role and what it involves. Let’s look at how.

Design vs writing

As Rhiannon Payne of UX collective suggests, ‘content design’ positions us as designers, and in doing suggests a high-level, strategic role on a product.

It points to our design process, from understanding user needs and business needs, to journey mapping, working with subject matter experts, research and iterating. It reminds everyone that to get the content right, we need to be involved in projects as early as possible.

‘UX writer’ focuses on the writing we do. By including ‘UX’, it doesn’t ignore the research, the user needs and the work with designers and developers. But it prioritises the output, the words that go into the body copy, microcopy, buttons, hint text and headers.

Immediate understanding

This one is highly anecdotal, but…

‘Content design’ is general enough language to cover the range of what we do, but because of that it does still sometimes need further explanation, even to informed colleagues.

Once the discipline is more widely recognised and understood (and we’re getting there), this won’t be so much of a problem. But for now ‘UX writers’ or ‘UX designers who use words’ can help to give non-specialists a shorthand for what we do. This does assume they know what UX is, but UX design does a great job in promoting itself and there’s no harm in piggybacking on that.

Content format

Content isn’t always words. It can be videos, charts or images. ‘Content design’ is helpful in emphasising that range of formats.

Realistically though, it usually is words. ‘UX writing’ narrows this down, which is helpful in the internet era in which ‘content’ is used in many fields to mean many things.

UK, US and the world

The term ‘content design’ began life in the UK and is popular over here, particularly in government design teams. Meanwhile ‘UX writing’ came from the Google design team in the US, and is widely used there.

The UX Writing Hub suggests ‘content design’ is also used in India, while in Canada and South America ‘UX writing’ is more prevalent.

Also, my (again, anecdotal) experience is that users of English as a second language seem to prefer ‘UX writing’.

Other meanings of ‘content design’

The term ‘content design’ is general enough to get confused with graphic or multimedia design in some job adverts (as much as 10% of the time, according to a study by the UX Writing Hub).

Once the discipline is more widely recognised this shouldn’t be so much of an issue, but for now ‘UX writing’ has the advantage of being unique while summing up the work we do.

Making our roles accurate and understandable

So the terms ‘UX writing’ and ‘content design’ highlight different aspects of the same evolving discipline.

They tell us about the output of what we do, and the process by which we get there. They are a trade-off between giving an accurate description of what we bring to a project, and being easily comprehensible to the people we work with.

Others in the industry feel differently, and that UX writing and content design should be considered separate. Follow the first two links in ‘Read more’ to find out why.

Read more

Content design: why it matters (and why it’s not just UX writing) — Hotjar

Why you need a content team and how to build one — Rachel McConnell

This article was inspired by Kerstin Leder Mackley’s post From learning the lingo to ways of working: an academic’s experience of transitioning into UX.