Five Tips for Making Your UX and CX Collaboration Sing
Nurturing the partnership between product designers and content writers ultimately supports user success.
By Dana Holloway and Anubha Dubey
“Content is part of the product. Content experience is part of the user experience. They should be involved from the beginning. When you have that engagement, you create meaningful content and experiences for our users.”
-Kathryn Murrell, VP of UX at Salesforce
When was the last time you used an app or a product without words? A seamless and effective user experience must have thoughtful and well-designed information architecture, interactions, interfaces, and content. But how do you create the right content to support your customers’ interactions with the product?
That’s where content experience (CX) teams come in. When UX and CX work together, they’re an unstoppable force. They collectively serve as the voice of the customer, contributing their areas of expertise and leading to a more well-rounded and cohesive product.
Strong partnerships support user success
At Salesforce, our CX team of technical writers and content designers work with UX to create accessible and relevant customer experiences. UX is involved in every interaction that customers have with the product. In most cases, CX should be right there in the room, as well. Content is a key part of the product, making the partnership between UX designers and CX writers especially important.
It can be easy to forget about this partnership when teams don’t interact daily, are focused on pressing deadlines, or don’t have a clear understanding about roles. Be mindful that workstream silos and assumptions about each team’s roles can be blockers. Remember that UX designers bring more to the table than just graphics on a screen, and CX teams contribute more to the product experience than just the corresponding labels.
Are you hoping to improve your company’s CX and UX collaboration? Ready to take this partnership to the next level? We asked members of these teams at Salesforce for their best tips on collaborating.
1. Recognize Each Person’s Expertise
As we mentioned earlier, the UX designer and writer are experts in their respective areas and bring specialized knowledge to the table. Often, UX and CX teams have well-researched style guides and processes to follow. For example, writers can share best practices about content types and the language. UX designers can share an iterative process rooted in a user-centric approach that drives a continuous cycle of experimentation, validation, and refinement. And if your team has content designers, they’ll focus on making sure the design and content meet users’ needs and usability standards. Understanding each role will make it easier to support one another in your broader team.
Together, UX and CX also make a great team in advocating for the customer. If you find that your other teams and stakeholders try to take shortcuts or make decisions against the customer’s interest, you can back each other up to make sure the entire experience for the customer is a positive one.
2. Decide How You’ll Work Together
Like in any team or partnership, you and your partner should make an effort to get to know each other. Set up some time outside of a working session or request-based meeting to talk about each other’s teams, interests, priorities, pain points, and focus areas. Teach each other about your team’s processes and support systems so you understand how you both work. It can also be helpful to set up a working agreement that covers how you’ll work with each other. Discuss tooling, service-level agreements, expectations, division of duties, workflow, communication, and the cadence at which you’ll meet.
At the start of each project, it’s a good idea to make sure that your partners have the same expectations of the role of technical writers, content designers, and UX in the typical product development process. For example, at Salesforce, our CX team has two types of writers: technical writers who write different types of documentation and text for the product’s user interface and content designers who focus entirely on the content displayed in the product. UX designers provide input and ideas to the product teams, and iterate on the product and engineering specs, evolving the product.
Depending on the company, you might have these same roles, or additional roles that specialize in specific deliverables (like UX writers). Or, you might have one person responsible for multiple parts of the product, who serves as technical writer, UX designer, and content designer all in one. Regardless of your company’s structure or what you think your teammates are responsible for, it’s important that your team discusses who will do what. Use each project kickoff as an opportunity to align your role, responsibilities, and team expectations. If you don’t have a content experience or UX partner on the team, determine who will be the point person to cover those responsibilities and what deliverables and acceptance criteria looks like.
As you start to work together, continue to be a good partner and be willing to answer questions, share feedback, and give your opinion. When the opportunity arises, show appreciation and credit each other for your contributions.
3. Get Involved Early and Leave No One Behind
UX and content experience teams should be a part of the entire project lifecycle, which means they should both be involved from the early planning stages. However, when we talked to UX designers and writers, most said that at least at one point in their career, they learned they’d been left out of planning for a major feature. They either had to scramble to give their input or, worse, it was too late to get involved. Not a good feeling.
The good news is that you can help make sure UX and CX are looped into the conversation early. If you’re invited to a product planning meeting but notice that your UX or content experience counterpart isn’t, ask about adding them to the meeting. If you learn about upcoming changes that could affect your partner, make sure that they’re aware.
During the planning kickoff, make sure UX and CX are part of the Definition of Done (DoD).
For instance, the story is done when:
- All acceptance criteria, as defined and agreed upon by the team as part of DOR, have been met.
- UX has reviewed and approved the proposed user experience (if applicable).
- CX has reviewed and approved all UI text (if applicable).
UX and CX DoD prior to the product’s release (ready to be deployed) might include,
- All UI components have labels ready for localization vendors.
- UI localization release schedules are observed and labels are ready for localization.
- UX has reviewed and approved system-level user experience.
The earlier that UX and CX are involved, the better the experience will be for your customer.
4. Practice Good Collaboration Habits (and Ditch Bad Ones)
After you get comfortable working with each other and contributing to the products for your area, it’s easy to rely on default collaboration habits. For example, everyone might zip to their part of the project after the ideas start flowing. But hold on: Are you sure that everyone involved in the product’s design (so at minimum, the UX designer, the writer, and the product manager) has the same end goal in mind? Are you all clear on what you’re trying to accomplish? Even though it can sound elementary, taking a pause to make sure you and your team are all in alignment will lead to a better final product.
Another pattern that’s easy to fall into is relying only on asynchronous collaboration, where you’re communicating only through comments passed back and forth in a document or design. Though it can seem like more effort at first, give a synchronous work session a try once in a while. Many teams find that it leads to a better, more open-ended discussion and that you come up with ideas that wouldn’t have occurred while having the whole conversation in comments.
5. Set Up Your UX and CX Toolbox
The best tool is one that works for both the UX and content experience team members. We’ve found that the best tools:
- Allow for easy collaboration, commenting, and change tracking.
- Maintain the source of truth of both the design and the text.
- Don’t involve too much copying back and forth between multiple documents.
At Salesforce, UX designers and writers have found success using Figma, Google Docs, and Google Slides. But it’s important that you discuss your preferences together and how you’ll use the tools together.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
The next time you’re working on a project, remember that the writers on your team aren’t merely word providers and spell checkers, and the UX designers know much more than colors and layouts. UX and CX’s extent of knowledge goes way beyond that and is key to creating an effective product.
Think of UX and CX as two sides of the same coin. Both are responsible for being the voice of the customer but are experts in different areas. If you collaborate right from the start, you’ll be able to create a well-crafted experience for your customers.
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