Creating a content design role

Summary
During the few years that I worked as a UX designer, I started to notice a trend with respect to content: it didn’t really seem like anyone owned the UI copy or user’s content experience. After discovering that others had this same observation, I was lucky enough to join a small group of designers whose mission was establish a content ownership role and figure out how it could be formalized within a design team.

Problem & user needs
Users need good, intuitive content that helps them understand what they’re seeing and how to accomplish their goals within a UI. When no one is responsible for the content UX and architecture, you end up with a disjointed, inconsistent, and often less than stellar content experience for your product.

Role
One of the original “content designers” to help develop a definition and guidance for the content design role in the Cloud, Data, and AI software organization at IBM.

Key contributions

Alongside Tom Waterton, who has spearheaded the embedded content design model in IBM Software, and a small group of other content design colleagues:

  • Defined the content designer role for our business unit, detailing our responsibilities around collaborating within a design team and contributing material to provide best practices and case studies.

  • Presented to potential pilot design teams, sharing our goals and process ideas for the new collaboration model with a focus on how we could work together and split responsibilities.

  • Established the Content Design Guild within IBM to bring together content designers across the company. I joined in May 2018, at the inception.

    • Served on the planning committee as one of 5 guild leaders for 4.5 years - helped plan and coordinate meeting topics, run our monthly meetings, monitor our channel for activity, and spread the word about the guild.

    • Worked on guidance for growing your T skills as a content designer, exploring key competencies and how to branch out to secondary skillsets.

  • Contributed to building education and guidance for content designers including:

    • Patterns Next Level program which aims to strengthen a designer's technical and managerial leadership skills, elevate their career eminence, and expand their internal professional networks.

    • Review and input to the component and pattern content guidance in our Carbon Design System.

    • Informal education and review sessions.

  • Ongoing:

    • Review product content and provide assessment scores as part of our Design and User Experience (D&UX) review program.

    • Share my journey as a content designer with many groups/conferences/teams to help others understand the importance of the role, how I personally found success, and why I think the content design role is so important to the makeup of a design team. Over the years, presented at internal conferences including ContentCon20, Patterns Program, IBM Z Content Development Summit, IBM Systems Design Summit, and more.

Outcome & impact
Elevated eminence for the content design role and helped bring together content designers working on UI content and copy. Through participation in our pilot program, sharing out our experiences, and continually building our knowledge on how to do content design, we’ve helped shape how this role has evolved and gained traction in design teams across the company. The impact has been improved and more consistent content experiences from marketing to in-product to documentation and an increased awareness about the importance of this role in the design team’s structure and processes.

The story

In 2018, I joined the Design Foundation team after working for a few years on different hybrid cloud products in a UX design role. The Foundation Team focused on higher level initiatives for designers in our group like workshop facilitation, design guidance, and support of our design mission; in other words collaborating with designers to improve the quality, velocity, impact, and eminence of the organization. My early role was design tools support and working with Tom on broader content goals like providing feedback on content guidance, helping critique UI content, ghost writing design org articles, and building a informational wiki on design tools. Through interviewing designers to try and understand their workflows, the tools they were currently using, and those they needed, I captured information about existing and potential tools and started working on a one-stop-shop for design tools support. I also served as an evangelist for new tools we were vetting, like Wake.

As the designer tools and workflows project approached a more finished state and was merged with another, company-wide effort, I started to spend more time on content tasks. In early 2019, a content design mission came into focus when Maranda Bodas, another content designer in a different part of the business, joined our team and the idea of trying to “embed” content designers within design teams took shape. The goal was to see how we could work side-by-side with designers in a full time capacity, dedicated to one product and content experience. Our manager reached out to a few teams to see if they would be interested in participating in this pilot program and a handful of us were assigned to those teams.

My pilot team was IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor. I had worked on the product previously, doing some UX design, so I was familiar with it and most of the designers on the team. There were 4 UX designers plus one visual designer, one researcher, and one UX engineer /front-end developer. Tom, myself, and our manager met with their team to introduce the idea and try to explain what we were hoping to accomplish. We got similar questions from most of the teams: What exactly was the role? How would it overlap with UX design? What does a content designer do and how would we work on designs together?

Our small team worked together on building a set of slides to present to our respective teams explaining the new role and responsibilities:

Most of the answers were unknown, even to us. We all met weekly to discuss hits and misses and share what was working within our pilot teams. I started a “Content Designer Diary” to try and chronicle how things were unfolding, what challenges I was facing with the role, and where things were going well. It lasted a little while (I’m a terrible journal keeper!) but helped me share insights with the team at large. I was almost immediately tasked with looking at terminology for our product and space, which continued to be a theme throughout my tenure on any product as detailed in Aligning terminology. Another recurring theme was pushing for involvement at the earliest stages. I’ve always told everyone who will listen that I’m a UX designer with a content focus but getting included in all of the meetings and activities that UX designers participate in is sometimes difficult. It’s a constant mantra of “include me early and everywhere”.

Attempt at trying to log my experience as a newly minted content designer:

Along with direct experiences from our pilot teams, we used the Content Design Guild, which had been formed the previous summer by Tom and Maranda, to connect with colleagues in other business units, explore questions and challenges for those doing the same work as us, and build a company-wide content design community. We met monthly and covered topics like content design critiques, creating portfolios, developing content guidance for the UI, planning content strategy, learning from content designers both inside and outside of IBM, and sharing tools and process tips.

One area of focus that became obvious was how thinly spread our discipline was. There was a real need to try and improve content skills and knowledge for UX designers to try and limit the load on us. I worked with Shelby Aranyi, a UX design lead in another area, to develop a guide for non-content designers as time permitted. The goal was to provide a quick avenue for learning the basics about UI content: common and pervasive style rules, why you don’t want to use fake text in designs, where to find content resources if you’re working on an island, and having at least one content designer in your phone-a-friend list. We wanted it to be super accessible so we focused on actionable steps for both super quick and longer term implementations. After a few months of gathering ideas and drafting guidance, we presented it for feedback and testing. It got a great reception and helped provide a one-stop shop for UX copy best practices.

Our UX Copy Best Practices guide:

After a year on Transformation Advisor, I split off along with some of that team to work on a special project that unfortunately was shelved before reaching delivery. However, I continued to build my skills and experience in the content designer role which definietley helped prepare me for the next adventure and challenge of content designing on a large team.