Not quite camera-ready for a Meet the Teams event at the IBM Tucson site in 2007.

In 2009, my husband took a new field-based service position with his company and we moved across the country to Vermont. I didn’t have much experience working remotely (we called it “telecommuting” back then), only spending the occasional Friday at home, but my management team had no problem with me going full-time remote. Things hummed along; due to the time difference with my team, and that my office was now at home, I often worked longer hours. Through my graphic design work, I was presented with a very unexpected opportunity in 2015. IBM was ramping up their design organization and a colleague recommended me for a UX design position in an entirely different part of the company. My only relevant experience seemed to be technical diagram creation and a personal endorsement but I was very grateful for the chance.

I quickly absorbed everything I could about UX design, learning from both new colleagues and on-the-side education that I consumed. I eventually became comfortable in my new role but always felt a nagging desire to somehow return to writing. Over time, I started to notice a gap in the typical design team specialties. While UX, visual, and research are all immensely important to covering the aspects of interface designing, something was still missing. No one seemed to own the content experience in the UI. If a UX designer did not take it on as a (usually extra) task to write copy for their designs, it was often left to development or the documentation team (if there was one) to fill in the blanks. In any case, it was almost always a last-minute afterthought.

After joining the design organization, I tried to keep a hand in writing and make it known that I had content skills and was eager to use them when needed. In 2019, I happened to be in the right place at the right time and was offered an amazing opportunity to participate in a trial of sorts for a potential new design role: content designer. My manager launched a pilot program with a handful of design teams to see how this might work. I was thrilled at the prospect of being able to combine all of my skills in both UX and writing into one magical pursuit. Though a little bumpy at first because both our group and the design teams weren’t completely sure who should own what and or how we should work together, things eventually smoothed out. We developed more and more guidance and a better understanding of how we truly fit in to make the design team structure complete.

I’ve worked as a content designer since then on several different products and I love what I do. I am a strong advocate for embedded content designers (content designers as part of the design team) who work hand-in-hand with UX and the entire design team to research, understand, and craft experiences based on what the user needs. The words on the page are the most important thing to conveying what someone sees and understands and when they don’t get the consideration they require, there is no doubt that the experience will suffer. The teams I’ve worked with have been amazing at embracing the importance of content design and giving me a home where I’ve been able to sharpen my skills and refine my design perspective. Content design is not simply about writing copy to plug into spaces in the screen; it’s about the bigger picture that encompasses designing an experience made of interactions and the information needed to understand them.