Content designers work closely with other designers and web specialists, such as developers. We work best when we’re part of an inter-disciplinary design team, with others that can complement our skills.
It’s common, however, to find content designers in a communications or channels team. If we are, I find we naturally migrate towards working with other design or web roles in other teams within an organisation.
This happens because in order to do our jobs properly we often need the skills of others that aren’t in our immediate team. While we can work like this, it can be a bit isolating when we don’t work with our own team day-to-day. It can also take much longer to form relationships with the key people we actually need to work with in an organisation.
In an ideal world content designers would be part of a design team, and this could include:
- content designers
- UX designers
- user researchers
- service designers
- developers
- product owners.
These roles can all work together to come up with the best web, service and content design for users.
There’s often some crossover of responsibilities in a design team so in my experience it can be helpful to get a team together to define roles. This helps to make it clear what everyone is responsible for and how everyone will work together at each stage of the design process.
A content designer will fit into many parts of a design process and it’s beneficial to include them at each step.
The NZ Digital Service Design Standard recommends creating and empowering inter-disciplinary design teams when creating a digital service. This includes content designers, developers and user experience roles.
Create and empower an interdisciplinary team – NZ Digital Service Design Standard
Working with others – examples
User researchers
While user researchers plan and develop user testing, content designers often have user research experience too and can contribute to this exercise.
We want to see first-hand how people interact with content.
By assisting researchers and attending user testing sessions, we can get invaluable information that can help us develop or improve content.
UX designers
Let’s say a UX designer is designing a form.
UX designers might focus on designing form elements and functionality, such as:
- what the form fields look like and what colours to use
- considering progress indicators, buttons and predictive fields
- where error messages are displayed.
Content designers work closely with them to design the form content. We’ll look at:
- what content leads people to the form
- what form fields are needed
- their labels
- any prompts or help text
- error messages
- introductory and confirmation screen content.
Both content and UX designers consider the user journey, such as where users have come from to find the form and where they’ll go next after filling it out. They’ll also both consider web accessibility when making their decisions.
Developers
Content designers and developers work closely together throughout content creation.
Let’s stick with the form example discussed under ‘Working with UX designers’.
When creating a new form for a website, a content designer could:
- work alongside developers to explore what’s possible and perhaps simplify ideas within the available functionality
- give feedback and help to make improvements as things are developed in test environments
- work with developers to make improvements or fix bugs once content changes are live.
Subject matter experts
A huge part of the content design role is relationship management. We work closely with experts, stakeholders and business owners who are subject matter experts on the content topic.
We’re the middle-person between website users and subject matter experts, but always remain an advocate for the people using a website. It’s our job to communicate what people need from web content while also considering the needs, wants and expectations of stakeholders.
We keep subject matter experts close and try to involve them in the design and content creation process as much as possible. By bringing them along on the journey they can better understand what users need or the problems they face – this is key to getting user-centred content approved and across the line.
Working with content designers
If you’re working directly with a content designer or about to recruit one, you can learn more about content design and what the role involves. The lowdown on content design is a go-to guide that breaks down the role so you can better understand it.