The complete guide to content design for product owners

A simple explanation of content design

Content design is a practice that takes a user-centred design approach to the content in products and services.

Content often means words, but not always. It might also cover video, audio, graphics, or anything else which conveys information or meaning to service users.

Taking a user-centred design approach means putting the needs of users first. For content designers that means asking:

• What do users need to know?
• When in the process do they need to know it?
• How can we make that information as easy as possible to understand?

Product owners of course need to balance the competing needs of users and stakeholders.

Content designers, like most user-centred designers, will prioritise the former, and champion the user in stakeholder discussions, as a point of principle.

Example 1: Content design in practice

This is a very simple example of how a content designer might approach a piece of content. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this paragraph:

But it’s much clearer when it’s been through the content design process:

How content design is different to other content disciplines

There are lots of different content-related roles and job titles. For example, as a product owner, you might have worked with UX writers, content editors, or content marketers.

There’s actually lots of overlap between content design and those other practices. And many content designers came to content design having worked in other content roles.

UX writing is probably the closest role to content design. In fact, some people argue that there’s really no difference. And it's true that many people have had both job titles at various points in their careers.

Others, however, feel that content designers take a broader view, thinking about content strategy and content governance, while UX writers tend to focus on the words being used in digital user interfaces.

Copywriting is not the same as content design.

Again, copywriters often move into content design, and vice versa.

But content design is focused on the functional needs of users, while copywriting is connected to marketing. It’s about helping organisations stand out from the competition and connect with potential customers.

That might be helpful for customers, but it isn’t driven primarily by their needs.

“Before working with content designers I knew how we said what we said was important. What I've learned since is how vital it is to spend time thinking around what is being said, and especially how your audience will be perceiving and receiving the content.”

Craig, product owner

What do content designers do, or produce?

It will vary from project to project but might include:

• A content audit reviewing and evaluating all the content on a platform, or in a user journey. Is it good enough, does it need to exist, what’s missing?
• Desk research exploring what language service users use and understand?
• Keyword analysis: what search terms do people use to find and navigate the service?
• Style guides and editorial standards to keep content clear and consistent.
• Prototype content for testing with stakeholders and users.
• Workshops to understand users and their content needs, or to co-create content with colleagues, stakeholders and subject matter experts.
• Content governance: systems, standards and policies for the creation, management, and updating of content.
• Content modelling: definitions and structures for content types and their relationships to each other. Page types or templates, for example.
• Content strategy: planning, developing and managing content, ensuring it aligns with business goals and user needs.

Example 2: The power of a content audit

A content designer is asked to create content to support a new initiative within a large organisation. Their first task is to audit the existing content.

They create a spreadsheet based on a standard template that includes columns such as:

• content title
• URL
• domain (where it is hosted)
• owner
• last update
• quality rating
• how often the content is accessed

Then, using a mix of automation and manual review, they go through every relevant piece of content on the intranet, Confluence, SharePoint, and any other repository they can find.

This reveals that, in fact, there are already more than 200 pages of relevant content, much of it out of date, and with conflicting information.

This helps them identify their priority tasks:

1. Work with stakeholders to remove duplicate and old content.
2. Move content to a single intuitive location, based on user research.
3. Update priority content (most important and most accessed).
4. Improve layout and legibility of content.
5. Create new content to address unmet user needs.
6. Establish content review processes to prevent content going out of date.
7. Establish content governance to regularly archive and delete content.

What content designers don’t do

Content designers are often the most confident writers on a project team and as a product owner you might call on them for work that isn't content design.

For example, editing slide decks, drafting documents, or writing marketing content.

In practice, they might agree to help with this kind of work, because they enjoy it, and because they’re team players.

This is not content design, and it’s generally not the best use of their time or skills.

You’ll want to make sure it really is a content designer you need and not, say, an editor, or marketing content writer.

Equally, it’s worth bearing in mind that if your project has a small amount of writing requirements, a content designer might be a handy person to have around.

How to decide if your project needs content design

The simple answer to this is that if you expect your product to include any content, you should have a content designer on the team.

And it is very unlikely that any service won’t include content, whether it’s copy on buttons or longform information pages.

In practice, if the content is minimal, you might not need a content designer on the team on a full-time basis.

It’s also possible that a ‘T-shaped’ or multi-skilled designer from another user-centred discipline can fulfil the function of a content designer.

It might be tempting to use a copywriter, content marketer, or someone else already on the team who is good with words. There is a risk with this option that they won’t have the necessary user focus, or the skills and experience to run content audits, establish content strategy, and so on.

If you’re unsure, try talking to a design leader in your organisation, or to a business analyst or service designer on your team. They’ll be able to discuss the pros and cons with you and perhaps help you find the resource you need.

“As a product manager, I consider the inclusion of a content designer on the team to be pivotal for product success. In navigating the landscape of policy jargon, teams rely on skilled content designers to transform complex policies into comprehensible, inclusive, and accessible content.”

Jack, product manager

Risks and benefits

Not having a content designer on the team brings risks:

• failure to meet accessibility standards
• failure to meet user needs
• failure to comply with organisational standards and style
• unclear, inaccurate, or confusing content
• less efficient products and services

While, on the flipside, there are concrete benefits to including a content designer, or content designers, in the mix:

• a clear owner for content
• support in navigating organisational content processes
• an additional champion for user needs
• stakeholder engagement and management
• improved quality and consistency of content
• efficient collaboration with designers and engineers

When to involve content designers

Content designers should be involved as early as possible in the process, ideally from the very start.

This gives them the best chance to understand the project from the ground up, and to contribute to preliminary research and discovery sessions.

You'll get the best from them when they're able to collaborate with service designers, business analysts and user researchers as early as possible.

Content designers find it useful to be part of the team throughout the whole process and experience suggests that design teams benefit from – and enjoy! – the presence of content designers.

If your budget for staffing the team doesn’t allow for a full design team from day one, consider prioritising a content designer.

It’s generally better for product designers (interaction designers) to pick up work done by a content designer than the other way round.

The ‘content first’ approach

‘Content first’ is an alternative approach to creating prototypes that starts with content rather than with visuals.

A common problem is when content designers are brought into the process after wireframes or prototypes have already been created.

This can leave content designers having to fill boxes that are already in place with, or replacing ‘Lorem ipsum’ placeholder text, with... something.

This results in content that there's no evidence users want or need, that clutters the page, and makes important content harder to find and digest.

A content first approach, by contrast, starts with content structures, and content elements, in wireframe prototype mode. This will be based on user research and insight.

Once the structure and content elements have been established, you can:

1. Test that structure with users.
2. Pass it to product designers to be worked up in higher fidelity.

It’s easy to update and experiment with content-first designs, which might simply be Word documents or sticky notes on a whiteboard.

Find out how Sparck used a content first approach on NHS Wayfinder

Accessibility and inclusion

An important aspect of content design is making sure that content works for as many people as possible.

This includes thinking about how content can be calibrated to work well for:

• people who use screen readers, including those who are blind or have sight loss
• people with conditions which make it harder for them to process information
• people for whom English is an additional language
• people under stress or in crisis
• people in marginalised groups

All designers will be aware of accessibility issues but content designers have a particular focus on content, obviously, and specific technical aspects of best practice.

For example, they’ll consider whether phrasal verbs might make the content harder to understand for people for whom English is not their home language. So instead of…

Fill in the form below

which uses the phrasal verb ‘fill in’ they might suggest

Complete the form below

which uses language more likely to be universally understood.

Find out how content design can serve mixed language groups

How content design contributes to sustainability goals

Product owners are often asked to account for how their product will contribute to sustainability goals and targets. Taking a content design approach is one way to do this while also serving user needs.

That’s because content design is, above all, about making user journeys as efficient as they can possibly be.

That means delivering information, or getting users where they need to be, with:

• the minimum number of steps
• the fewest page loads
• the fewest diversions, refreshes and dead ends

Each additional or unnecessary step in the user journey comes with a carbon cost. The slimmer the product, and the more direct the user’s route, the better.

Content governance, another aspect of content design, also reduces the amount of redundant, out of date or otherwise useless content sitting on servers.

Find out more about how content design contributes to sustainability goals

Content design on projects without content designers

Not every project will have a content designer. That might not be ideal but, pragmatically, it will happen sometimes.

That doesn’t mean you have to give up on the idea of following content design principles, however.

As mentioned above in How to decide if your project needs content design, another designer on the project (a product designer, or service designer) might take responsibility for content design as an additional part of their role.

You might also be able to draw on the expertise of central content design teams in your organisation, or content designers in related business units. But try to avoid asking them to “take a quick look over the content” if you want to stay friends!

In organisations with an existing culture of human-centred design (HCD) there may also be:

• editorial style guides
• design systems
• content review and approval processes

Even without a content designer on your project team, using these resources can help keep you on track with best practice.

Using AI for content design

We know that, increasingly, product owners are being asked to think about how generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools can be used to operate more efficiently.

That means, in turn, that content designers are often asked for advice on uses for tools like ChatGPT.

Content design is rarely about turning out large volumes of content, such as blog posts or articles.

In fact, writing, or producing content, is often a relatively small part of the content design process, after a lot of strategic thinking and analysis.

So, some of the more obvious uses for AI don’t necessarily apply. However, content designers are exploring ways to use AI to:

• generate options
• create variants of existing content
• adjust the tone and complexity of content
• edit and proofread content
• re-format or re-purpose content

It might be particularly useful on teams with no content designer, or where content design support is limited to a particular period of the project.

People who are not content designers can use tools like ChatGPT to check the content they produce for plain language, for example.

And the most recent, more sophisticated versions of these tools make it possible to feed in style guides so that AI can check for compliance, or apply house style to drafts.

Find out more about how content designers can use generative AI

Learning from content designers

One major benefit to having content design roles on your project team is capability building, upskilling, and training.

If your organisation doesn’t have content designers at all, getting one involved in a specific project can be a great way to understand what they do, and learn a bit about how they do it.

You can learn a lot from just working alongside content designers and observing their approach. In most cases they’ll also involve colleagues hands-on in working on content and in critique sessions (crits).

“People often assume that what they’re communicating is being understood. On a recent project there was a situation where two teams were talking past each other, and their messages were not landing. Being able to pull back, and being challenged to do so by the content designer on the team, meant that our cross-organisation messages landed as intended. It wasn't just the delivery team that took this lesson, either. I saw a marked change in the approach of stakeholders after they had been taken through a content design workshop.”

Craig, product owner

Sparck content designers often run training sessions with client teams, passing on knowledge so that improvements to content will be sustainable after the project ends.

You might also bring in content designers with the explicit intention of upskilling your team, through a capability building programme.

This can broaden the skillset of existing content workers, such as copywriters or content marketers. It can also help other types of designer, such as product designers, become more ‘T-shaped’ and versatile.

Find out more about design capability building

Taking a content design approach in your own work

Once you’ve worked with a content designer, the chances are you’ll often find yourself thinking like one in your day-to-day work.

If you ever produce any kind of content, from job advertisements to internal emails, you’ll benefit from approaching the task as a content designer might.

• Think carefully about your users and what they need.
• Create only the content they need to achieve their goal.
• Structure content for ease of scanning, with headings and lists.
• Make the language clear, plain, and unambiguous.
• Collaborate on the content to fix faults and make it as good as it can be.

Conclusion

Hopefully that’s made content design feel less mysterious and complex.

It’s really just another way of thinking about and describing the role of the content person on a design or development team.

But if you’re still not sure, why not try:

• connecting with some content designers on social media
• reading Content Design by Sarah Winters
• finding a small, safe, internal project to test a content design approach

Let’s talk

If you’re curious to learn more check out content design posts on the Sparck blog.

Or get in touch with Emma Baker on LinkedIn.

Emma is the head of our content practice. She’ll be happy to have an informal chat and help you understand more about how content design might help you deliver better products.