Ask Me Anything and Panel Discussions

jcolman
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

[Closed] AMA — Content Design: Writing the User Experience

It's-a-me!It's-a-me!👋 Hey Community! I’m Jonathon Colman (he/him, @jcolman) and I’m a Senior Design Manager at HubSpot where I lead our global content design discipline. Before joining HubSpot, I led content design teams at Facebook, Intercom, and REI.

 

But hey, waitaminit — what the heck is “content design” anyway?

 

Content designers solve product user experience (UX) problems using language. They write the words you see in product experiences to make sure everything is simple and clear, useful and usable. This includes things like calls to action, navigation, error messages, chat bots, even product names!

 

But content design isn’t just about writing, just like UX design isn’t just about making things look pretty. We often say that UX design is focused on determining how things should work for customers, so content design is focused on determining what things should mean to them. And to figure that out, we have to work deep beneath the surface of products.

 

I’m excited to discuss content design and answer any questions you might have because we’re hiring content designers at HubSpot right now. And since content design is a newer discipline in product teams, many folks don’t understand what content design is or what content designers do. So this is a great opportunity to learn about writing user experiences and bring content design practices to your own product teams.

 

From September 20–24, I’ll answer your questions about designing content for products! Not sure what to ask? Here are a few sample questions to get you started: 

  1. How do you write the user experience?
  2. Is content design the same thing as content marketing or technical writing? How are they different?
  3. How do you measure the quality or success of content in your product?
  4. How do I know if I need a content designer on my team?
  5. Where can I learn more about content design?

 

I'm looking forward to connecting with you!

30 Replies 30
jcolman
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

[Closed] AMA — Content Design: Writing the User Experience

Hey @DavidDennison, what a fun question! Here's something everyone should know: You can't fix a broken product with content. To see what I mean by that, take a look at the point of sale terminal from Wegmans:

 

Wegmans point of sale unitWegmans point of sale unit

Notice anything? The workers at the store have added a bunch of stickers practically begging the customer to hit "Skip" first before doing anything else. That indicates to me that something's broken with entering your phone number or scanning a card or app. So here the product is broken and a local store is trying to create a workaround for it. It may help their customers in the short term, but it won't fix the product in the long term.

 

Here's another example:

 

Instructions for a complicated light switchInstructions for a complicated light switch

 

 

This is a photo of instructions that were attached to a wall next to a complicated light switch in a conference room for a well-known global tech company. The light switch was very fancy and expensive, but it had an unfamiliar interface design for doing common tasks like turning the lights on/off or dimming their brightness. So an employee at the company took a photo of the switch and wrote up these notes to show people how it worked.

 

I'm sure this documentation helped people figure out the light switch, but here's the thing: you shouldn't need any documentation at all to turn the lights on and off! Technically, the product works, but the interface design veers so far away from the fundamentals that people can't figure out how to use it. So while the content helps people, the product experience is still broken.

 

The thing I want people to take away is that many of the problems that people face when using products are actually product and design problems—words alone can't fix them. And this is why content designers need to do more than just write the words. They need to be involved with product development from the beginning to actually solve product and design problems.

DavidDennison
Key Advisor

[Closed] AMA — Content Design: Writing the User Experience

Wow! I absolutely love your examples and that is some great advice! Thank you for sharing!

David Dennison

Search Engine Optimization

and Content Marketing Expert

mobilePhone
702-556-5062
emailAddress
david@daviddennison.com
website
https://daviddennison.com
danmoyle
Most Valuable Member | Elite Partner
Most Valuable Member | Elite Partner

[Closed] AMA — Content Design: Writing the User Experience

How does conversational writing and content design connect? I love writing conversationally and hopefully that skill gets folks to engage and converse (it does) — I wonder how content design would play into that work? Thanks! 

 

Did my answer help? Please "mark as a solution" to help others find answers. Plus I really appreciate it!


Dan Moyle

HubSpot Advisor

LearningOps | Impulse Creative

emailAddress
dan@impulsecreative.com
website
https://impulsecreative.com/
jcolman
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

[Closed] AMA — Content Design: Writing the User Experience

Hey @danmoyle, thanks for a great question!

 

For folks who aren't familiar with conversational design, there's a great book about it appropriately titled Conversational Design written by Erika Hall. I'd urge you to check it out! Beyond being a great introduction to the topic of conversational design, it's also one of the best-written tech or design books of the past decade.

 

I see conversational design as being a valuable tool in the belt of content designers who are working on platforms or systems that involve conversations, particularly those that are live/real-time or involve actors or agents taking turns replying to each other over time.

 

So here's one way content designers can practice conversational design. One of the concepts Erika talks about in her book is Grice's Maxims of conversation, which set the foundation of theory for how our conversations work—not just online or in systems, but in real life.

 

Content designers and others have used these maxims to build conversational platforms and products that feel more natural and human. Over time, we've found that systems relying on these maxims are easier to use and result in better outcomes for users, customers, and businesses. If you pick apart a conversational flow in just about any chatbot, you can quickly see them at work!

 

There's plenty more to explore and understand about conversation design, particularly once you get into designing for voice (or VUI: voice user interfaces!). A good resource for learning more about designing for voice is Voice Content and Usability by Preston So.

natejoens
Contributor

[Closed] AMA — Content Design: Writing the User Experience

Hey @jcolman great timing on this as we actually just had a colleague of yours who's a Content Designer publish a co-marketed blog with our company (see here) so very relevant!

 

I'm curious, what is your typical process for researching content design? How do you come up with a topic, content type and goal that makes it relevant to the business? I imagine pretty heavy on the SEO/keyword research and goal alignment, but what else goes into making sure your content is set up to perform from the get-go?

 

Thanks!

jcolman
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

[Closed] AMA — Content Design: Writing the User Experience

Hey @natejoens! I saw Dayne's post about strategies for closing the sale on the Structurely blog and it's so good! And it's a great showcase for one of the core strengths of content designers: becoming so immersed in audience/market and product that they can communicate clearly about complex, nuanced topics of interest to professionals working in the field.

 

Your question gets at the difference between what I think of as content marketing (a marketing discipline focused on things like SEO, keyword research, content performance, and so on) and content design, a product discipline which is focused on user experience, interaction design, and UX writing. Content design as we practice it at HubSpot is a specialization of product design rather than a marketing discipline.

 

Different companies and orgs work differently, but at HubSpot, our content designers focus on building product and UX rather than content marketing. We always admire great content marketing, but it's not what our content design team is held accountable for. HubSpot has teams of content marketers that focus on nothing but marketing strategy and tactics, so our content designers instead focus on building product that solves problems for people and their businesses that are trying to grow and scale.

 

You can learn even more about what our content designers do in this blog post!

steffenpbauer
Participant

[Closed] AMA — Content Design: Writing the User Experience

Hey Jon, thank you for this AMA! Here's my question: When being asked about the future of content design on the "Product Bakery Podcast", you talked about the discipline probably becoming more automated by technologies like artificial intelligence. The role of content designers might then focus more on systems design and concept design and guiding this technology. To what degree do you think the Beth Bot might be a step in that direction? Do you and Beth Dunn have any plans or visions for this product and how it might evolve in the future?  

jcolman
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

[Closed] AMA — Content Design: Writing the User Experience

Howdy Steffen! First of all, for folks who may not know what BethBot is, it's an internal service that helps everyone at Hubspot write using our voice, tone, terminology, and style. You can learn more about BethBot in this interview that Beth Dunn (HubSpot's first content designer) did with our friends over at GatherContent.

 

I'm not aware of any immediate plans for updating BethBot, but even in its current state, it's already having a massive impact on freeing up the time of content designers—and others! I'm happy for services like BethBot to take on the simpler writing work that content designers (and engineers, and PMs, and marketers, and tech writers...) do in favor of giving them time back to focus on more strategic issuess and opportunities. That's part of how teams scale and solve harder problems for the people they serve.

TravisP
Contributor

[Closed] AMA — Content Design: Writing the User Experience

I would imagine it's tempting for a development team to say, "This already says exactly what it does." How do you demonstrate the value of content design for something that seems, on the surface, self-explanatory?

jcolman
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

[Closed] AMA — Content Design: Writing the User Experience

Great question, @TravisP! This is certianly something that content designers face regularly and that technical communicators faced long before them. The bottom line is that product teams often struggle to understand that they are not their own audience—and they never can be. Concepts that might seem simple and straightforward to the team may not resonate at all with users or customers.

 

Partnering with UX researchers and data scientists can help content designers make the case to their product team (and, likely, their leadership) that they're not building for themselves.