What is content design, and (why) does it matter?
A day job for the word nerds
For the past 7.5 years, I’ve worked in the same discipline as both an individual contributor (IC) and manager at Meta: Content Design. Actually, when I joined in June 2017, it was Content Strategy. Since we changed the title in 2020, I’ve often joked that we tweaked the wrong word—as far as corporate-speak goes, the word “strategy” could mean anything, but “content” even more so. It is perhaps the greatest irony of our practice that we’ve long struggled to succinctly capture what we do, because it’s supposed to be about simplifying complex ideas in digital environments through clear language.
There are a lot of ways to describe this work. One that’s always stood out to me, back in spring 2017 when I was researching it while interviewing for the (then Facebook) role, is “user experience for word nerds” (credit to Sara Getz, a current CD Director at Meta). “Design with words” is another good one. “In-product copywriting” is perhaps an oversimplified way to put it. We could keep going here, but we won’t. Suffice it to say that once I understood the fundamentals of the discipline, what appealed to me most was the way it allowed me to get deep into crafting quality experiences for products I found both fascinating and genuinely important to get right.
At Meta I’ve bounced from the Friending team to News to Social Impact to Generative AI, often stressing over seemingly trivial concerns like punctuation and capitalization because upwards of three billion people might read what I’d written. I’ve also stressed about less trivial concerns in my work, such as:
What’s the right way to tell my product team that the content experiment whose results they’re excited about only works because it’s created a dark pattern?
With the (somehow) limited resources we have in a massive company, what are the best monetization features we could build to help news publishers stem the bleeding from a wound that we as a company contributed to slicing open?
When we deprecate a product dedicated to local news, how should we communicate its disappearance to the people that rely on it?
When a company blasted for its purported role in the outcome of the 2016 US election decides to build out a dedicated results experience for the 2020 election that takes place during a global pandemic, what are all the possible scenarios that could play out and how do we build a messaging system that can flex to all of them and more?
If some urgent occurrence takes place in a local community (voting location changes, traffic jams, natural disasters, etc), how might we advocate for informational notifications to take precedent over whatever other notifications affected people get from friends, family, the pages they follow, and so on?
As we bring generative AI to the masses, how do we balance transparency into its workings with excitement over its possibilities with the often dangerous tendency of people to anthropomorphize the unknown?
And that’s just the output. It should come as no surprise to anyone that’s been a cog in a huge machine that a lot of the job ends up being about figuring out how to navigate bureaucracy well enough to give yourself a shot to push work across the finish line. Unfortunately, it’s been my observation that the unique strengths of most content designers—deep empathy, attention to detail, a clear feel for systems, exceptional writing chops—are the exact qualities that hold us back in the game within the game of exacting influence in large, product-driven organizations.
Over time I’ve seen a pattern of common refrains for content designers across the tech industry: pay us the same as product designers. Loop us in earlier. I have an opinion about the oxford comma. To varying degrees, these are reasonable statements to make. Say them enough without demonstrating substantial “impact” though, and they start to become real tired, real fast. And trust me, I get just as frustrated as the next word nerd when I’m treated as a content vending machine by my product partners, expected to fill in the blank without any context before a deadline that passed yesterday. I’m fortunate enough to have been in the Meta CD community, a group of some of the smartest, kindest, most thoughtful people you’ll find in tech, for much longer than I ever thought I would. But I’ll be the first to tell you our discipline has been bumping up against its ceiling for a while now, and that barrier has in many ways been self-created.
At its best, content design is fundamentally driven by sharp product sense. It’s about taking the annoying task a product manager or designer or engineer passes to you and sending the seemingly simple solution back to them packaged in a thoughtful, systemic approach to your shared problem space that says: here’s the sophisticated work I’m capable of doing. It’s about leveraging the same tactics as other well-established product functions—clear hypotheses, data-driven arguments, a discussion of tradeoffs, a knack for visual storytelling—to build a case for why your team should do the thing you feel is right. It’s about resisting the urge to be the language police and make others who also write and speak and think in English feel bad or lesser about their word choices just because they’re not a “content designer.” It’s about shedding the inferiority complex and focusing on the work.
There’s some really cool shit on the horizon for tech, and in fact some of that is already here: AI, spatial computing, augmented and virtual reality devices, interactive storytelling, and so on. These new paradigms need the strengths of content design to welcome people into their exciting possibilities while feeling safe, empowered, and grounded. And by leaning into this future, we’ll grow as a discipline—from one that designs primarily static UI content to one that shapes new dimensions of human-computer interaction. Instead of writing in-product content for a still 2D screen, we could and should and in some cases already are designing tone and response formatting for large language models, navigation patterns for immersive 3D worlds, voice-forward conversations with AIs, the ground rules for interactive media, and much more.
Content design has come a long way since the early days of the Internet, but it’s still a niche role that struggles to articulate its value and even justify its existence. As someone who’s been practicing it for a good chunk of time now, I’d love to see the discipline collectively seize the opportunity at hand and evolve in exciting ways, rather than seeing its most senior and talented people either burn out or simply switch into other more lucrative disciplines because the self-imposed ceiling was too hard to break through. I think content design, however you define it, does matter. But no one else will think so unless we commit to proving it.