Why do content design and documentation matter?

As a content design and development leader, I’ve long been interested in the importance of aligning documentation to user needs and organizational outcomes. And recently, in an article about layoffs at a major technology company, content designer was one of the roles specifically mentioned where people were impacted.

In the broader world, I wondered how many truly understand the role of content designer. Even to me, a content leader, I wondered if a consensus exists on what it means in our profession.

Understatement: There are a lot of “stakeholders” in an organization who create content.

Observation: There’s a lot of disconnect and inconsistency across all of that content for the intended audiences of it.

If these statements are unclear, consider your customers, clients, users, employees, partners, and prospects. In many cases, a customer of one of your products and its content might be a prospect for another product, service, or feature. Consider the content needs — for information, communication, and documentation — for each of these audiences.

Do you have a content strategy for all of the different user experiences? Or is there a lack of a comprehensive strategy for all of that content getting planned for, designed, developed, delivered, measured and assessed?

Designing and developing content

Content designers create content for a range of products, businesses, and customer experiences. The work and responsibilities can vary widely. This is likely part of the reason why content receives a lack of understanding and prioritization. And because much of the content is often created in silos, it is not always connected or consistent. There may also be a lack of awareness or sense of urgency for content work to be coordinated as a critical need to the business.

Content should always be identified as essential to ensuring greater customer satisfaction. But the details about what this means largely depends on where in an organization the content is getting designed, developed and delivered.

Many teams in an organization are creating content. Marketing teams have content designers creating content for prospective customers. Design teams have content designers creating content for inclusion in user interfaces (UIs). Development teams and shared services teams have content designers creating online help and user guides.

Designers view content design as a discipline in design, whereas most technical writers are embedded in product development teams or allocated as a shared service. So, the clarity between content design and content development is frequently murky, as is defining and knowing who is doing what to ensure content quality and consistency across user experiences.

I’ve seen many examples of designers not aware of the content developers/tech writers who create the help that’s embedded within the applications that the designers are working on. And similarly, I’ve experienced many instances of writers who do not collaborate with the designers who are working directly with product managers and developers focused on their products and user experiences.

But all writers know that they need to think about their intended audience if they are going to create content that is actually useful and engaging. Long before folks were referring to user needs and user experience, writers have been making rule number one, “Know your audience.”

Nevertheless, there are huge opportunities to do better for the intended audiences and users of products and services when it comes to design and content. One of the ways forward is to identify the disconnects between design and content in terms of the work — the people with job roles for that work and the content they produce.

Content and content types differ by the intents and objectives for it. Obviously, right? A scripted marketing video, a tooltip in a user interface, and a technical user guide are all forms of content.

But in the context of user experiences, content means all of the information that comes in many forms (and modalities) that should help all of your intended audiences to be more effective in completing their objectives.

Confusing job titles

As already noted, being a content designer can mean creating content for a range of areas for a product, a business, or customer experience. And the names for jobs around content can be ambiguous, which adds to the lack of clarity as to who is creating what.

There are content creators for in-app content, product documentation, training and enablement, customer support, and a whole lot more. And not everyone calls it content.

There are content designers, content developers, and content strategists. And many content creators perform all three of these roles to varying degrees.

Marketing teams have content design roles, and so do many design and development teams. Many content-related job roles across an organization refer to content in various ways such as “technical content,” “tech comm,” “tech pubs,” and “documentation.” For much of my career, “information developer” was part of my job title. And some people I’ve worked with refer to content-related job roles as “user assistance.”

Job titles with the word “content” and job roles where content creation is part of the job are commonly spread across an organization. Without clear and intentional collaboration efforts across the job roles there are risks in disconnected content-related workstreams that your intended audiences may experience.

Consider some of the common types of content that users — colleagues, customers, potential customers, and partners — experience:

• Marketing content
• Customer support content (possibly in a searchable knowledge base)
• Technical content (product documentation, release notes, and many other kinds of content for deploying, managing, using, extending, and integrating, tuning, and troubleshooting, products and services)
• User interface (UI) content
• Sales and training content for staff and for customers

Are the content creators, regardless of their job titles for each area, working together or do they even know about each other? Is there someone leading a content strategy across all of this content? Does anyone have the Content Strategist job title to lead the effort? Frequently not.

Does all of this content have a consistent set of terminology? Possibly, if there’s a resource for content creators to use and align with.

Is anyone ensuring consistency? Do companies have content strategists or anyone else whose role it is to do this across an organization? Probably not.

And the overlaps occur at both the industry and individual organizational levels so that when people see a job opportunity for a content designer it’s not always clear what the job entails or where it fits within the organization.

Who is your user? Who is your audience?

At the heart of this all is what writers have always known. You need to know your audience — to empathize and understand their needs and challenges— in order to create usable, valuable, and effective content. And to know your audience, you need to be curious, considerate, proactive and persistent.

You need to work with and listen to what your stakeholders say and seek out real customer usage and user feedback. And you make these efforts because:

• Content is a part of each step of a user journey, enquiry, objective, workflow, and job to be done.
• Content might not be in all of the places that you think you know those audiences need or could benefit by content that helps them and your business results.
• Disconnects in the design and development of the different content costs money. It increases costs in customer support, and it decreases revenue opportunities in lack of user engagement and product adoption.

Let’s use a few examples:

• A website that includes links to older versions of documents than the versions linked from the actual product UI.
• A customer support knowledge base with information that is out of date.
• A link in a product user interface that points to the wrong content.
• Inconsistent content used for the same element or task in an application.

These types of issues can all be prevented if everyone is aligned, collaborating, and has a strategy, resources, processes, and culture of making connections.

Some of the ways that content design matters for your users and to your business is to provide content that:

• Supports and preempts common user errors and issues by providing it in UIs to prevent and/or resolve them.
• Explains what a user will or can use, see, or interact with to nurture trust and understanding for people to engage with what it is you’re showing them or asking or offering them to use.
• Offers users a way to understand not just the data shown in a dashboard or a report or a visualization but what are the sources of data and how it was collected, possibly modified, combined and used in the analysis. Content should also explain any limitations in the data.

Here’s just one way to lower the cost of a common issue…

Find the top issue in customer support that frequently occurs and has a simple solution where content — information — in the right place(s) at the right time(s) would or could prevent users from hitting the issue or resolving it without calling customer support. Get that content into those right places by collaborating with the key stakeholders to make it happen, starting with the product manager to get alignment and buy-in to make it happen.

Support teams read the docs and frequently use the content to assist customers who call them. Any instance where the support resolution is a reference to the product documentation where the answer is provided is an opportunity to find ways to make that content more easily findable for the customers.

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There’s a special interest group in the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) named “SIGDOC” (https://sigdoc.acm.org/about/history/). It was originally named for “documentation” but it redefined the DOC to “design of communication” in 2003.

On its website: “The newer name for what DOC represents is a good reflection of the real world of current technical communication and of how both industry and academia have modified their scope and definition of former technical communication and computer science departments.”

While this newer definition and scope is far wider and perhaps less clear, I believe that it strongly recognizes the reality and supports the need for broader multidisciplinary collaboration, especially as many or even most people probably have no idea that human computer interaction (HCI) and design are largely synonymous. My point is that designing the best products and user experiences requires a content strategy and proactive cross-functional collaboration.

Moral of the story for designers and writers?

Regardless of organizational structures, designers and writers need to collaborate. They both need to work closely with all stakeholders. The list of who that might be includes product managers, developers, testers, people from sales, marketing and customer accounts, trainers, and customer support specialists. And it might include folks from operations, security, legal, compliance and regulatory affairs.

We all need to be proactive and persistent to get iterative input and feedback from our stakeholders to ensure we are delivering accurate, up-to-date, and consistent content in all of our interfaces and documentation.

We need to apply design and documentation processes for planning, creating, reviewing, revising, publishing, and measuring our content and its impact on customer success.

Leadership buy-in would be nice. And having a seat at the leadership table to define and require processes that ensure content is designed, developed, reviewed, tested, and delivered as part of a product or service to be considered “done” would be optimal.

What might the to-be state or north star look like? Picture this…

• Templates that provide guidance and ensure content consistency.
• Sprints that include requirements and dependencies for content design, development, and delivery.
• Review processes and playbacks that ensure alignment and quality of content.
• Product and services teams not shipping their offerings until they are “Done, done, done” — implemented, tested, documented.
• Engaging feedback mechanisms that motivate users to use them and provide feedback about the content, or lack of, or accuracy of it and its part in their user experience.
• Active communication with stakeholders and end users so they know they’re the focus and they’re appreciated.
• Content that increases product adoption and customer satisfaction.
• Content that decreases costs for customer support and that preempts and resolves customer issues.

The returns on your investments for ensuring end to end content quality, completeness, and consistency will reduce costs, increase revenue, and build better organizational bridges for optimal stakeholder collaboration, engagement and productivity.

Reach out to your leaders and make the case for the value and opportunity of a content strategy that will connect the content across client journeys and user experiences. Seek ways to get buy-in to make it happen. Provide examples that illustrate the value proposition so that it’s not just theoretical. Work with your colleagues to find ways to understand and improve the current state of affairs. Collaborate to define, work on, and achieve direct results.

All of these efforts will improve business results in the form of lower customer support costs and higher customer satisfaction. It will also improve employee satisfaction for the content creators and stakeholders as their work becomes more closely connected. Employees will be able to co-create shared objectives that help the intended audiences and see their own work make more of an impact.

Rob Pierce was a design manager and a content design leader for Merative from July 2022 to March 2023. Previously, Rob was an IBMer since 2003, in various roles for information development, content design, management and content strategy. His next content-related role will be noted soon!