Content First Approach in Design: Collaborating with Content Strategists and UX Writers

Words are a universal way of communicating. At Google, they help us understand the details of how a design works and feels before translating that into a solid product.

As a designer, I often work with a UX writer to revise the copy in my design, but before designing anything, I would typically start with a content first approach in which I use writing as part of my design process to understand what is needed in a design and have found use of it in multiple ways, whether as a way to map user journeys and frame the product story before proceeding with higher fidelity designs. UX writers and content strategists do the same in that they look at the big picture of what a design is trying to convey and then using the appropriate language to guide the user towards the central goal.

The content-first approach works for collaboration in that we both emphasize on building out the structure of a design and how the content will presented. The UX writer can understand the whole design and provide language that is based on the context, problem and user. They are able to refine and craft words in ways that a designer might not be able to which makes them really valuable to a product team. They are the stewards/stewardess of how the content sounds to create an unified voice in your product.

Here are a few ways the content first approach helps collaboration with a UX writer:

Organizing content more effectively- For me, immediately visualizing something in a digital format such as Sketch, can be time consuming because I have a tendency to make it look fleshed out even though the intent was to generate many ideas, fast.

When I start out the design, I don’t use placeholder text. A problem with using placeholder text is that it isn’t a realistic appearance of what people are actually going to see when interacting with the product. It makes designers in lazy in creating relevant content that will be needed for the final output and it certainly doesn’t help engineers in that they may not understand the significance of a design because the content that is part of a design isn’t there. I focus on fleshing out the content based on the design itself. This includes where I am in the design, and what is…