Design is Content is Design
We need to talk about how content design plays way too small a role on most design teams. Some content designers support 10 or 100 designers.
To understand why, let’s look at how we got here.
A designer’s history of every tech company ever
Tech companies typically start when a developer–or a group of them–creates a product. They’re fortunate enough to find product-market fit. People want to pay money for a thing that the devs used their coding skills to create! It’s very exciting.
Now they have a company. And it just so happens that since this successful company was founded by developers, and since the thing that brings in money is something that those developers made with their coding skills, the company is focused around engineering.
It makes sense, right? Engineering is the practice that enabled people to create this product, and this company, out of nothing.
Eventually, a few things happen:
The developers realize they don’t want to spend their time designing interfaces, or they’re not convinced that they’re coming up with the best designs.
So they hire a designer.
They value this designer’s specialized skills in “making things look nice,” but design isn’t a focus when it comes to staffing, organizing work, and getting a say in the strategic direction of the product.
It’s still an engineering-focused company: when leadership thinks about staffing and organizing the work, they prioritize engineering.
Despite this, over time, as the design work grows, the design team does too. They grow in numbers, as well as influence. They may even begin to influence the business and the product at a strategic level. It’s awesome.
Then a few more things happen:
The designers realize they don’t want to spend their time writing, or they’re not convinced that they’re coming up with the best language for their product.
So they hire a writer (who may have the title of content designer).
They value the content designer’s specialized skills in “making things sound good,” but content isn’t a focus when it comes to staffing, organizing work, and getting a say in the strategic direction of the product.
This pattern plays out in tech companies over and over.
But why does it happen this way? Why do engineering-focused companies hire designers with visual design skills before they hire writers?
(Visual) design rules
I want to state for the record that all designers, whether they’re called UX designers, content designers, UI designers, or whatever, are fundamentally problem-solvers. Even if the people hiring them don’t know it, the main value designers bring to the company is their ability to understand and solve user problems.
That’s why, when we hire designers today, we look for skills like research, iteration, stakeholder management, project management—all skills that help them deliver this value of problem-solving.
But still, what typically prompts that little engineering team to hire its first designer is the feeling that they need help making the product look good. This leads them to hire visual designers.
Note: For the remainder of this article, I’ll be using the term “visual designer” to refer to a traditional product/UX designer with skills in visual design including creating high-fidelity mockups and deep expertise in software like Sketch and Figma. I do this to distinguish them from content designers, because the latter should also be thought of as “product” or “UX” designers, just with a different skillset.
Now, you might think I’m about to criticize engineers for hiring visual designers first. But I’m not. Heck, they built a whole company, didn’t they? Good for them! Engineering is their discipline. It’s the lens they view the world from. We design folk are still figuring out what UX is. Those technical founders can be forgiven for maybe having a limited view while they were busy building companies and giving us all jobs.
But times have changed. Tech has matured. It’s time to acknowledge and question this visual-first mindset:
Often a company will build an entire visual design team before they hire their first writer. Is this the right approach?
Which should come first, visual design or content design?
How products deliver value
To answer this question, let’s ask another question: What is the most valuable aspect of your product: its visual aesthetic or its content?
To frame this question another way: does your product deliver more value as a visual artifact or as a communication vehicle between your company and your user?
There’s no question in my mind that a product’s visual aesthetic, which includes color, typography, layout, and whitespace, is immensely valuable. I’ve even seen companies that were able to quantify the value of their products’ aesthetic in dollars. Many, many dollars.
On the other hand, it should be obvious that the product’s effectiveness at enabling communication between the business its users is many times more valuable than its visual aesthetic. If you need hard data of content’s value, see the real-world examples in my article “The ROI of Content Design.”
Yet we persist in staffing visual design before we staff content designers.
What if the priority that we give to visual design is simply a holdover from the early days of tech, a product of the nascent company’s first impulse to get help making the product look better, when in reality hiring a specialist in language—a content designer—would deliver much more value?
Why not both?
My questions above are kind of trick questions. I’ve framed visual design and content design as alternatives to each other, when in reality they should never be separated.
And while my completely unbiased opinion is that content design delivers potentially more value than visual design, I’m not advocating for content-only design teams. I’m simply calling for more content design representation on design teams—at minimum, a good start would be to have a dedicated content designer for each product.
There’s lots of research showing that cross-functional teams excel in solving complex problems, just like the problems we’re solving when designing digital products.
In a future article, I plan to lay out arguments and data that support staffing cross-functional teams, and show what a content-first, cross-functional design process can look like.