For the past 4 years, I’ve been fortunate to work on a variety of experiences as a horizontal content designer. I’ve worked on account opening flows, AI chatbot experiences, fraud associate experiences, and a ton in between. Each team I’ve partnered with has had a slightly different process and none of them had much experience (if any at all) partnering with a content designer like me. Here, I want to focus on how I want to work as a Content Designer, because when these 3 things happen, I’ve enjoyed the work and produced the best results.

1. Help identify valuable customer and business problems with business partners

Business analysts aren’t the only ones who can identify opportunities. Anybody working at your company or even using your products and services can tell you something they think should be better. The best companies know this and enact policies and processes that allow for this to happen. Google was famous for allowing “20% time” which led to multiple new businesses and millions of dollars in additional revenue streams.

Don’t rely on your VP’s for great ideas. Let the folks closer to the work identify their own problems to solve. Just make sure those problems roll up to organizational imperatives or broader goals (you know — increase revenue, reduce attrition…the obvious ones).

Invite your content designers to partner with the smart people currently identifying which opportunities to solve. Within the first several months of starting as a content designer at a large financial institution, I asked my manager why people couldn’t open a checking, savings, and credit card account all at the same time. It’s an obvious idea, and as the content designer for the Bank account opening team, it was obvious that nobody was working on this idea.

Frankly, I wasn’t in the position to propose this as a project and definitely didn’t have the influence to make it happen. I had to wait 2 years before a Marketing partner approached my product manager to inquire about the feasibility. The back of the napkin math was in the billions (with a B). My product partner replied that it would take 3 years because the tech stacks for Bank and Card applications were so far apart.

Thankfully, I made sure I was in the room during the initial meetings. “Wait a minute, there’s another way.” They let the content designer speak. “We could solve it with content. What if we put the 2 applications back-to-back and combined them with a content bridge that basically says ‘thanks for applying for the credit card, now fill out a few more things to open your checking account’?” Essentially we could bookend the experience with content that made it clear you were opening both a credit card and a checking account, and we could bridge the two technically different applications with content. The marketing partner asked the product manager how long that would take. “3 months,” he replied.

That was enough to set the wheels in motion. What seemed like hundreds of Bank, Card, and Marketing stakeholders convened over several months to hash out the broad strokes. Eventually, the entire design experience was left in the hands of one content designer and one UX product designer. Now, I’m not saying the entire initiative was my idea, but I sure was glad that I was in the room during the early discussions of the opportunity. While designing the experience, I had a lot more context on the business opportunity (from Marketing) and feasibility issues (from tech and product). Now, I just had to bring the customer’s perspective to the experience to make this work.

2. Collaborate with UX/UI product designers to create prototypes

Every product designer I’ve collaborated with has been super open and excited to partner with me as a content designer. Many designers considered content to be a weakness of theirs and were happy to work with someone who had content design as a strength. For them, words didn’t come naturally and it was the hard part of their job. So, when we got to create prototypes in Sketch or Figma, I got to focus on my strengths, and they got to focus on theirs.

The best partnerships were when we used a content-first design approach. We would open up a Google doc and start brainstorming together on the words of the experience.

• What were the customers’ goals?
• Where were they coming from?
• What were they expecting?
• What questions might they have at each moment of the experience?

We’d type out everything we could think of, and naturally, we’d start to envision how the experience would come together digitally.

Content design is not meant to be done in a vacuum. If you expect your content designer to write all the words and send them over to the designer, you’re doing it wrong. As a content designer, I want to be in jam sessions with my designers while they’re trying to figure out which component to use, or the spacing between the content and CTA button. If you’re doing it right, the content designer will learn UX and your UX designer will become a better content designer.

3. Celebrate the successful outcomes with business, tech and other stakeholders

Once the designs are finalized, reviewed, and released, I want to be included in the celebration with the rest of the team. Don’t just shout out the Product and Engineering teams. Don’t give all the credit to the Design Director who manages the portfolio of work. Celebrate the designers who created the prototypes and include the content designer who helped.

For the massive Bank and Card cross-selling project, the analysts had predicted that a 1–3% uptake of our proposed solution would result in billions of dollars of additional deposits. This was based on the “painted door” test they had conducted to gather data for the business case. The UX Designer and I had tested multiple iterations of our designs with users, and based on that feedback, 1–3% sounded low. Users had been confused about a few things in our initial designs, and we had iterated to make the content easier to understand. When the results from the live test came back, we were both super proud that our design had resulted in an 8–9% uptake! We had tripled the analysts expectations. That’s worth celebrating!

As a content designer, I want to help define the problem, collaborate closely with a designer, and be included in the celebration of the success. That’s all I want. That’s what will energize me at work. Empower me to identify the problem, develop various solutions with a designer, and celebrate the success. If you let me do that, I’ll improve our customers’ experience and make the business money (maybe even more than they expect).

I’m Shawn Roe, and I’m a Content Designer and Design Strategist. I use the power of words to create simple, useful experiences that make businesses money. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Check out these other articles I’ve written:

• How I work as a UX Writer — 7 principles that guide how I work and a few stories as well.
• UX Design is Not Graphic Design; It’s Business Strategy — the difference between design as a strategy and design as simply aesthetics.
• How I use content-first design to influence strategy — the power of starting with words to create an experience.