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1	Thanks for your interest in The Question! Sign up to participate in future questions here. This file is the raw data from Episode 12, deep dive hosted on Feb 22, 2024 with Ben Callahan and Erin Starr White There are __ answers. The question this week was: ----- Erin and I were chatting this week about how there aren’t a lot of good examples of foundational content design influencing design systems. In fact, many of us working on design systems don’t actually know what content design is. So, I asked Erin to provide us with a definition for context: "Content design uses language to co-create digital experiences that are clear, concise, and useful. It’s a UX design discipline that pays attention to both the words and the structure they're a part of. This type of writing is informed by research data, strategy, business objectives, and an understanding of human behavior. It supports and guides users, fostering trust in a business and its products." Contrast this robust definition with what most systems do: include some subset of guidelines about voice and tone so we can check the “content” box for our system. This leaves a design system feeling more like containers to have content crammed into. Erin told me, “Easy reading is hard writing. Content Design views words very differently than a journalist, marketer, or lay writer does. We use them as a design tool.” With all of this as context, here is this week’s question: Are you satisfied with the level of influence content design plays in your design system? If yes, how has content guidance in your design system made your teams and products better? If no, what are the barriers to making this a reality and what do you wish you had?
2	Question 1: Are you satisfied with the level of influence content design plays in your design system?	Question 2: If yes, how has content guidance in your design system made your teams and products better? If no, what are the barriers to making this a reality and what do you wish you had?
3	No	We barely do any content design tbh. The Design System team is running an initiative where we meet with the team and try to establish patterns. Some of these patterns have to do with content. Once we agree on those patterns we capture them in confluence. Our storybook components are as flexible as we can make them. Our figma components are slightly more strict but with no content. Content lives in Confluence sadly.
4	No	I'd like to gain a better understanding of what content design is, with examples. However, I'd say a barrier of ours is that we don't currently have a content-focused team member that is contributing to the growth of our design system at this time, early into our maturity.
5	Yes	We are extremely lucky to have a dedicated content designer on the DS team (and even got a second one this year). Our content work extends beyond DS documentation: it coordinates with the larger content design team to incorporate overall content guidelines into the DS, it helps shapes the narrative around the DS through communications planning and execution, and shapes support and training material for extra tricky parts of the DS, through active and passive user feedback.
6	No	When at Salesforce, I feel words were generally used intentionally because we were a marketing team at heart. Consistency of the words, a focus on localization, and naming of the different parts of the UI were a key part of product delivery. Inconsistencies become costly since it's also the customers who create training videos; their cost to change their training is very high. At other companies since, words took less importance than features. I feel if the culture is towards rapid shipping, then the organization needs good guidelines and blessed terminology so teams can work independently. Also, Marketing and UX Researchers should be brought closer together to make each other aware of how language is being used.
7	No	The barrier is focus and prioritization and what I wish we had was designs and components that built up from our product content. We are an online education company with very specific products. One very clear example is we do not have design system items for displaying our core product offerings like courses, projects, tracks, etc.
8	Yes	Our content strategists have helped guide our design system by helping us to define microcopy standards and character length/limitations for elements such as buttons, labels, form fields, tooltips, etc.
9	No	The current synergy between content and DS is entirely too weak. There is some guidance, but it does not come from the source of the content, it's just designers' best guess of the nature of content, which doesn't line up. It causes a lot of issues starting from content length, supply of images, microcopy, etc. All of these affect the components used to display or accept the content and a stronger coupling is needed. Albeit it's more a communication issue than a design issue, we're trying to build systems where the communication has to happen before the design. -Arko
10	No	The main barrier to this is having clients that understand the value of content design and the time/budget to make it part of the process.
11	No	I’ve created 50+ design systems and language content was limited to me developing the voice and tone. High-level guidelines were created– a huge piece to developing the language of the DS + Brand but a dedicated content owner on the product side is rare. My last org had a content person but they were not designing language on the front end. We had writers for marketing but they were not tasked to do product language. Designers will follow guidelines if they gave them but there needs to be extensive examples and a method to quickly test if your content is working.
12	No	We don't have content guidelines and often leave it to the last minute, and by that decision-fatigue is too strong to care much about it =(
13	I don't currently have a design system to be influenced by content design (looking for my next designer role).	Having copywriters/content creators involved in the design system creation process.
14	Yes	On our team, her job title is technically "UX copywriter" but most of us think of her as our content designer. She works both in the design system and in hi-fi product design to ensure consistent patterns in how and where certain types of information should display, consistent tone of voice and use of symbols etc. She has also used our design system components to create a content pattern library for certain components to be pre-configured with content that is used over and over in the product prototypes. We would move much slower without her.
15	Yes	The design system I am currently working with has weekly open office hours with the content design team that reviews, critiques, and helps with content in the high fidelity designs. It's very effective and a great way to learn more about content design as a product designer. In the past, I have not experienced this level of dedication to the content design. I have had to write my own copy and come up with my own content which was nerve racking. I like having a team so that I can focus on the experience and interaction. I can see in this current team how much the content can relate back to the user experience changing the ui needs in the screen based on previous flows.
16	Yes	It's made our system/team better because it creates usability and consistency. Not only is the system itself (in its documentation-consumable form) easy to navigate and understand, the actual components and assets INSIDE the system are just as cohesive, using the same vocabulary, same casing rules, same hard-stop rules, same best practices (content design-ception!). For us, content is deeply ingrained in our design system (perhaps because a content designer is writing it, lol). Each component has a content tab with general guidance, casing rules, rec' character counts, and information matrices. We have a whole Messages pattern section that formulaically breaks down the entire concept of messages in a digital product: what kinds are there (error, warning, info, success, destructive action confirmation, statuses, etc.)? What components can be used for each (inline alert, badge, modal)? How does our visual representation of sentiment play into this? How should they sound? Even our button group gets a little philosophical with defining and assigning "scopes of action" for buttons and how those scopes should be ordered. What this does is paint a picture of the possibilities for design system users. Look at how easy and seamless your product can be! Look at how nice it sounds! Look at how helpful! When content design is good, it's actually quite unnoticeable (easy reading is hard writing indeed!). But that content design legwork has to be done to get it seamless, and it has to come from the "roots"--as in, systematically. Integration of content design has also aligned our system semantically in incredible, extremely useful ways. A badge is a badge is a badge (not a pill, or a chip, or something else). Communication is notoriously difficult sometimes with design system work between teams, and being aligned is INCREDIBLY helpful to cut down spin/churn.
17	No	We have content specialists working in the organisation, but none of them are focused on or involved with design system work. We've found 2 people that are specializing in UX writing and they have expressed interest in helping shape content design standards in our design system which is great!
18	Yes	Content design plays a huge role and is embedded throughout our documentation, not just as a 'tone of voice' section of our guidance site. Each of our library components and templates also includes content design guidance, which is treated with equal importance as the rest of our usage guidance. We also have an overall 'vocabulary' section highlighting our different terms and how we format things like dates or shorthand content. Our content design teams are consistently iterating, supporting and evolving our content guidance. Doing this has had a huge impact on the quality of our product, as there are no questions about how we speak to our customers in different situations, creating a unified brand from end to end.
19	No	We do have some content guidance that improves our product, but we could always use more. I prefer to start content-first, but it's not a common practice internally and a lot of design happens without real content, which I think is unfortunate. I wish we had more rigorous requirements that included content alongside design and development.
20	No	We don't have any content designers, content strategists, UX writers, etc. We're a small team of product designers, all generalists. Not many of my designers have strong content/UX writing skills. Those of us who do shoulder the burden of trying to create good content guidelines, but it's always something that feels incomplete or underbaked.
21	No	Content is usually involved after a component has already been designed. This is too late in my opinion. Having content folks who deeply understand design systems is very important. Their job isn't just about reviewing documentation, they should be a core driver throughout the component creation process.
22	No	Siloed work. A lack of understanding of the importance of content and design working together from the beginning. Content as an afterthought and/or not understanding the expertise of a content designer. Process at the beginning isn’t clear or established. Rush/truncated timelines that cut these essential tasks from planning and execution.
23	Yes	Content Design has made our work much more efficient. We now leverage a pattern library to expedite the building of pages. Consistency in personas and scenarios makes our prototypes easier to build and more cohesive for viewers.
24	No	My design system historically hasn't had content guidance, BUT I work with Erin, so all of that is changing. We have a robust plan to move our system forward leaps and bounds in 2024.
25	Yes	We're building robust content guidance into our DS — A11y is very much a part of this. Some systems we're looking to are Spectrum, Base, and Atlassian.
26	No	building one now!
27	No	Our Design System has content guidance, but the adoption or awareness of our Content Guidance should have more influence. As a Design System Lead, this is not my area of expertise but would like to delves deeper and help drive organizational change in partnership with my Content Strategist.
28	I've never even worked with content designers, so, unfortunately, the topic is far away from my experience. Of course, I'll be glad to know about it!	The team was too small
29	No	We do have content designers, but their work isn't that closely connected with our design system team. Content designers are working in product teams and for their priorities. But they themselves as a group do maintain content guidelines that include instructions and for example also ready to use error messages for common use cases etc. I'd love to work more closely with them and build for example a "UI messages system" as a technical solution. Now it's mostly copy-n-paste system.
30	No	Oddly the challenge isn't in the number of content writers we have but in how we coordinate with them. Like many aspects of my design system team, we have all the resources we need but struggle to collaborate appropriately. I am hopeful that this will change, as I do believe that how we communicate is as important as the assets/utilities/components we produce.
31	No	Definitely lacking. We give guidelines on min/max characters to facilitate aesthetics over robust content design. Regional language and tone aren’t considered very well either. Also the majority of our system deals with quick turn marketing content. There seems like a pretty large contrast between content design and what we deliver. We’re not doing a lot of storytelling.
32	Content design has not been part of the design systems I've worked with.	I know how important UX writing is for a product. We know this at the agency. But I wouldn't know how to package such thing into a design system. I want to learn more!
33	Yes	thats the real point where we actaully find out how our basic items are working, its a great test. And we usually learn from it, not just from design system POV but from UI and UX concepts as well. It can also bring us closer to how actual users experience our products in a not-so-laboratory view. However we are at really begining, so we need still more input from content design, because our system is far from readyyet, a lot of things are missing.
34	No	We're still figuring out how to best integrate content into our system
35	No	For us, content doesn't have a single structure. It comes from multiple sources with varying opinions (and levels of stubbornness) which makes the messaging - although arguably "related" - disjointed at the core.
36	No	The head of design is not allowing these opportunities
37	Yes	I answered yes, but we could always do better. Over my years at my company, we have watched the content practice dwindle, so I do fear that at large our leadership is missing the value that content designers bring to the equation. Our system does have a dedicated content designer. Our guidelines include the standard content principles, style guidelines, UI terms glossary. Additionally, we provide content guidance for components and content patterns (phrases, sentence constructions and language templates we can reuse across experiences). We also cover special topics such as emoji usage, error message content, and language for HTML elements to ensure a good experience for non-visual users. While our component designers often translate the Design API into the documented guidance, our content designer has set the framework how we document and consults/reviews to ensure the guidance is user-friendly. Our content designer also supports contributing teams through documenting their experience-specific guidance, provides 1:1 and asynchronous feedback and guidance on experiences. Our content designer has added value to iterating on our doc site IA and content structures as we've received feedback through usability research.
38	No	It’s hard to communicate with the team about content and common language use.
39	No	We have not a had a content designer in the team until very recently, and the first priority for them will be documentation and comms. Also, we've been constrained by not having a robust and adaptable (by contributing content designers outside of the system team) documentation site platform. Building micro-copy into components, or defining maximum character counts within components, is so much less important than displaying best practice, do's and don'ts in examples which use the system, so it's really important that we can scale these contributions, otherwise our internal team content designer will not be able to cover the territory alone.
40	No	More leadership support and understanding of the importance of content design
41	No	Knowing how to start, when to collaborate and fully understanding "how" content design impacts the design system. When does structured content play into the design system? How can designers take that into account? How can/does content guidance impact components? How and when should designers take that into account when designing? A barrier we have is just documenting a more solid process that both content designers and visual designers can follow when starting a design system
42	Yes	Having content (Erin) pour into our system and help streamline the content within it has been so important and we are just getting started. Having a one stop shop for those standards will pay off tremendously, for even just the small questions we are asked on a regular basis that aren't specific to UX or design, but are part of the grey area where our worlds overlap.
43	No	I answered 'no' as our team previously did not have a content design specialist. Our system is lacking core content instruction and guidance. However, we now do have a Content Designer (yay!) but we are finding there's many projects which they can have a big influence on right now. Having them focus on content principles and system oriented tasks just isn't a top priority right now in comparison. A dedicated Content specialist for our system's team would be the most ideal situation. Where they create content principles and work with us on documentation and new components to ensure we are tackling information architecture, copy, tone and user flows in the best manner.
44	No	we have a very large state-wide footprint, its going to be practivally impossible to onboard everyone. We need to start small
45	No	We've done a lot of usability testing that has demonstrated that poor UX writing is one of our biggest weaknesses, but I'm struggling to figure out the best way to communicate this in a traditional design system reference site.
46	No response	No response
47	No	Persistent mental concept that content is only focused on language and writing.
48	No	Not including Content practitioners in DS to begin with. General attitude that Content exists outside of UX and that content practitioners don't have enough experience/insight to be seen as relevant partners in this field.
49	The design systems I’m involved in are still new. Have not gotten that far where content has any influence. Except for determining spacing and font sizes.	N/a
50	Yes	Having reusable components means content design is a requirement in my opinion. At my current role we create user guides for developers and designers to reference as a truth of source, here we cover everything from design guidelines, accessibility, description of the component, when to use it, when not to use it, special variations, and content guidelines such as character limitations, content styling (paragraph, bullet points, etc) and again accessibility callouts. I typically love to have content 50% there before starting a page design
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