UX CONTENT RESOURCES
Product management and design can often have an adversarial relationship. It’s a shame, because ultimately the two groups are achieving the same goal: trying to create the best product possible. But while many PMs do a good job in working with designers, UX content is often seen as a support role within that design space, or disregarded entirely.
We think that’s a mistake. Content is a critical part of any product strategy and should be treated as one. PMs looking to maximize their success should be working closely and effectively with their UX content team members, but too often the impact of UX content is underestimated and left until the last minute.
PMs should learn these skills, especially now when generative AI is democratizing content creation. Knowing how to control that content, maintain quality at scale, and recognize good content from bad, are skills every product manager should learn.
In this article we’ll explore:
UX content professionals and product managers have close relationships. However, this still doesn’t stop UX content being often seen as a support role within the design space or disregarded entirely.
To be clear, we believe this puts product success at risk. According to our salary and industry survey, product managers topped the list of people with whom content designers collaborate.
But those same UX content designers cited their biggest challenges as not being included in meetings, lack of influence, and supporting too many projects.
Even though content designers say they work closely with PMs, this isn’t necessarily indicative of a good working environment. There are many great PMs who support UX content as a full part of design, but a close relationship can often reveal a dysfunctional team dynamic. Some survey respondents cited the fact they aren’t a part of the design process, are siloed, and have to spend too much time and energy explaining their role.
UX content might be seen as an annoying “requirement”, and so someone is hired to write strings so developers don’t have to. Sometimes technical team members are responsible for writing content, but the quality of that content isn’t managed or maintained. With so many goals to juggle, many PMs see the content as the purview of brand or even marketing.
In some cases, UX writers or content designers are engaged horizontally and are embedded in specific teams, and PMs didn’t ask for them. Without a roadmap on how to work well together, the content is left to languish.
Another key issue is that content professionals are often seen as “wordsmiths”, to be used for editing instead of a full participant in the design process.
Product managers often have technical backgrounds and can participant in other activities such as coding, which may lead to an assumption that content is another activity that can be done by others. This is true – anyone can create UX content. But PMs need to understand there is an entire layer of best practice and strategy that underpins how content should be implemented in both a user interface and through a product in general.
How content drives product success is obvious: the more clear and helpful an experience, the more users feel they’re being taken care of. Better still if that content creates any type of emotional connection or anchor between the user and the product.
But why PMs specifically learn content design and UX writing skills?
As a PM, your decisions shape the user experience and the overall success of the product. Understanding UX content skills allows you to discern between good and bad content, ensuring that what goes live isn’t just functional but also engaging and effective. Good content is clear, concise, and user-focused, providing value without overwhelming the user. Bad content is often vague, cluttered, and disconnected from the user’s needs, leading to confusion and frustration.
The distinction between these two qualities often nuanced and difficult to recognize.
Recognizing good content involves understanding the principles of readability, tone, and user engagement. For instance, a well-crafted onboarding message can significantly improve user retention by making new users feel welcomed and guided.
Conversely, poorly written error messages can lead to user drop-offs and increased support queries. By mastering UX content skills, PMs can ensure that the content enhances the product rather than detracting from it, ultimately leading to a more polished and user-friendly experience.
Effective collaboration between PMs, designers, and developers is crucial for the seamless execution of product features. When PMs understand UX content principles, they can communicate more clearly and precisely with their teams. This shared understanding minimizes misinterpretations and streamlines the workflow, ensuring that content, design, and functionality align perfectly.
For example, when discussing a new feature, a PM with UX content skills can provide detailed content guidelines that fit within the design constraints and technical capabilities. This proactive approach reduces the back-and-forth often caused by vague or incomplete requirements. It also empowers the team to anticipate and address potential issues early in the development process. Clearer communication leads to fewer revisions, faster development cycles, and a more cohesive final product.
In many organizations, content, design, and technical teams operate in silos, leading to a fragmented user experience. PMs with UX content skills can bridge these gaps, fostering a more integrated and collaborative environment. This holistic approach ensures that every aspect of the product, from UI elements to backend functionality, works together harmoniously.
By understanding the nuances of each discipline, PMs can mediate and facilitate discussions that lead to better-aligned strategies. For instance, they can ensure that the tone and style of the microcopy match the visual aesthetics of the design while also being technically feasible. This alignment not only enhances the user experience but also boosts team morale, as each member feels their contributions are understood and valued.
Achieving product-market fit is the ultimate goal for any product manager. UX content skills play a crucial role in this by ensuring that the product’s messaging resonates with its target audience. Understanding user personas and their pain points allows PMs to craft content that speaks directly to the users’ needs and preferences, enhancing engagement and loyalty.
For example, a PM who can create compelling user stories and scenarios is better equipped to validate assumptions about user needs and behaviors. This user-centric approach helps in fine-tuning the product to better fit the market demand. Moreover, effective content can differentiate your product in a crowded marketplace, making it more appealing to potential users and stakeholders.
Usability is a key factor in the success of any product, and content plays a significant role in enhancing usability. PMs with UX content skills can ensure that the content is not just informative but also intuitive and easy to navigate. Clear, concise instructions, helpful tooltips, and well-structured navigation can significantly improve the user experience.
For instance, by understanding how users interact with content, PMs can design more effective onboarding processes, reducing the learning curve for new users. They can also create more intuitive error messages that guide users on how to correct mistakes, thereby reducing frustration.
By focusing on user satisfaction through thoughtful content design, PMs can drive higher engagement, reduce churn, and foster long-term loyalty.
While so much of the time implementing AI is spent on technical foundations (and rightly so), it’s surprising how little effort is spent actually considering the quality of the content that’s being created.
We like to differentiate between creating content with AI and creating content for AI. In both cases, product managers ought to be aware of potential problems, solutions, and unexpected obstacles that demand at least some knowledge of how to distinguish good content from bad.
When it comes to writing with AI, understanding how to create well-structured prompts goes beyond simply asking a chatbot to produce some content. Without a foundation in best practices, PMs won’t be able to distinguish the difference between good UI content and bad. It could be easy to focus on improving product delivery by using generative AI to create strings and other UI content, but without a quality layer.
However, it could be reasonable for PMs to expect that content designers and UX writers start using generative AI in their own day-to-day work to improve delivery cadence.
The relationship between PMs and content designers becomes more complex when considering how to implement features driven by Large Language Models.
Any good AI product or features requires a base layer of content to function properly. That content also needs to be structured appropriately, organized, labelled, and governed as part of a regular process.
How and where that content appears may require the involvement of content designers, particularly if any user interface text is involved that explains the function and limitations of the feature to users.
A growing discipline among organizations creating and training their own Large Language Models is in using content designers to create training data sets as examples for optimal content.
This is where content design plays a specific and key role. Content designers “think” in content, they understand how to structure content and make it organized and retrievable. For instance, models might be designed to retrieve small chunks of text from a larger body. Being able to structure and write that content in such a way that small pieces make sense sans context is a job best suited for content designers.
The instructions given to Large Language Models are written in plain, detailed language – a craft in which content designers excel. As a PM, it makes sense to make content designers your allies here.
We don’t mean to suggest PMs should learn every UX content skill under the sun. But there are some areas that it would pay to learn more.
A foundation in UX writing is often enough for a PM to get started. Even simple principles such as understanding how UX writing differs from copywriting, how to write for various components, principles such as front-loading or progressive disclosure, etc, are enough to recognize and check whether content meets minimum requirements.
But PMs would also benefit from going beyond these fundamentals and starting to learn how different components and tones require different approaches.
For instance, a modal letting a user know they are about to perform a critical action should be written differently from a tooltip. Which principles should be used? How should the sentence be structured? Which words should be used on the CTA? Product managers are busy, spending their team spread across dozens of problems with minimal time to solve them. Yet ignoring UX writing details can often lead to further and larger product problems later that spill into other teams as well.
Beyond the fundamentals of UX writing, PMs would benefit by adopting and taking the principles of content design to heart.
Though some might use the terms UX writing and content design interchangeably, we’d prefer to think of content design as the practice of considering content within the design process itself. In this way, UX writing isn’t simply filling in the blanks left by designers during the design process, but as a foundational part of that design from the very beginning.
In general, this means creating and delivering content through the product in a way that serves the user best. It means giving them what they need, when they need it. It means being able to see content as inseparable from the design itself.
Words and visuals work together – one can’t change without affecting the other. PMs ought to think carefully about this whenever suggesting even the smallest of changes.
Something PMs ought to keep in mind – and expect from their UX content team members – is that content research begins early and never ends. Beginning UX content research early gives product a foundation in how users talk, grounding any design decisions in their own vocabulary.
But this speaks to a larger issue: UX content research is often profoundly misunderstood and can hide critical product risks if left unchecked.
Testing without content is so ineffective that you may as well not test at all. The principles of content design show us that form and content can’t be separated – users don’t interact with a product based on their visuals alone, they take in every piece of content at once, words included.
Ignoring content in testing hides problems that could easily be fixed. Unfortunately, this often means A/B testing is seen as the “appropriate” place for content testing. But this testing is often specific, focused on individual words or phrases. If the content problems are more structural (such as the amount of instructions on a screen, or how those instructions are delivered across an experience), they are much harder to diagnose.
A PM’s currency is the ability to find problems quickly. Testing without content robs you of that resource.
Another key misunderstanding of content research is that it’s assumed we can simply ask users what they think of the content. Not only does this prime the user to give a response, but it also ignores more effective ways to discover a disconnect between the users’ expectations and what the product actually does.
Understanding this isn’t just the purview of design teams. Product managers involved in watching usability tests need to recognize and understand when the right questions are – or aren’t – being asked as it pertains to content.
Although the use of LLMs go further than chatbots, PMs would be wise to consider how basic conversation design skills contribute to a more nuanced experience for users. Too many AI features interact as a “wrapper” around an LLM, which lead to degredated and generic interactions.
Finding a middle ground between an AI-powered conversation, and a guided experience, is crucial for understanding how chatbot tech can work most effectively.
Although we consider product content a critical part of overall product strategy, content strategy as a whole is a complete and distinct practice.
In-product content fulfills part of a role within content strategy as a whole, but it expands well beyond UI. A good first step would be reading about the fundamentals of content strategy and identifying which aspects of their role support this practice.
In practice, PMs should consider how the content being used as part of their product fulfills a greater purpose than simply guiding users. It forms a piece of a larger content strategy that encompasses all products.
Understanding content strategy also means understanding some of the practices and techniques that come alongside fully building out and implementing that strategy, including card sorting, content audits, content modelling, and other similar practices.
(We’d recommend reading this piece from Brain Traffic about content strategy.)
While the need for translation and localization may differ from product to product, all PMs should be aware of accessible UX writing and content design practices.
Understanding WCAG guidelines and the difficulties users may face in using products can prevent smaller problems from becoming larger ones. At the very least, PMs fluent in accessible design will be able to identify any weaknesses in their product’s content.
As for localization and translation, many PMs will be somewhat familiar with these practices. Including content designers within any localization and translation strategy will make for a smoother process overall.
Product managers are extraordinarily busy and face immense pressure. We don’t mean to suggest PMs should suddenly become experts in UX writing and content design – that’s what UX content professionals are there for.
But we do think there are several ways product managers can help support and encourage good UX content practices in their own ways.
While PMs may not have full authority over how content designers are organized, we’d encourage them to consider UX writers and content designers as part of any design discipline. They should take part in the same brainstorming, research, prototyping, testing, and review sessions.
Learn best practices for UI writing
Gaining a vocabulary in best standards for user interface text means PMs will be able to give feedback more effectively, and spot problems before they occur. We’d encourage PMs to understand how sentences and text is structured in modals as opposed to tooltips, or error messages as opposed to form fields. All of these components have different standards and may even change based on circumstance.
Create standards for content designers to follow
Content designers are not afraid to be treated as part of a full design team. Setting high expectations for content can be an excellent method to include the practice in overall product management. This means asking content designers to find and use high-quality data to back up hypotheses, to create and seek collaboration with colleagues across departments, and ensure high quality documentation.
Expect content designers to deliver research from the very beginning of a design phase, even if that research consists of 5-second tests with users. Ask content designers to justify their vocabulary decisions and base those decisions in real user feedback. Ensure questions asked during usability testing actually demonstrate a way to find gaps between words and users’ understanding.
Don’t leave content research solely to A/B tests. Ensure this research is conducted continually.
Don’t underestimate how much or little content may or may not be involved in upcoming products and features. Seek feedback from content designers (and other designers) in how they may be able to contribute. You may even spot possible problems before they become critical.
Speak to content designers and strategists to understand what your organization’s overall approach to content is, and how the specific content in your purview helps ladder up to that overall strategy. In the same way you understand how your team’s product strategy contributes to a whole, content does the same thing.
Interested in learning more about the skills we’ve outlined in this piece? Here are some resources we’d recommend:
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