Integrating Content Strategy In Your Product Design Workflow

Content Strategists are a huge asset to a product design team.

Having a million different designers and developers adding copy to your product can make it sound and feel manic. It’s extremely distracting and increases cognitive load as users are trying to make their way through your UI. Content Strategists define product voice and tone & ensure consistency across the product.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with a variety of design teams now, and have recently been introduced to a content strategy integration workflow using InVision that works really, really well.

The solid process flow:

• The Project Manager reaches out to the Content Strategist about the project and they hop on a call with the lead designer for a few minutes to review the functionality via rapid prototype.
• After the call the Content Strategist dives in and adds copy suggestions.
• The PM, CS and designer sync up in a quick call to review and tweak the copy and then the feature is developed.

This process is EXTREMELY efficient.

Now let’s chat about the other side of the process flow spectrum.

The train-wreck workflow that makes content strategists want to jump out a 5th story window:

• Once a product feature has already been developed, someone pings the CS and says, “Write some some copy for this feature.”
• No context is provided and and the CS can’t get ahold of anyone to answer questions because the rest of the team is already working on the next feature.
• Adjusting the copy is a low priority compared to meeting the next feature deadline, so a majority of the time the copy doesn’t even make it into the release.

This approach is obviously completely broken and a huge waste of everyones time.

Content Strategists can make a really big impact on usability if they are given the opportunity to do their jobs at the right point in the design process. Inject them into the design workflow early to get the most bang for your buck.