The debate over what “our” title “should be” overlooks three major things, all of which disconcert me.
If you’re not a content designer/content strategist/UX writer/joke about SEO, you might not know that for as long as my discipline has existed, there’s been a debate about what the hell we should call it. Read all about it at the end of this article, if you’d like.
If you are a fellow traveler on this road, I’m sorry. I offer no answers here. What I do have are thoughts and questions — and I think they might just be useful.
1. The business realities
Every content professional works in a world of scarcity.
There are never enough of us to go around, so the vast majority (if not all) of us are working on strategy, design, and content on every project we touch. At least, when we have the time for it.
In the typical (dysfunctional) arrangement, we’re relegated to doing the job of UX writing — but even here there’s resistance to the “UX” half of the title. It’s okay that these moments happen, as long as it’s occasionally. After all, with so many projects going on, folding us in on a tertiary priority just isn’t always practical, or the best use of our time.
Better still if we’re left alone to focus on our core responsibilities, but generally, I’m more glad to have been asked than not. If nothing else, even projects like this can afford us an opportunity for stakeholder education. And if I just don’t have the time, there’s always that golden word:
No.
On projects where we’re more involved, you can often fold the “UX” half of writing and the design half of content into your process. Assuming you can convince the designer to accept that they have a co-designer on their hands.
It would be nice if there was headcount for all 3 to work together on projects, but there isn’t, and there likely won’t be any time soon.
Which brings me to:
2. The nature of our work
Content strategy, design, and writing aren’t titles in this world of scarcity.
They’re skillsets or bundles of praxis, all of which need to be applied each time we’re asked for work or feedback. A UX writer who isn’t considering the flow itself isn’t doing their whole job. Variations on that statement for the other two “titles” also hold, for me.
3. Audience response
When I set aside my own hyper-awareness of the politics and branding work “content design” is trying to do, all I can think is that it must seem jargon-y and unclear to collaborators and stakeholders. I don’t know, and haven’t seen research to this or other effects, but that is in itself disconcerting.
I know we’re all “supposed to” bring solutions to the problems we highlight, but I don’t have any here. I *do* think that treating these title contenders as skillsets or foci within a larger field of practice is a vein worth mining.
The great title debate: a potted history
Once upon a time, in the misty era before everyone and their mother knew what the arcane syllables “UX” meant, one might’ve called any of my fellow weirdos “information architects.” By “my fellow weirdos,” I mean: the weirdos who care about how tools and knowledge are created, packaged, and shared on ye olde internet.
Designers, UX writers, front-end developers, content managers, digital editors in chief — we could all sit comfortably under the big tent of information architecture (IA).
And then UX design came along. And everything changed.
Design seemed to suddenly dominate the conversation. Content atomized into two parts: its architecture, and its material. Engineers laid claim to the actual structure, designers raised their flag over how that structure was conveyed to people, and content got winnowed down to the actual words on the page.
But we all knew content was bigger than that.
Enter content strategy. Kristina Halvorson’s new discipline (and title) name sought to elevate the role of content back to its strategic function — to help everyone see that everything from the architecture down to the words themselves took place not discretely, but as points on a spectrum. As with the world itself, every decision, every event, that takes place at one point ripples through every other point, like a wave displacing a long line of lonely buoys.
And the material of that spectrum is itself language. From the PM’s feature requirements document to the engineer’s code to the writer’s — ah, what a relief to say it so simply — word choices: all of it is, and takes place in, the realm of language.
But that’s my typically high-falutin’ way of putting it. More concretely, the title content strategy said:
This is not just about words. This is about viewing content as a strategic necessity, and priority. Because the words we publish do everything from drive people to sign up, to drive them away. And that means we need a strategic viewpoint on those words.
And then content marketing came along and ate the term content strategy. Not fully, not to this day, but enough to create a great deal of confusion in the marketplace.
Then we tried “UX writer.” Clear, descriptive, structurally parallel to concepts like “UX researcher” and “UX designer” — it had a lot going for it as far as naming is concerned.
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