About content design

Author: Erin Donehoo | Last edit: August 22, 2024

What is content design?

Content design is a discipline that focuses on improving and enhancing user experiences through writing. By using clear, conversational, and easy-to-understand language, we can make software products and other digital interfaces more user-centered, accessible, and human. Good content design must also consider information architecture, hierarchy, brand voice, tone, and visual design, while paying special attention to user needs, expectations, and potential roadblocks. This all combines to ensure that the right content is shared in the right place at the right time.

Why is content design important?

Carefully choosing the words used to guide users through a product can make their experience more effortless and engaging. Even small changes can have a big impact. For example, this study showed that by changing the words on a single button on Google, engagement increased by 17%.

Using consistent style, voice, and tone also helps shape Red Hat’s brand. Not only does a consistently presented brand help establish a relationship between a company and its users, it can also increase revenue by 23%.

Don’t just take it from us — here is what others have to say about our content design team:

“As a technical writer, the content designers have taught me plenty about writing action-oriented, brief conversational UI text that keeps a sharp focus on customer goals. They’re great at spotting where a proposed workflow could be tricky for users, suggesting how to explain it better, and keeping an eye out for consistency between services and products. Content designers and tech writers share the same goals of providing a better customer experience – it’s a natural partnership that ends with a better product for our users.” – Dayle Parker, Principal Technical Writer

“Having an embedded content designer as part of the team has been instrumental for improving the quality of documentation we can provide to our PatternFly users by contributing their skill in working with our developers to generate more complete and readable documentation." – Matt Carrano, UX designer

"The value of content design has been undoubtedly evident within PatternFly. It provides an invaluable and different point of view when it comes to the creation of and updates to our content, and is an important part in delivering that content at a higher level of quality, understandability, and accessibility." – Eric Olkowski, Software Engineer

About the team

Who's on the team?

Abi Donahue, Manager 

Allison Wolfe, Content Designer

Katie Edwards, Content Designer

Erin Donehoo, Content Designer

What do our content designers do?

While writing is part of the job of a content designer, most of the time is spent researching, strategizing, collaborating, testing, and iterating. Our content designers often work alongside product designers, researchers, Customer Content Services (CCS) writers, and developers to create accessible, data-based, and consistent designs. Our designers typically work on microcopy throughout a product, including error messages, tooltips, empty states, loading messages, and more. Longer forms of writing, such as pages of documentation, are typically written by other teams, but we are able to assist in creating and implementing it into the UI. 

Our designers work across several content channels: 

• Product: Our designers improve Red Hat product experiences through microcopy–the text you see in a UI. They plan, craft, edit, and iterate within our assigned product groups, and provide ad-hoc support for additional products outside of our portfolio.
• PatternFly: The source of truth for content design (and product design in general) comes from PatternFly. To ensure that this source of truth is accurate, comprehensive, and clear, the team creates and maintains technical documentation, design guidelines, and other content on the PatternFly website.
• Community: Being part of the larger Red Hat, open source, and content design communities is a priority for the team. To share knowledge and contribute to these communities, they maintain a presence in various community channels, like X, PatternFly Medium, and Red Hat blogs. 

How do content designers support products?

The team offers three models of content design support for Red Hat products:

• Embedded content designer: Each content designer is embedded into a product group full time, working alongside other designers and developers to plan, craft, edit, and iterate microcopy at all stages of the design process. They attend regular product group meetings, including planning and demo sessions, to stay up to date. They also collaborate with CCS (also known as the Docs team) stakeholders in an effort to provide a unified content experience across a product’s UI and its documentation (for example, the UXD-CCS microcopy collaboration process). To see which product groups our content designers are embedded into, see the UXD organization deck.
• Best effort: Our designers also have “best effort” product assignments, to which they offer part-time work and serve as the main point of contact for content needs. They provide microcopy consultation and reviews when requested, and also attend some product-group meetings as needed.
• Ad-hoc: Any content designer with available bandwidth provides microcopy assistance when it's requested via the content request form.

Reach out to us with any questions about content design support models and availability.

How can I work with our content designers?

There are a few ways you can connect with the content design team–pick whichever works best for you!

1. If you have an embedded content designer on your team, reach out to them.
2. Post a question in the #uxd-content-help Slack channel.
3. Join the content designers for office hours every other Wednesday from 2–3 PM EST, where they provide individualized help for any content needs you have. You can access this meeting using the UXD Design Sharing calendar.

Learn more about content design

If you want to learn more about content design, or how the team works, here are some additional resources:

• Check out the PatternFly UX writing style guide for writing guidance and examples. 
  • Component-specific microcopy guidance can be found in the components' design guidelines.
• Check out other Red Hat style guides:
  • The corporate style guide (maintained by Marketing Communications) 
  • The product terminology supplementary guide (maintained by CCS)
  • The IBM style guide (requires Red Hat login)