Content Design has a Confidence Problem
We are so soft and tender. We're so cute and quirky. We have a conference named Button. We need to stop.
A rallying cry.
I found in my career the same pattern over and over, in board rooms, in LinkedIn posts, content needing to justify why it exists. Why we’re important. Why we deserve a seat at the table. Why you need to pay us $100k plus to words. I write words.
These are, in the word of the great Holmes. Really elementary. We are repeating the same, frankly basic, steps of our craft over and over to partners, stakeholders, belaboring, wringing them like attempting to dry a cloth of our writerly tears from trying to find the perfect word.
Why are we throwing ourselves over and over, like the dull thuds of attempting to get into someone else’s skulls, the same points?
Because we have a confidence problem.
Good designers, good creators, businesses know the value of good words. I’ve found this over and over as a business owner and freelancer— you’ll never beat water out of a stone. You’ll never make someone pay a decent rate who doesn’t understand. If the word is no, it’s a no. People who don’t see your value may see it for a flash, but that will always go away.
Does an engineer justify their value? No. We need them to build. AI evolves this, but the same internal confidence is there:
“This doesn’t get built without me. Pay or no build.”
The product doesn’t get created without engineers. Same with content. The product doesn’t go in front of human beings with human being eyes and get sold without words.
Things that happened when content didn’t exist on projects I adopted, took out of the wilderness, wandering and crying without words:
- Grammar mistakes everywhere
- Missed capitalization
- Wrong spelling on products about to ship
- Mediocre words
- British spelling. Aworse sin.
And this is with LLM where any of these brilliant in their discipline people could have pulled up the AI and spell-checked. The gift, the expertise, the spark to choose the right word is a million dollar skill.
The gift, the ability, to send words into the wind and actually have them be grammatically correct, support a larger narrative, brand, product, and create brand experience and sales is a billion dollar skill.
So why don’t we act like it?
I think it also gets into the itchy hands. Everyone can write, right? So we see those words on the Figma file, and a Designer, or an Engineer, or say that Executive who is somehow threatened by someone else having a brain or creativity in spite of being paid more can magically write whatever they want (I’m not talking about and healing personal trauma in this essay, of course). Until you catch a sentence going out without a period or capitalization into production. Until the language on one screen is great because of AI and makes no sense in the larger brand architecture.
I also think it comes as part of the territory.
We’re writers— we live behind the screen, not knowing, writing the words that run the world. We’re not in front, confident, announcing. We’re bookish, searching for the perfect word, hunting bookstores, the kind of person who reads of the world behind pages and screens, who maybe dives into greater adventure but always has that voice of words running, turning experiences into words, pages, processes, thinking, metaphors, similes, the words falling out our tongues. I’ve found over and over people I’ve worked with are really, really insecure in the discipline and their work, and as people, and to partner with as a result, and I think that insecurity undercuts part of the insecurity of the discipline. This is both individual as I found collaborators upset when I was confident and wouldn’t undercut and with partners. I wasn’t invited to a Figma file. Oh no, a great wringing of hands. That needs to be cut out. If a Design team isn’t working properly, it needs to work.
We don’t come to the table unless we eat, and if Product or Design Managers aren’t on the same page, that organization doesn’t deserve Content.
Some of that is confidence to break out of the nerdy writer, who hides behind the book, the screen, and has this persona: it’s funny, fun, and instead owns being secure, powerful, great.
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I’ve had to do this journey in my own personal life. I was an English major, Honors student, and growing up in America Internet 2010’s, there’s a constant self-reflexiveness and insecurity. You can’t be confident. You have to undercut every accomplishment with a laugh or insecurity. But I need us to lose that. Be small, tiny, cute, so fun, but then own being great, making changes which bring millions of dollars in the next paragraph.
There’s also a gendered dimension to this of Content Design and writing. The majority of Content Designers I worked with were women. My lead team was women. When we play small, we do what brands, societies, companies, and cultures have been doing to us for centuries, millennia: keep us small.
How Do We Change?
I think we have to take away the threat:
That we’re not enough, not valued, overpaid, not useful, that we’re dependent on companies for income and really own how great we are as a discipline.
Beyond content design, we are design.
One word can make the difference of millions of dollars. Of mistakes. That’s design.
I think we also have to both get over ourselves and on top of ourselves a bit. AI is helping with that.
Sometimes it’s just words and, something can be thrown in, and that’s ok. I actually think creating such a belaboring over how it’s, “Never just a quick fix” (it isn’t) creates more of a furor. Sometimes we need to ship things, and it’s not the greatest ship that’s sailed. Oh well.
But we also need to own being great and show results rather than asserting we’re great all the time. Where’s the concrete proof for that very poofed up 18th century descended noun? Where’s the results the screens that show, when you pay us, you get great things. Pay us, or nothing happens.
I actually think AI will help with this. No longer is it simply, “I can write" in the minds of stakeholders and people who think they can just type into the UI (that is what we do after all), but people will need to know to design prompts, rubrics, have specialized language, design content systems rather than individual screens. The artist becomes the tech lord with the computer in front. Much like Adobe locked that door and said, “A designer has specialized skills a f- y’all” to spend hours hunched over tiny grey boxes and endless sub-menus, suddenly a writer needs grammar, localization, and specific prompt skills.
Stop asserting how valuable we are online with another text post. Dear God.
Instead, show. Case studies that brought millions. Differences in words.
Bring studies to the table. Incorporate UXR as much as possible. Every single UX Writing project that got tested at my Fortune 5 company wasn’t tested until I made noise while the UX was. Then use the testing.
The more our discipline says, not, “Look how great I am,” but, “Look how great I am,” the more we grow. The more people naturally accept the incredible work content brings to the table because it’s needed.
Stop being so precious. To an extent.
Look, I love being cutesty, I love finding the right word online, yada yada. Business is vicious. Executives don’t give a shit. I think we should embrace cuteness some because it’s fun, and we word good. Brands are fun, we’re fun. We make brands fun.
At the same time, the more we cutesefy and infantalize ourselves, the more they can.
The more we own the fact their products don’t have words, motion, or money without them, the more content coming to the table isn’t a need.
It’s time for Content Design to grow up. We’re great, you need us, we know it. Time to get paid.
Words change the world. Let’s stop acting like they don’t.
I was recently reading of Gertrude Stein. She insisted on her importance over and over. In the 20th century, surrounded by male, drunkard, sexist, poetic and literature figures, insisting on her importance over and over. Not asking, explaining. Claiming her greatness.
That’s a call for women, but to the greater discipline which applies content. We are great. Stop being anything less. Rather, be.
Hi! I’m Charlie, a Fortune 5 Content Strategist, and the #uxwritingfairy. I write about Content Design, Design, getting into tech and high paid careers, women’s rights, and evil thoughts.
I self-built myself into Content, Design, and six-figure fields and help other women do the same.
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