Content design for startups: how to work lean, have maximum impact, and get all the high-fives
When you have a small design team or none at all, how do you ensure that your content is consistent, has the right tone, and is captivating? It can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be! Julia Steffen, Principal Content Designer at Varis, spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, about how startups can achieve impactful content and delight users.
In her talk, Julia shares her most useful tips, tricks, and rules of thumb to ensure meaningful content design. She also shares some helpful tools to achieve maximum efficiency.
Julia Steffen bio 🎤
Julia has worked in content for 10+ years at St.Jude, Wunderman Thompson, MetaLab, and Grubhub. She is based in the United States and is the Principal Content Designer at Varis.
Content design for startups - How to work lean, have maximum impact, and get all the high-fives ✋🏽✋🏻✋🏿
Why should you care about content design? Julia argues that “content design is product success”. Because Julia specifically talks about content design in relation to startups, she focuses on how to achieve the best results possible with a small, lean team. To that end, Julia discusses four must-haves for content design:
Voice
Tools for efficiency
Words in the experience
Ways to check, test, and perfect your words
Voice 🎙️
Why is your company’s voice important? Voice tells your users who you are, creates meaningful connections, and provides valuable signals that convey whether or not your company is deserving of trust. Choosing the voice for your startup begins with a competitor audit. Documenting who you compete against, and how you might want to differentiate your startup is crucial to finding your corner of the market. For example, is your voice welcoming, gentle, and positive, or are you more formal and technical?
User research can also be really helpful when determining and monitoring your voice. Involve your research team and learn what does and doesn’t delight your audience when it comes to your messaging.
It’s also important to map your voice to your startup’s values. Be sure to connect to your mission and your brand. Julia sums up product voice as:
Product voice = your values + space to differentiate + what research tells you
So, when you find your voice, where can you lean into it? There are several key areas or moments that provide opportunities to share your unique voice, such as:
Notifications: Emails, SMS, and in-app messages are a great place to delight customers
Success states: Celebrate with your users in your voice (and remove any anxiety that may be there)
Empty states: They aren’t just a chance to educate, they’re a chance to add some interest or fun (or to mask a UX issue).
Placeholder text: If a field is well labeled, you can use this section to bring joy and reduce a user’s anxiety.
Onboarding: You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Make it count!
Tools for efficiency ⚒️
To remain lean and efficient as a startup, one of the best things you can do is create a style guide. This helps to keep your content and voice consistent. For example, what pronouns do you use in your interface, do you capitalize certain words, etc? There is actually a lot to consider here, so Julia points viewers to various resources that allow you to copy and paste, such as Quinn Keast’s Product Language Framework.
A glossary or language bank is also important. Record branded words, terms that you never use, and terms that you’ve heard your users say organically. This helps to ensure that you’re using language that resonates with your audience and language that reduces cognitive load as much as possible.
Pro tip: Use the Writer app with Figma. This integration helps to ensure that your style guide is actually used! It includes your style guide and glossary so that you’re being consistent as you work. You can also use the Hemingway app or Grammarly to look out for passive voice, hard-to-parse sentences, and overall readability.
Words in the experience – writing for content design 📝
The first thing Julia points out when approaching writing is the need to be user-focused. This might seem obvious to UX practitioners, but word selection can be nuanced, and subtle changes can be powerful. For example, instead of writing “[Your company] introduces a new feature”, think about how can you change the statement to be more about what the new feature means for the user, rather than your company. Here are a few rules of thumb to help refine your writing.
Clarity over cleverness. Unless you’re clear and the message is understood by your user, even the best jokes and wittiest phrases in the world will be wasted.
Write like you’re having a conversation with your Grandmother. Be clear and don’t use too much jargon.
Think like the best content designers. Writing is a process and there are several things to consider, such as the purpose of your copy, the context that it’s being read, and what emotion the reader might be feeling at that moment, etc. Julia offers the Microcopy Canvas as a useful tool for startups, which is a helpful writing template/worksheet created by Jane Ruffino.
Ways to check, test, and perfect your words 👀
Julia suggests that design reviews are the perfect place to sense-check your words and content. Review your designs intentionally and through a content lens. Again, the Microcopy Canvas can be a useful tool when conducting this step, helping to ensure you have considered the right tone and achieved your purpose with your words.
Following a design review process, it’s important to test for clarity and affinity. Conduct user tests frequently to ensure your words and content are clear, understood, and hitting the mark in the intended way.
Finally, make sure your content goals are recorded in your dashboards. Be accountable to your own success measures, KPIs, and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Some metrics that help track success are:
Onboarding flows
Notification metrics
Feature adoption
Conversion rates
If you’re falling short on some metrics, review your content and try to figure out where words can be sharpened to be clearer, more friendly, or less technical, for example. Then, feed this information into your prioritization and planning. What changes are going to have the most impact on your product’s success? What changes are quick wins?
Why it matters 🤯
Julia’s talk is important for UX and content designers, particularly those working in startup environments, as it highlights the critical role of content design in achieving product success. The content you share, the voice and tone you adopt, and the clarity of communication, all add to the user's overall experience with your product. Investing time into your content is critical and, as Julia explains, it doesn’t have to put too much stress on your team's workload. If time isn’t invested, however, you may find yourself with poor content, delivering poor experiences, resulting in high customer attrition.
Efficiency, therefore, should be a focus for startups wanting to achieve great content design without being weighed down. Julia offers pragmatic advice on maintaining consistency through tools like style guides and language banks and by leveraging apps like Hemingway and Grammarly. Tools like these are incredibly helpful when streamlining processes and ensuring a cohesive and polished user interface.
At the end of the day, Julia stresses the impact that content design has on user experiences and encourages startups to pay close attention to content in ways that are achievable for small teams.
Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry.
Susanna Carman
Speaker Bio 🎤
Susanna Carman is a Strategic Designer and research practitioner who helps people solve complex problems involving services, systems, and human interactions. Specializing in design, leadership, and learning, Susanna brings a high-value toolkit and herself as a Thinking Partner to design leadership and change practitioners who are tasked with delivering sustainable solutions amidst disruptive conditions.
Susanna holds a Master of Design Futures degree from RMIT University. She has over a decade of experience delivering business performance, cultural alignment, and leadership development outcomes to the education, health, community development, and financial services sectors. She is also the founder and host of Transition Leadership Lab, a nine-week learning lab for design, leadership, and change practitioners who already have a sophisticated set of tools and mindsets but still feel these are insufficient to meet the challenge of leading change in a rapidly transforming world.
Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥪
Designing in teams with different stakeholders can be incredibly complex. Each person looks at projects through their own lens, and can potentially introduce jargon and concepts that are confusing to others. Simplicity advocate Ella Stoner knows this scenario all too well. It’s what led her to create an easy three-step tool for recognizing problems and developing solutions. By getting everyone on the same page and creating an understanding of what the simplest solution is, designers can create products with customer needs in mind.
Ella’s background
Ella Stoner is a CX Designer at Spark in New Zealand. She is a creative thought leader and a talented designer who has facilitated over 50 Human Centered Design Workshops. Ella and her team have developed a cloud product that enables businesses to connect with Public Cloud Services such as Amazon, Google and Azure in a human-centric way. She brings a simplistic approach to her work that is reflected in her UX New Zealand talk. It’s about cutting out complex details to establish an agreed starting point that is easily understood by all team members.
Ella is confident that she is not the only designer who has felt overwhelmed with technical and industry specific jargon in product meetings. For example, on Ella’s first day as a designer with Spark, she attended a meeting about an HSNS (High Speed Network Services) tool. Ella attempted to use context clues to try and predict what HSNS could mean. However, as the meeting went on, the technical and industry-specific jargon built on each other and Ella struggled to follow what was being said. At one point Ella asked the team to clarify this mysterious term:
“What’s an HSNS and why would the customer use it?” she asked. Much to her surprise, the room was completely silent. The team struggled to answer a basic question, about a term that appeared to be common knowledge during the meeting. There’s a saying, “Why do something simply when you can make it as complicated as possible?”. This happens all too often, where people and teams struggle to communicate with each other, and this results in projects and products that customers don’t understand and can’t use. Ella’s In A Nutshell tool is designed to cut through all that. It creates a base level starting point that’s understood by all, cuts out jargon, and puts the focus squarely on the customer. It:
condenses down language and jargon to its simplest form
translates everything into common language
flips it back to the people who’ll be using it.
Here’s how it works:
First, you complete this phrase as it pertains to your work: “In a nutshell, (project/topic) is (describe what the project or topic is in a few words), that (state what the project/topic does) for (indicate key customer/users and why). In order for this method to work, each of the four categories you insert must be simple and understandable. All acronyms, complex language, and technical jargon must be avoided. In a literal sense, anyone reading the statement should be able to understand what is being said “in a nutshell.” When you’ve done this, you’ll have a statement that can act as a guide for the goals your project aims to achieve.
Why it matters 🤔
Applying the “In A Nutshell” tool doesn’t take long. However, it's important to write this statement as a team. Ideally, it’s best to write the statement at the start of a project, but you can also write it in the middle if you need to create a reference point, or any time you feel technical jargon creeping in.
Here’s what you’ll need to get started:
People with three or more role types (this accommodates varying perspectives to ensure it’s as relevant as possible)
A way to capture text - i.e. whiteboard, Slack channel, Miro board
An easy voting system - i.e., thumbs up in a chat
Before you start, you may need to pitch the idea to someone in a technical role. If you’re feeling lost or confused, chances are someone else will be too. Breaking down the technical concepts into easy-to-understand and digestible language is of utmost importance:
Explain the Formula to the team..
Individually brainstorm possible answers for each gap for three minutes.
Put every idea up on the board or channel and vote on the best one.
Use the most popular answers as your final “In a Nutshell” statement.
Side note: Keep all the options that come through the brainstorm. They can still be useful in the design process to help form a full picture of what you’re working on, what it should do, who it should be for etc.
When you have a small design team or none at all, how do you ensure that your content is consistent, has the right tone, and is captivating? It can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be! Julia Steffen, Principal Content Designer at Varis, spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, about how startups can achieve impactful content and delight users.
In her talk, Julia shares her most useful tips, tricks, and rules of thumb to ensure meaningful content design. She also shares some helpful tools to achieve maximum efficiency.
Julia Steffen bio 🎤
Julia has worked in content for 10+ years at St.Jude, Wunderman Thompson, MetaLab, and Grubhub. She is based in the United States and is the Principal Content Designer at Varis.
Content design for startups - How to work lean, have maximum impact, and get all the high-fives ✋🏽✋🏻✋🏿
Why should you care about content design? Julia argues that “content design is product success”. Because Julia specifically talks about content design in relation to startups, she focuses on how to achieve the best results possible with a small, lean team. To that end, Julia discusses four must-haves for content design:
Voice
Tools for efficiency
Words in the experience
Ways to check, test, and perfect your words
Voice 🎙️
Why is your company’s voice important? Voice tells your users who you are, creates meaningful connections, and provides valuable signals that convey whether or not your company is deserving of trust. Choosing the voice for your startup begins with a competitor audit. Documenting who you compete against, and how you might want to differentiate your startup is crucial to finding your corner of the market. For example, is your voice welcoming, gentle, and positive, or are you more formal and technical?
User research can also be really helpful when determining and monitoring your voice. Involve your research team and learn what does and doesn’t delight your audience when it comes to your messaging.
It’s also important to map your voice to your startup’s values. Be sure to connect to your mission and your brand. Julia sums up product voice as:
Product voice = your values + space to differentiate + what research tells you
So, when you find your voice, where can you lean into it? There are several key areas or moments that provide opportunities to share your unique voice, such as:
Notifications: Emails, SMS, and in-app messages are a great place to delight customers
Success states: Celebrate with your users in your voice (and remove any anxiety that may be there)
Empty states: They aren’t just a chance to educate, they’re a chance to add some interest or fun (or to mask a UX issue).
Placeholder text: If a field is well labeled, you can use this section to bring joy and reduce a user’s anxiety.
Onboarding: You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Make it count!
Tools for efficiency ⚒️
To remain lean and efficient as a startup, one of the best things you can do is create a style guide. This helps to keep your content and voice consistent. For example, what pronouns do you use in your interface, do you capitalize certain words, etc? There is actually a lot to consider here, so Julia points viewers to various resources that allow you to copy and paste, such as Quinn Keast’s Product Language Framework.
A glossary or language bank is also important. Record branded words, terms that you never use, and terms that you’ve heard your users say organically. This helps to ensure that you’re using language that resonates with your audience and language that reduces cognitive load as much as possible.
Pro tip: Use the Writer app with Figma. This integration helps to ensure that your style guide is actually used! It includes your style guide and glossary so that you’re being consistent as you work. You can also use the Hemingway app or Grammarly to look out for passive voice, hard-to-parse sentences, and overall readability.
Words in the experience – writing for content design 📝
The first thing Julia points out when approaching writing is the need to be user-focused. This might seem obvious to UX practitioners, but word selection can be nuanced, and subtle changes can be powerful. For example, instead of writing “[Your company] introduces a new feature”, think about how can you change the statement to be more about what the new feature means for the user, rather than your company. Here are a few rules of thumb to help refine your writing.
Clarity over cleverness. Unless you’re clear and the message is understood by your user, even the best jokes and wittiest phrases in the world will be wasted.
Write like you’re having a conversation with your Grandmother. Be clear and don’t use too much jargon.
Think like the best content designers. Writing is a process and there are several things to consider, such as the purpose of your copy, the context that it’s being read, and what emotion the reader might be feeling at that moment, etc. Julia offers the Microcopy Canvas as a useful tool for startups, which is a helpful writing template/worksheet created by Jane Ruffino.
Ways to check, test, and perfect your words 👀
Julia suggests that design reviews are the perfect place to sense-check your words and content. Review your designs intentionally and through a content lens. Again, the Microcopy Canvas can be a useful tool when conducting this step, helping to ensure you have considered the right tone and achieved your purpose with your words.
Following a design review process, it’s important to test for clarity and affinity. Conduct user tests frequently to ensure your words and content are clear, understood, and hitting the mark in the intended way.
Finally, make sure your content goals are recorded in your dashboards. Be accountable to your own success measures, KPIs, and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Some metrics that help track success are:
Onboarding flows
Notification metrics
Feature adoption
Conversion rates
If you’re falling short on some metrics, review your content and try to figure out where words can be sharpened to be clearer, more friendly, or less technical, for example. Then, feed this information into your prioritization and planning. What changes are going to have the most impact on your product’s success? What changes are quick wins?
Why it matters 🤯
Julia’s talk is important for UX and content designers, particularly those working in startup environments, as it highlights the critical role of content design in achieving product success. The content you share, the voice and tone you adopt, and the clarity of communication, all add to the user's overall experience with your product. Investing time into your content is critical and, as Julia explains, it doesn’t have to put too much stress on your team's workload. If time isn’t invested, however, you may find yourself with poor content, delivering poor experiences, resulting in high customer attrition.
Efficiency, therefore, should be a focus for startups wanting to achieve great content design without being weighed down. Julia offers pragmatic advice on maintaining consistency through tools like style guides and language banks and by leveraging apps like Hemingway and Grammarly. Tools like these are incredibly helpful when streamlining processes and ensuring a cohesive and polished user interface.
At the end of the day, Julia stresses the impact that content design has on user experiences and encourages startups to pay close attention to content in ways that are achievable for small teams.
