Content Design

Content design focuses on shaping information so users can find, understand, and act on it easily. It combines writing, structure, and strategy to meet both user needs and organizational goals. Content is not a final layer added to a finished design, but a design material in its own right. The words in an interface are often the most important design decision you can make.

Key Concepts

• Content-first thinking: The words, labels, and messages in a product should be designed before and alongside the interface, not written afterward. Content shapes the user's mental model of what they're doing and why.
• Dual goals: Every piece of content must serve two sets of goals at once — organizational goals (security, compliance, task completion) and user goals (speed, clarity, confidence).
• Collaborative ideation: Effective content design involves input from diverse team members across technical, legal, financial, and design disciplines, as well as a variety of user perspectives. No single person holds all the context needed to write content that is both accurate and usable.
• Iteration and testing: Content is never finished on the first draft. Refine it through user research, usability testing, surveys, card sorting, tree testing, and heatmaps to validate whether it is understood and effective.
• Awareness of constraints: Good content design accounts for business constraints, technical limitations, display contexts (mobile vs. desktop), and localization needs from the very start.

Writing for Your Audience

The right content strategy depends heavily on who you're writing for.

Public-facing content serves people who are often in a hurry. They skim and scan, looking for the quickest path to completing their task. Plain language is essential — it builds trust, reduces errors, and ensures that people at a wide range of reading levels can succeed. Use second-person ("you"), active voice, and simple sentence structures. Avoid jargon.

Internal or federal workforce content can be slightly more technical when your audience has domain expertise, but clarity and precision still matter. Match the vocabulary to what your audience already knows, and explain acronyms when they're introduced.

In either case, the goal is the same: help the person understand where they are, what they need to do, and what will happen next.

Voice and Tone

Voice is consistent, reflecting the organization's character and should be recognizable across the entire product experience. Tone shifts to suit context. You can recognize someone's voice regardless of whether they're being serious or playful; the same is true for a product.

Common voice styles include:

• Friendly — warm, casual, conversational (e.g., Slack)
• Professional — formal and precise, prioritizing clarity over warmth (e.g., IBM)
• Witty — uses humor and wordplay to create memorable moments (e.g., MailChimp)
• Formal — polished and respectful, suited to high-stakes or traditional contexts (e.g., luxury brands)

Tone, meanwhile, adjusts to the situation. An informative tone works for feature explanations. An empathetic tone is essential for error states and failures. An encouraging tone fits goal-completion moments. The voice chart helps writers shift tone intentionally without losing the product's consistent character.

A voice chart is a practical tool for maintaining this balance. It documents how a product's core principles should express themselves across dimensions like concepts, vocabulary, verbosity, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. This gives writers and designers a shared reference for making content decisions consistently.

Login.gov Voice Chart Example

Errors, Alerts, and Breaks in the Experience

What happens when something goes wrong is often the most important content in a product. Users remember errors. How you handle them shapes trust.

There are three categories of breaks in the experience, each requiring a different content approach:

Inline errors are the least disruptive. They appear adjacent to the field or element that caused the problem.

Detour errors interrupt the user's path but can be resolved within the product. Lead with what the user needs to do before the explanation. Make sure the call-to-action matches words in the heading, so that even if the user skips the body text, they can still move forward successfully.

Blocking errors occur when the way forward is completely blocked until the user takes action outside the product's scope — a planned outage, a 404, or a security breach.

Across all error types: speak to users directly, respectfully, and in plain language. Don't lead with technical jargon. Apologize only when appropriate, and keep the focus on what the user can do next.

Research Methods for Content Design

Content designers need to understand not just what users do, but what words they use to describe what they're doing. The vocabulary users bring to a product is the vocabulary that will cost them the least effort to process. Those are the words that people scan without feeling like they're reading.

Useful research methods for content design include:

• Moderated usability testing: Watch users interact with the product or a prototype. Pay attention to moments of hesitation, misreading, or re-reading. These often signal content problems.
• Unmoderated testing: Useful for validating specific content decisions at scale with less facilitation overhead.
• User surveys: Collect data on knowledge, expectations, and preferences. Watch for social desirability bias, sampling bias, and question framing that can skew results.
• Card sorting: Reveals how users categorize and label concepts, which is especially useful for navigation and information architecture decisions.
• Tree testing: Evaluates whether users can find content within a proposed structure, using a text-only outline of the site or app.
• Heatmaps: Show where users click, scroll, and direct attention, helping identify which content is visible and which is being skipped.
• Analysis of reviews, questions, and comments: Often the fastest source of research. The language users use to describe their problems is free, candid data about what your content is and isn't communicating.

The Editing Process

Good content goes through several distinct editing phases, not just one pass:

1. Purposeful: Does the content meet user goals, organizational goals, and protective goals? At this stage it's okay for the text to be long.
2. Concise: Strip the text down to its core meaning. Remove adjectives, adverbs, and filler. Experiment with different structures and word orders to find what's briefest and easiest to understand.
3. Conversational: After cutting, restore any warmth or naturalness that was lost. Content should not feel sterile or robotic.
4. Clear: Verify that the meaning will be unambiguous to the person using the experience, especially someone unfamiliar with the product or domain.

One useful editing technique: try starting the same sentence or heading in several different ways (with the imperative verb, with the user's purpose, with context, with an emotional motivator) and compare which version is shortest, clearest, and most aligned with the product's voice.

Pluribus Expectations

Design content as part of the product, not as decoration. Write clearly, test early, and iterate often. When in doubt, read your content aloud. If it sounds like something a knowledgeable, respectful person would actually say, you're on the right track.

Additional Resources

• Plain language | Digital.gov
• Plain Language Guide Series | Digital.gov
• Requirements for plain writing | Digital.gov
• The CDC Clear Communication Index
• Writing for the Public: A Newcomer's Guide to Civic Tech UX Writing (Blog)
• Strategic Writing for UX by Torrey Podmajersky — the foundational text for practitioners who want to go deeper