In content design ops, your colleagues are your users
One of my favorite things about working in content design ops and content design systems is that the primary users I design for are my teammates and design partners. I love creating content design system documentation that reduces decision fatigue and helps them create consistent content more efficiently at scale 📝 ⏱ ✨
It can be challenging though to ensure that you're applying all the best content design principles to content intended for the folks you work with. Even though they’re design professionals, they still deserve documentation that’s clear, useful, and organized intuitively. Here’s some tips for creating user-centered documentation when you’re designing for your colleagues:
📗 Use familiar terminology
Content designers and UX designers might refer to the same component by different names. Is it a “dropdown,” a “select,” a “list,” or a “menu”? Consider doing a deep dive on component taxonomy in collaboration with your design system to define a foundational set of terms for components and content patterns.
📚 Consider your documentation’s IA and create a system rather than a random collection of artifacts
Make sure each artifact is structured in a way that makes it easy for your users to find what they’re looking for quickly and get back to their workflow. Think about the overall system as well, and make sure that the artifacts you create form a coherent system with clear relationships between them and as little redundancy as possible.
📋 Don’t forget about user research!
Check in regularly to see what types of documentation your colleagues would find valuable, take a look at your content design system’s site analytics to see what's getting the most hits, and think of the questions you receive about content guidelines as user research data. This data can help you identify topics to add or expand on, edge cases to account for, what needs to be updated or adjusted, and what guidelines exist but are too difficult for your users to find in your documentation.
