Content design systems can help preserve institutional memory

Content design systems are a great way to bring together all the knowledge and best practices that a content design team has spent time researching and developing and house it all in one place where content designers and UX designers can easily find it. If you maintain a well-organized set of guidelines your team has discussed and made decisions on, then no more time has to be spent litigating these guidelines unless they’re later found to be deficient or incomplete. Content design systems can also preserve content snippets, patterns, and templates that your colleagues have spent a lot of time designing and iterating on. This will help standardize messaging and expedite the content creation process.

Creating a content design system is also a great way to preserve institutional memory. It can:

📒 Empower new onboarding team members to work more autonomously by helping them find past content governance decisions.

📒 Help current team members find answers to questions on team content decisions without painstakingly searching through old Slack threads or messaging someone they think might know. As my team’s content design ops specialist, I never mind answering questions about content guidelines. That can get time-consuming though sometimes, so I love it when my colleagues are able to find what they’re looking for on their own.

📒 Preserve institutional memory on guidelines and best practices that might otherwise be lost when team members move on to new roles.