Whether you lead a practice, manage a segment, or support product teams as an individual contributor (IC), reporting the impact of content design is critical to your success. This means showing the connection between content quality and business outcomes.
The stronger we all get at this, the more business leaders will understand that content design is integral to a company’s success. As a result, they will make a “seat at the table” for our function because they want that value.
To get you started, here are the ABCs of establishing a content quality system: Audience, Business, and Content metrics. If you’re an IC, you might not build a whole system, but this article will equip you to think strategically about how to claim product and business impact for your work.
Understand your audience
Since every company operates differently, the first step to defining your key metrics is identifying what matters to your leadership and product teams. As Tali Samoylenko points out in A new approach for advocacy, we tend to speak “content design-lish” when we talk to our product partners. Even in a supportive environment, this creates confusion. We are the experts in what we do, and it is our job to communicate that information upward and outward.
Leadership
The higher up someone is, the more they oversee. The Head of Design wants the organization to drive world-class quality. The Head of Product wants the organization to ship features that make customers happy. The CEO wants the company to grow in a healthy way. You are closer than any of those people to the detailed work that makes their goals possible.
Connect content quality to the bigger picture by discussing the impact of content design on specific business goals, speaking leadership’s language as you advocate for the business value of the function. Over time, this paves the way for you to build business cases for resources and headcount.
Examples of company and org-level goals
- Establish market leadership
- Demonstrate design leadership
- Increase operational efficiency
- Decrease time to resolve bugs
- Decrease customer support tickets
Ways to identify company and org-level goals
- Ask your leadership team
- Attend company and org all-hands meetings
- Review vision and mission statements
- Review KPIs, OKRs, and other strategy docs
Product team
It takes a mix of many functions to develop a product. Product designers are your partners in thinking through a flow. Product managers balance the user’s needs with business strategy. Engineers build and evolve capabilities. While each function has a different focus, everyone works together to ship the strongest possible product.
Show how content quality helps the team solve problems. You already have the core skills of storytelling and communication. Apply them to strategy decks, case studies, demo videos, and more! Help your product and design partners get excited about how content design drives innovation and world-class UX.
Examples of product-level goals
- Drive product adoption
- Increase active usage (daily, weekly, monthly)
- Increase engagement
- Decrease churn
- Prevent bugs from shipping
Ways to learn product-level goals
- Ask your PM
- Attend team syncs
- Attend product reviews for your team
- Review project briefs, product requirements docs (PRDs), and strategy decks
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Business planning
Strategy is the same as getting directions: You must decide where you’re going first. Once you identify what matters to your leadership or product team, build your plan by determining which specific goals to map to and how to support those goals.
Which goals to map to
Content design can immediately impact certain types of goals and take longer to prove out for other goals. What you focus on depends on your company and how your function is positioned. (I know, I know… is it even content design if someone doesn’t say, “It depends…”?)
The good news is that you get to talk to your teammates and involve them in your decisions. Nick DiLallo’s article, Have better conversations about content design, offers detailed guidance on how to lead discussions to get the information you want. While that piece focuses on tactical design decisions, the method outlined also works for higher-level planning.
Tips for identifying goals to map to
- Align with the PMs of your product teams. They are experts in business strategy and can help you identify meaningful company, organization, and product-level goals for content design to support.
- Identify goals at each level. This equips you to show the impact of content design on specific products, on the design and product teams overall, and on the company.
- Start at the product level. When in doubt, do the hands-on work. You can categorize content design changes to figure out which metrics you’re moving.
Content metrics
I promised you a content quality system, and we are finally here! So what is it?
A content quality system is a framework that:
- Defines how your team, organization, or company measures quality
- Provides repeatable ways to assess quality (heuristics)
Content designers already do this type of thinking as they work on individual projects. This system translates the knowledge in your head into a powerful tool that helps you work faster and smarter while demonstrating impact.
As usual, there is no single “right” way to document a content quality system. So, I’ll provide the basic components of the system and show examples.
Content quality system basics
- Quality spectrum
- Full range of content quality
- Minimum viable quality
- Evaluation
- Heuristics
- Reviewer
- Tools
- Standards
- Terms list
Quality spectrum
Define different levels of content quality. Show examples to help people understand what you mean. You can pull ideal examples from standards and work out some frustration by showing the bad stuff.
Doing this exercise will help your design and product partners learn the difference between “good” and “bad” content design. It gives you more control because you assign the quality level. Otherwise, people have to guess based on what shipped, even though mistakes will inevitably make it into the product.
Evaluation
Next, define your heuristics. These are practical criteria to keep your design judgment consistent and efficient. If you’re leading a team or including design and product partners in evaluation, heuristics keep everyone aligned on how to assess content quality.
The personal approach
This approach is a lot easier after you’ve organized examples. Go through each one and ask, “Why is this good enough?” “Why is this a blocker?” As themes emerge, capture them as your heuristics. They are the ways you naturally assess quality.
The business approach
Team and company goals can inform heuristics. For example, if your product organization aims to reduce accessibility bugs by 20%, one heuristic could be: Meets accessibility requirements. This equips content design to measure how content quality impacts the organization’s ability to meet that goal.
Here’s a template with universal heuristics to get you started. Feel free to customize it as you use it and learn what works for your unique circumstances:
Let’s go a little deeper. Just like with quality levels, specific details are helpful. Consider what you can objectively measure or which guiding questions would elevate your thinking. Here’s guidance for the universal heuristics in the template:
- Meets standards
- Quantitative: Number of violations, number of standards violated
- Qualitative: Does anything violate the spirit of content design standards? How?
- Clear
- Quantitative: Readability score (Hemingway app)
- Qualitative: Could anything confuse the user?
- Accurate
- Quantitative: Matches term definition (Y/N)
- Qualitative: Could anything mislead the user?
- Consistent
- Quantitative: Number of deviations from established patterns
- Qualitative: Will the user feel like this is a cohesive experience?
In this example, I show how to document both quantitative and qualitative reasons for the assessment. This enables product teams to prioritize fixing blockers and helps them understand content problems.
In a real-world design review with multiple screens, this table can get really big. You can decide whether to use this format to capture granular details or summarize high-level themes.
Reporting
You’ve done all the work and built a system for consistently evaluating content quality. The final step is to demonstrate how content design drove business success. At this stage, you’ll use all of the information you’ve gathered to make your case.
Here are actual metrics I’ve used in content design status reports and performance reviews:
- Shipped 264+ UX improvements for [feature]
- Flagged 4 compliance risks
- Moved content quality from blocker to world-class
My content quality system documented:
- Number of content quality problems before content design changes
- Quality level before content design changes
- Specific blockers and reasons they were blockers
This documentation enables me to demonstrate the impact of content design with data to substantiate it.
Menu of metrics
Metrics and reporting will depend on your unique business circumstances and strategy, but you can choose which to focus on based on your needs:
Quantitative
- Impact
- Risks prevented
- Blockers solved
- Errors fixed
- Total output per feature, product area, initiative, review cycle
- Productivity/Output
- Strings
- Screens
- Flows
- Features
Qualitative
- Impact
- Change in content quality
- Before and after screenshots (very effective for showing how small errors add up)
Just as all product development is iterative, so are your metrics. Your product organization will define new goals regularly, which will shift content design priorities. The important thing is that you own these metrics. You will learn new things and evolve your system. You will change the mindset at your company. Remember that you will grow in the process — simply by trying.
Own your story
A content quality system transforms how organizations view content design. By focusing on audience needs, aligning with business goals, and defining content metrics, you tell the story of content in the language of business value.
Even better, this system empowers you to advocate for products and user experiences that truly serve the world around you. Start small, get feedback, and keep going. It’s okay to experiment! The more you do this work, the more you will spot opportunities to develop your personal strategy. And when that happens, I hope you’ll reach out and teach me what you’ve learned. We are in it together, and it’s an incredible time to advance our practice.
Credits
- Gillian Terzis created a content review process at Meta that informed my thinking.
- Jay Firestone taught me to visualize complex problems and always carries a whiteboard marker.
