Summary: Content strategy focuses on content-related processes, while UX writing shapes user experiences through text. The two disciplines work in harmony.
Though often conflated in job descriptions and on UX teams, content strategy and UX writing are not the same. You can think of these areas as complementary: they work together to improve the user experience. There’s a lot of work and focus that goes into content strategy and there’s a lot of work and focus that goes into UX writing.
Definitions of Content Strategy and UX Writing
This article outlines how the roles of content strategist and UX writer differ, to help you determine whether you need both.
Content strategy supports and enables UX writers and content designers by fostering alignment, communicating goals, clarifying roles, establishing standards, and managing workflows and tools.
Content strategy involves setting up an intentional plan, practice, and process to reach specific goals with content over time.
Kristina Halvorson, Content Strategy for the Web
Content strategy focuses on the planning, delivery, and maintenance of content across all formats and channels. Though related, content strategy is fundamentally different from UX writing.
UX writing involves creating clear, concise, and contextually appropriate copy that guides people through an experience.
UX writing encompasses any written information, including:
- UI copy (e.g., button text, navigation labels, and error messages)
- Microcopy (e.g., headlines, summaries, and metadata)
- Longer-form content (e.g., articles, video, or podcast scripts)
Content strategy involves planning and managing content to achieve goals, while UX writing uses text to enhance people’s experiences.
Content Strategy: Enabling Content Quality and Production Efficiency
The main goals of content strategy are to:
- Ensure that the content meets the goals of the target audience and of the organization
- Improve efficiency for people creating content (UX writers and content designers) by putting in place content-creation processes and standards such as style guides
- Track content quality and effectiveness of content-improvement practices over time
As you can see, content strategy has a wide set of goals. There are activities (such as writing actual content) that are outside its scope.
Content Strategists’ Activities
Content strategists use analytics tools, content-focused usability testing, and surveys to understand, measure, and communicate about internal and external content’s needs and effectiveness. UX researchers and UX writers are also often involved in these activities so they can leverage the findings in their own work. Content strategists also oversee the publication and the management of content across platforms, as well as the management of backend content.
Content strategists use methods such as:
- Content inventories and audits: Regular audits reveal what content exists and where. They help strategists see where and how to shift plans to reach goals with content. Audits also ensure content remains effective, relevant, updated, and (eventually) removed when it’s become irrelevant.
- Content operations and workflows: Content strategists create editorial calendars for planning content publication, manage step-by-step workflows, and introduce tools into the content process to help reach specific goals.
- Content structuring: Content strategists design scalable, reusable content systems for various channels and formats. They establish a content taxonomy using information-architecture methods, determine how new content fits into it, and efficiently scale or reuse content across different platforms.
Content Strategy for Specific Content Types
An organization could have separate content-strategy efforts dedicated to specific content types. For example, one could have a content-marketing team dedicated to content strategy for marketing content. A different content-strategy team may work on product-related content.
The specific goals, workflows, and metrics for each of these subdisciplines of content strategy will be slightly different, depending on their specifics, but the types of activities involved will be the same.
| Content-Marketing Metrics | Product-Content Metrics |
| TrafficSocial media followers or reactionsEngagement metricsConversionRetention or churn | UsageTask timeTask successSatisfaction |
Whether you’re developing a content strategy that supports the whole customer experience or focusing on a specific area like customer support or marketing, content strategy and UX writing are still different and need to work together.
UX Writing: Working on Words and (Users’) Woes
While the phrase “UX writing” is more self-explanatory than “content strategy,” the relationship between UX writing and content strategy is unclear for many UX professionals. UX writers focus on creating copy that’s concise and guides users through an experience so they can achieve their goals.
The copy written by UX writers is uniquely tailored to answer questions. It can ease or prevent frustrations, challenges, and pain points that people encounter when interacting with a marketing message, product, or service.
UX writers rely on the processes, tools, and frameworks set by content strategists to do their work well and be efficient, consistent, and aligned with broader organizational goals and standards.
UX Writers’ Activities
UX writers’ main activities are:
- Writing and editing copy
- Publishing content
In consequence, the skills needed to be a successful UX writer may include:
- Proper grammar knowledge and attention to detail
- Comfort with writing
- Knowledge about user research, ideation, and best practices for writing for digital products
- Search-engine optimization skills
- Knowledge of how content-management systems work
UX writers focus on:
- Clarity and concision: UX writers write clear and concise copy to communicate actions and information (regardless of presentation format or communication channel) in ways that align with people’s expectations and organizational goals (set, communicated, and measured by content strategists).
- Consistency: UX writers adhere to style guidelines and express the organization’s personality consistently across all interaction points to evoke the intended emotions. They ensure content is always accessible and inclusive for all people (standards set, communicated, and adapted through collaboration between content strategists and UX writers).
- Design collaboration: UX writers work closely with UI and product designers to write and refine copy, ideally early in the process and directly in design tools, for efficient, authentic feedback in content-focused usability testing (processes and tools documented, communicated, and adapted through collaboration with content strategists, UX writers, and designers).
What About Content Design?
Content design is closely related to UX writing and involves structuring, formatting, and presenting content in a visually appealing, accessible, and easy-to-navigate way.
UX writers may also do content design or may work alongside UI or product designers to handle design and layout. Content designers usually have skills in both writing and design and are responsible for:
- Information architecture: Organizing content logically in the site’s or the app’s structure
- Wireframing and prototyping: Creating visual representations of content layouts that include text, images, audio, video, and graphics
- Structuring and formatting: Organizing messages by order of importance and ensuring that formatting techniques (e.g., clearly distinguishable headlines and subheadings, proper spacing, use of white space, bullet points, and highlighting) are applied
Contrasts and Complements
Content strategy and UX writing are closely related but distinct. In some organizations, content strategists may also perform some UX writing, while in others, the roles are separate.
| Dimension | Content Strategy | UX Writing |
| Process and Tools | Sets and adapts processes, workflows, and tools | Follows and influences changes in processes and tools |
| Research | Supports and enables user and stakeholder research | Creates copy variations for testing and works with designers |
| Goals and Metrics | Communicates content goals and metrics, tracks and reports progress | Creates and modifies copy to meet goals, iterates based on feedback |
| Technical Systems | Understands and communicates capabilities of content-management systems | Leverages technical capabilities in writing and content design |
| Standards and Guidelines | Oversees and maintains style guides and content standards | Uses and adheres to standards in writing, contributes to updates |
| Writing-Support Tools | Explores and implements new tools for quality and efficiency | Uses tools, offers feedback for improvements |
| Reviews and Editing | Sets review cadences and roles involved in approvals | Runs reviews, advocates for user centricity, makes changes |
| Publishing and Maintenance | Prepares for content-publishing and maintenance tasks, trains publishers, coordinates audits | Writes metadata for SEO, performs final reviews |
| Metrics and Feedback | Gathers and reports feedback, determines standards for inventorying and auditing | Makes copy changes or creates new written information based on metrics and feedback, weighs in on audits |
| Content Retirement | Determines content-retirement processes | Helps with redirects, content reuse, archiving, or merging in retirement |
There’s much more to content strategy than writing, and there’s much more to UX writing than communicating information. Because of the complexities of each role and the significant amount of work that each entails, more and more organizations invest in two separate roles, rather than having one role for both content strategy and UX writing.
Collaboration Between Content Strategists and UX Writers
Collaboration between content strategists and UX writers is essential for creating cohesive user experiences. Content strategy and UX writing can leverage each other’s strengths through:
- Shared understanding of people’s needs: Both rely on research to ensure content and processes support users’, stakeholders’, and writers’ needs.
- Consistency in standards: Both work together to define, contribute to, and maintain guidelines that ensure consistency.
- Feedback loops: Both use feedback to guide improvements to the content, internal processes, and standards.
Reference
Halvorson, Kristina & Rach, Melissa. (2012). Content Strategy for the Web. New Riders.
This blog is based on information written by Anna Kaley
