Project

As the sole content designer in Zapier's product organization, an early question I had to answer was how I could maximize my impact.

After working with product teams for several months, I realized that it was easy to spend a lot of time reviewing copy and making repetitive edits (like changing button copy from title case to sentence case), but my time was most valuable working on high-level content projects.

I decided to design and conduct a content design training to equip UX designers and product managers with a solid foundation in content design and empower them to write better product content.

Strategy

The first step was the hardest—deciding what material I should include in this training. I had spent years learning and working in the discipline of content design, but I had to determine what knowledge I could realistically impart to beginners in a condensed period of time.

I combed through articles, books, and courses I had read and completed in the past, as well as evaluated about my own experience and knowledge, and eventually landed on the following course objectives for participants:

I spent one month writing and designing the content in Google Slides. Here are a few examples that showcase the range of content covered:

I wanted the training to be focused and interactive, so I structured it as a 2-hour session split into five sections, with four live exercises and a 10-minute break in the middle. To encourage active participation, each session would have no more than 10 participants at a time.

I ran a pilot version of the training with a group of seven UX researchers, which helped me to test the flow and timing and identify what content needed to be modified.

Outcome

After conducting four training sessions with a total of 30 product managers and designers, I asked participants to provide their feedback in a Slack-based survey, indicating what they found helpful or could be improved in terms of content, structure, and format.

While it wasn't an objective, it was also a personal delight to receive messages like these:

I also directed participants to the Zapier Content and Messaging Guide, where they could easily reference content design guidelines and apply them to their work. Designs that came my way after the training had greatly improved content, and I was spending less than a third of the time I used to on content reviews. In some cases, I actually had to double-check if I had reviewed a design before, because I couldn't identify any changes that needed to be made.

I now run this content design training on a quarterly basis for new designers and product managers, and am working on a second training centered on conversational design.