One Year as Duo’s First Content Designer

This article has been indexed from The Duo Blog

Approximately one year ago, I was hired as Duo’s first Content Designer. You might be thinking: what is Content Design at Duo? It’s designing in words, concepts, systems and terminology, voice and tone, and knowing how to apply them to make our products more usable and easier for people to adopt. Content design is about seeking harmony between images and words to tell a rich story in our products. Although it has its own capabilities and techniques, close partnerships with product strategy, product design and design research are indispensable.

How Content Design Works with Teams

When I joined Duo, I knew my work would largely focus on writing and editing product content to make sure it’s accurate, clear and consistent. To be successful as a Content Designer, I’d need to collaborate with Product Designers and feature teams. But as a team of one, if I spread myself too thin and overcommitted, I risked sacrificing the trust of designers, PMs and engineers. That didn’t sit well with me. How could I responsibly contribute to these relationships? What activities would help me do that?

In the beginning, I had hypotheses about the dynamics of these relationships. I soon realized I had to work with teams and designers to figure out how to work with them. After a few months, I developed three models for “how I work”:

Fully Embedded

Here’s where I can bring the most value to teams. Essentially, I’m accountable and function like a Product Designer on the team. While embedded on a single sign-on (SSO) team to work on Duo Central, some activities I did included:

Regular working sessions with the product designer to iterate on content
One-on-one meetings with the Product Manager and Engineering Lead to better understand the product roadmap and any dependencies or constraints
Reviewing content-related Phab tasks before shipping