What content design is, and why marketers should care

Marketing gets someone to the page, content design decides whether they can do anything there

Most marketing training covers the first half of that sentence. Persuasive copy, a subject line that earns an open, an ad that earns a click. Fewer marketers are trained in the second half, which is whether the page the click lands on lets someone finish what they came to do.

After more than 20 years in communications and marketing, I think that gap is the most expensive unattended problem in small business content. It is not a specialism for government services or accessibility teams. It is a hole in ordinary commercial marketing.

I found it early. Three months into my first marketing role, I watched someone try to find our pricing page. They went through the navigation, came back, went through it again, and after about 5 clicks they left. The analytics showed they were not unusual.

Every word in that navigation bar was well written. The problem was that we had organised the information around how we wanted to describe ourselves, rather than around what someone trying to buy something needed to find. No amount of rewriting the labels would have fixed the order they were in.

What content design is

Content design starts from something a person needs to do or find out, and then works out the best way to meet that need.

Sarah Winters of Content Design London, who did much of the work that established the discipline in UK government, defines it as answering a user need in the best way for the user to consume it. GOV.UK's guidance puts it as taking a user need and meeting it in the best way possible.

The phrase carrying the weight is 'best way'. The need comes first, then the format. The answer might be a paragraph. It might be a table, a calculator, a diagram, a different page order, a form with 2 fields instead of 9, or removing a page so people stop landing on it. Content Design London give the example of a healthcare service that planned to spend millions on a mobile app, where the research found the need was better served by posters in doctors' surgeries.

That is the part marketers tend to find uncomfortable, because it means the deliverable is not decided in advance. A content design brief cannot start with 'we need a blog post'. It starts with what someone is trying to get done, which I have written about separately in user needs versus what users ask for.

How it differs from the jobs next to it

These 4 roles overlap and are often done by the same person in a small business. They answer different questions, and confusing them is how businesses end up commissioning the wrong work.

Discipline	The question it answers	What it produces	How you know it worked
Copywriting	How do we make someone want this	Persuasive copy for a defined audience and offer	People respond to the message
UX writing	What words does this interface need at this moment	Button labels, error messages, form hints, empty states	People get through the interface without stalling
Content design	What does this person need, and what is the best way to meet it	Whatever meets the need: structure, format, sequence, or no content at all	People complete the task they arrived to do
Content strategy	What should exist, who owns it, and what happens to it over time	A plan for the whole body of content, and the decisions about retiring it	The content stays true and the set stays coherent

Copywriting assumes the offer and the audience are settled and the job is persuasion. Content design can conclude that the page should not exist. That is the practical difference, and it is why the 2 need to work together rather than one taking instructions from the other.

For the fourth column, the ownership and retirement side, see the content lifecycle nobody plans for.

Structure is speed

Most readers will not read your paragraph. That is uncomfortable if you spent an hour on it.

Jakob Nielsen's 2008 analysis for the Nielsen Norman Group put it at at most 28% of the words on an average page visit, with 20% more likely. Two caveats are worth carrying with the figure. The 28% is a ceiling that assumes the visitor spends the entire visit reading, and the underlying data came from a 2005 study of highly literate users, several of whom worked at a university. Treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a precise rate for your audience.

The order of magnitude is enough to act on. Content design responds to scanning instead of fighting it. Put the point first. Write headings that match the question in the reader's head rather than the team that owns the copy. Break a dense block into structure a scanning eye can use. None of that is writing worse, and it is covered in more detail in plain English as a conversion tactic.

Sometimes the answer is to change the thing, not the words

The NHS bowel cancer screening programme is the clearest public example of format beating phrasing.

The programme replaced its old home test with FIT in April 2019. FIT needs one small sample rather than the several the previous test required, and Cancer Research UK describes it as simpler and more convenient, designed to make it easier for people to say yes to screening. Uptake has risen from 59% to 65% since it was introduced. NHS campaigns alongside it dropped the clinical vocabulary and talked about a poo test, on the reasoning that embarrassment was part of what stopped people.

I want to be careful about what that shows. The test itself changed at the same time as the language, so the uptake figure cannot be assigned to the communications. It also runs over years and across several campaigns. What it demonstrates is the method rather than an effect size: the team asked why people were not doing the thing, and the answers were the difficulty of the task and the embarrassment of the subject. Neither is fixed by a better-written letter.

That is the content design move. Ask what is stopping the person, then change whatever is stopping them, which may be the process rather than the prose.

Evidence beats guesswork

I once spent £3,000 on a blog series I was sure would take off. Analytics showed 22 readers.

The lesson was not to write better articles. It was that I had never checked whether anyone was asking the questions those articles answered. I wrote for an imagined audience rather than the one that existed.

The same instinct shows up in smaller decisions. Boomerang looked at over 40 million emails sent through its own service and found that messages between 50 and 125 words got reply rates above 50%, falling gradually to about 44% at 500 words and dropping below 35% past 2,500. It counted replies rather than opens or clicks. It is observational data from one product's users, not a controlled test, so it tells you about a correlation in that population rather than what would happen if you cut your own email in half.

Taken carefully, it still points the same way as everything else here. The urge to add one more paragraph explaining your reasoning usually costs you.

A rewrite that mattered

A client's checkout button once read 'Proceed to Transaction Finalisation'.

Nobody had asked for it to be changed. It had been there long enough that nobody in the business saw it. We changed it to 'Pay now' and conversions improved.

I will not put a number on that. It was not an A/B test, other things changed on the page in the same period, and I would rather undersell it than invent a figure. The direction was clear and the change cost nothing.

The phrase was not ungrammatical, and anyone who already understood the process could parse it. It was wrong because it made a familiar action sound unfamiliar, at the exact moment a customer needed confidence.

Accessibility is part of the job

In the 2023 to 2024 financial year, 1 in 4 people in the UK were disabled, which is 16.8 million people, up from 11.9 million a decade earlier. Some of those conditions affect how a person reads, navigates or processes a page.

Content design treats that as part of the work rather than a check at the end. Meaningful alt text, a logical heading order, plain language, and content that still makes sense to someone using a screen reader or a keyboard alone. Content Design London's Readability Guidelines are free and are a reasonable first checklist if you have never looked at a page this way.

The same decisions help everyone else. A logical heading order is what lets a screen reader user skip to the part they need, and it is also what lets a rushed reader find it.

If you do marketing, not content design

You do not need to retrain. Three habits carry most of the benefit.

Before the next campaign, ask what the reader has to do once they arrive, not only what you want them to feel. Before the next rewrite, find out whether anyone has struggled with the current version, rather than assuming a cleverer draft fixes it. Before you add another paragraph, ask whether a shorter one would get read at all.

The one I would push hardest is the first. Persuasion earns you someone's attention. What you do with the attention is a separate skill, and most marketing only does the first half of the job.