How content design solves user needs (and why marketers should care)

The moment I understood the gap between persuasion and understanding

Three months into my first marketing role, I watched someone try to find our pricing page.

They clicked through the navigation once. Then again. On the fifth click, they gave up and left the site. I checked the analytics later and found we were not the only visitor who did that.

Our navigation had been designed to sound clever. Nobody had checked whether it actually worked.

That was not a copywriting problem. Every word on that navigation bar was perfectly well written. It was a content design problem: we had organised information around how we wanted to describe ourselves, not around what someone trying to buy something needed to find.

Marketing is good at getting attention. Content design is good at what happens next.

Marketing gets someone to a page. Content design decides whether they can do anything once they arrive.

Most marketers are trained in the first half of that problem. Persuasive copy, a strong subject line, an ad that earns a click. Fewer are trained in the second half: whether the page that click lands on actually lets someone complete the task they came to do.

That is not a niche skill for government services or accessibility specialists. It is a gap in most commercial marketing, and it costs conversions every day it goes unaddressed.

Start with what people actually need, not what you want to say

The NHS Bowel Cancer Screening Programme is a useful example, not because the numbers are dramatic, but because the method is instructive.

Uptake on the programme had stalled at around 58%, and it was lowest among the people most at risk. Rather than write better copy for the existing test kit letter, the team went back to first principles: what was stopping people from doing the test at all.

Part of the answer was language. The test itself became known in public materials as the "poo test" rather than its clinical name. Part of the answer was reframing: moving the whole programme's messaging from "bowel cancer" towards "bowel health," a subject people find easier to engage with before they are frightened into it.

Nobody wrote a cleverer ad for the old approach. They changed what the content was trying to do.

Structure is speed

Here is an uncomfortable fact for anyone who has spent hours polishing a paragraph: most readers will not read it.

Research from the Nielsen Norman Group has found that on an average web page, people read at most 28% of the words during a visit, and 20% is more typical. That has held steady since their original eye-tracking studies decades ago. People scan for what they need. They do not read the way a writer hopes they will.

Content design responds to that fact instead of fighting it. Front-load the point. Use headings that match the question in the reader's head, not the department that owns the copy. Break dense paragraphs into structure a scanning eye can actually use.

None of that is about writing worse. It is about writing for how people actually read, not how you wish they would.

Data beats guesswork

I once spent £3,000 on a blog series I was confident would go a little viral. It did not. Google Analytics showed 22 readers.

The lesson was not "write better articles." It was that I had never checked whether anyone was asking the questions those articles answered. I had written for an imagined audience instead of the one that existed.

This shows up in smaller decisions too. Boomerang's analysis of 40 million emails found that messages between 75 and 100 words got the highest response rate, around 51%. Anything from 50 to 125 words beat a 50% response rate. Past that, replies dropped off slowly as length increased.

The instinct to add more, whether that is a longer email or an extra paragraph explaining your reasoning, usually works against you. Content design treats that as a testable claim, not a matter of taste.

A rewrite that mattered

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

Nobody asked for that phrase to be simplified. It had been there long enough that nobody in the business noticed it any more. When we changed it to "Pay Now," conversions improved. I would rather undersell that than invent a precise number I cannot stand behind, but the direction was clear and the change cost nothing to make.

That is the whole discipline in miniature. The words were not wrong in the sense of being ungrammatical or unclear to someone who already understood the process. They were wrong because they made a familiar action sound unfamiliar, at exactly the moment a customer needed confidence, not confusion.

Accessibility is not optional

Around 1 in 4 UK adults have a disability, according to the House of Commons Library's most recent figures, covering 16.8 million people. Some of those disabilities affect how someone reads, navigates or processes a page.

Content design treats accessibility as part of the job, not an add-on for a specialist to check at the end. Meaningful alt text, a logical heading structure, plain language, content that still makes sense to someone using a screen reader or navigating by keyboard alone. Content Design London's Readability Guidelines, still freely available, are a useful starting checklist if you have never audited a page this way.

This is not charity. It is the same discipline that helps every reader, applied properly.

A useful thought experiment, not a reported result: imagine a health insurer explaining "pre-authorisation" as "getting approval first," adding a faster way to submit a claim, and showing people the average amount they would save by switching. None of that requires new persuasion techniques. It requires removing the friction between wanting to act and understanding how.

What this means if you do marketing, not content design

You do not need to become a content designer to benefit from thinking like one.

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

Persuasion gets someone's attention. Content design is what happens after they give it to you. Most marketing only does the first half of that job.