In about a month, the smart-as-heck folks at @ConfabEvents are kicking off @buttonconf, a dedicated 3-day online event focused on UX/Product content. If that sounds like your jam, you totally should check it out. https://www.buttonconf.com
I’m particularly interested in @buttonconf because it recognizes — and leans into! — the growing distinction between content that lives inside of a design and design that presents content. It’s a fuzzy line, but you definitely know it when you see it.
Understanding the distinctions is particularly interesting to us at @autogram_is, given our focus on the intersection of design systems and content architecture. Informally, we’ve been talking about it as a spectrum…
The labels are terrible, but the challenges at the extremes and in the middle are distinct and critical for the teams grappling with them. On one side, “UX/Product Content” must do the work of effectively communicating meaning, context, etc. as part of a product interface.
On the other side, templated design work contends with the variations and exceptions inherent in high-volume content publishing. We see a lot of tension when design systems and pattern libraries from the product/UX side are applied here w/o rethinking.
And in the middle, “content design” wrestles with problem-focused content where messaging and design decisions are often unique to each piece of content, not whole classes of them. It’s where a lot of structured content work gets messiest.
There is really good writing and thought (and, increasingly, even good tooling) at different points on that line, but more and more orgs are trying to build design systems, content models, and publishing tools that stretch across the whole spectrum.
Understanding what’s shared, what’s different, where approaches and tools can be shared and where they have to be tailored… that’s an interesting bundle of questions, and that overlap is an exciting place to be right now.
Also: yes, I am colorblind, and yes, that does explain my diagrams.