Content design: owning the conversation between product and user
Content design is still a young discipline, yet it shapes how users perceive, choose, and use products every day. Practitioners go by many titles—content designers, UX writers, product writers—but the core job is the same: give users the right guidance at the right moment so they can accomplish their goals on an interface. Where visual designers own layout and look and feel, content designers own what might be called the conversation between product and user along each journey, making sure nothing is missing when a user needs to move forward.
Paradoxically, the better the text on an interface, the less attention users pay to it. Effective interface content simply "works": it fades into an experience that feels smooth and delightful, guiding users toward success without drawing attention to itself. That outcome requires content designers to understand user needs deeply and know exactly which problems a product solves. Working alongside visual designers, they map user flows and wireframes—and only after all that groundwork do they sit down to write.
From documentation to the dashboard
That path describes what I do at Cloudflare, though it wasn't where I started. In July 2020, I joined as a technical writer for the Zero Trust products. My days involved setting up and testing features on the interface, essentially observing experiences and documenting them. Over time, I noticed those experiences could be better. What if we took a holistic view of how we talked to users throughout the interface, instead of just writing instructions that bridged the gap between user needs and features?
Cloudflare's ambition is to make products ridiculously easy to use. That means building something people don't need to look up—a product that communicates consistently, anticipates questions, marks a clear path, and reassures users when an error appears. I raised the idea with my manager and volunteered to own UI content too, eager to transform the interface from something users must read about into something they instinctively understand.
Nearly two years later, I look back on the foundations that helped me launch what became a one-woman content design team—lessons that still inform how we approach the work today.
Build a toolkit before you write
Successful UI content runs on consistency, and consistency breeds familiarity. Users gravitate toward experiences they recognize. That raises a question: how do you write consistently across a large interface? I started by assembling three building blocks.
- Product voice and tone. Defining identity comes first. Is this a playful product that sprinkles exclamation marks, or an established, authoritative voice offering concise, reassuring guidance? Nailing that identity anchors everything that follows.
- Guidelines. Saying a product should sound "friendly" is vague until you tie it to concrete writing practice. Because all UI content lives inside a design environment, I based our guidelines on the Zero Trust dashboard's design system, so anyone writing for a specific component knew the rules of engagement. That is where questions like "Do we use em dashes?" and "Should we say 'please'?" get settled once and for all.
- Heuristics. When I flagged content as suboptimal, stakeholders often needed a quantifiable reason to act. We developed objective parameters and a scoring system that measure a feature's purpose, clarity, accessibility, and alignment with voice and tone—turning subjective impressions into a clear assessment of how much work an area needs.
Get involved early
In my first days wearing the content designer hat, I got pulled into error-message work at the last minute, right before features shipped. Even with the toolkit in hand, I was unpacking context on the fly: who would see this message, when in their journey they would see it, and what they needed to move past it. The copy suffered, and users told us loudly.
The lesson: show up earlier. I started joining front-end team stand-ups, sitting in when PMs explained the problem a feature solved, when specs were presented, and as developers raised issues. That context was enormous. I also deepened ties with product designers. We shared the same challenges, and collaboration made our stories about products more coherent. When I set out to define dashboard product principles, designers pitched in energetically; when new features emerged, we started together from the screen.
Eventually the whole team learned to row in the same direction—we became the UI team. That collaboration produced a new Zero Trust dashboard home, consistent and informative empty states, an overhaul of error messages, and a redesigned onboarding experience. All of it centered on the user and aimed at shipping something genuinely easy to use.
From solo effort to a growing team
As the dashboard's UX content matured, the sheer volume became unsustainable. Every design decision ran through me, projects overlapped, and I still wrote documentation for new features while iterating on content strategy. Conversations with my manager in the Product Content Experience team confirmed the value of what we had started, but we needed a plan to scale the practice beyond one product or one person.
Today we are building a dedicated content design team. There is significant work ahead—but it is work worth doing. The story of content design at Cloudflare is just beginning. Or, as I told my editor: "We're just getting started." That's the version that feels right.
(Yes, we're hiring in Lisbon and in the US! Come join the team.)
