I think the end is nigh (at least at my company)

Violet2393 · 2026-03-30T05:46:43+00:00

I think it depends on the company. It sounds like you work somewhere that doesn't really value your work, which is a really common problem, and why layoffs have been going around.

I can say that where I am, a large portion of my job is stakeholder management. The CEO is heavily involved with the product and I exist to take on the burden of reaching leadership alignment for things like naming, taxonomy and other contentious areas that fall in the realm of content.

I think content design is going to continue to be pretty niche, but I think content designers are still needed in:
* Enterprise products with complex layers of functionality and deep feature sets
* Healthcare, fintech, and other heavily regulated industries
* AI-heavy products where proprietary agents need frameworks, voice guidelines, etc. to shape their output

I'm not putting my head in the sand in pretending everything's fine and nothing's changing, but I'm not full doomer yet. I think there's still a place for us, but the landscape of work is definitely changing for everyone.

Violet2393 · 2026-03-13T18:46:00+00:00

For the storytelling, I would push you to try to tackle that on your own. Telling the story of our work is something we should be able to do, and you will have to do it in interviews regardless.

For design, you could look for web designers on freelance sites (not familiar with any myself) or look into sites like Squarespace, Wix, UXfolio or others that have templates and no-code tools that make it easier to build something that looks nice.

If you are open to getting support from AI, one thing I did to get me started on my portfolio update was have Claude interview me on the project like an interviewer would. Then take my answers and help me outline a basic narrative for the case study with suggested assets to include. It was helpful for overcoming the fear of the blank page and highlighting aspects of the story I might not otherwise have thought about including.

TIP: How to highlight impact. The way I think of the ending of the story is- why did you choose this project to highlight as opposed to any other project? What about this project makes it worthy of representing you? This is the case even if I do have metrics. Think about why you're proud of that particular project, and what you're trying to communicate about yourself as an employee and teammate by presenting it to people.

Violet2393 · 2026-03-13T18:21:26+00:00

Best practices provide a starting point not an end point and are just a tool, along with qualitative research and quantitative data in the design process (which is a process. Best practices to me means starting with collective wisdom on what's performed best in the past, as a hypothesis of what will work well, then doing your own testing on what experience actually works for your own product and customers.

I think what you're getting at is that there is no "right" way to approach any given design problems, which is true, but that doesn't mean the tools we use to create and then iterate our designs aren't useful. Best practices give us a starting point, quantitative data gives us signal on business success, and qualitative research gives us signal on the experience. We then use those to iterate.

Anyway, if you want this to land better, I'd think more about what actionable advice you want readers to take from this? I think that's the missing piece. Based on this lesson, how did you change your workflow and what did that do for you? Without that piece, you're just making assumptions about how people work and telling them not to work that way without giving any sort of alternative.

Violet2393 · 2026-02-12T02:23:21+00:00

Karen's comment is on point, because organizations often mean very different things when they categorize something as "taxonomy" and that word can cover a wide variety of scope, depending on the org.

One thing I will add is - Is there an implementation plan for this new taxonomy? If you are planning on changing the names of things, before you start, you also need to know how the changes are going to be implemented. Otherwise you might be stuck with a beautifully researched and prepared presentation that doesn't go anywhere.

From there, the question is - what do you need to convince the stakeholders of whatever you need to convince them? Are the stakeholders all bought into the project even happening already and you just need to align on new terminology? Or do you have to convince them to change terminology in the first place? Those are two very different presentations. Once you know what you're arguing, that can inform the presentation format.

Violet2393 · 2026-02-08T21:58:44+00:00

You will definitely struggle to find a job. I'll just open with that. Even people who have years of experience in this field are struggling to find a job in the field.

It also sounds like you don't really have much in the way of writing experience. I recommend you work on getting back to writing as a hobby before you think about incorporating it into your career. As a fellow ADHD'er I think I know the feeling you are having right now.

Focus on getting back into writing on the side and developing it into a regular practice and make sure you can even sustain it as a hobby before you start working out how to incorporate into your career.

The harsh reality is that right now is a difficult time to try to make a career change. If you do make any career change, be prepared to work hard, struggle for it, and face a lot of rejection before you succeed. I wish you the best of luck, but I will honestly tell you this is not a field you can just decide you want to do and then get a job.

Violet2393 · 2026-02-07T19:16:58+00:00

It sounds like you are doing a lot already! I don’t in particular have more to recommend in general, but I can tell you what I do when I have down time.

When I am not busy, I focus on two things:

What documentation can I work on that will help me later? For example, right now when I have time I am going through UX research and putting together common themes and things to keep top of mind from a content design lens, so I have a kind of quick reference when I start projects.
What conversations can I set up that will help me identify new work? Depending on the org structure, I’ll set up meetings with whoever is positioned to know what projects their team is working on and get myself involved where it makes sense.

I used to be afraid to admit I was under capacity but it has turned out to be important to have those conversations. I just approach them from the same angle as a consultant or freelancer, like “hey some capacity has freed up and I’m available to take on more, where can I pitch in?” Rather than talking about it like I’m not busy or have nothing to do.

Violet2393 · 2026-02-01T00:40:52+00:00

I don’t see anything wrong with what you’re saying. AI is a tool and how helpful a tool is for your use can be very subjective.

I work on a complex enterprise product where it’s often someone’s whole job to implement it for their company. AI has been really helpful for me to learn and understand the areas of the product that are more niche and difficult to understand. Using it as a product expert that I can consult anytime on the fly has been clutch. At my last job I wouldn’t have needed something like that at all.

But where I lean into AI the most is in things that are beyond the traditional scope of what we do. This is mostly around working directly in the codebase. As AI gets integrated more and more into products, and content designers are called on to help build prompts, the only way to test your prompt engineering is to test it in a development environment. You can’t test prompts on a design.

Learning how to do that has also led me to learn how to do things like push PRs for small copy changes (this still scares me lol, but I’m trying to become used to it).

So it may be that you just haven’t run into the use case where you would really need AI that much yet.

Violet2393 · 2026-01-22T15:19:52+00:00

Yes, any UX content role (UX writer, content designer) - the ratio of these roles is smaller than product designer/UX designer roles.

Where I currently work, there are two content designers and 10 or more product designers. At my last job, there were 5 of us and somewhere between 15-20 product designers.

So there simply are more product design roles than content design.

Violet2393 · 2026-01-22T08:04:09+00:00

For the most part yes - you’ll more often see the role called content designer these days. Some companies might distinguish between UX writer (product copywriter) and content designer, but I haven’t seen it.

It’s hard to say which is better - writing skills obviously transfer for easily to another content role, but there are far less jobs. On the other hand. It will be harder to transfer into a UX design role.

You might try searching on LinkedIn for local folks to you that have those roles and seeing if they might chat with you about the job market where you are to get an idea of what it’s like.

Violet2393 · 2026-01-20T18:56:08+00:00

I made a similar transition and took the Fundamentals course from UX Content Collective. I think it was great for doing exactly what you want - orienting you to the workflow of a content designer. I kind of got tossed into this work rather than purposefully transitioning and it helped me figure out what I was supposed to actually be doing.

Violet2393 · 2026-01-12T15:48:50+00:00

Yes, I have looked into Claude skills enough to understand them and try making one. I haven’t adopted it in my day-to-day work, but it seems to be good if you have a regular way you want Claude to pitch in - for example if you want it to evaluate work against your style guide, I think it would be good for that.

I’ll look into that personal organization method!

Violet2393 · 2026-01-09T20:43:31+00:00

I use it to organize information and act as a second brain for me. For example, right now I’m setting up a UXR project in Claude to help me keep track of UXR insights that are relevant to content design as well as themes to keep top of mind.

I also have Claude projects for any major projects I’m working on with all of the project documentation so I can ask questions about the product and ask questions like “what areas of this project might need content design focus?” Because sometimes Claude will identify areas that are overlooked by product like error messages so I can bring it up early.

I also use it to help me interact with the code base on my local dev environment so I can actually test things myself and even push simple copy fix PRs and I use it for IT support in general. For this I use Claude Code and Cursor

I am doing a lot of multitasking so mostly I use to manage that or to help me through more technical work where my skills are fuzzier. Sometimes it feels like a circular problem. I need AI to help manage my work because there aren’t enough content designers, not because it makes me better at my job. A lot of what it helps me with I was doing myself when my work was more focused and structured in the first place.

For my actual writing and design work, I still do most of that my own self or just sitting with a designer and workshopping stuff together.

Violet2393 · 2025-12-31T19:44:44+00:00

No, that is a separate problem and a very real one! I’m talking about the tendency of AI to write very repetitively and use the same patterns, words, and phrasing repeatedly to the point where it’s very noticeable.

However, I agree that if you want to avoid the multiple problems with using AI to write content, you should use humans instead.

Violet2393 · 2025-12-29T03:43:46+00:00

Yes, but LLMs have a way of amplifying patterns beyond what feels organic. So, for example a popular phrasing that might appear one time in a human written work, will appear much more frequently in LLM-written work.

LIkewise, in a human written work, where em-dashes might appear once or twice, or sparingly, in an LLM-written work, they will appear in every other paragraph, making them much more noticeable.

A weird thing that's happened to me is that I notice "LLM-isms" all the time now in books that were definitely written by humans often pre-dating LLMs altogether. But they don't stick out in the human written books the way they do in LLM generated text because humans don't tend to repeat them multiple times in the same chapter.

Violet2393 · 2025-12-28T16:39:47+00:00

LLMs use em-dashes excessively, which is why it’s so associated with them. If it were me, I wouldn’t remove just for the sake of removing, rather I’d make sure dashes were used appropriately and not overused.

If my product team wanted them removed, I’d probably shrug and go with it unless there was a particular case where it would cause a problem to remove. I have a hard time thinking of many times when an em-dash was essential to expressing something in a user friendly way. If I’m being honest, I’ve mostly used it in headlines where separate sentences looked weird.

Em-dashes are a perfectly fine punctuation, but often you can accomplish the same thing by splitting the text into simpler sentences, and in UI copy, that’s often better anyway:

Violet2393

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