Designing a name
Why we’re changing the job titles of our content team
Our naming guidelines in Polaris start like this: “The names we give our products and features teach merchants how to use Shopify.”
What’s true for products can also be true for teams, which is why — after lots of on-again, off-again discussion — we’ve changed the name of our discipline from Content Strategy to Content Design.
The timing was finally right to make the change. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at job titles more broadly across the organization with a few goals:
- More accurately describe our contribution to the products we build
- Increase alignment between job titles within teams
- Improve understanding for people outside of our discipline
When we talked about all the things our content team actually does, people inside and outside of the UX practice immediately understood that as design. Is our work strategic? Absolutely. But content design clearly describes our work and our output, and it reinforces our role as partners in crafting Shopify experiences.
In short, it teaches other people at Shopify how to work with us.
As we weighed the benefits of each name against the goals of our project, the choice was pretty clear:
- Improve clarity and understanding: While both strategy and design describe what we do, content designer does so in a more specific way. We don’t just think or write. We design with content. We collaborate with product designers, researchers, and developers to create Shopify experiences using language as our lens and our primary tool.
- Establish mental models with parallelism: Speaking of working alongside designers, this title also aligns well with their job titles. In our guidelines, we encourage names that help establish a mental model and clarify where the thing we’re naming fits into our system. One way to do that is to use parallel naming conventions, using terms that align across areas or levels. Content designer does that by better aligning with the framework and titles for designers throughout our manager and individual contributor tracks.
- Use straightforward terms for non-experts: Everyone (sorta) knows what a designer does. They inherently understand that our products and experiences are designed, even if they don’t necessarily think about the strategy behind those designs. When we say content designer to audiences outside of UX, it’s easier for them to understand the type of work we do and how it impacts our products.
- Enhance people’s perception of our brand: This usually applies to naming features, but it also works for how we “brand” ourselves. When we use a name that helps everyone understand what we do more clearly and aligns with more established roles within our work, we’re putting ourselves in an even better position for the future. Fortunately, the content team at Shopify has always benefited from a seat at the table with design, but as we grow, this name reinforces that shared purpose even more.
*Fun fact: These are also some of our key principles for naming and choosing terms in our products.
There’s been debate around these terms within the broader content world for a while now. And this may seem like the Shopify team is stepping into the fray to plant a flag for Team Content Design.
In a way, I guess we have. But this change wasn’t the result of that debate, internally or externally. And it didn’t come out of content strategists locking ourselves in a dark room to hammer out the one perfect name.
Not surprisingly, it came about the same way most naming projects do in this work. We were asked to revisit the way we talk about an existing concept, with the goals of making our language more clear, consistent, and approachable. Working closely with a group of project stakeholders, we weighed the benefits and settled on the best option.
Now the real work continues. Because naming and labeling things is actually a very small part of what we do. The most meaningful part of our work is in the design process, partnering with our UX teammates to create Shopify experiences.
This simple label doesn’t change the way we do that work, but it does help others understand our place in it. That’s what good names do.
