The term “emotional labor” (along with other therapy-speak) has had a real moment since the mid-2010s. Women have used it to refer to the “thinking work” required to anticipate household and family caregiving needs, which is a genuine imbalance, but of a slightly different kind. Millennials and gen Z-ers have used it to refer to (gasp) listening to their friends, increasingly with the sense that holding that space should merit a Venmo request (which is less about labor and more about reconstructing the logic of capitalism in their relationships). Neither of these meets the definition of emotional labor.
(Disclaimer: I am also about to bend the term to fit my own argument. Stay with me.)
So what does it actually mean? Arlie Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor” in the 80s to describe the type of work flight attendants do to provide an “effortless” experience — presenting a calm and pleasant demeanor so passengers feel safe and cared for. In other words, managing their own emotions in order to manage or influence the emotions of the customers they serve. Their work requires patience and poise and (always!) a smile. These requirements don’t necessarily show up in the job description, but customers would notice if that friendliness and warmth was missing.
When emotional labor is done well, it’s invisible. To make an interaction feel natural, the labor behind it has to disappear. Content design operates on a similar principle.
When friends ask “what even is your job,” I tell them that when a product “just works,” that’s me doing my job well. Most people using a well-designed product will never consider that someone chose each word carefully and precisely; they will never know that someone mapped out the emotional arc of the user experience, thought deeply about what people need through that experience, and intentionally chose language to meet them there. They just know it works.
I think this is why content design, like work that requires emotional labor (e.g., caregiving, service, hospitality, education — notably, work that skews toward women and gender non-conforming people) is sometimes dismissed or devalued. That, and the word “content” has such a nebulous definition as to mean almost nothing, but I digress.
If you can’t see the mechanism, it must not require skill. If it feels natural, it must be natural. The work requires empathy and emotional intelligence and these skills are considered “soft” (read: unserious).
At most organizations, “hard” skills still mean quantifiable, technical work. The work of anticipating and understanding how a person will feel moving through an experience and then adjusting every interaction state and word to shape and manage those feelings is just as crucial and complex but much harder to pin down. Invisibility is evidence of solid craft. That this effort disappears is the whole point, so it’s unsurprising that it goes unrecognized and undervalued.
The consequences for content designers are: less organizational influence, lower pay, and the persistent experience of having to justify your existence and expertise to people who assume your work is nice to have, but not crucial. Fluffy, even. (The same kind of people struggle to emotionally regulate when a barista is lukewarm to them, by the way.)
I don’t have a solution for this beyond gingerly tapping my little microphone and asking people to take notice. I measure the impact I can and make my work visible when I can, but ultimately I’ve had to accept that most of my work will never show up neatly in a concrete metric. How do you measure the absence of confusion? How do you quantify what doesn’t go wrong?
It’s easy to notice when a product doesn’t work — when I run into a vague error message that leaves me frustrated and wondering what actually went wrong and what to do next, when I can’t find the setting I need buried in an unintuitive UI (I’m looking at you, Sony), when terminology feels inaccurate or misleading…
It’s harder to notice when a product works well, but I try to. When the user experience is so smooth that I don’t have to think about it (and I’m not thinking about what I would personally do to improve it), I know someone worked hard to make it that way. I see the effort it took to make the experience feel effortless.
Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash