“It just works!”

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 they weren’t performing friendliness and warmth.

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 never consider that someone chose each word carefully and precisely; they don’t realize 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 part of why our work is sometimes dismissed or treated as an afterthought. That, and the word “content” has such a nebulous definition as to mean almost nothing, but I digress.

The devaluation of content design follows the same logic as the devaluation of emotional labor. If you can’t see the mechanism, it must not require skill. If it feels natural, it must be natural. Emotional labor has historically been associated with women’s work (e.g., caregiving, service, hospitality, education). The fields of UX and content design also skew heavily toward women and gender non-conforming people. These roles require empathy and emotional intelligence and these skills are considered “soft” (read: unserious).

The mental model that most organizations have for “hard” skills centers quantifiable and 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 critical. Fluffy, even. (It’s the same kind of people who 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 what I can, make my work visible when I can, but ultimately I’ve had to accept that most of my work will never show up 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 or 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 feel that way. I see the effort it took to make the experience feel effortless.

Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash