Findings from the 2023 Content Design & UX Writing Survey
About the survey
In February 2023, Jane Ruffino launched a survey for people working in UX content. The goal was to run a health check across our rapidly shifting field—and to create an opportunity to support and validate the people in it.
More than 240 people responded, sharing wins and worries, progress and pain, and dreams for the future.
This website, created by a team of volunteers who came together to analyze the data, captures a snapshot of those responses. We believe it paints a picture of a creative, caring community that’s struggling to balance enthusiasm for the work, exhaustion at the present moment, and both hope and worry for the future.
Watch the replay of our launch event
Missed our June 29 live event? Watch the video and hear our team share the biggest themes we found in the data—and what we think it means for the humans who make up this field.
Introduction from Jane
Our discipline just had a painful, exciting growth spurt.
Content strategy and content design have been around a long time, of course, but certain types of content work, including UX writing, started coalescing in the late 2010s. It all seemed to take off in tandem with the COVID-19 pandemic.
This means that a lot of us came together, professionally, at a time of unprecedented instability and vulnerability. It gave our discussions and friendships a unique openness to strong feelings and realtalk.
But even as our visibility and the number of roles grew, many of us continued to struggle with fragile influence, impostor syndrome, and messy organizational dynamics. I noticed (and felt) a lot of anxiety.
Am I doing this right? How do I know? Does everyone else have a seat at the table, while I’m still begging for Figma access?
If I do this one new thing, then will I feel legitimate?
A lot of people got hung up on title changes or certification, or devoured books and articles about collaboration. These were tactics we hoped would collectively and individually give us credibility—and that seat at the table.
And then, as waves of layoffs began, LinkedIn became a virtual sewer of anxious thought leadership. My group chats exploded with people saying they couldn’t bear looking at it.
I’d run surveys before, and I hadn’t planned to do another one. But in January 2023, the podcast If Books Could Kill did an episode on the bestselling ‘90s self-help book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. I’d bought into that book as a teenager—but as I listened to the episode, I realized just how binary and blamey it was.
I also realized something else: the advice given to content folks about “gaining influence” sounds a lot like the advice John Gray gave to women trying to convince men that they’re worthy of respect. Be quietly helpful. Give them all the space they want. Lead from below. Don’t sound too sure of yourself, you might startle a product manager.
I thought, wait a minute, that emotional labor we do isn’t just an invisible second job. It’s punitive. Are we in a codependent relationship with an industry?
No wonder everyone answers, “How have you been?” with “Completely exhausted.”
Maybe getting a seat at the table isn’t the problem.
So, I ran a survey, with the intention of building a picture that shows the progress we’ve made and the love a lot of us have for this work (it’s real!), but also to capture what we’re all still going through.
I hoped I’d get maybe 50 responses, if I left it up for long enough. When 243 of you answered, I saw that this data—made out of your experiences and feelings—deserved a deeper treatment than I could give it alone.
So here we are, four months later, a team of somewhat tired, unpaid volunteers, finally launching the results. If you contributed, thank you. If you thought about contributing but couldn’t manage it, thank you, too. If you’re still reading, also thank you.
—Jane Ruffino, content designer and UX writer
June 29, 2023
Findings highlights
Our respondents talked about building teams, influencing organizations, and being involved earlier and more regularly in processes than they were even a year or two ago. These are huge wins, especially in such a short time.
But for a lot of us, doing more in the design process has also resulted in more work, more context-switching, and more responsibility. An overwhelming number of respondents expressed frustration with the continued and constant need to prove their value and defend their existence, on top of all this other work.
In fact, anxiety was a huge theme. People are worried about AI—not because large language models are an existential threat to us, but because organizations that don’t value content will happily use AI tools as a cheap way to replace content people.
There were also concerns around layoffs, which we knew we would see, and a disillusionment with Big Tech that was larger than expected.
The uneasiness of an undefined landscape a few years ago has given way to a field that's starting to feel like it’s full of walls and gates, and the work is still very messy: more stakeholders to manage, and even higher demands placed on job-seekers by people who don’t always understand the work—exacerbating the problems created by the lack of roles for juniors and mid-career transitioners.
There’s a persistent hunger to learn and improve, and while this is exactly what we’d expect from an engaged community of smart, curious people, it’s not alleviating the anxiety.
If doing more was going to get us the recognition and influence we need and deserve, it would have worked by now—and people are starting to see and express that.
In fact, if we were to name one overarching theme in this data, it’s that getting to where we are has involved massive effort, with diminishing returns. This is enjoyable, satisfying work that we all want to do our best at, but we’re very tired of the work around the work.
And yet, there’s also a lot of hope to go around.
A lot of respondents are aiming for equilibrium, or to move beyond big product companies and into smaller organizations or more values-aligned work. If other industries developed more content maturity, they’d have an eager segment of talent ready to embrace roles there.
We also saw a lot of concern for one another at a collective level. And even though lots of us still have big dreams (and someone has a book contract—congratulations!), those dreams are now matched with a shared desire for stability, community, and some room to breathe.
We believe everyone deserves those things. And we hope these survey results help us come together and create them.
“I’m spread way too thinly, and don’t get to work with other content designers much.”
—Senior content designer, UK
“[My biggest win was] gaining a larger seat at the design table.”
—Senior UX writer, USA
“We spend too much time making decks to prove our value and not enough time coming together as practitioners.”
—Senior director, content design, USA
“AI is a threat? I don’t think so, but sometimes our skills are invisible to companies.”
—Lead content strategist, Italy
“The layoff trend seems to be forcing people to give up the workers’ rights gains we made in the Great Resignation. How do we work collectively to protect ourselves and each other?”
—Senior content designer, USA
“I would love to go to a cool, mission-driven startup.”
—Content designer, USA
“In seeing how tech has behaved with layoffs, it has me questioning so much about if it’s a good idea to work in it.”
—Content designer, USA
“I once went through six rounds of interviews and didn’t get the job, plus I had to do a three-hour panel interview with them and take a ridiculous IQ test.”
—Senior content designer, USA
“The UX fam includes some of the most brilliant people and everybody just wants to share what they know and help others within their discipline(s).”
—Senior copywriter, USA