Senior Content Designer

Senior Content Designer, Springer Nature Digital

We're looking for an experienced senior content designer to work across our digital products, platforms and services. Springer Nature has a portfolio of over 3,000 peer-reviewed journals and books across all areas of academic research. Our brands include Nature, Springer, Palgrave Macmillan and BMC. We also have a wide range of products and services that help people find and read scholarly articles, publish their own research findings and develop their careers.

This role is part of the UX Content Design team within Springer Nature Digital (SND) and will involve working closely with colleagues across our business.

The work

We work for an audience of millions of researchers across the world and offer a portfolio of products and services covering all aspects of publishing. Many of our customers don't have English as a first language, and many publishing concepts can be hard to understand. We want to make our products and processes clearer and more valuable for our users.

Your role

As a senior content designer, you'll be supporting content development across Springer Nature products, websites and services. You'll become an expert in the journeys we want to support, using data and research findings to inform how you work and where to prioritise.

Most of your time will be spent working with product teams (including UX and UI designers, product managers, researchers and business analysts). You'll advise on where improvements can be made to have the most impact and will write UX copy for new features. You'll also be expected to take a wider view of the overall experience, and to help define how content design can contribute to our success.

Your work will be research-driven, and you will be comfortable taking an iterative approach as we learn more about where we can make a real difference. You'll have used a variety of techniques to build a picture of users' information needs. That will include using analytics, or other data points, and competitor analysis. You'll also be familiar with working alongside researchers to find evidence for decisions or feedback on specific messaging.

You'll collaborate with colleagues from different business areas, including Editorial, Legal, Marketing, SEO, Brand, Customer Support, and Policy. You'll be focused on getting the best outcomes for users while taking business needs and context into account.

The role is a combination of both content strategy and delivery, as you look at understanding and prioritising the journeys we want to support and work on. We want every interaction to be helpful, friendly and clear, and to provide a consistent experience through the language we use.

Main Responsibilities

• Create clear and engaging UX copy, product emails and guidance that contribute to the success of our products and services
• Contribute to the development of content patterns, style and tone of voice
• Guide the creation of any content inventories or audits to understand whether content is effective or not
• Help set up efficient content creation and review processes
• Communicate how content contributes to the success of our products and services and help to define success measures
• Run content creation workshops with colleagues - this might be about UX writing, or long-form guidance or policy content
• Apply a structured approach to content and be able to guide the development of information architecture to help people find what they need, when they need it
• Contribute to projects where content design/strategy knowledge is needed, for example, CMS or other tooling.

What You Will Be Doing

Within 3 months

• Understand how we work, the outcomes we want to achieve and how content strategy and design can contribute
• Get to know your content design colleagues and the wider UX team
• Get familiar with the research we have - where it helps you and where we have gaps
• Review our digital writing guidelines
• Begin to meet stakeholders across the business who create information for users
• Start to collaborate with designers to discover and solve content-related UX challenges in a single product area

Within 6 months

• Audit content within a prioritised user journey - understanding who is responsible for it, what its purpose is and how effective it is
• Make content improvements, working with stakeholders and colleagues to rationalise, simplify and improve content across user journeys
• Develop a good working relationship with content providers in other departments, for example Marketing or Customer Support
• Take part or run user research activities to ensure our approach is meeting user needs
• Analyse research outputs, data or other information that would support making changes or measuring success
• Understand challenges and opportunities for content design

6 months+

• Positively influence how content is created across customer journeys
• Deliver changes or updates to content patterns and style guide
• Contribute to product launches that have significant content elements
• Contribute to strategic initiatives for content both in SND and elsewhere (for example, within the Customer Service or Marketing departments)
• Contribute knowledge to content tooling or CMS projects
• Champion the importance of content design as an integral part of digital service delivery