The work behind good content: empathy, influence, and teaching
From the Inside Seat Edition 4: Across the Pacific, a candid conversation between digital and content leaders Elle Geraghty and Rebecca Harper.
A job description for a UX role does not quite capture the depth and breadth of the work. Beneath the artifacts and deliverables is a consistent thread that runs through practitioners who actually move things forward: empathy. Empathy for the people you research, for the stakeholders you need to bring along, and for the people you teach.
That thread surfaced in a recent conversation between Rebecca Harper and Elle Geraghty, two content strategists with backgrounds in information knowledge management working on opposite sides of the world. Rebecca runs a UX design and strategy consultancy in Calgary, Canada with fifteen years across industries, sectors, and countries. Elle is a digital and content strategist in Sydney, Australia who started her career in broadcast journalism and has spent the last two decades helping organizations figure out what their digital presence is actually for.
Empathy as a foundation for good UX.
UX acknowledges the gap between what someone needs in the moment, sometimes in their worst moments of grief and urgency, and what a system actually provides them, and how it provides it. The work of content designers is designing information and its delivery in a way that is understandable, intuitive, and aligned with the states and environments of the person receiving it. Doing this requires separating your own mental models from those of your users, a skill developed either through your own lived experience or by getting close to someone else’s through user research. That understanding deepens as you test products with real people, observing how they connect with information, navigate through it, and where they stumble along the way.
Elle: Lived experience changes your intellectual understanding and your empathy, but I feel like empathy really does impact on the way that you make sense of the world…Actually talk to and observe people who are your true audience for this content, or this particular user task.
If you don’t have that lived experience, talk to someone that does have that lived experience.
— Rebecca Harper
Empathy is where the work starts and continues in how to land it with other stakeholders.
Speak the language of the room.
Once the insight exists, there is a different kind of work that begins which is the work of being heard. Doing knowledge and insights work means being a connector and a translator of data across methods and sources, which requires really understanding your variety of audiences and stakeholders. Elle has built a workshop exercise around exactly this:
Get the problems that are resonant with stakeholders on the table in a list whether it be structural, governance-related, or organizational.
Then move to the next column: what does that mean for the user?
Then the one after: what does that mean for the business?
Then draw a connection and through line between those three things.
Elle: “You’ve got people who are trying to complete a task in the field, and they can’t because the content’s not displaying in a device that works for them, or they’ve got really convoluted or inappropriate word salad that people are trying to process, and that’s really difficult for them. And so now you’re getting a bit of a sense of what the impact of that is and then take it a step further and go, what does that mean for the business?… Challenges can be around staff retention, not selling enough units, brand or reputational damage, or how much it costs to make something and, hence, what your profit margin is.
Draw a connection between those three things. Have a conversation about the business problems, and then posit the digital or website problems as the solution. The insight doesn’t change, but the framing does. For instance, the cost to service inquiries about a product or a service is really high. How can we use the website to handle that more cheaply, and potentially as a byproduct more conveniently for actual people?
You are carrying your stakeholders through the story, and that is how you connect teams and build a shared language across functions.
There’s this whole realm of change management and interpersonal communication skills that we need to harness as well. So that we can go out and have those productive conversations with 10 different people, and more, and get that organizational alignment.
— Rebecca Harper
The content work that still matters.
How people discover products, services, and information is changing. Increasingly, discovery is happening through LLMs and AI-driven chat systems, not just traditional search or navigation through your own website. This shifts how content work needs to be thought about and scoped. Content must now be optimised for the questions people ask before they ever reach your pages or site.
You need to understand why people come to you in the first place. Maybe that’s because they want to buy something, or maybe they want to learn how to return something, or find where your shop is located.
Elle works through this by picking a case. Say you work at a museum. Ask: what are the top ten tasks people are asking about your museum?
Elle: “So, first of all, you know what those tasks are, and then you think: ‘Okay, so if I was to ask an LLM that question, how would the LLM answer that question, and would it in any way reference the material that I’ve been publishing? And if it does or if it doesn’t, how accurate is it? How reliable is it?’…And then you think: ‘Well, what do we actually do to influence? Like, how can we make these improvements to our content?”
The answer is the same work that has always mattered which is deeply understanding your users goals, auditing your content, reducing duplication, increasing consistency, writing in plain language, and structuring information clearly. That expertise is what you bring and what you teach to the teams around you.
You’re already teaching. You may not have noticed.
Most UX practitioners don’t think of themselves as teachers, but you may be taking on that role without even realizing because it’s a pretty essential skill in your toolkit, whether it be the workshop with stakeholders, the onboarding conversations, cross-functional readouts.
Rebecca: “There were so many opportunities for me to share kind of the baseline of information architecture. It was kind of my primer into teaching. I was like, okay, I’ve already actually done a lot of teaching, just in a more informal capacity, workshops, or having office hours, things like that.”
What practitioners often don’t expect is how much teaching sharpens their own practice.
Elle: “One of the things that I absolutely love about teaching is how it has enhanced my own practice and I didn’t really understand how good it was going to be, so in describing to someone how I would do something, I feel like I’ve so improved my own practice, because I’ll go: Why do you start there? Or, you’re making so many assumptions, you need to explain why. And then I’ll think, why are you doing it in that order? So it’s just understanding more intellectually what I do has helped me refine and improve and reorder and restructure and discard pieces. It’s really built my confidence.”
Rebecca: “My clients got a better version of me, my students got a better version of me, and my confidence soared.”
When theory and practice run in parallel, they sharpen each other. Rebecca found this in her first semester of teaching when she was running a client project at the same time, which meant the work she did in a stakeholder meeting became the real-world example she brought into the classroom. Explaining her decisions out loud forced her to break them down and returning to the work with fresher eyes made her a better practitioner for it.
AI can help with a lot of overhead like processing data at scale and pulling in sources, but depth and intellect come from sitting with a problem, connecting mixed sources, and sharing findings in ways that actually move people. That is the role of content and UX practitioners, and it is how we build better experiences.
It starts with empathy and that carries through everything.
There is a lot of anxiety in the industry right now about AI, what roles will look like in five years, and where to put your energy, but conversations like this reinforce that good UX work is as important as it has ever been.
Hear from your users.
Understand the systems in which people work and search.
Translate what you find into language that moves people.
Teach the way you think, so it outlasts you in the teams and organizations you move through.
It starts with empathy, understanding your users’ worlds and mental models, and that perspective carries through everything: the stakeholder room, the content strategy, the student asking why you start there and not somewhere else. That’s what grounds good UX work, how it gets heard, and how it keeps going.
This article features Rebecca Harper and Elle Geraghty, sharing expertise across content strategy, information architecture, consulting, coaching, and teaching.
Follow us on LinkedIn to watch more conversations like this roll out.
ICYMI last month we caught up with Kaleb Loosbrock and Adeline Salkeld, Head of Product Experience here at Optimal, on how to grow in the age of AI.
