If you’ve spent any time in the digital world over the last decade, you’ve probably heard the term "content design." It sounds fancy. It sounds like something a person with a very expensive desk would say. But honestly? Most people still think it just means "writing better."
It doesn't. Not even close.
Sarah Richards—who now goes by Sarah Winters—didn't just come up with a trendy new job title when she was at the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS). She actually blew up the way we think about information. Back in 2010, the UK government's web presence was a mess. A total disaster. We're talking 75,000+ pages of dense, jargon-filled walls of text that nobody could actually use.
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Sarah and her team didn't just edit those pages. They deleted tens of thousands of them.
The birth of Sarah Richards content design
Why did she do it? Because she realized that people don’t go to a government website to read. They go there to get stuff done. They want to pay a tax, renew a license, or figure out if they’re eligible for a benefit. They are often stressed. Their cognitive load is maxed out.
Sarah Richards content design was born out of that specific frustration.
Instead of asking, "What does the government want to say?" her team asked, "What does the user need to do?" It’s a subtle shift, but it changes everything. It moved the "content person" from the end of the production line (where they’re usually asked to "make the words pretty") to the very beginning.
Content design is about design.
It’s about deciding if the best way to help someone is a list of bullet points, a calculator, a video, or maybe no content at all. Sometimes the best "content" is just a button that says "Pay now."
It’s not about the words
If you talk to Sarah or read her book, Content Design, you’ll notice she’s pretty obsessed with data. Not the "how many clicks did we get" kind of data, but actual evidence of human behavior.
She famously argues that if a user has to read a 500-word page to find out they don't qualify for something, you’ve failed them. You’ve wasted their time. You’ve caused them "cognitive pain."
Kinda intense, right? But it makes sense.
She introduced techniques like pair writing, where a content designer sits down with a subject matter expert (SME)—like a lawyer or a policy wonk—and they write the thing together in real-time. This stops the endless back-and-forth of "I didn’t mean that" and "Legal won’t like this." It gets the facts and the user-friendly language in the same room at the same time.
The famous "crit"
One of the cornerstones of her methodology is the content crit (short for critique).
In many companies, feedback is a nightmare. It’s a Google Doc with 400 comments from people who all have different opinions on whether to use "click here" or "select." Sarah brought the art school tradition of the "crit" to the writing world.
It’s a structured session where people look at the work against specific user needs.
- Does this answer the user's question?
- Is the language simple enough for someone with a low reading age or high stress?
- Is the most important information at the top?
If the feedback isn’t about the user, it’s basically ignored. It’s a brutal, beautiful way to keep egos out of the way.
Why it’s still misunderstood in 2026
Even now, businesses keep hiring "content designers" and then asking them to write 2,000-word blog posts for SEO.
That’s not what this is.
Sarah’s work at GDS won a D&AD Black Pencil, which is a huge deal in the design world. It proved that words are a design material, just like pixels or code. If you’re just filling boxes that a designer gave you, you’re not doing content design. You’re just decorating.
Real Sarah Richards content design means you might tell a stakeholder, "Actually, we shouldn't have a page for this at all." That’s a hard conversation to have. It takes guts. But it’s the only way to keep the web from becoming a digital junkyard.
The Readability Guidelines
After leaving GDS, Sarah founded Content Design London (CDL). One of the coolest things they’ve done is the Readability Guidelines.
It’s an evidence-based project that looks at things like:
- How people with dyslexia read.
- Why we should avoid metaphors.
- How much white space a brain actually needs to process a sentence.
It’s not just "best practice." It’s science. For instance, did you know that we read about 25% slower on a screen than on paper? Or that users only read about 20% to 28% of the words on a page?
Sarah’s whole philosophy is built on these realities. If you know people are going to skip 80% of your words, you better make sure the 20% they do see are the right ones.
How to actually do this (the next steps)
If you want to move away from "writing stuff" and start "designing content," you have to change your workflow. It's not a quick fix. It's a culture shift.
Stop writing in a vacuum.
Stop waiting for a finished wireframe to start typing. Get in the room when the researchers are talking to users. If you don't hear the user's "pain points" yourself, you're just guessing. You’ll end up writing what the boss wants, not what the user needs.
Use the user's language.
Sarah is big on "search terms." If your company calls a service "Unified Digital Solutions" but your users are searching for "fix my internet," you’re failing. Honestly, nobody cares about your brand's internal jargon. They care about their problem.
Embrace the "crap first draft."
Don't try to make it perfect. Just get the information down. Then, run a crit. Invite a developer. Invite a customer service rep. See where they get confused.
Check your accessibility.
Content design is inherently about inclusion. If your content isn't accessible to someone using a screen reader or someone who is exhausted and distracted, it's bad design. Use plain English. Short sentences. Clear headings.
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The legacy of Sarah Richards is that "content" isn't a commodity you buy by the word. It's the product itself. When you treat it that way, you stop cluttering the internet and start actually helping people.
Next steps for your project:
- Audit your top 5 pages: Look at your most visited pages. Do they answer a specific user question in the first two sentences? If not, rewrite them using the "Inverted Pyramid" style—most important info first.
- Run a mini-crit: Take a piece of content you’re working on and show it to someone outside your department. Ask them to explain what the page is for. If they hesitate for more than 5 seconds, it's too complicated.
- Map the journey: Instead of writing a page, map out where the user is coming from (Google? An email?) and where they need to go next. Design the content to bridge that gap, nothing more.