Content Design

Product Information

Government should take advantage of the more open, agile and cheaper digital technologies to deliver simpler and more effective digital services to users." So what's the danger then between just calling it user experience design and then working with UX writers on these teams to say, okay, here are the needs that need to be met, here are the scenarios you need to write for. Go do that.

Finally, thanks to the many people who contributed to the guidelines - too many to mention but all important.

What’s in the book

So that's where the term content design came from. And then I just went shopping around all the disciplines. And so I was watching these designers and product managers doing journey mapping, and I'm like, we should be journey mapping and we should be doing language mapping across the channels. We should be knowing what people say and do and think at every point of this journey. So you know what? Content team are going to be here. I did crits when I was at art school, and crits for me were like, you put your work up and then everybody just hammers into it and makes you cry. And I saw the designers doing crits at GDS and it sparked off that memory. And I was like, why are we not doing that actually as a content crit? Why are we not doing that? And so I went round and just went shopping through all the disciplines and pulled it together. That is so weird because we don't have that problem over here at all. I am just kidding. That was just a little joke. It was just a little sarcasm right here on the podcast. Thank you very much. Yeah, it is a huge... I actually want to use that to roll into another part of this topic that you and I have danced around previously. It is a huge challenge to look across different organizations and say, okay, you're saying content strategist, but what I think you mean is that person is supposed to do marketing content. Or you're saying UX writer, but really I think what that person is doing is writing product support content. Or you're saying content designer and I think what... you know what I mean?

How we read, including eye fixation zones, memory and typography. Chapter 3: Content discovery and research Sarah manages CDL’s training. She plans our courses and looks for ways to grow our training as the content design field evolves.Our content designers work directly with clients to create clear, accessible content that meets user needs. They are experienced trainers and regularly work with individuals and organisations to help them develop their content skills. Clare Reucroft Throughout the book, we have used an example of a fictional company so you can see all the advice and guidance in action. Here, you’ll see the finished content. Looking after the planet Passionate about learning and teaching, Sarah organised education events at universities in North America before working in content. She led training alongside her content work at Expedia, Cazoo and the Financial Ombudsman. Sarah has extensive experience designing help centre content and a strong interest in accessibility. Jas Deogan We may be digital professionals who spend a lot of time online, but we still like analogue too. The research was organised into both book and wiki formats to make it simple and accessible. We always use our user's language. It's what we do. I thought, they have to stop thinking about us in the way that they've been thinking about us. So, we had to come up with a new name, because if we were just called editors, they'd go, 'yeah, we know what you do'.

User stories are great if you have a number of different audiences who might all want to consume your content. But there’s an alternative to user stories that might be better if you only have one audience, and that’s job stories. Job stories always start with: And I've got one more for you. I've got one more. And this one is amazing. So we've got one coming out that at the moment is still in draft, but this is one that I'm really excited about. It is like conversations with, and we are bringing some neuro divergent people up, and it's just conversations about their experience, because we don't have concrete recommendations to make for content people for certain conditions. So for example, aphasia, ADHD, and deaf, blind, because we will give you advice for one person and it won't be right for somebody else. But we want to really bring some of that neuro divergent or disability type awareness into your practice, and then you can take away whatever it is that you want to take away and apply it to what you're doing. So that one's very exciting too. So next year is book central and other exciting things that I can't tell you yet. And I think that it's so interesting too that you were like, wanting to stay away from the words editorial and writing, et cetera, and really focus in on the relationship between the content and the design. Because of course, elsewhere the phrase content design was being used already. And so it's not like anybody can say, I made this thing, I invented this thing. People were talking about areas of this topic and areas of this practice, cobbled together in different ways, all over the world for a really long time. It's just that you wrote the first book with content design on the cover. Yeah. And that's a pretty big deal. The winner of the #Diversity Category at the 2020 #ImpactAwards is..... @ContentDesignLN for their incredible work in progressing #accessibility 🏆 Congratulations!— DigitalAgenda #TechForGood (@DigitalAgenda_) June 16, 2020And so I really do feel like that might be the problem that we are facing, is where should this live? And when we're talking about things like design systems or even design teams and functions within an organization, I don't know, let's call it design ops, that those have been established and that they live within a solid part of the organization and they are the source of truth when it comes to design, and establishing some kind of a source of truth for content when everybody can write. I mean, that's the magical mystical pursuit, right? But a content designer saying 'no, we're going to make that content a calculator and your 4 million words are now 12 words'; to get that across, we had to change the conversation - otherwise we wouldn't have been able to change the power and the relationship." Understand how you can open your content to a much wider audience by using content accessibility and inclusivity techniques.

If you have multiple audiences, each of which has different needs for different kinds of content and different levels of detail, you may find user stories better. And so the titles just matter within an organization and they can say, well, this is just what it's called here. But it creates such a massive headache not only for organizations who are trying to recruit for the right skill set, but also for people who are trying to find work that matches their skill set, and figuring out how to position themselves in the marketplace. Now at the time I was looking for books and interviews and videos and stuff about this kind of thing. And from what I saw, and I don't read everything obviously, but from what I saw, everything was from a design perspective and from an interaction, I'm doing silent air quotes here, interaction design perspective. It wasn't done from a content perspective. So by the time I left GDS, I was like, this is content design in and of itself. It's the journey maps, writing to a user needs, we can run a whole organization off of one bank of user needs. It's language mapping, it's sentiment scoring, it's using empathy maps. So we didn't start any of that, but we pulled it all together and it was like, this is what we do. So content design. So that's what I mean, you can just cut that out if you like. That's a very long waffly answer to the fact that it is a content perspective on user centered design. I think it is the people who are above that who, they're either super excited and attracted to bright shiny objects that design can create. They are looking for people that can point to very, very hard data, which can also be a difficult thing for content designers and content design leaders to grab onto and say, this is data that we impacted. Because of this thing that we did, these numbers shifted.Sarah Winters is the delightful CEO and founder of Content Design London, a content design agency that works around the world helping governments and organizations to transform the way that they communicate. She is also the author of this seminal book, Content Design, and a respected and in-demand speaker who shares her expertise to audiences at conferences, meetups, and events around the world. Sarah, hello. A wiki format meant that we could continue to update the guidelines as we gathered evidence and learned more. The result Learn how to correctly use headings, writing and punctuation, plain language, emotional language and images for usability and accessibility. Chapter 8: Pair writing I love my content. I love my video, I love my words, I love my sign language, and I didn't really want to move away from it."