Content Design

Product Information

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. Jas has several years of experience working in the telecommunications sector. He is now focused on empowering teams to design and create user-centred products and services. Jas is dedicated to learning and helping others grow and enjoys helping organisations solve problems to create better user experiences. Senior content designers That's right. Sarah, I usually start off our podcast interviews by asking folks to share their career path to content strategy and content design. So I wonder if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit with our at home audience about where you come from and why you do the things you do. A typical week for Sarah may be a mixture of attending a conference, a meetup or a 'lunch and learn', presenting to groups like an organisation's board to explain what content design is (because perhaps there's an internal project which is just not being listened to and supported by them enough). 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.

And then of course, being able to get to the crux of the information whilst retaining the tone. But most of our job, 80% of our job, is usually getting people on board in organisations." What's one piece of advice you'd give other content people who want to achieve similar accomplishments to yourself? This technique can help speed up content production and sign-off. Pair writing with peers and stakeholders can take you a long way to faster content production. Chapter 9: Crits 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:

Setting up the Alpha

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, 2020 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. Article: Copywriter to content designer The differences between the two from Sarah's point of view.

Alpha ran for 8 weeks. And we learned that the answer to most of those questions was “yes”. We could see the value in producing a resource like this, straight away. People were passionate about having a place where they could share their experience and bring the discipline forward. Taking it to Beta Do you know? I don't know, often hear content strategy sits in comms, and it's not what I would call a content strategy anyway. I would like to see, so at the GDS, Ben Terret, who was Head of Design, took user experience out of everybody's title because he said, that is your whole job. Everybody in this digital team does user experience. We just all do it in different ways. So stop calling yourselves user experience. And I really agreed with that at the time, but maybe actually that is our job, and that I would like to see a team that does user experience from different lenses, and the content strategy I think should sit with at least one foot in that team. But I also have a problem with the silos that are between comms, marketing, the digital teams, the developers, whatever it is. Here particularly, very, very siloed working. And so having it in one team or the other isn't going to work, I guess. I would like to see something that works across the board. Writers write, sub editors edit and publishers publish. That’s the old world of content. Now, content designers join the discovery phase, influence service design and can make or break your service with a single word. That's right, sounds great. But see, this is where we're all going though, right? It's constantly, I can't remember who wrote about it, but somebody wrote a post many years ago that content strategy is organizational change. Content design isn’t graphic design or just copywriting under another name.Content design focuses on what content best serves the users’ needs, whether it be the written word, infographics, visuals, videos, or charts.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'.