Words. Ideas. Actions.

Mandatory changes can be a time to make some additional, much-needed changes. And sometimes, not so much. 

15 October 2023

Let’s make this clear from the start: These thoughts are far from the most important ones we should be exploring these days. So, if you have the capacity to read about content design right now, then this is for you. I know I am using this as a bit of a break from reading about the ongoing tragedies which continue to make headlines. Please, make the time you need for yourself as you go through your day. This post will still be here when you get back.

For those of you continuing on this journey here, I want to share two stories about times when I was tasked with updating some user experiences. One went great. The other was a disaster. Let’s start with the shitshow, first, shall we?

One of my first projects at Twitter as a newly minted Product Content Strategist (our roles and titles and career ladders were constantly evolving when I was there, but that was my title at the time) was to add a new option into the Tweet reporting flow. You know, the one where you notify the content moderation team to say, ”This doesn’t belong on the platform”? What a quaint thought today. 

Anywho, I got a note from a Product Manager saying she needed to add an option to the existing ones for reporting a Tweet, specifically, the ability to report hateful conduct. The exact wording was still under discussion with our Legal and Compliance teams, but I would get to write it and shepherd it through our approval process. I just needed to draft an additional bullet like, “It’s abusive or harmful,” which would live alongside the existing reasons for reporting a Tweet, which included, “I’m not interested in it” and “It’s spam”. No problem, right? 

I really wanted to nail this first assignment. To go above and beyond. Dazzle ’em. So, I audited what was already there, and reimagined the entire reporting flow. All six screens of it. And then rewrote all of it. I know; under promise and over deliver, right‽ It was a disaster. 

By redoing the entire flow, I would add weeks of work to the teams. Designers would have to create new screens and flows, with sign-off from their managers. Engineering would need to set aside time and resources to code the new experience. The Trust & Safety team had to understand the new choices to retool their own enforcement systems. Oh, and we’d need to get approvals from Legal and Compliance on all the new wording before the localization team could even start to translate the new screens into 42 other languages. With my one ambitious idea, I had created work for someone in almost every department throughout the company. Yay, me!

My PM, was not impressed. I was hoping for adulations and accolades and commendations. What I got instead was a stern, but empathetic, realignment from my collaborator who didn’t have time for my individualistic showmanship (thank you, again, Michelle).  

Years later at Google, I had a similar opportunity to make a big change when only a small one was requested. This time, however, I handled it very differently. We were renaming a feature, and all of the Google App Ads Help Center pages needed to be revised to reflect the new naming, and update a few of the features. Since we were going to be revising and editing the pages anyway, I thought it might be a good time to make them a bit more user friendly. Sound familiar?

My first move was not to start drafting, though. It was to start a conversation with my PM and Product Marketing manager. One of my first questions was, ”Do we have the capacity to do more?” This led me to pitching my idea of creating a new Help Center hub, improving and consolidating the most-relevant articles under a new information hierarchy to better serve the people who needed this help. We created a working group, which included not just our PM and PMM, but also our Product Operations Manager, Global Product Lead, and Operations Center Lead, to identify internal and external needs, coordinate launch dates and user journeys, and scope the phases of a roll-out plan tied to the renaming launch.

The plan we created included three phases: 

1. Creating a new Help Center hub, which consolidated all the articles relevant to the product, and drafting new ones to fill in any knowledge gaps for people using it for the first time. 

2. Identifying any unmet user needs, based on the data we had from page visits and Customer Service partner metrics, to focus on the top ten, most escalated topics, and creating new articles to address those needs.

3. Revised and improved articles based on our internal success metrics and user feedback on the existing pages to make sure they aligned with the new product experience.

Lastly, I partnered with our designers to make sure we could do all this within the design system constraints, mirroring the structure and format of other successful Ads Campaign pages, so we could create a familiar information architecture and navigational hierarchy to sort the existing articles. This helped ensure users could find the information they needed as quickly as they could on the rest of our site. This new hub increased satisfaction sentiment rates to 83% — up from the low 60s — and reduced escalations to our Customer Service agents by more than 6% in less than three months. A much better result than just springing a framework on everyone a few days before launch, dontchathink?. 

As much as I’d like my work to do my talking for me, I’ve had to reluctantly admit that no matter how stellar the improved user experience is that I pitch, it will never see the light of day if I don’t bring the people along who can help me get it launched. When we have a shared vision, we can do it together. Otherwise, I might as well just tilt at windmills on my own.

See y’all next week?

20 March 2023

The job search continues. And continues to be frustrating. While I know I need to be patient, I just want to be done. Add to that the fact that there’s no real good system of feedback, and the process becomes even more demoralizing. Let’s take today as an example.

I’ve been honing a presentation of my work examples for weeks. It’s pretty solid at this point, highlighting some work I’m proud of and the collaborations which brought it to life. It’s a radically updated version of a deck I came up with when I was on the hunt in 2020. Thankfully, there was one interview panel back then where I got some valuable feedback. And I’ve incorporated it into this new, 2023 version. But that’s so, so rare these days. In one presentation today, for instance, I know I highlighted all the points I wanted to make. I tied them to the business needs of the position I was interviewing for. I even threw in some ideas for how I can help achieve the goals they have already revealed will be part of the position’s success metrics. But as I left the interview, I had a sense of dread. One of those, “You did your best, but your best wasn’t good enough” feelings that I’ve only had a couple of other times in interviews. And my intuition was always spot on, in retrospect.

So, as I sit here tonight, I’m thinking back to a line in one of my favorite things I’ve ever written: 

But even in the Bay Area’s highly publicized culture of “Done is better than perfect,” jobseekers never get a second chance to make a first impression. We aren’t given feedback. We can’t take what we’ve learned and make things better. The process ignores exactly what we are supposed to be good at: progress.

I try to approach these interviews like user problems. I get as much information as I can about why the role is open, what the success metrics for the position are, and ask for the types of things potential collaborators are looking for in their new college. Then, I try to see what examples I have in my work history that I can show which will help them decide I'm the exact person who can bring a solution to their specific problem. But I wish we would look more broadly at how people can help. 

Nobody should be hiring based on what people have already done. We should be hiring on the promise of what we can do together. The work I’ve done came to life thanks to a specific confluence of events, in a particular moment, at the hands of a unique combination of people and their ideas. We’re never going to be able to recreate that. And the solutions I’m showing in my portfolio would be different if even just one of those elements were changed. So, why aren’t we better at assessing and quantifying whether we can create beautiful solutions with someone, other than looking at their past work? I honestly have no idea. And I’m obviously frustrated by that. 

One thing I’m sure of, though, is that I — thankfully — have a few more interviews lined up for later this week, and I’m again refining my portfolio deck for them, one more time. I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied with having to present past work to represent future promise, but unless and until that changes, I’ll keep playing the game. Right up until I land my next gig, that is. Then, I hope to take this curmudgeonly perspective about how we hire and suggest changing it in each and every place I’m lucky to be a part of from now on.

See you tomorrow?

10 March 2023

The other day, when I had lunch with a friend, one of the topics which came up is still resonating with me. And it’s something I had to learn the hard way. During my interviews this week, I’ve been trying to be more cognizant of it, and more open about the fact that I didn’t always get it right. What is it? I don’t want this to be a big wind-up, but — essentially — it’s that the work doesn’t always speak for itself. 

This has been a recurring theme for me, unfortunately. I like my work to be good. Scratch that. I need my work to be good. Even better than good. And my assumption had always been, it could stand on its own. Unfortunately, I know — now — that’s not true. In fact, the work is usually, like, 40% of your job. Especially in places where content design is not yet a known quantity. And for people like me who love both doing content design and talking about content design, it should be easier to be successful. But I often didn’t get that balance right.

See, most of the time, and especially when I started at Twitter, I thought that if I put my heart and soul into each and every project, the results would speak for themselves. And most of the time, the results were great. I’m very proud of the contributions I made to the product while I was there. But I didn’t do enough to create the relationships which would allow more of my work to see the light of day. I can’t even imagine how much more I could highlight in my portfolio if I had just taken some of the effort I was putting into the word choices and experiential flows, and invested them in my relationships with the teams and leaders I was building with. 

Now, I definitely got better at this while I was at Twitter. And a vast majority of the time I spent at Google was doing what is frequently referred to there as “stakeholder management”. But throughout my career, I feel like I neglected the relationship portion of my role, preferring to spend my time with templates and frameworks and style guides instead. The possible explanations for this are numerous, but I’m glad to finally have the self awareness to think more realistically about how much time I should spend on the process of content design and how much I need to spend with the people who will help get all that design thinking into the project I’m working on. 

I think we tend to carry habits from job to job, both the good and the bad. I am very thankful for the places and the people who allowed me to grow, pulling me aside when I went astray, setting me on a path for improvement, and making the work, our product, and me better along the way. As hard as it is for me to admit, no matter how good the work was, it needed a team behind it to launch. I keep reminding myself that in my interviews. And I hope that I keep learning, no matter where I go next.

See you tomorrow?

23 February 2023

Today, let’s talk a little bit about mental health. Hooray! Specifically, the many ways brains process information. I know it’s maybe not what you’re expecting in these, but I think it’s an important component of what we think about when we’re making design decisions, and I don’t want it to go left unsaid as the content design-related posts pile up around here.

It should be obvious, but I’ll start with this anyway: I’m not a doctor. So, any of the suggestions I have here are based on my work and life experience only. Your mileage (and mind) may vary. But even as I type that half-joke caveat, I think we’ve already unearthed the gem at the center of why I think this post is important. Everyone consumes and creates knowledge and ideas differently. Those could be slight differences, like thinking you’re talking about either a flipper or a turner or a scraper when someone mentions the word “spatula”. Or, there could be large gaps in understanding for people who are better at processing audio information versus written.

These are just a couple of examples, but they both speak to why we need to build our experiences for a spectrum of understanding. This includes making good decisions around taxonomies and metadata, but it also means that we need to make all of our components accessible at launch, not an afterthought to add into the v2 iteration. Additionally, we should be attracting and retaining team members who either have these considerations top-of-mind, or are at least willing to learn why they are so important. 

Let’s dig a little deeper on those last two points, though, starting with accessibility. I hope everyone knows about the curb cut example, but I can summarize it quickly, if not: Initially thought to help people using wheelchairs to navigate their environments by removing barriers to crossing intersections, installing  curb cuts was also helpful for people pushing strollers, delivery people hauling large loads on hand trucks, and even for people with mobility issues where stepping up or down was difficult or dangerous for them. So when we build accessibility into our products and services, we don’t know how widely those benefits will reach. 

When Kat Holmes spoke to our team at Twitter, she shared a concept which has stuck with me to this day. What I took away from part of the talk was that we’re all potentially temporarily abled. We don’t know what each day can bring, but we should build for the broadest possible accessibility rather than limiting our ideas to what we consider the “norm” (I’ll talk about that naming more in a bit). Think of it this way: You may have full mobility and strength in both your arms and hands. One day, though, you might need to navigate a mobile site from your phone while holding a bag of groceries, or a child, or with one arm in a cast. We need to account for these temporary scenarios when creating items like navigation menus and thinking about button placement, as just two examples.

Now, let’s talk about our teams, and how we’re defining them and our own users. First, I want us, as an industry, to move away from the idea of a “normal” user. What even is that? Have you met anyone normal recently? I know that, at the very least, the last two-plus years have made that term basically meaningless for me. Instead, let’s talk about our users’ needs, and then frame those using a more mathematically based term, median. What do the most number of our users need? And then, how far to each side of that cluster are we building? Defining these edges becomes important because we are actively deciding not just who we are including, but also who we are willing to exclude. To quote Eric Myer, who was paraphrasing Evan Henſleigh, “When you call something an edge case, you’re really just defining the limits of what you care about.” Defining our target audience is also a de facto exercise in letting people know who we’re not building for. This is where building strongly opinionated teams comes in.

I am purposefully avoiding saying “diverse” teams. Diverse teams can still fall into a group-think mindset. And I don’t think that building teams based on physical characteristics alone is the way to go either; the definition of diversity doesn‘t start and end in the mirror. Yes, those physical factors are important, but what’s more important to me is what lived experiences these people can bring to your discussions. No doubt that how people present and how they are perceived have shaped those experiences, so they are a major factor in the perspective they can contribute. But we also need to keep in mind that no one person from a marginalized group, for instance, should be placed in a situation where they are having to explain and educate the rest of the team on what it’s like to be part of that group. That burden of education is not for them. It’s for you, and your entire team. Do the research! It’s not like all intersections show up as visual cues, either. Looking at me, for instance, you’d have no idea about the alphabet soup of acronyms and abbreviations that my brain has been saddled with. But am I supposed to be the spokesperson for everyone with an OCD diagnosis, for instance? Hell no! But I can say, “Hey, have we considered how this decision will affect people living with XYZ?” Whether you have that condition or not, we need to build teams that are fluent enough with the diverse needs of our users to ask these questions, whether or not we have team members who identify with them. 

Let me be clear, though: Building more diverse teams will let you build better products. Period. The more accessible your products are, the more people who can use them. Isn’t that the point? To get as many people as possible through your onboarding flow and into the thing you’ve spent so much time, energy, and resources creating? Ideally to solve one of their problems? Every time you push to make something more accessible and as open as possible, you’re increasing the number of customers potentially available to you. And you can do that by prioritizing their needs, understanding how to expand the definition of your target audience, and putting together teams who know what questions to ask and how to advocate for everyone, everywhere. This can be as simple as having your team ask things like, “How will this work for low-vision users?” or “Is our language as inclusive as it could be?” or “Will this feature work as well for people in low-bandwidth situations?” or even “Who are we potentially harming if we launch this?” The broader the perspectives are on the teams asking and answering these questions, the better your products will be.

See you tomorrow?

06 February 2023

Friday’s post was not as controversial as I anticipated. I was hoping for a vigorous defense about albums I missed or long rants about an undeserving inclusion or even a — deserved — interrogation about decades-long gaps between some of the chosen albums. But none of that came to pass, save for Spencer replying with his own well-thought-out list. Which leads me to conclude my list, like the albums on it, is definitely, completely perfect. So, let’s move on to something potentially more controversial: artificial intelligence.

I’ve been reading a lot of articles and opinion pieces about the rise, use, and fears around AI, specifically text-generating bots. And with today’s announcement of Google’s public entry into the text-generating AI playing field, I thought it might be the right time to talk about how I think these services will change writing on the web, and how I’m feeling about that. In a word, I’m excited.

Now, I completely understand the reservations people have about technology coming for their jobs and livelihoods. But that worry isn’t new. Technological advancements have forced people to adapt since the invention of the wheel. Today’s worries, I think, are just specific to a set of craftspeople who haven’t had to worry about their roles being automated out of existence ever before. Potentially. These advancements shouldn’t be feared, though, they should be embraced. Writers are so much more than sentence generators, which is — essentially — all these emerging technologies are. And even if we only use them to create sentences, there will always be a need to make them better. Or more targeted. Or even used as inspiration. And that’s the part which has animated me recently.

I’ve used a few of these posts to talk about creativity. It is the only part of me I know I’ll never run out of. I’m not saying that to brag, it’s just, at the very least, each day brings many new opportunities for me to make something new. Today, it’s this post. But some days, it’s a simple doodle. Or a guitar riff. Or even an impromptu bedtime story for a very discerning nine-year-old. And it’s that creativity I’m looking forward to putting to use with all of the AI that is emerging. 

Most of my creative endeavors, I’ll admit, are made better with a collaborator. As a writer, I’m much better working with an editor. When I was in bands, the songs that we came up with as a group at practice, or as the result of bouncing ideas back and forth rather than bringing in a finished tune, were the ones which proved more popular and endured in our live sets longest. And when I was focused on UX problems, especially at Twitter, my work and our solutions were much better thought out (and simpler to implement and use) when I had a designer and researcher to collaborate with on solutions. Thinking about the future of my work, or even ideas I have for personal projects, I feel almost overwhelmed with opportunities to work with these different text generators. Essentially, they are more than tools; they’re like collaborators which never sleep. 

The key to using them as more than tools, and not simply fearing that they’ll replace me, goes back to the creativity I need to employ to turn a potential competitor into a collaborator. Sure, I can plug something simple into the prompt, get the results, and call it a day. But what I’m looking forward to is using the prompt as a starting point on a journey to something entirely unique. All powered by me, working to make both the prompt and the resulting answer better and better until the final product is something decidedly new and unexpected. 

Let’s say I wasn’t to create a new story for bedtime. I could simply ask one of these services to, “Create a bedtime story for a nine-year-old girl.” But with a little imagination, I could start a little further down the path to something more interesting, like, “Create a rhyming bedtime story about a pair of cucumbers who get stuck in a museum elevator while on their way to see their friend’s show about floral arrangements.” No matter what comes out, we‘re already into brand new territory as far as bedtime stories go around here. And, depending on what the result is, I get to take that as just a starting point for the rest of the pair’s journey.

Basically, I want to spend all day typing prompts into all the text generators, coming up with new ideas for stories or writing prompts or just flights of fancy. It all sounds much more interesting than updating my résumé. Say, that gives me an idea …

See you tomorrow?

24 January 2023

Tonight’s post started as an idea before I went to see SunnO))) at the Great American Music Hall on Monday night. And, truth be told, I’m composing these words just before I dash out to see night 2 of their San Francisco shows (my intent is to have a draft done before the second night’s set and, hopefully, post the finished version after the show but before midnight, if I time this right). 

Anywho, the show last night was an almost ritualistic, devotional experience, if you’re devoted to both volume and distortion. For those of you not familiar with SunnO))) (which, I must admit, is probably most of you — they are definitely an acquired taste), most of their music is based on loud, tuned-down, heavily distorted guitars, working in tandem to create monolithic slabs of noise so intense, with so many harmonics and undertones, it’s almost hypnotic. What makes their shows such a spectacle, and such a draw to me, is how the duo has to not only play their guitars, but simultaneously use their amplifiers (there were 16 cranked to 11 at Monday’s show) and the feedback those wide-open stacks of speakers create in whichever venue they’re in, manipulating those rumbles and peals and growls to recreate the songs they want to perform on the night. 

And that cacophony leads to the nugget of an idea I had before I saw Monday’s show. See, I’ve been thinking about how to build teams. And after my recent, unexpected layoff, I have been thinking about which new opportunities in my inbox I want to start pursuing. Some of those involve leading existing teams, some are to bring a seasoned perspective to emerging teams, and some are to build a team from scratch. It’s that last option which is most intriguing to me. 

I liken the idea to being in bands. I’ve auditioned for some, been added to one, and built a few of my own. And those approaches all have their own pros and cons. Auditioning is like trying to convince a group that your skills will compliment the collective and help them head to where they want to go. Being asked to join one means that you’ve already shown enough of your worth on your own to make it past all the initial vetting hurdles in order to add to the greater good. But building something from the ground up means you’re not only defining the direction, but also identifying who is going to help you get there. It’s like playing the instruments and the room at the same time. 

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, adding an element to an existing solution can be tricky. But so can developing one. Do you build a team based on the direction and destination you want to go, picking members based on the specific skills they have which you think will help you get there? Or do you gather people whose instincts, curiosity, and decision-making you trust, putting them together to see where they end up? To make another potentially clumsy music analogy, it’s like deciding between composing for an existing string ensemble, with all the inherent sonic constraints, or booking time in a recording studio and inviting your favorite players to bring their preferred instrument to record whatever they concoct. 

I’m not sure which way my thinking is headed yet. But I need to find something relatively soon. All I know is there are a lot of strings to pull and speakers to hear and venues to try them out in. Like SunnO))). Who I’m headed out to see now. 

See you tomorrow? 

Update: I made it home just after 11 p.m., my ears ringing, head spinning, a smile plastered on my face, and these words posted mere moments before the witching hour. Thanks for letting me force these analogies night after night — it’s definitely therapeutic, at the very least, and sometimes even helpful.