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?

08 October 2023

Welp, I didn't think I was going to return to posting under this banner, but here we are. There are a few factors which have led me here, and I’ll name them in a bit. But I want to establish a few new ground rules that will make these next few entries more predictable, and less of a burden, so that we — yes, both you and I — can get more out of them. Hopefully. 

First, these won’t be daily. That was too much. And I’m too tied to this machine already, trying to line up my next full-time gig (if you need a seasoned content designer, please get in touch). Second, I want to make these next handful of posts focused on content design (or UX writing or content strategy, whichever term your employer has been using to try and portion out that tiny piece of users’ experience). But please know that there will most likely be some soccer or music or politics of — heaven forfend — Twitter references thrown in, because they have all defined me, (for good or for bad) and have definitely shaped who I am today. The last ground rule is that I reserve the right to undo or add to these ground rules at any moment, based on needs, mine or yours. So if you have an idea or response, please let me know. 

Now, on to the reasons we’re back here. I’ve been volunteering as a middle school math teacher on Tuesdays at my daughter’s school (have you read about our teacher shortage?) and during my lunch break, I listened to this recent conversation between Patrick Stafford and Kristina Halvorson live on LinkedIn while inhaling my lunch before 5th period started. They kept making one point over and over: We need to talk about our work. And not just where we’ve worked or the metrics we may have achieved. Sure, those are important, but we need to start sharing the intricacies and minutiae of how we do what we do. 

This got me to thinking’. I’ve been telling the same handful of stories over and over in job interviews and portfolio presentations, but I’ve only shared parts of them in my previous posts. So, another reason we’re back here is so I can write them all down. Not just for you, but for me, too. I hope that I can get enough detail out of my head and into these sentences to make the daunting task of interviewing a little less harrowing. 

The last reason I’m doing these again is I miss the community. When I was publishing daily posts, I really enjoyed getting reconnected to the voices I missed on Twitter. And I got to meet some smart people for the first time through LinkedIn. With the rise of BlueSky (I have invite codes, if you need one), and the start of Button just a few days away, I want to rekindle the deeper discussions some of my previous posts had garnered. With that in mind, here are a few ideas for upcoming topics: 

• Accessibility
• Conversation design
• Glossaries
• Office hours
• Reusable frameworks
• Templates

Now, I listed these alphabetically, but I don’t have any idea — yet — which one is coming next. We’ll find out together in a week. And if you have a desire to read more about some specifics about some of my past work, please let me know and I’ll add it to the agenda.

I hope you’ll climb back on for this ride. It should be more focused than our last trip. I’m looking forward to connecting with you again. Oh, and if you know of a senior-level UX writing or content design role, I know a guy who’s looking again.

See y’all next week?

29 March 2023

I very rarely know if I’ve made the right decision. And I find that I question decisions I’ve made for a long while after. They could be big ones, like did I pick the right college, to small ones, like should I have ordered the shrimp and grits tonight instead. And as I sit here tonight, I feel that familiar feeling of second-guessing coming on again.

See, I think I’ve decided what my next gig is. I have been very fortunate to have a good amount of interest in my services since being part of the Google layoffs in January. I know that. There are a lot of talented people — and seemingly more and more every day — competing for what feels like fewer and fewer roles. So, I understand what a luxury it is to have my last paid day at Google this week, while starting something new on Monday. I just don’t know if I picked the right option. And I probably never will. What I do know, however, is I don’t think I’ll ever stop looking. Not anymore.

One thing these last few years has taught me is that you never know what’s coming. And I have also discovered — the hard way — that your only allegiance you should have is to your colleagues (both past and future), not your company. I am making a choice that’s right for me and my family today, and that’s the most important consideration. But I am going to keep my eyes and mind open to new positions for a few reasons:

1) The future is unknown and unwritten, both for you and your employer, so change can come at you in a moment’s notice, and your only true boss is yourself.
2) I want to continue stretching my understanding and my skills, so as soon as I feel like I am stagnating, I’ll look for ways to learn even more.
3) There are many highly qualified candidates on the hunt right now, and if I can help connect any of them with their next gig based on my network and teams I’ve already talked to, I am more than willing to help in any way I can.

I hope that in a few months I’ll be able to look back at this post and confidently see that I made the right choice. But there’s nobody handing out “Winning Decision” ribbons, that I know of. Instead, I’ll just have to ask myself some hard questions, and hope that I like the answers. In the meantime, if you’re reading this while looking for your next content design or UX writing gig, and you think I can help, please send me a note either here or on LinkedIn.

See you tomorrow?

23 March 2023

I’ve never lived more than a 30-minute drive from a large, salty body of water. I’m not really sure what life would be like without that access. I know there’s a cliché about coastal bias, but this is different. And I will fully admit that I am biased for the coasts. Whether it was during my early years in Florida, or my current ones in San Francisco, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be land-locked. And this is where we make a dramatic change in direction, and head straight into content strategy!

See, I think one of the most important attributes for a good content strategist is to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Whether you do that through user interviews or customer data or even persona explorations, we need to be able to build for people outside of our own lived experience. Like baking accessibility fundamentals into product launches, rather than trying to tack them on afterwards. We need to build for everyone, not just for ourselves.

Sometimes, all that takes is some imagination. Other times, it’s really questioning the assumptions we have about how people will use what we’ve built. And, occasionally, it’s stepping in to say that what we’re building is not ready for public consumption because it could put people in harm’s way. There’s a lot of that kind of discussion happening now around AI tools and large language models, and I highly recommend you digging into those ideas on your own (try following Timnit Gebru and Mia Shah-Dand as a start). But we should be that skeptical about everything we build, making sure we’re not making design decisions based on narrow perspectives and unquestioned assumptions. It’s why I believe our design teams need to be more diverse. It’s also why I think we need to move away from attention-based metrics, and more toward ones focused on task completion. And, most importantly, it’s why I hope that if you read anything in these posts which misses the mark, you call me out on it; I can’t see my own blind spots until someone points them out to me. And I want you to!

This push for expanded perspective, though, isn’t limited to just building new things. It can come into play when looking at our own habits, too. I have a story which rattles around in my head that I don’t really know the source of. It feels like family lore, and for someone, maybe it really is. But on a recent call to my parents, they verified that they’d heard the tale, too, but it wasn’t from our family. The version of the story I know (embellished a great deal because I’m typing this on a plane and it’s what I’m doing to entertain myself for a bit) is this:

A college-aged daughter brings her new boyfriend to his first family gathering around Easter. There are many generations huddled in the kitchen, getting to know the new beau, and sharing those embarrassing childhood anecdotes which always seem to pop up as soon as someone you’re trying to impress comes around. As these get tossed about, meal prep is in full swing. And it has all the hallmarks of a classic Easter feast, with deviled eggs, fresh peas and asparagus, buttered new potatoes, green bean casserole, fresh-baked rolls, and a large honey-glazed ham. By the time everything is ready, the new boyfriend is ecstatic. He can’t wait to taste it all, especially the ham. It’s his favorite part of the feast, particularly the crispy, sweet end. 

When they all finally gather at the table, serving plates piled high with a steaming assortment of menu items, the boyfriend notices something which stops him cold: The end of the ham has been completely shorn off! He spends the next few seconds in a whirlwind of coalescing emotions. He’s simultaneously disappointed, appalled, confused, concerned, stunned, and even a little angry. As diplomatically and furtively as he can, he leans over and quietly asks his girlfriend, “What happened to the end of the ham?” 

Without catching his unspoken agreement of stealthy communications, his girlfriend casually replies, “Oh, that’s the way we’ve always made it. It’s our family recipe.” And without taking a moment’s breath, she turns to the other end of the table and loudly asks, “Hey Mom, how come we cut the end off the ham?”

The boyfriend sinks low into his seat. 

“It’s the way we’ve always done it,” the Mom shares. “It’s our family recipe.” 

“That’s right,” Nana weighs in. “We’ve been doing it this way for years. Isn’t that right, Ma?” 

All eyes now turn to the matriarch of the family, seated at her traditional spot at the head of the table. “Yep,” she confidently confirms, “It’s how my mother used to do it. See, when I was growing up, we had a very tiny stove and only a small baking pan would fit in it. Every year, when we’d get an Easter ham, we’d have to cut a part of it off so that it would fit, and since we didn’t want to get rid of the end with the larger slices, we’d just cut off the end.” 

Everyone else stopped their chewing. Some mouths even fell open a bit. 

“You mean the only reason we’ve been cutting off the end is because, years ago, your stove was too small to fit an entire ham‽” Mom managed to ask. 

“Uh huh,” the great-grandmother responded between the bites she never stopped taking. “It was the only way we could cook a ham.” 

“Then why are we still making it like this if we have pans and stoves big enough for a full-size ham?” the daughter asked.

“It’s our family recipe.”

The point, obviously, is to question even your own ways of doing things. Just because something has worked one way in the past doesn’t mean we still have to do it the same way today. Repeating outdated methods isn’t going to lead to progress. And won’t let us learn anything new. By breaking out of the ways we’ve always done things, either for ourselves, or our users, we get to introduce new perspectives on familiar ideas. Like the moment your daughter first hears The Beatles. Or your initial taste of your now-favorite food. Or jumping into a familiar ocean from a brand new pier. 

We all can use a reset sometimes, especially when we’re building for others. We have to constantly remind ourselves that we’re not our target audience. By imagining how and why other people are coming to us to solve their problems, we’ll build them better solutions. It just takes a little empathetic imagination. 

See you tomorrow?

(Also, if you know where this ham in the pan story is actually from, I’d love to know how I came upon it.)

15 March 2023

Well, I spent a good part of the day gathering my thoughts, looking back over notes, and taking a lot of deep breaths. I’m not sure, however, that I’m any less troubled by how bad we are at categorization. So, let’s get started, shall we? But first, a flashback …

More than a decade ago, while leading a team at Symantec, one of my favorite schticks at lunch was doing an Andy Rooney impression (I was old way before I actually got old). The premise was his thoughts after going to the farmers market. 

“I went to the farmers market with my wife this weekend. She likes to get our produce fresh. Have you ever noticed how strange the names of fruit are? As we wandered around, I kept noticing them. I like oranges. Oranges make sense — they’re orange. But why don’t we call bananas “yellows”? I like grapes, too. They’re fruit. But grapefruit? That’s not only redundant, it’s just factually inaccurate. There aren’t any grapes in grapefruit! …”

I can go on like that for a while. A long while. But it brings me to my point: Every name you can think of came from a human. A wonderful, fallible, living, breathing human, much like yourself. Maybe. It could have also come from a racial segregationist and apparent accessory to murder. So, you know, maybe not like you at all. But these names tend to stick around, no matter where they came from. And no matter whether or not we have any similar intersections with the people who came up with them, we have to live with their consequences. And, not to get too TED Talk-y, but we need to be a lot more diligent and thoughtful about the labels we place on things and — especially — people.

I mentioned last night that this came up again for me as I was applying to jobs. A lot of the online systems I’ve been using for applications have sections which gather demographic information. Some of them are well thought out. Others, not so much. But one thing they all have in common is a set of labels each and every candidate needs to fit themselves into, whether or not they identify precisely with them or not. And all of them are fiction. To quote one of the Daniels during one of their acceptance speeches at the Oscars the other night: 

“We are all products of our context.”
– Daniel Kwan 

Names, labels, categories. They all result because of somebody’s decision. We can decide how we want to be identified. But we can’t impose that choice on someone who’s meeting us for the first time. They are going to bring all their lived experience and bias and assumption to define you for themselves. Until you define yourself for them. But if they only give you a few options for how you are able to do that, are you defining yourself, or are they still defining you?

It all comes down to choices. And the more of us who are making those choices, the better. I know I don’t want rooms full of people who look like David Starr Jordan to come up with the names of things that I am going to have to use for the rest of my life. Not only do I not have a lot in common with him, but I don’t really trust his judgment. And when it comes down to it, don’t we need to trust the labels and categorization which we give to things? Otherwise, we are entrusting a handful of the powerful to decide between terms like “looter” or “survivor,” “refugee” or “migrant.” Let’s take two more examples that have always gotten under my skin. 

First up, Comcast. Or Xfinity. Good lord, now that I think about it, they can’t even get their own name right. And when I scroll through their program listings looking for soccer, I find everything with that label is all men’s teams. But if I want to watch the NWSL, I have to search for “women’s soccer”? Why is that? The number of players are the same. The objective is the same. The field, ball, and rules are the same. So why are the listings named differently? Soccer is soccer, no matter where it’s played or who is playing it. So the distinction is either unnecessary or sexist. If it’s unnecessary, then any match, whether it features men or women, should just be labeled “soccer”. If it’s sexist, then let’s list “women’s soccer” next to “men’s soccer” so that there’s no question as to why Comcast/Xfinity includes “women’s” on certain events. 

Another example is musical. And may be a bit more controversial. It’s about genres. These are tried and true, sure, but are they still helpful? Take jazz, as an example. How are we defining what jazz is? And who came up with that definition? Is it dependent on the instrumentation? The composition? The performers? What Miles Davis did with J.J. Johnson is very different from what he did when he played with Carlos Santana. Are they both jazz? And if so, why? I think it comes down to putting a label on something so that it’s easier to find. And now we’ve gotten to the content strategy portion of the program.

All of these categories and labels and taxonomies are methods to try and bring some order to what is, essentially, chaos. We try every day to communicate the amorphous ideas and emotions trapped in the squishy collection of fat and water and protein and nerves, we call a brain, housed inside the bone helmet we call skulls. And we have to do it in a way that makes sense to other people with a completely different collection of fat and water and protein and nerves. So whatever names we come up with have to be understood and agreed upon, otherwise, it’s just more chaos.

To go back to the candidate identifications, I have to ask myself who is imposing these choices on the chaos of our varied identities? I know when I look at these lists, I have a hard time figuring out which levers to pull. How do I qualify my own heritage? I’ve learned the birthplaces of most of my great-grandparents. But the lineage of one of them has become a bit more muddled the closer we look. And some of those Italian secrets were taken to the grave long ago. Without divulging too much about our own possibly torrid family history, though, it makes me wonder how much of my identity is truly definable, and how much of my presentation is quantifiable. Do I present as Hispanic to you? What if I tell you that I grew up eating much more ropa vieja than apple pie? Does that, along with the fact that my grandfather was born in Cuba, qualify as enough to put a tick in the Hispanic box? And who’s checking anyway? It’s a name. A label. A category some fellow human came up with so that I could be quantified. And, these days, it sometimes sits right next to the relatively new “LatinX” label. I have no problem using it, especially when referring to people who prefer it, but when I talk to family still in Florida, they have no idea where it came from or why they need it. It’s just a new square-shaped box they’re not sure how to fit themselves into. 

I wish that this post had a really concise solution for this problem. It doesn’t. Sorry about that. But I do have a suggestion: Bring more brains into the conversation when you are naming and categorizing and sorting your information. If yours is the only collection of fat and water and protein and nerves coming up with a name, you’re going to miss something. Or unintentionally exclude somebody. Or worse. We have to be more deliberate, and careful, about the way we are identifying things. Especially people. 

See you tomorrow?

14 March 2023

Well, while applying for jobs today, I got really worked up about the names we give to things again. I know it’s a little bit of a recurring theme around here, but naming and labeling and taxonomies and categorization are all ways influence is imposed and structures are enforced. 

I definitely have a lot more to say about this, but I feel like if I try and get it all down tonight, it will just end up as a ranting tirade without a real point. I mean, I could turn it into a bit of a party trick and just vomit a bunch of poorly thought-out half-ideas, like starting with 3.14159… and just keep going until I run out of breath. So, instead of just aimlessly venting here, I think I want to put a little more focused effort into talking about pull-down menus with the titles companies use to try and categorize its candidates. White. Black. Hispanic. Female. Male. Disabled. Veteran. Ethnicity. Identity. Almost every application includes a demographics section where we have to squeeze into these little boxes, defined by others and understood by few (and don’t even get me started on the places which use Workday as their application software).

This is my promise to you: I am going to jot down some notes tonight, watch a few new episodes from season three of “Ted Lasso” (I know!), and sleep on all this angst in the hopes that I can have something of a little more coherent approach to talking about why we should be more careful when we attach a label to something. Especially if we want other people to feel both represented and understood.

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?

06 March 2023

I love watching soccer. It doesn’t really matter who’s playing, there’s just so much that glues me to the screen. Mainly, though, I think it’s the unpredictability that draws me to each and every match that crosses my path. Heck, that may be why any of us watch any sports at all; you really never know what will happen. Take this weekend’s 7–0 thrashing of Manchester United at the hands of Liverpool. I don’t really care for either of those teams, but I tuned in anyway because I knew it would be a match to remember. But I don’t think anyone could have predicted what actually happened. And that’s why we watch. 

I want to focus on both the draw and repellant nature of unpredictability tonight, though. Yes, it can beckon us. But if your brain is anything like mine, you have to prepare for the unexpected just to fit it comfortably into your life. Now, I know that may sound contradictory, but let me talk through how I think about things like this, and maybe it will make a bit more sense. See, I have a need — some might even label it a compulsion — to create and maintain as much order as possible. Even in the work I love, I get to put that into practice every day. Templates, frameworks, and systems, these are all tools and processes I employ to try and control as much chaos as possible. I know that I can’t control for everything, but employing these gimmicks usually gives me the elasticity to account for whatever comes my way. 

Let’s take earthquakes as an example. No, I’m not saying I can control for them, much less predict them. But I can put a plan in place should we have one. Because, more likely than not, we will. I can tell my family what to expect, and where to meet, and make sure our kit is well thought out and in a place where we all can  get to it at a moment’s notice. I can’t prevent earthquakes from happening, but I can be as confident as possible that we have done as much as we can to prepare for one, if it comes.

There are other events, however, that are both completely unexpected and out of our control. The COVID-19 outbreak, for instance. Or the Google layoffs. Sure, they were distant possibilities in people’s imagination, but I sure wasn’t ready for either. Thankfully, I have enough systems and frameworks in place to create the capacity (or illusion of it) to deal with them. Or so I hope. 

Besides the ManU-Liverpool match, the other inspiration for tonight’s topic was a recent “Radiolab” episode. I don’t want to ruin the payoff, but it involves the evolutionary process of crabs and how chaos is a key component. That unpredictability is terrifying to me, but also essential to my development. I can intellectualize that, but I don’t have to like it. I know that all my growth has come from change. Usually, it’s been change I had no control over. So, while I can attribute each of my personal and professional leaps to chaos and unpredictability, if I had my druthers, everything would stay static.  

Even as I type this tonight, there’s hail hitting my windows in San Francisco. We’ve lived here for almost 16 years now, and we’ve had more hail events in the last week than in all those years. I would have never predicted that. And I’m sure there are tons of other things I will not be able to predict. I just want to make sure I’ve created order in as many other aspects of my life to be able to handle whatever comes our way. Before we all evolve into crabs, of course.

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?

20 February 2023

Noise Pop’s 30th anniversary event starts today, so this post is going up a bit earlier than usual so I can get in line for a show. Tonight’s post will probably be a bit abbreviated, too, because I feel like I’ve been waiting all day. I drafted what feels like a metric ton of cover letters, sent maybe a dozen of messages on LinkedIn, and I drastically revised a pitch script for a UX conference talk which is due tomorrow. So, I’m repurposing a lot of that pitch script for you tonight. You know, just in case.

I think I’ve mentioned my naming talk before. I’ve given it internally a few times, and every time I do, I feel like it could be more provocative. More urgent. More about how we show up in the world. Even with this last draft, I still don’t think I’ve nailed it. Here’s how it starts:

My name is Stephen, I use he/him pronouns, and I’ve been wrangling words (including these) for longer than I’d care to admit. The work I’m doing now is content strategy. Or content design. Or maybe UX writing. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure what we’re calling what we do anymore. And that naming issue is kind of what I want to talk to you about today. 

See, the names we attach to apps and features and products — as well as those we use to identify ourselves and our users(?), customers(?), consumers(?) — they go a long way in framing how each of them are presented and interpreted. Essentially, those names have meaning. Now, I know that’s not a groundbreaking thought, but please remember: I used to work for a company which called its own employees “Tweeps”!

Most of us know how important and contentious naming can be. But today I want to help you figure out the best way to find exactly what you want to name something, while making sure you have both your users’ and your business’s needs at the forefront of your thinking. 

That introduction is fine, I guess. It definitely highlights what I want to get to. But honestly, I think our industry needs a good kick in the pants when it comes to talking about identity and how we present and the intersectionality of the people making our user experience decisions. And the lens I want to use to bring this more into focus is through naming. Or labeling. Or categorizing. 

It’s a lot to cram into one cohesive talk. And I’m still working out how to tell the story in a way which both informs and entertains. But I still have time to get it right. If my pitch is even accepted. So, wish me luck, I guess? Now, I’ve got a show to get to.

See you tomorrow?

16 February 2023

Well, interviews have started. I’ve had a couple of screening calls with recruiters this week and last, but now the full-on “what have you created” discussions with hiring managers and potential teammates is getting underway. So, if you’ll indulge me tonight, I’m going to draft one of my case studies here in front of you. 

As I’ve mentioned when I started creating these posts, writing has been a constant through-line in my career. One of the aspects about being a content designer and UX writer that’s so attractive to me is the ability to use systems thinking to make writing easier and better for both individuals and teams. Essentially, I want to help make crafting content quicker, and more scalable, for global organizations. Whether that means creating and maintaining style guides so that standards are understood and adhered to, or mentoring designers — for instance — who are looking to document their decision-making process so they can better defend them in presentations or submit them as a talk at conferences, I really love giving people the tools to become better communicators. With these systems in place, we can streamline the ways we implement the improvements we want to make in our apps and online experiences. I think of it as setting up a kitchen so that you can create exactly what you are craving. That means ensuring recipes have all the steps you need, you have easy access to the right ingredients, and you’ve made sure the cookware and utensils are clean and in expected and convenient places so that you can start creating rather than casting about for one thing or another. With that explanation of how I think about content strategy in general out of the way, let’s look at an example of how I put it into practice during one project at Twitter.

Specifically, I want to talk about why and how we expanded Twitter’s Tweet limits from 140 to 280 characters. We noticed that people were abandoning Tweets as they got close to that 140-character limit. So the Design Team worked with our data partners to figure out how much of a problem that limit was for people creating Tweets. Turns out, 9% of all English-language Tweets were bumping up against the 140-character limit, but less than a half of a percent for Tweets in Japanese. We also learned that a good portion of those people who were bumping into the upper limit were abandoning their drafts rather than revising them. So this was a problem not only for our users — because they couldn’t say what they wanted to — but also for Twitter, since Tweets were the fundamental building blocks of essentially everything else the business was built on. To put it more starkly, without Tweets, Twitter doesn’t exist.

As we explored ways to test whether giving people more characters would keep people from abandoning Tweets which were too long, we needed to make sure making this change — specifically longer Tweets — didn’t have negative effects on other aspects of the timeline, such as Tweet density, especially in double-byte character sets. In addition to how Tweets would show up in the timeline, we needed to look at the Tweet creation flow, and test different ways to make it clear what the new limits were and when people were getting close to exhausting it. Working with my Design partner, Josh, we created some visual explorations for how we could simply and clearly communicate the new limit to anyone, anywhere in the world. 

As we tested this extended character count, we saw the number of those 9% of English-language Tweets which were previously hitting the 140-character limit plummet. With the expanded character count, that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. We were definitely addressing both the user and business problem. With the solution in hand, we still needed to figure out how to implement it, though.

What I love about the explorations and collaborations we worked on for the final implementation was the fact that the “content” I was strategizing was more than just words. Our needs were global, and that meant that almost any error indicator or hint about the limits were best indicated without words so that they were universal and accessible, no matter how people were interacting with the apps and website. So rather than iterating on different versions of a “Your Tweet is too long” written error message, we settled on an indicator which closed and changed color as you got closer to the new, 280-character limit. We also built the status indicator into the VoiceOver flow so that people using screen readers would know if they had exceeded 280 characters, and by how many of them they had gone over. 

Once we had the product design approved and the product implementation coded, we need a communications plan to coordinate with the launch. Working with the Brand, Marketing, and Comms teams, we did a series of Tweets and blog posts, which I helped edit and ghost-write, to talk about the entire process — from the design and the rationale, to UI indicators and error messages. But we can talk about that part of the story another time. Wish me luck.

See you tomorrow?

13 February 2023

I came across a couple of surveys on LinkedIn today (I’ve been spending more time than usual there, as you may imagine). Both surveys are for my fellow content strategists/UX writers/content designers/whatever we’re calling ourselves these days. The first one I want to share with you is a UX Content Salary Survey from Bobbie Wood, Founder and CEO of UX Content Collective. The survey covers the type of work you do, who you regularly collaborate with, and how you’re compensated. If you’re so inclined, please add your responses so we can get a better idea of where we are as a discipline and where we need to go.

The other survey is where I want to spend a little more time tonight. It’s from content designer and UX writer Jane Ruffino, who’s done one of these two years ago. I encourage you to fill it out, too, maybe even before finishing this post. I’ll wait.

Al’right, welcome back. I’m not going to post my answers to every question in the survey, but I did want to share a few of my responses from the end of the survey in the hopes that we can start a conversation about where content strategy stands in the product and design industry these days. The survey’s questions will be in bold, and my responses in italics, but I reserve the right to expand on my initial response now, with a few hours’ reflection.

If you could magically fix one aspect of your work, process, team, or organization tomorrow, what would you fix, and what impact would it have on your life and work? 
I would tie our metrics more directly to what users are actually experiencing, and hold leadership more accountable for helping us meaningfully move them in the right direction.

One of the aspects I’m finding more and more difficult to stomach is accountability. Especially in this era of “overhiring”. If we are truly trying to make our users’ lives better, why are our measurement tools so bad at capturing what’s really going on within the apps and experiences we’re creating? I understand there are business needs, and yes, obviously we should capture those metrics. But we should also be able to ascertain whether or not our customers are able to complete the tasks they are trying to do with the tools we are building for them.

Thinking now about the content discipline and community itself, what, in your opinion, are the two biggest challenges we're facing in 2023? 
1) Giving people the capacity to specialize in a part of the content discipline, so they don’t have to be the single source of all content-related needs
2) Harnessing AI as a tool, rather than a dreaded specter of career doom, so that we can shorten the content lifecycle, but still add the humanity and editorial rigor which makes good content more than serviceable, but instead, makes it great

The field of content strategy has grown so much since the first time I saw Kristina Halvorson utter that phrase during the “Queens of Content” talk at Adaptive Path in 2008. Today, you can specialize in microcopy or metadata or information architecture or design systems or content governance or so, so many other hats some of us are trying to wear simultaneously everyday. Especially if you’re in a small org as a single practitioner. To quote Torrey Podmajersky, “Everything is content.” And because that’s true, we need to be ready to service all of it, and embrace emerging new tools to help us with that, whether that’s Figma or large language models or something new that has yet to be invented. 

Finally, since there will be a lot of people interviewing and hiring this year, what do you think is most broken about recruiting for the kind of work we do?
There is not a lack of diversity in the people who are passionate about this work, but there is a lot of gatekeeping preventing underrepresented voices the ability to make important decisions in what the products we use every day say and do. When hiring starts to better look like our user bases, we’ll better address the needs of everyone, not just those considered “normal”.

This may eventually get its own post here, but we need to better reflect the diversity of our users in our staffing. That’s easier said than done, I’ve discovered. Mainly because this effort doesn’t stop at hiring. We have to look past people landing the role, and focus on keeping them, and valuing their viewpoints, so that the perspectives we lack are consistently making the decisions we need to be making for our users. All of them. This means we should be reimagining metrics. Rethinking incentives. And focusing on belonging. Without all of these, working hand-in-hand, the work we do to recruit and hire will be useless if we let these smart, talented, empathetic people walk out the door to find a place where they feel like they belong. 

You can use this last field to say whatever you want, about anything. 
One trend which is starting very slowly which I’d like to see gain more traction, much more quickly, is the ability for leaders in the content discipline to be welcomed more readily into the ranks of design leadership more broadly. As the discipline has matured, we’ve seen a wonderful set of leaders emerge, but their progress seems constrained to solely leading content teams. The thinking, priorities, and experience these emerging leaders can bring to a larger design team, complete with designers, researchers, content strategists, UX writers, and design operations groups, are similar enough to offer another rung on the career ladder for content design leaders. I hope we see more of them leading design organizations in 2023 and beyond. 

This is another idea which should get its own focus here in the days to come. Looking back at the fact that content strategy has been around for more than a decade, and our leaders have risen to the tops of their discipline, we need to create a path for content design leaders to transition into design leaders. As I touched on in my initial answer, leadership skills are easily transferable. You set the vision. You translate the goals. You motivate staff. And you trust and empower your teams to get the work done. Whether you are leading a small group of writers or a large design organization, leading is leading. And we need to be ready to make that leap, creating opportunities for those who come after use to walk a similar path. My ask of any content design leaders reading this paragraph is to formalize a path for your people, from their first, entry-level job in your organization all the way up to running your org. Without a clear career trajectory, we’re going to keep bouncing from company to company, managing bigger and bigger content teams, but never breaking through to the design leadership roles which so many in our field are so ready to take on. And who we so desperately need.

See you tomorrow?

07 February 2023

As I type these words tonight, I’m sitting in front of the TV watching the State of the Union address. That’s one way of essentially saying I’m a bit distracted. So tonight, I’ll just tell you a brief story.

Back in 2002, after my disastrous first attempt at managing a team, I was looking for a new role. Coincidentally, a family friend had decided to run for office. Since I had just spent more than six years producing stories for a state-wide news agency (some of them award winning!), it was a good time to try out the other end of the press release tango. So, I volunteered to do some earned media work for the campaign during the primary. This mainly meant that I was in charge of returning the calls that the Communications Director didn’t want to return. 

Slowly, but surely, though, I saw needs which were going unmet. Need a database of news radio station contacts? I can put one together. Need to create a template for recurring press events? I can put one together. Need to collect all of our standard answers to recurring policy questions? I can put one together. I didn’t know it then, but I was already learning how to be a content strategist.

As the days’ work melded into nights, I realized I was working more than I was sleeping. And I loved it. There’s something about the belief in a candidate that allows you to power past any idea of an eight-hour day. For a long time, I was pretty sure that was what was motivating me the entire time. But now, as I’ve gotten farther in what I can now call a career, I get to look back at the jobs I’ve held and the ones I’ve loved to see how and why they are different. And with more than two decades of perspective, I think the theme running through the ones I loved is what we’re now calling content strategy. 

Finding the right thing to say, to the right people and at the right time, has been the only common thread in each of the jobs that I look back on fondly. And, even at Twitter, where during my initial interview I was asked to define content strategy for the hiring manager, being able to explain when, why, and how to inform people has always been a part of what I love about this work. I’ll tell you the same thing I told him: 

“Content strategy is, essentially, big-picture thinking about every little detail.”

And I can’t wait to do it all over again.

See you tomorrow?

26 January 2023

Tonight I want to talk, briefly, about rule enforcement on social media sites. In light of what seems like announcements dueling for “Worst Decision of the Year” awards, Twitter this week reinstated (then suspended again) the account of an avowed white supremacist, followed by Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, announcing that they will be allowing the 45th President of the United States back on their platforms. 

I’ve touched briefly on the topic of content moderation here in the past, so tonight, I want to share a little nuance about how we approached one aspect of suspensions inside Twitter when I was there. One of the first tasks I had as a content strategist after moving to the Design and Research team was to help our Trust and Safety folks update our enforcement emails, the ones people get explaining why their accounts had been suspended. One important part of the task included finding the right balance between our newly updated brand voice and a stern but understanding tone. 

To start, we took the finite list of policy offenses, along with the number and degrees of infractions involved, and started auditing the existing emails, prioritizing the ones we sent the most, first. As we started going through them, we noticed that we could streamline what we were saying, and to whom, by creating templates which accounted for severity (like first offenses) and the offense itself (like spamming links to people). We started to create templates with places for variables to be programmed in, such as the name of the policy people had broken and the number of times the account had violated it. For a good deal of the most frequently violated policies, this work was pretty easy: Revise the version we had with the new brand voice in mind, test it with the policy variations inserted, and then move on to the next. But here’s where doing work at Twitter gets interesting. 

Even as we were undergoing this transformation, our policies were changing. And for any social media platform you want to be a part of, they should always be changing. No service is going to be able to create a set of policies on launch day which will suffice for any good amount of time without evolving. Because the way people use those platforms will evolve. In good ways and in bad. The policy enforcement teams, hopefully working in collaboration with a lot of other people, both inside and outside of the company, need to stay on top of things like trend manipulation, spam, impersonation, and a whole host of other ways of weaponizing product features. 

Those product features, more accurately the people who are pitching, designing, and developing them, also need to be able to anticipate the number of ways a new or iterated feature can be used for harm, and either build in mitigation factors or re-evaluate launching altogether. It becomes the responsibility for each member of the team to look at what they’re building and ask not just “Who is this for?”, but “Who could this harm?”.

As we step back and think about how we’re building the social web, and what foundational decisions we continue to build upon, I am starting to wonder why we can’t move away from engagement-based metrics and towards something more benevolent. But there’s obviously no shareholder value in curiosity or community or news literacy. Unless and until we can create incentives which reward civility, we are going to keep recreating the scenarios which have ushered in today’s separatism. Especially if Web 2.0 platforms keep allowing the worst of us to drive the conversations for the rest of us.

See you tomorrow?

17 January 2023

Tonight, I reluctantly return to a topic that was part of my everyday existence for at least 5 years: Twitter. Earlier today, the Verge and New York magazine published their collaboration about the timeline and inner workings of the recent Twitter takeover. And while I think it’s a valuable use of your time even if you’re not a former Tweep, I want to focus on one paragraph in particular toward the end of the piece:

Four days later, Twitter crashed. More than 10,000 users, many of them international, submitted reports of problems accessing the site. Some got an error message reading, “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault.”

See that error message there? That last sentence there with the em dash? The one on the quotes? I wrote that! And, as I mentioned in a Slack channel earlier today, if that’s my Twitter legacy, I’m fine with that. But I want to give you a little history about how that particular error message came about. It’s a combination of content strategy and #LoveWhereYouWork ethos, which is a great example of the zenith of my time at Twitter.

In 2018, our batch of interns was stellar. We consistently had great groups come through, but that year, there was something special in the air. And I’m not just talking about the ones assigned to the Design and Research team. Throughout the org, every intern I worked with not only made the platform better, they taught me a ton, too. It was a pretty great summer. 

Each intern had a mentor assigned, and specific tasks they were assigned to work on. But they also got to pitch and complete a project on their own. One of that year’s interns, Vanessa, wanted to reimagine the design of our error messages. Visually, they had changed very little from the days of the infamous Fail Whale. And that illustration didn’t even come from a Tweep. So her plan was to update our errors, aligning them with our then-current visual brand guidelines, which gave me an opportunity to update the kinds of messages which were available for our engineers to use. 

That’s where this post turns from watching the current Twitter car crash (all layers of innuendo intended) and more towards an error message how-to, at least in regards to how we did it on my team back in 2018. First, we asked ourselves what scenarios could cause an error to pop up for people. From what I can remember, we came up with four broad scenarios we needed to account for:

• User error- This should be self explanatory, but it’s basically something like a typo, usually in a search term or URL.

• Twitter error- Sometimes, things break. And when we knew it was our fault, we needed to tell them that.

• Connectivity error- Not all of Twitter’s features were available offline, so we had to account for moments when we needed more bandwidth.

• Mystery error- And then there were the unexplained gremlins, which may later have an explanation, but in the moment, this was the equivalent of a shruggie.

After we had mapped out all the instances which needed messages, then we had to decide what to tell people. And whether or not we needed them to take an action. So all four of the types of messages we mapped out had a version with a call-to-action (CTA) and a version without. If we knew a refresh might fix things, for instance, we’d include a button reading “Try again”. 

Lastly, we made sure that each of the messages, whether they had CTAs or not, were using our updated brand voice. But we had to make sure that our tone was appropriate for the emotional state of people when they saw it. Remembering that nobody really wants to see an error message — no matter how witty it is — was a key component in crafting a clear message rather than a clever one. We did this by developing a template so that we could balance information with empathy, and roll them out in all 42 languages we were using at the time. 

If we look at that example from earlier, “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault,” I can tell you that was one for the Twitter error scenario. And it was probably followed by the “Try again” CTA. We reused that “Something went wrong…” piece for all of them, I think, and then tailored the ending depending on which error type it was and what we wanted people to do next. 

Honestly, it’s been a while since writing those, and I don’t remember them all. I wish I had a list of all of them, but I’m sure if you’re still using Twitter, you’ll most likely see them pop up more and more the longer the current regime retains control. While I’m glad these posts aren’t revisiting the Twitter drama as often as when I first started writing them, I was glad for this trip down memory lane today. And happy to revisit some of the content design problem-solving that consumed most of my waking hours back then. I miss that work a lot. But I’m glad to have my life back, too.

See you tomorrow?