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?

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?

13 March 2023

During my — what seems like — hourly scrolling of LinkedIn, I came across a post about writing that resonated with me. I know I’ve talked about the act of writing as a way to crystalize ideas, but the link Jonathon Colman shared captured a lot of what I tried to say the other night on my own. 

I’m sharing this because I want to use tonight’s post to better formulate an idea I had when I misheard a phrase while listening to a podcast yesterday during our last evening dog walk. I don’t even really remember what I misheard at this point because I spent the remainder of the walk trying to work out the notion I had. The gist of it, however, was about how we spend a lot of time looking for, “a needle in a haystack.” And that’s our jumping-off point.

See, I feel like a lot of times, we develop a number of ideas trying to locate and extract the needle. Can we use a magnet? Could we get a light to reflect off it somehow? What about sifting it to the bottom? What I don’t think we spend enough time on is how to sort through the hay. In my mind, that’s where the problem really is. 

Essentially, it’s a signal-to-noise issue. And the methods to going after the needle just add to the chaos, and probably won’t yield the results we’re hoping for. But, in my content strategy-focused brain, I want to bring some order to that stack of hay, leaving nothing but order and the elusive needle.

As an example, I’d advocate developing a sorting system for all the hay. Let’s say we just start organizing them by size. This would do a couple of things in my mind:

1. Bring some focus to the search

2. Force a methodical, systematic evaluation of each piece of hay

3. Identify what’s been done and what’s left to do

4. Ensure that nothing was missed

Obviously, this would take a considerable amount of time. But the other advantage is that you’d be able to evaluate how long it should take you to get through the pile and estimate when you’ll be able to actually stumble across the needle. 

Thankfully, I don’t think I’ll ever actually have to find a needle in a haystack. But I have had to come up with ways for people to find the information they’re looking for amongst a sea of other information. By thinking about how everything else is sorted, we help people more easily find what they’re looking for, rather than sending them on a Quixotic path. Thanks for letting me tilt at this windmill for a bit tonight.

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?

24 February 2023

I’ve been thinking more and more about content recommendations. Specifically how those recommendations are developed and delivered. With the Supreme Court weighing the role of recommendation engines in radicalization, along with my recent daily use of the new Artifact app and my never-ending desire for a great music recommendation engine, the idea of “content” in “content recommendations” has been on my mind a lot lately. 

There are plenty of more well-informed people writing about the Supreme Court. I’d recommend (I use that term knowingly) getting updates from NPR’s Nina Totenberg and analysis from Slate’s Slate Marc Joseph Stern and The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka. What I want to talk about is how videos at the center of those cases ended up in front of the eyes of terrorists. To put it far too simply, our recommendation engines are broken. 

One of the reasons I think this is because our current systems and algorithms rarely reward curiosity. Here are a couple of examples: Let’s say you want to know why the bar across the street just erupted in cheers. You look on Twitter, for instance, to see that the Golden State Warriors are playing, and scroll through a few Tweets to learn that they pulled out a win in the last seconds of a regular-season game. The recommendation engine has no idea what motivated your search. All it thinks now is, “MUST SEND MOAR BASKET BALLS!” [Please read that in the voice of Frankenstein’s monster.] But you don’t really like basketball. You were just curious, and found an answer to your question. But now your Twitter timeline is suddenly injected with NBA-related Tweets you have no desire to see. It’s misunderstood you and the limited number of signals it can read about you. There’s no way it knows that you’re five-foot, six and couldn’t sink even a layup even if your life depended on it. But let’s look at another example, shall we?

For people who follow the news closely, there is a lot of value in having a wide array of sources to get your updates. But if you’re using an app like the new Artifact, the narrowcasting can happen pretty fast. If you read a New York Times article, for instance, a lot more Times articles end up in your feed. The same happens for topics. If you read about a local break-in in your neighborhood, you run the risk of having your feed overtaken by crime reporting. It almost makes you reluctant to stay informed for fear that you’ll only get those types of stories over and over. It’s like telling your grandmother when you’re 7 that you like penguins, only to get penguin-related gifts from her for the rest of your life. 

One last one, if you will. Say you have a gloriously broad set of music you like. And, occasionally, you explore bands you read about by looking them up on Spotify. So, you listen to an album you read about on Pitchfork, or wherever, and then, suddenly, your Daily Mix 4 is full of bands who think whistling and stomping and clapping are the-end-all, be-all of songwriting prowess. All because you wanted to try something new. 

I guess what I’m saying is, we need more control. We should be able to explicitly indicate what we like and what we don’t. If we were better at providing that nuance, I’d trust these algorithms more to recommend things to me. And as we move away from cookies and personalization, and toward privacy and control, we might be able to get there. As long as corporations can profit from it, I assume.

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?

08 February 2023

I saw a post today on LinkedIn using a music analogy to make a point about content’s importance in solving user experience problems, and thought to myself, “My people!” Part of the post included this idea:

“Content is like the bass player, UX is the drummer. Together they’re the rhythm section. Information architecture is the song arrangement. UI is the melody, the frontperson, and dazzling guitar solos.”

The first thing I like about this is it draws a line in the sand. We can’t really have a discussion until we frame it. And, if you’ll allow a bit of a digression before we get back to the band analogy, I want to highlight a trick I learned from a design colleague at Twitter for framing discussions which need to lead to a decision. As I remember it, he called it something like the “Pizza Lunch Problem”.

In his scenario, when you’re ordering lunch for a group of people, if you don’t frame the question right, you’ll probably end up with cheese pizza for everyone. His logic is that it’s easily shareable, it’s cost-effective for groups, and cheese is the simplest topping which most people will end up agreeing on. But getting there is probably going to be painful. You’ll start by bouncing a bunch of food types around, like Indian, sushi, Mexican, sandwiches, etc., and inevitably end up at pizza. Then, you have to turn to toppings. Now, you’re accounting for those who don’t want meat or hate pineapple or only like a stuffed crust. So, after much deliberating, and probably some frustration, you end up with cheese pizza. And the decision probably didn’t take you 30 minutes or less.

His suggestion, then, is to put a stake in the sand as a starting point; “Hey y’all, let’s order lunch from McDonald’s.” While this may be polarizing, it frames the conversation in a way that starts to better highlight the needs and wants of the group. You may still end up at cheese pizza, but using the constraints of the McDonald’s menu helps draw out the preferences and restrictions which will get you to where you need faster. Hopefully, in time to enjoy a well thought-out lunch.

With that out of the way, let’s get back to this content-band analogy. Making the bass player content is a definite choice, and I like that it works hand-in-hand with the drumming of UX. But in my opinion, the entire band is UX. The bass playing is important, but it works in tandem with a drumming foundation which I think is actually research. Without knowing what your users need, and what other options in the marketplace are offering them, you might as well just be composing “Saucy Jack”.

I really love the idea of including the song arrangements as a part of the discussion, but I want it to be metadata, with an evening’s setlist standing in for information architecture. That way, you’re thinking about where to place certain songs in the set so that the overall performance is enjoyable for you and your audience. All of this gets put together to create your new favorite band, UX. #\m/

Thank you for, once again, letting me torture a music-related analogy. I have a lot of fun with these. And now, I’m actually headed out the door to see a band in action. 

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?

07 December 2022

Tonight’s post is going to be a little bit meta (please note the lowercase “m”). I want to talk about the process of writing these, the pros and cons of my approach, and the aspirations I have for at least one of these. First, some logistics. 

Normally around here, everyone is in bed by 10 p.m. Except me. That’s when I crack my knuckles and get to work on these. That usually means I need to already have an idea in mind about what I want to write about, and just buckle down to get the thoughts out of my head and onto this page. I may have mentioned it before, but to reiterate, I want to have everything up and posted before midnight. That gives me about two hours to get close to 500 coherent words together, add links where needed, choose a title from my predetermined list (have you figured out where I’m pulling these titles from yet?), and scroll through my old photos to select one which is mildly related to the evening’s topic. 

So far, I’ve posted one of these almost every weekday evening since the beginning of November, my own version of NaNoWriMo. And after working on more than two dozen posts, one conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s so much easier to write about opinions than to write about facts. And maybe that’s why we’re so inundated with a morass of ideas which we have to navigate through to get to the truth. Let’s go back to the World Cup as an example. 

If I want to put up 500 words about how much I despise the play, technique, and mindset of a certain high-scoring Portuguese captain, I could do that pretty effortlessly, without having to cite one stat or example, just a stream of consciousness about how watching him makes me feel. And, since that‘s my lived experience, there’s not really much debate about it. But if I wanted to present a well-informed case about why I think a more petite, 35-year-old forward from South America is a better all-around soccer player than a certain recently terminated Manchester United forward, I’d need to back it up with examples and statistics and a thorough evaluation about why one brings value to a team and the other only values himself. And that takes work. Just sharing an opinion is far from work. 

When we start to evaluate information, it takes critical thinking. And research. And the humility of knowing what you don’t know as well as the confidence to get a little uncomfortable in order to potentially learn something new. Another in the long list of reasons why I loved Twitter was the ability to learn something new every day. Or even every hour, if I was willing to spend that much time and effort to seek new information. Under the new leadership, however, the burden to verify what you’re reading is far too much. You used to be able to trust that most of the news you were seeing, especially on the Explore tab, was presented with enough context for it to quickly make sense. Now that the entire Curation team is gone, though, one has to be more than skeptical about every trend and hashtag listed, especially on the Trending section. 

While I stand by the thoughts I’ve been able to collect in these posts, I know that there’s not a lot to them. Right now, I think that’s fine. If you’re reading them, I hope you’re appropriately skeptical of what I’ve put here. Eventually, though, I want to be able to spend the time and effort to put something together which teaches you — and probably me — something new. I know that the process of putting these words together is a clarifying process for me, so from just that aspect, these are valuable. I hope they're a little valuable to you, too. Even if they’re not Tweets.

See you tomorrow?