Applying content strategy thinking to establish ways of working
I recently started a new and exciting chapter of my career as a Lead UX writer.
It’s only been a few months, but I’ve already learned a lot of lessons when it comes to applying content strategy principles in my new role.
In this post, I’d like to short some of what I’ve learned. But first, a little bit of context.
When I joined the company, there were only two full-time UX writers and both were also quite new. There were some basic guidelines that had been inherited from a writer who worked with the company some years ago. But it quickly became clear that important foundational pieces such as ways of working were missing.
So, I put my content strategist hat on and started to investigate the current situation a little bit closer. What follows is a description of the steps I went through and the outcomes thus far.
1–A quick audit
Before coming up with any solutions, I needed to take stock of the current state of things and start to identify areas that needed my attention. My colleagues who’d joined a few months before me had conducted a survey with product managers and designers at our company to gauge our colleagues’ understanding of UX writing as a discipline and how they’d envisage working with the UX writing chapter.
While there were clear gaps in how people understood UX writing, there was also a willingness and openness to learn from UX writers and establish productive and collaborative ways of working. This was music to my ears!
2–Digging deeper through workshops
The natural next step for me was to hear from the writers themselves. By this point, we’d had new writers join the company, and I wanted to learn from them what challenges they’d faced in the past and how they saw collaboration with team members panning out. So, I conducted a workshop. And what better way to collect everyone’s thoughts than with a handy Miro board and lots of sticky notes?
I divided our workspace into three sections:
- Pain points and challenges: these are the blockers that UX writers at my company have faced and those that new joiners had experienced in the past.
- What’s worked well: these are positive examples including ones we uncovered from our survey. They encompass helpful attitudes, empathy for UX writers and projects where collaboration between UX writers and other roles was efficient and fruitful.
- The future state: this comprised our “wish list” of what we’d like to see in terms of collaboration and ways of working in the future.
3–Potential solutions and future state
Armed with the survey insights and my colleagues’ perspectives and experiences, I started clustering all the paint points (challenges) and opportunities.
I saw themes emerging from this exercise. For example, many UX writers noted that they were often invited to projects a little too late, making it harder for them to have a strategic say in UX solutions. Also, because UX writers tend to be a shared resource, writers said it can sometimes be difficult to prioritise work when they have several projects and deliverables.
On the other side of things, there were several opportunities that I believed could help solve our challenges; including an openness to tips around when to involve a UX writer.
The next step was to explore ways to address the challenges and at the same time, capitalise on the opportunities we’d uncovered.
Through my research around UX writing ways of working, I’d found a very interesting and relevant model that had been created by Brownyn Berkely, Principal UX Writer at Amazon.
Brownyn’s “Own, Partner, Consult” model treats UX writer involvement on a project-by-project basis.
So if a project is heavy on content, the UX writer should typically own and drive the project. This means that they are responsible for the content strategy and for selecting the design components. This level of engagement works well when the project does not require new design components. An example of such a project would be creating new content for alerts and error messages.
When a project requires content and new design work, Brownyn suggests UX writers partner with designers. In this case, the designer is the UX lead who is responsible for the overall strategy, working closely with the writer to create content and strings. An example of such a project would be a new product feature.
Finally, if a project requires little content that is not complicated, the UX writer can be consulted for feedback as needed. In these types of projects, the designer is the UX lead and the writer is brought in when needed.
We really liked this model because it appears to address many of the challenges around ways of working that we’d been facing.
So we decided to apply the model and create best practices and tips for our colleagues.
4–Implementation and rollout
Now that we’d come up with a solution to establish ways of working for the UX writing practice, it was time to test it.
We created a Confluence page that explains what UX writers do and introduces Brownyn’s “Own, Partner, Consult” model. We also listed tips and best practices for colleagues wondering if and when they should involve UX writers across the design process and team rituals.
In conclusion…
While the work I described above is fairly recent and needs validation, I believe that applying a content strategy-type approach has helped put us on the right track. We started by assessing the current state of affairs and collecting user insights to identify the problem. We then envisaged the future or ideal state and put forward potential solutions to get us there. The next step will be to reassess the state of affairs and gather new user insights to measure our strategy’s impact and success.
Content strategy thinking has served me well thus far and as I navigate my new role, I think I will keep my content strategist hat close by…
