DesignOps 2020: How to Maximize the Impact of Content Design (Session Notes)

Speaker: Jonathon Colman, Senior Design Manager, Intercom

— Going to show how to maximize impact of content design
— Senior manager at Intercom in Dublin Ireland, but don’t have Irish accent because he is originally from the United States.
— For any questions not asked, if you are busy and multi-tasking at home
  • Just got following address: go.inter.com/maximpact.
—Links to references tools all are in one place

— Talk will begin with biggest failure of Jonathan’s career and  will end with a second failure
  • Will involve the use of DesignOps build resilience to his design practice
— Why talk about failure?
  • Pretty rare to hear about losss and mistakes
  • Failures interesting stories that teach the most
— So let’s open new scabs
  • Jonathan used to be a content designer at Facebook
  • First product he did content design for at Facebook  wasmeant to identify movies/TV around you
  • Equivalent to Shazam for Facebook
— A user created an audio finger-print and worked to match them to help figure out what needed to be done
  • You could then post sound/TV to Facebook
— Jonathan’s mistake: Just because you can solve a hard technical problem, doesn’t mean you are solving a real problem for real people
— Everything described after this point actually happened

— If you see “Learn More” link in image, Jonathan actually produced  the written content for that.

— So what went wrong? People needed to know how and why feature worked
— Amy Thibodeau called what Jon did as content designer  “dusting up content”
  • Jonathan was tidying up surface words, while not focusing on product or UX

— All he was doing was dusting, but not giving experience or considering the people the product was meant for
— Buried important context in screen, and overall value proposition was unique
— Jonathan was solving problem for Facebook, but it wasn’t a real problem

— So what happened? Without a clear message or value proposition, people feared the Facebook product would be used to record their conversations and target them with advertising
— This led to petition which 600,000 people signed
— Also led to viral video, and led to Jimmy Kimmel skit
— Facebook attempted damage control, but product was dead on arrival
— As a side note, Facebook can still serve personalized adds without listening to you talk

 

— Jonathan takes absolute responsibility for the failure, as the team designing the app didn’t have a dedicated product designer.
  • Jonathan didn’t act as proxy designer
— But why? He wasn’t focused on a single project.
  • He worked with different teams across back-to-back meetings

— Jonathan worked on copy for Facebook platform
— And worked with multiple managers designers, and managing team of content strategists
— Each of whom worked at own content strategists

— Slogan of “Move Fast and Break Things” accurately describes how product content works
  • Not best or only way to work
— Working this way is unsustainable at best and meant to fail at worst

— In 2018, when Jonathan joined intercom, he worked to figure out how content designers create impact
— He found eight core problems
  1. No focus— Content designers are constantly context switching and optimizing for quick work.
  • Work done under conditions won’t be your best
  1. Will have less context as to what team is doing. You can’t sit in on every meeting, and will run into conflicts. Won’t be aware of issues as  much as everyone else
  • No clear understanding of what needs to be done
  • Creates distrust in your work and you
  1. Teams don’t know what you do, or why your work is valuable
  • Don’t see process, solve problems, or validate success
  • Neither you or team set for success
  1. Less depth at work
  • Can’t work on problems as deeply as everyone else
  • Colleagues don’t decisions and question judgment, because they don’t know how you work
  • You be come a copywriter instead of design
  1. Won’t have opportunity for product impact.
  • Work is unnoticed as you are not seen as key part of team
  • Ability to influence is constrained
  • You crave recognition, but don’t get it.
  1. Unclear career paths
  • Not just promotions, but no real development and ways to develop skill as designer or product manager
  • What if you want to grow into a field?
  • Hard to grow skills due to rapid context switching
  1. Less pay than peers
  • You are not paid as everyone else, and need to take on new roles
  • By end of career, will be further along
  • Survey found  74% UX writers identified as women, and gap in tech
  1. Feel burnout
  • Hard to feel motivated when all of these factors impacting, and risk of beginning process over again
  • Draining process and sense you have unfulfilled potential
  • Know you can achieve more if only org let it change

— Problems are not new and people have grappled with them in content strategy
  • People don’t talk about these problems at all

—Content design doesn’t align with effective design organizations
— Most content teams don’t work, and have an unhealthy foundation, unhealthy output, and unhealthy management
— Don’t have to be defined by problems, but take design approach, se solutions, and build over time
— Show DesignOps process to change how content designers worked, their accountability, and even their pay
— Hope came from DesignOps, which has grown over past years, especially with distributed Design Teams
  • Useful for small teams especially

— A definition of DesignOps everything that support high quality design crafts methods

 

— At Intercom, you always start with a problem. Consistently return to make sure you are not going off course

— Jonathan interviewed content design people across the world
— He then developed a document that defined eight problems
— Hypothesized solutions
  1. Key change was moving content designer to one team at a time
  2. This matched allocation of colleagues
— Lot of advantages and opportunity to find focus
— Need to develop deep understanding and context
— Earn trust of team, working with them can participate in team rituals
— People see what content designers do, how they do it, and how it drives impacts

 

— Far fewer content designers than teams. How to decide which teams got what?

— Jonathan began with the premise that not all problems had equal impact, so came up with simple rubric to assign content designers
— Found highest business priority, and content design aligned with business goals
  • Focused on content design opportunity ranks (i.e. customer facing concepts)
  • Looked at factors that might gauge effectiveness of content designer on team (i.e. teams had valid reasons to say no, such as through a prior track record)
  • Is team in same office. Built product in three offices.
  • Would be bad experience for content designers
— All factors put together had a rationale that could be presented to stakeholders, which people felt confident in.
  • Openly showed what was being optimized for

— Needed to give up distractions that would mitigate focus
— Content esigner use office hours to earn trust and provide light-weight support
  • Unclear accountability
  • Encourages short-cuts
—Colleagues pleased to have it shut down

— Content designers work on team, so how to spend time
— Needed new expectations for colleagues

— Came up with full-stack content design, all the way to its foundations
— Set expectations that content designers would be accountable for overall product success
  • Influencing systems and solution concepts, like everyone else
  • Had as much stake in product success as PM or engineer

— If content designers deep focus, and work deeply on product and impact otherwise
— Ability to set product priorities, like product designers do
— This allowed people to have clear idea of what designer want or “D” -design.

— Content designers began to act as product designers, following methods like double-diamond to prototype, identify and ship
— Followed double-diamond process on entire project

— What were content designers accountable for?
— What was good design? How to advance career?

— Wrote up a list of content design capabilities, but trashed it

— Didn’t see any reason as to why content designers couldn’t match competencies that Intercom requested
— You can reference Intercom standards online
— Expectation for products and teams
  • Content designers are held accountable for each project
  • Hard to imagine any role being effective without these skills
Same for behavior and competencies Intercom values
  • Why can’t content and product designers be accountable for same thing
Also holds for results, and making sure competencies for outcomes were aligned with each other
  • SMART Goals, bias toward action, and making the same things in general

Only real difference in design execution
  • No big gulf if context designers work at one team at a time
  • Decided to keep same expectation, with expectations that product designers focus on interaction and UI
  • Content Designers focus on IA and UX writing
— Expected to be proficient and accountable across all areas
That was the only difference.

— Worked to pay people equivalently with content designers, as well
— Content designers systematically not paid as much as product designers
  • Figured that if content designers do same work, using same process, to same level of expectations, and held accountable for same results
  • Should be paid the same
— Content designers now have same focus and experience
— Same pay scales as product managers
— Conversation was not hard, as leaders understood
  • Also differentiator for content designers
  • Believes everyone should be paid fairly at work
— If done at scale, clear impact against pay gap in design and tech

— Summary of four key changes that provided resilience
—Combined change solve all eight core problems

— Three key tradeoffs covered. Tackled just as COVID hit
Trade-Off #1
— Most products don’t get content support at all
  • By prioritizing some teams over others, picking winners and loseres
  • Focus on top priorities for company
Increase documentation, more training, and grow self-serve tools
Trade-Off #2
— Work is held to higher-standard, and ask for heavy lifting
  • People now have same expectations
  • Content designers must know space inside out, and need to move fast
  • Need to take ownership for moving things forward
Trade-Off #3
— Content designers can’t holistically work across entire product system
  • Not just products, but handoffs of where products occur
  • Would find inconsistencies and potentially bad experiences
  • Have guidance for problems and in contact
  • Sure things slips through cracks

— Beginning that talk would start with failure and end with one
— Unexpected events like pandemic can wreck best plans and destabilize best teams

— Due to the pandemic, Intercom had to lay people off including entire content design field
  • Jonathan was devastated, especially after the org re-design had taken effect

— Even now there is hope, as content designers have found work, and up-tick in interest in content design in Intercom
— Speeds planted with re-design are beginning to take root and germinate, and will grow something new
—Failure is better teacher than success. Found resilience in something else.
  • Where there’s life there’s hope.

—Thank you!

Questions

  1. Difference between content designer/UX writer/UX designer?
Don’t know, it’s contextual.
All design roles are liquid that is poured into organization.
Shape of organization determines shape person takes place.
If people in org understand what you mean, that is critical
  1. How to contact?
Jonathan can be found on Twitter via @JColman.