Writing Is Designing

Without words, apps would be an unusable jumble of shapes and icons, while voice interfaces and chatbots wouldn’t even exist. Words make software human-centered, and require just as much thought as the branding and code. This book will show you how to give your users clarity, test your words, and collaborate with your team. You’ll see that writing is designing.

Who this book is for

• People who make their living writing and leading content strategy for software interfaces, or those who want to transition into this type of role from another writing background.
• Designers and design leaders.
• Product managers, engineers, and executives.

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.

Sample Chapter: From Solo to Scaled

This is a sample chapter from Natalie Marie Dunbar’s book From Solo to Scaled Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice. 2022, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1: The Content Strategy Blueprint

I’m fascinated by buildings: single family structures, high-rise dwellings, and especially office towers. As such, I’ve always had a healthy curiosity about the construction process. For example, Figure 1.1 shows a Habitat for Humanity building that I worked on. From the initial breaking of ground to the completion of a building’s façade, I find comfort in both the art and order of construction—how foundations support columns, columns support beams, and beams support floors. When the building plans are followed as written, every element comes together perfectly to create a strong structure that is capable of withstanding natural elements like wind and earthquakes.

Figure  1.1

I worked as a volunteer on this building with my UX team.

In my career as a content strategist, I’ve heard colleagues speak about “standing up a team,” or “standing up a practice.” There was familiarity in the concept of building a figurative structure that had a specific function or purpose. And, of course, that familiarity stemmed from my fascination with buildings, so the construction metaphor made sense to me.

That metaphor also reminded me of one of my favorite books, Why Buildings Stand Up, by Mario Salvadori. Before writing and content strategy became my full-time job, I worked in various roles in residential and commercial real estate. All of those roles exposed me to various phases of building construction and tenant improvements, and reading Salvadori’s book helped me understand construction and architecture in an engaging way.

The familiarity I felt when hearing the phrase “stand up a practice” in the digital experience world often stopped short of the idea of the building metaphor. For example, practices were “stood up” with no attention to order. Foundations were poured before soil tests were completed, often resulting in skipping the addition of the footings that might be needed to support the foundation, or in the case of the practice, doing the work to ensure that the practice followed the necessary processes to create digital experiences that met the needs of users as well as the goal of the client or business. And inevitably, the structure—or the practice—began to crumble.

And sometimes those practices failed completely.

From the Ground Up

Having had the opportunity to build an agency-based content strategy practice from the ground up, and later expanding and maintaining an existing practice within a mid-to-large-sized organization, I began to see that failures often happened because steps crucial to supporting the structure had been skipped. Or perhaps the structure had been compromised because the framework used to build it—if one was used at all—couldn’t withstand the constant stress of tension and compression.

When I started to think about what caused these seemingly strong practices to crumble—I returned to the building and construction metaphor to look for possible answers. That’s because it’s sometimes easier to, er, construct a mental model that’s more tangible than the nebulousness nature of digital information spaces.

If the building metaphor still feels a bit weird to you, then try this: think of the last time someone asked what you did for a living. If you’re a UX practitioner, or if you collaborate with members of a UX team, you’ve likely experienced the feeling of the listener’s eyes glazing over as you tried to explain the concept of user experience—or as I once saw it described, “making websites and apps stink less.” Then think of what might happen if you described the user experience using a more relatable metaphor, such as one of the following:

• The internet is a space.
• A website or mobile app is a destination within that space (and in the case of websites, a space complete with its own address).
• The work you do helps people avoid getting lost in that space.

In keeping with this theme, now imagine that the opportunity that’s immediately in front of you—that of building a UX-focused content strategy practice—is a pristine plot of land. Provided you have a solid plan and the right materials and tools, this untilled soil is ready for you to break ground and to stand up a healthy content strategy practice.

So this figurative plot of land you’ve been given needs someone—you—to till the soil and prepare the space for a structure to be built. And the creation of the plans for that structure, as well as sourcing the building materials and the tools you’ll need to build it, has also fallen to you.

Lucky for you, this book is your blueprint.

Nuts and Bolts: Tension and Compression

In construction, tension happens when building materials are pulled or stretched. In the process of standing up (or building) a content strategy practice, tension can happen when you are asked to take on tasks that pull you away from the core functions of the practice.

Compression happens when building materials are pushed against or squeezed. As you’re building your practice, compression may present itself as pushback from departments outside of your immediate cross-functional team. You’ll find more details on how the concepts of tension and compression can impact your practice in Chapter 3, “Building Materials.”

Department, Team, Practice: What’s in a Name?

So, why the focus on building a practice? Why not focus on creating a new (or expanding an existing) content strategy department, or focus on hiring a team of content strategists? First, the focus on buildings and structures is intentional. That’s because I’ve learned that for the work of content strategy to succeed as the function that happens within the structure you are building, it must begin with a sense of permanency—a firm foundation. Ask any content strategist how many times they’ve been asked “when the content strategy was going to be done,” and how many times they had to explain in response that “the content strategy is never done”—that content has a lifecycle, from content creation to archival; that there will most assuredly be legacy content that will need to be maintained in some shape or
form; and that the creation of new content (or the addition of newly curated content) starts the cycle all over again.

Content departments and content strategy teams often sit in a variety of places within an organization or agency, including marketing or some variation of digital or user experience. There are also content strategy teams embedded in different organizational functions, such as customer care; or teams that support a specific product or feature, such as video content; or those that are aligned with a single line of business within an organization, such as in a healthcare organization where practices support individual and family products, healthcare plans offered by businesses, or Medicare and Medicaid plans. These teams tend to be highly specialized, and they focus on creating strategic approaches to content geared to a particular business need. But no matter where that team sits within an organization—and even if content strategy as a function is distributed throughout the organization—establishing a structure where content strategists can practice their trade goes a long way toward supporting the strength and longevity of the work of content strategy, or the core of the practice.

Also, departments and teams can be absorbed or completely dismantled. I’ve seen this happen where content strategists were reassigned to other types of content work, or worse, laid off or let go. I’m not saying that building a content strategy practice will safeguard you against those outcomes. But I am saying that building a practice with the support and buy-in of cross-functional teammates, product owners, and stakeholders might make the complete dismantling of the practice a less desirable option, especially after so many people have invested their time and resources into co-creating it with you, and especially because they have undoubtedly reaped the benefits of the practice as a result.

Beyond Copywriting: Meeting the Unmet Need

Imagine this scenario: You’re the solo “content person” in your department or agency. You write copy for digital experiences, have a good understanding of UX principles, and you likely know a little bit about search engine optimization, or SEO.

You’ve heard of content strategy, but there’s so much to learn. Then a client asks (and therefore makes the case) for the establishment of a content strategy practice, saying, “We hear that content strategy can help us create content that is performance-driven, useful, and reusable. Do you have anyone on your team who can do that for us?”

If you can relate to (or are currently experiencing) the previous scenario—or if you’re a digital creative director, a content manager, or a user experience lead, and you’ve found yourself in a similar situation, take a deep breath, grab your favorite beverage, and settle into your favorite reading spot. There is ground to break and some structures to build. But first, you’ll need to create and review the specs for getting it done.

Power Tools: Resources on the How of Content Strategy

Since you’re reading a book about building a content strategy practice, it’s a safe bet that you’ve either done your research on, or know a thing or two about, what content strategy is, and you have a good idea of how it’s done.

If, however, you’re building a practice while simultaneously learning how to do content strategy, don’t fret! Here’s a short list of books to get you started:

• The Web Content Strategist’s Bible by Richard Sheffield
• Content Strategy for the Web (2nd edition) by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach
• The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane
• Content Strategy at Work by Margot Bloomstein
• The Content Strategy Toolkit by Meghan Casey
• Writing Is Designing by Michael J. Metts and Andy Welfle
• Content Design by Sarah Richards
• Managing Enterprise Content by Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper
• Content Everywhere by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

The first five books will dive into the “what and how” of content strategy. The next two track the evolution of content design from content strategy, and the last two take a deep dive into “back-
end” content strategy—structuring content intelligently to make it future-ready and device agnostic. You’ll learn more about front-end and back-end content strategy approaches in Chapter 4, “Expansion: Building Up or Building Out.”

Blueprint Components

The second entry in Merriam Webster’s online definition of a blueprint reads, “ . . . something resembling a blueprint (as in serving as a model or providing guidance) especially: a detailed plan or program of action.” It’s that last part—a detailed plan or program of action—that parallels the concept of a blueprint as a tool for providing guidance as you consider the components necessary to build a content strategy practice.

There are five components to the practice building process that I’ve come to call the Content Strategy Practice Blueprint:

1. Making the business case
2. Building strong relationships with cross-functional teams
3. Creating frameworks and curating tools to build with
4. Rightsizing the practice to meet client or project demand
5. Establishing meaningful success measures

In this chapter, you’ll learn how each blueprint component will help you build a practice that’s both sustainable and scalable. In subsequent chapters, you’ll learn about the people, procedures, and processes that support these components.

One last thing: Before you break ground, let’s get aligned on the kind of content strategy practice that you’re constructing. While this blueprint could apply to building a variety of practice types, our focus here is specifically about establishing user experience-focused content strategy practices—a practice that has the mission of creating and supporting a brand or organization’s digital experiences and information spaces across digital channels, including websites and mobile apps, and that might extend to include AI, blockchain, and beyond.

Although the work of the practice may well include conducting content inventories and auditing content in social media spaces and on third-party websites, this book is not about content marketing strategy, which focuses on placing branded content (or content created in-house by a brand or organization) on third-party sites, social media, and similar channels.

Making the Business Case

In the building and construction trade, the circumstances that lead to breaking ground on a new building site are many, such as inheriting a new plot of land, or the need for more space, which necessitates acquiring adjacent plots to accommodate growth.

And so it is with building a content strategy practice.

Like a homeowner seeking a real-estate loan to make improvements that add value to a home, you’ll want to show how building a content strategy practice adds value to your agency or organization. That’s why the first component of the practice blueprint is making the business case. As well, every component that follows helps you implement this first step correctly and establish footing that is critical to creating a firm foundation for your practice as you build.

Conversely, there are other times when the business case is made for you. For example, there are creative leaders who realize that a client project—say, a website design—requires more than just a reskin and copy refresh. They know that something more deliberate and permanent is needed to support the sheer amount and types of content necessary to meet the needs of users and achieve the goals of the business, so they search for a content professional who can bring a critical skillset to complement an existing UX team.

Other times, there is a fierce advocate for content strategy of the user experience kind, who is willing to sponsor the establishment (or growth) of a practice that is distinct from marketing content operations a practice that is focused on things like content structure, content hierarchy and the flow of information from one part of the experience to the next, and how things like navigational labels and visual cues help users find what they need and successfully complete tasks. That advocate may have hired a content strategist or two, or elevated an existing, seasoned, UX-leaning digital content pro to transition from content creation to content planning and other strategic functions to begin building out a practice.

Then there are situations where someone within an organization recognizes that adding content strategy to their user experience capabilities provides value to the business, where content is created and maintained as an asset. In this case, once a decision has been made to establish a team or practice, a UX or CX (customer experience) lead, manager, or director is tasked with staffing a content strategy team, and the people who comprise the team may eventually choose to formalize the practice.

No matter which of these scenarios you identify with, take the time to execute on the following steps to establish your footing and make the case for building your practice.

• Know what you want to build before you break ground. This book is about building a structure, or a practice, in order to house a function, which is known as content strategy. While it’s true that there are overlaps between a team and a practice—and maybe you could argue that you can’t build a practice without a team—you can, in fact, start a practice team of one and expand (or scale) that practice as the demand for content strategy increases.
• Identify the value proposition that you’ll share with business stakeholders. This step involves communicating the value that the practice brings to your agency or organization, whether it is an expansion of agency capabilities and services you offer to your clients, or, for a midsized or enterprise practice, demonstrating how the practice can foster alignment around the strategic use of content to meet business goals and user needs.
• Find relevant case studies—or create one from a past client or project. Take this step to show how the establishment of a practice dedicated to delivering sustainable content strategies can make the difference for your clients—internal or external—by introducing repeatable processes for ensuring that content is useful and usable and supports the digital experiences created by your UX team.

So, whether you’re lucky enough to have advocates clamoring for the creation of a content strategy practice that will create, curate and manage content as a vital asset to your agency or organization, or the business case is made for you, taking the time to walk through these three preliminary steps will help you avoid the risk of establishing your practice on an unstable foundation.

Notes from the Field: Making the Case for Content Strategy

Barnali Banerji, Design and Research Manager, McAfee

When Barnali Banerji inherited a legacy team of UX writers (later called content designers) at McAfee, she knew there was a need to introduce content strategy into the mix. “The strategy part was essential because we have very complex apps and complex products that interconnect over different operating systems and different form factors. You need a content strategist who is able to see how to present content in an organized way—how to make content reusable, how to repurpose it, and how to establish consistency.”

In order to differentiate between the types of content roles and the value each one could add, Banerji sought to better understand the role of the content designers on her team. “There was a lot of overlap with product design. So you start to ask, where does product design start? Where does it end? Where does content design start? And what is content design supposed to do?”

“I’ve done a lot of work on mental modeling and top task analysis, and how that reflects the information architecture of a product.” The content designers were adept at storytelling as it related to products and services, but Banerji’s team needed expertise in both areas—content design and content strategy.”

Banerji now has a mix of content disciplines on her team. “In my opinion, content strategy is very different from content design. When you look at strategy, you’re actually talking about how might we present this offering, and how might we scale it? How might we measure that we’re doing the right thing?”

Making the business case for (and showing the value of) content strategy at McAfee was easy to demonstrate for Banerji. “From the front-end perspective, because we have such complex apps, and because there are so many features on those apps which don’t make sense to the user, that’s where content strategy shows up.”

The first content strategist to join Banerji’s team helped to improve the information architecture. They showed how to organize information, and how to surface that information on the front end. The second strategist she hired helped to build a reusable and scalable content management system for their products.

Banerji has plans to add a third strategist to the team as well.

All of the content strategists are loosely embedded in product teams because Banerji wants them to have time for (and control over) being part of content governance discussions and driving more content-related initiatives at the broader level of the organization. “In order to do their best work, content strategists need to have a really good understanding of the business context and the larger product vision.”

Building Strong Relationships with Cross-Functional Teams

While the crafting of content may be a solo endeavor or one that’s relegated to a team of writers, the effort it takes to bring that content to a screen or similar modality doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are many hands that your content must pass through before it becomes part of your digital experience, and the people (and disciplines) that those hands are attached to should be involved in the formation of your practice before you break ground. At the very least, these cross-functional disciplines should include the following:

• Visual designers
• User experience/human-centered designers
• User researchers
• Information architects
• Developers/engineers
• Product owners/managers
• Project managers

Introducing the concept of the practice and articulating its benefits, especially to the people you collaborate with the most, is a crucial step toward establishing practice longevity. At the early stages, you’ll want to focus your efforts on understanding the functions or disciplines that are a part of your team; on helping every member of the team understand how content strategy will impact their work; and ultimately on helping everyone individually and collectively see the value that a strategic approach to content brings to your combined efforts.

You’ll also want to consult with your colleagues as you begin the work of constructing a process framework. Involving them at this stage not only gets buy-in, but it also creates a sense of co-ownership in the practice. Chapter 2, “Structural Alignment,” takes a closer look at how a content strategy practice can benefit each of the disciplines listed previously and provide you with some conversation starters on specific ways the practice can add value. You’ll also learn what a process framework is and how to create one in Chapter 3.

Creating Frameworks and Curating Tools to Build With

To ensure stability and longevity, every structure, no matter how big or small requires a solid framework to help it stand. From the foundation to the footings, to the columns and beams and walls, every element that comprises a building’s framework, along with the tools used to construct it, contributes to the strength of the structure, allowing it to withstand forces that would otherwise cause it to fail.

It’s the same with the practice you’re building. Creating a process framework—testing it and improving upon it—will help your practice stand strong. More than just a building metaphor, you will learn to create a repeatable framework that considers all the trades (cross-functional disciplines), tools, and elements that contribute to and are impacted by the work of your practice. You’ll “soil test” your framework—meaning that you’ll test the environment you’re building in to ensure that you can create a firm foundation for your practice—with a variety of agency clients or in-house projects to show where you might need to add additional footings to further support the foundation of your practice, all with the goal of avoiding structural failure.

The following elements are critical to this blueprint component:

• The involvement of and collaboration with cross-functional teammates to establish alignment with the goals of the content strategy practice.
• The creation of an end-to-end process framework to identify responsibilities, dependencies, and critical handoffs in the development of a website or similar digital experience.
• The evaluation of a variety of tools to use within your practice at the project or client level to help you find what works best for your agency or organization.

Rightsizing the Practice to Meet Client or Project Demand

After you’ve successfully made the business case for the establishment of your agency or organization’s content strategy practice, your next step is to rightsize the practice to fit demand. Rightsizing can sometimes have negative connotations, such as when an organization has to reduce its workforce to adjust to a downturn in business or market conditions. But in keeping with the building and construction theme, rightsizing in this instance refers to “creating a structure that’s optimized for the size of the agency or organization—and for the number of clients or projects—where the practice is being built.”

Even if there aren’t any immediate projects on your radar, think bigger and consider the potential for future expansion of the structure you’re currently building. This blueprint component requires you to think beyond the current project plans that are right in front of you and to consider how intentionally planning for future expansion can help you sustain practice growth. But how can you do that if the demand for the practice isn’t there yet?

You create it. You use what you have in front of you to show how you’ll grow the practice when the demand comes. Here’s another way to approach it: most content strategy projects begin with a qualitative audit of the current state of the content and with a future state goal (usually informed by product requirements) in mind. If you are adhering to best practices, that future state goal usually includes plans to fill gaps in the content that might occur as a business or brand changes and grows.

You may not currently know what those changes will entail, but it’s reasonable to assume that changes in your business goals will be constant. So you create a core content strategy that considers the content components you’ll need to meet the current requirements, and one that also identifies content elements that may be needed in the future to support growth and change. And you’ll also consider how that content can be structured for reuse across digital platforms.

Additionally, you should consider the people, processes, and tools needed, not only to maintain the core strategy, but also to accommodate change, including the estimated number and types of roles you’ll need to fill, along with the workflows and governance needed to make key content decisions that will undoubtedly impact growth. Since you’re likely already familiar with these processes from the how of content strategy, you can take a similar approach to rightsizing your practice.

If you are a sole practitioner at an agency or looking to rightsize your content operations into a more strategic position by expanding your practice to accommodate growing demand, consider adopting these approaches:

• Are there current clients or projects you’re involved with that will allow you to demonstrate the benefits of taking a more strategic approach to content? If so, you can turn these projects into test cases by identifying a few quick wins that won’t compromise the timeline as you demonstrate how the practice can scale to take on more work:
  • Take a proactive look at the organization’s content through the lens of a sample inventory and audit (sometimes called a spot audit) and measure that content against attributes that map to future state goals.
  • Conduct a comparative analysis among similar brands or industry peers to identify potential content gaps that you can strategically turn into future content opportunities.
• If there aren’t any immediate client opportunities for you to work with, find out what’s on tap with potential clients. Determine if there is a chance for you to position content strategy as a value-add and to show how the practice can grow to accommodate more work:
  • If your agency is pitching its services on a rebranding project, ask to review the creative brief with an eye toward understanding why and how the potential client is planning to rebrand. Then do a quick spot audit of content on their website or app to see if current content offerings map to their future state, post-rebrand goals.
  • Determine if there are clients in need of an updated style guide or voice and tone guidelines. These are content deliverables that sometimes get overlooked and a demand that your practice can easily fulfill.

If you’re a solo practitioner or the lone “content person” in a medium-sized organization, or if you’re part of a small content team that wants to begin building a foundation for establishing a practice, the previous approaches can still work for you with a slight change of perspective:

• First, you’ll be looking at the content as an insider. Hopefully, that means you have access to things like product backlogs and roadmaps to identify upcoming initiatives. You can take a proactive look at the types of content that may be needed to support those initiatives, and you can strategically turn the results of that review into content opportunities to demonstrate value.
• Second, familiarity with your organization’s content likely means you know a thing or two about the editorial process. Conducting a few informal interviews with content creators, editors, SMEs (subject matter experts), and others involved with this process may reveal gaps or missed steps in that process that you can use to identify opportunities to improve the editorial process within the practice structure.
• In many organizations, there’s no single source of truth for information on who those content creators, editors, SMEs, and others are. As a result, when the time comes for a site refresh or redesign, or migration to a new content management platform, the content team is left scrambling to figure out who owns what. This situation presents another great opportunity for you to demonstrate how the practice can meet another demand by creating a sample content matrix to show how a tool like this can save time and resources.

Establishing Shared and Meaningful Success Measures

There are several ways to measure the success of a singular content strategy, whether for an agency client or an in-house project. And there are just as many ways to determine whether the content created and curated based on that strategy is delivering against established metrics. Whether you use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), or some other metric du jour, your choices for measuring content effectiveness are many. There are also many ways for you to measure the success of the practice. Working with your client, content lead, or in-house digital experience team, along with product owners or managers and business stakeholders, can help you establish measures that are meaningful to the success of the practice and the overall success of your digital experience team.

Measuring effectiveness at both the project and practice level should:

• Be collaborative, involving colleagues and partners from multiple disciplines. If at an agency, this collaborative approach can (and should) be introduced to your client(s), and the results should be shared with those on your team who are responsible for delivering success for your client. Or your team can offer to lead a workshop to help clients establish this collaborative approach.
• Be documented, with the understanding that as business goals, user needs, and technologies change, so too will the things that you or your clients measure and how you measure them. You’ll want to create a living document or repository of documents to track and update success measures as the practice matures.
• Be shared, not just as a finished artifact that gets circulated among teammates, or delivered to a client, and then shelved or archived never to again see the light of day, but to ensure buy-in and support from other departmental partners, as well as leadership for agency clients and in-house teams alike.

Ultimately, while there is no one single best measure of success for the practice, the measures you choose to gauge practice success depend largely on a few factors:

• Agency-based or in-house practice: Measures that matter to an agency practice may not apply (or may be unimportant) to an in-house practice within an organization. By the same token, the measures you ultimately decide upon to test the overall success of your practice will determine what measures make sense for your situation.
• Overarching client or organizational goals: While you can count the construction of your practice as a measure of success, your work doesn’t end when the practice has been built. After the practice is standing and operational, project or client work will likely begin to increase in frequency and intensity as the word gets out that the practice is up and running. That means the success of the practice will be measured by meeting the goals that have been set by your client or dictated by the requirements of the project you’re working on.
• Quantifiable business goals: These goals track the success of your practice for things that can be counted, usually as an answer to the question “How many?” as in “How many clients have we successfully provided content strategy services to?” or “Of the five most important content strategy initiatives we’ve identified, how many projects have we successfully completed?” Keep in mind that an increase in the number of clients or projects is only a single factor among many to consider as you create and track success measures. You’ll also want to look at whether projects were completed on time and to the satisfaction of the client contract or product brief.
• Baseline number of clients or projects handled by the practice: You may be tempted to assume that this number will always be zero, but if you’ve applied content strategy how-to to even a portion of a client or in-house project, those efforts count toward the establishment of growth measures, and will show where you are currently as you map out where you want to go in the practice’s future state.

Renovations While Occupied

Chances are, if you work in content at an existing agency or organization, you’re likely working on building a practice while simultaneously taking on your first content strategy project. While
that might sound a bit like living in a house while an addition is being built, a.k.a. renovating while occupied, the truth is that in most cases, you simply can’t avoid it. And that’s OK. It’s how you learn to build resiliency—and the strength and tenacity you create while doing so is how you’ll eventually succeed.

This book is going to guide you as you build the structure where content strategy can happen—a solid container where the work can be done with minimal disruption. You’ll learn the best ways to augment that structure so that the practice can function under different loads, whether at an agency with several clients, or within a medium organization or large enterprise.

You’re also building a practice that invites stakeholders and teammates to co-work with you, both as trusted advisors and SMEs, and when it’s time to hand off to another discipline in the product development process.

Establishing structure or building a practice gets buy-in at the earliest stages. If you decide to scale from a practice of one to a practice of many, you’ll find that having that buy-in from stakeholders and teammates will make it easier to garner support from leadership as the practice grows.

Notes from the Field: Tips for Building a Content Team

Andy Welfle, co-author, Writing Is Designing, Head of Content Design, Adobe

Andy Welfle knows a thing or two about building a UX content strategy practice from the ground up, having grown a team at Adobe from a solo operation to a team of ten, all without the benefit of a blueprint or guide. “I probably could have ramped up a lot faster if I had a book that talked about some of the common scenarios and things to look for.”

Welfle had given little thought to organizational structure before joining Adobe. “I wasn’t prepared for the open-endedness and ambiguity of everything.” He soon figured out that work structure matters. “Who you report to and who your boss reports to sets you up for success—or failure.”

Among the many books that have been written about organizational structure, Welfle wished there was one for content teams—especially teams that sit within a larger design org—and one that addresses typical organization structures and their strengths and weaknesses. “I was really lucky that I had a boss who let me figure things out and empowered me to say no to certain things.”

Welfle was the lone content strategist among some 200 designers and 30 researchers. So knowing when to say no—and that it was OK to do so—was of particular importance to his personal well-being. Trying to be everything to everyone simply wasn’t sustainable. “I definitely burnt myself out.”

His boss suggested finding a product team to embed in and told Welfle that he wasn’t expected to help everyone. “But I would get Slack messages from everyone looking for help. And I didn’t want to say no. I wanted to show my value far and wide.”

Getting product stakeholders to understand what he did and how his work added value took some work. “I tried, through a lot of trial and error, to get them to understand what I did and show my value as a content strategist. Some of it was hands-on explaining ‘I’m going to help you through some of these content problems.’ And some of it was just presenting a slide deck.”

The need for establishing boundaries—and defining what kind of services were provided within those boundaries—became clear as the team grew. “Pretty early on we started doing office hours. It was really useful, not in solving actual problems, but for understanding the bigger problem space, to see trends and problems across products, and for building relationships. If I gave the perception of being accessible, people were a lot friendlier and willing to talk about that stuff. It worked out really well for me.”

Welfle has spoken about his practice-building experience at conferences and meetups and has developed a list of six tips for growing a content team (see Figure 1.2). They’re complementary to the practice blueprint outlined in this chapter, and they’ll be useful to you as you’re making the business case for building your content strategy practice.

Figure 1.2

Andy Welfle’s six tips for growing a content team are a useful addition to your toolbox and will be quite valuable as you are making the business case for building your content strategy practice.

Notes from the Job Site: A Practice in Need of a Plan

I’ve been herding digital content for nearly two decades, and even now, I’m still surprised at how many content strategists I’ve spoken with who can relate to starting out as the lone “content person” at some time in their career, evolving from solo web copywriters to growing or being a part of a team of content strategists.

Still, as this book started to come together, I wondered if my experience was more of an edge case. I mean, I knew how to make sense of smaller companies and agencies that lacked the resources to invest in building a content strategy practice. I could see how some didn’t understand how establishing such a practice would level up their content creation and curation game—or that of their clients—while enhancing their organizations’ user experience offerings.

And even though more and more books about the importance of the work and how to do it were being published with increasing frequency (in answer to an increasing industry demand), when it came time to stand up a practice—a figurative structure where the work gets done—there weren’t many resources.

For example, when I first joined the agency where I stood up my first practice, I had to learn the hard way how to introduce the work to the staff UX lead. In my desire to do a good job, I inadvertently stepped on toes, and had to figure out, through trials and many, many errors, how to introduce content strategy—and by extension, the content strategy practice we’d eventually build together—to my cross- functional teammates.

I also had to learn how to articulate the value of the practice with everyone from designers to developers, to project managers and product owners, in a way that broke down potential barriers and built strong partnerships that helped the practice grow and thrive as an integral part of the agency’s user experience capabilities.

But just because I was eventually able to get most of my colleagues on board, the work of building the practice was far from done. Like a builder with approved plans, I still had to figure out what materials I’d need to complete the practice-building process. I needed the frameworks and tools to create a firm foundation for building the practice, as well as success measures that I could point to as indicators of bringing value to the agency and its clients.

It wasn’t until I moved to a larger organization with a similar practice- building goal that I began to document what worked (and what didn’t) and to figure out if it could be scaled to fit a larger organization.

This book is the blueprint I wish I had access to years ago.

Persistent Principles to Remember Along the Journey

Wherever you are in your practice-building journey, you’ll find it helpful to remember these principles along the way:

• You will always be called on to educate (or re-educate) clients, stakeholders, and team members about the value that the practice brings to your digital experience capabilities.
• You should always keep goals and success measures in mind as the scope of your projects—and the potential impact of the practice—evolves and changes.
• You’ll find peace in knowing that you are not alone. There is a vibrant community of authors and experienced practitioners who have years of experience and lots and lots of stories to share.

The Punch List

There’s a lot of information here for you to process, and there’s even more actionable information to follow. For now, grasping these takeaways will prepare you for expanding your practice-building knowledge and skills, and set you up for success as you make your way through subsequent chapters:

• There are only five components to the Content Strategy Practice Blueprint. All five steps are integral to building a practice that can withstand stressors like tension and compression from outside of your practice structure. The order of the components (and the steps and guidelines within them) are important, too, but the main takeaway here is, even if you have to change the order of things, don’t skip a component.
• The work of content strategy isn’t “one and done,” nor is the construction of the practice where that work happens. Just as a newly constructed building needs maintenance and repair to prevent structure failure, your practice will need similar attention to prevent its failure, too. Collaborating with cross-functional teammates, product owners and managers, and stakeholders to get buy-in and gain alignment will help you build resiliency and resistance to structure failure.
• Remember the persistent principles: Always educate, always highlight the practice goals, and always, always remember you are not alone. Your practice will always be stress tested, because things will get tough, no matter how hard you work to maintain your practice structure.

As an author and fellow practitioner, I’ve got you. And as a member of a generous community of passionate content strategy practitioners, we’ve got you. And you—yes you in the hard hat holding the blueprint and wondering what to do next—you’ve got this, too. Now let’s learn the tools and tactics you’re going to need to lay a strong foundation for your practice.

Back to From Solo to Scaled

Conferences

Sample Chapter: Writing Is Designing

This is a sample chapter from Michael J. Metts and Andy Welfle’s book Writing Is Designing: Words and the User Experience. 2020, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1: More Than Button Labels: How Words Shape Experiences

Two people stand in a conference room looking at printouts of mobile app screens. The office used to be a warehouse, but it’s been renovated and turned into offices. The printouts are taped to the glass partition that separates their conference room from the hall, because tape doesn’t work on exposed brick. It’s a perfect stock photo opportunity.

“What does that button do?” asks one.

“It saves the user’s data,” says the other. “That’s why it says ‘Save.’”

“Does it save all their data, or just what we’re looking at right here?”

“Oh. Just what we’re looking at here.”

“How will users know that? Should we tell them?”

Conversations like this happen all the time and in all kinds of places—not just repurposed warehouses. Teams who create software spend a lot of time talking about how people will use it.

That’s where the word “user” comes from. People use buttons to take action, navigation to find where they need to go, or the dialog in a voice interface to figure out what their options are.

They also use words. Words help them figure out what that button will do, where that navigation will take them, or what that voice dialog means.

Start by Designing

How should those words be written? Most people have this question in their minds, but it’s a tough place to start. Before you start writing, think about designing the experience you want your users to have. Here’s how we think about these two activities:

• Writing is about fitting words together.
• Designing is about solving problems for your users.

To find the right words, writing and design need to team up in your brain and work together.

Think about the two people talking about the Save button in their mobile app at the beginning of the chapter. How should they know what to write?

• A writing mindset asks: How many words will fit here? How should I describe this action? What terms are we using elsewhere?
• A design mindset asks: What terms are our users familiar with? What happens next? What problem are we really trying to solve?

You can’t have one without the other—and you need them both.

If the people you’re working with don’t understand that writing is designing, they’ll be surprised when you suggest that changing how the experience works is the best way to improve it. Some problems can’t be solved by writing, and learning to recognize when that situation occurs is just as important as learning to write a good button label.

Designing with words requires a broad range of skills, including many that don’t involve arranging letters into sentences. Framing your work this way will make you more effective.

In our own work, we aim to design experiences that are usable, useful, and responsible. How does that apply to the words you write? Here are some questions you can ask yourself.

• Usable: Do the words help people use the interface? Are they clear? Do they help people accomplish what they set out to do? Are they accessible to all audiences?
• Useful: Do the words represent something people want to do? Do they give people control over the interface, product, or service? Does the experience add value to the user’s life?
• Responsible: Could the words you’re writing be misused? Are they true? Are they kind? Are they inclusive? Do they subvert language that people trust and understand to gain a business advantage?

To do this, you’ll need to understand the product you’re working on, along with the vision, constraints, interactions, visuals, and code behind it. You’ll need to spend time facilitating important conversations, conducting research, and aligning on a strategy.

Before you start writing, start designing.

Usable Words

When a product is usable, it means that people can use it without coaching or help. You can find out if your software is usable through usability testing: giving users key tasks and then observing them to see if they’re able to do what your product is designed to do easily.

But writing usable words goes deeper than that. For example, one of the best practices most people seem to know about interface writing is that you should not tell people to “click here.” This advice is easy to remember, but the underlying concept is what’s important. For example, it’s easier for people to use a link rather than words when the link describes where the user will go. See Figure 1.1 for an example of how a link can make text more usable and clear. On the left, the words at the bottom of the list of tutorials tell the user to search for more and how to get to the search experience. The words at the bottom of the list on the right actually take the user to search. The words on the right are shorter and much more usable.

For the visually impaired people who use screen readers to narrate the words on a screen to them, this feature especially helps with usability.

Figure 1.1
This before (left) and after (right) shot of an Adobe Creative Cloud mobile app search page shows some text at the end of a list of tutorials, prompting the user to use the search tool if their desired tutorial wasn’t on that list.

Experts in the field of accessibility provide guidelines and best practices to support screen readers and more, but for the person using a screen reader on the “click here” link, what’s the difference between accessibility and usability?

Sarah Richards, author of Content Design, gave a talk called Accessibility is usability in 2019. She made the case that if the words you write for something aren’t accessible to everyone, then you’ve made a design choice that prevents people from using that thing.

In her book, Richards pointed out that you can make writing more accessible and usable through plain language that people with a variety of reading levels can understand. This practice helps cognitively disabled users, those who have recently learned the language you’re writing in, and even people who are stressed.

“It’s not dumbing down,” Richards said. “It’s opening up.”

Design experiences that are accessible to everyone include different literacy levels, cultural backgrounds, and disabilities. Usable writing works for all your users, no matter who they are.

Useful Words

For your words to be useful, you need to understand and honor the intent of your users. If you don’t respect them, how can you expect them to keep giving you their time, money, and attention? Giving users control and prioritizing their needs is what makes writing useful.

Figure 1.2 shows checkboxes that appear as the user tries to pay for and reserve a hotel room. The first checkbox is required to complete the purchase. It requires that you sign up for the loyalty program, agree to the terms and conditions, sign up for marketing emails, and agree to the privacy clause all in a single checkbox. It also demands that users abandon their checkout flow to unsubscribe from email marketing.

The second checkbox frames opting out of emails as a negative option, so you may leave it unchecked because its logic is reversed from the first checkbox, which could lead some users to sign up for emails accidentally.

Figure 1.2
The tactics Melia uses here to gain loyalty program members and email subscribers aren’t a useful part of this room reservation system.

The team responsible for that reservation system didn’t make creating a useful experience their priority. They used writing and design to force people into the loyalty program and email lists.

By contrast, the Pinterest Terms of Service show what happens when a team is able to build a vision for useful writing across a team that included designers, developers, and lawyers.

Figure 1.3 shows a portion of their Terms of Service, which includes a summary of each section in simple terms, to help users understand what they’re agreeing to.

Figure 1.3
Pinterest’s terms of service uses words to design an experience that’s far more useful than most of the legal agreements users are forced into.

Useful writing focuses on what people want from your product or service and asks how you can balance that with business goals, rather than focusing purely on what the business can get out of it.

Responsible Words

Words should be used for good. As a writer and as a designer, you’re responsible for what you put into the world and your words have power. To write responsibly, you have to consider a wide variety of scenarios.

Irresponsible writing weaponizes language to cause harm to your users. One popular example is the practice of “confirm-shaming.” This situation occurs when an interface asks the user for something and then forces them to say something negative about themselves to decline. In Figure 1.4, a news app call theSkimm forces users to say they prefer to be miserable in the morning (see the last line) to close a form that asks for their email address. (Have you noticed how companies really desperately want email addresses?)

Figure 1.4
No one prefers to be miserable in the morning, but theSkimm forces people to say they do. This example was found on confirmshaming.tumblr.com, which collects examples of this.

But it goes deeper than not being a jerk. Often, words can cause harm in less obvious ways.

Figure 1.5 shows a LinkedIn conversation between two people. The first person is offering help to someone who was recently laid off. The second person responds with gratitude and says they’re going to take some time to process what happened.

LinkedIn’s algorithm suggested that the first person respond with a pre-built message like “Great!” or “Sounds good!” (Figure 1.5), which wouldn’t have been appropriate. This feature is likely designed to help people save time, but in this case there’s something far more important at stake than saving 30 seconds on typing a message. An accidental tap could have made this interaction hurtful and insensitive.

Figure 1.5
“Good luck!” is remarkably insensitive when someone has recently lost their job. “Congratulations!” doesn’t make sense at all.

These pre-built messages probably aren’t being used the way the writer intended, but that doesn’t let them off the hook. As a writer, it’s your responsibility to consider not just how your writing will be used, but also how it could be misused, whether it’s by an algorithm, others in your company, or malicious people outside it.

How Words Build Experiences

What does it mean to design something by writing? It means that your words are building someone’s experience.

Here’s an example that has nothing to do with writing or software: Think about leaving your house to buy some apples from the grocery store. If you’re physically able to walk, and the store isn’t too far away, and your neighborhood was designed to include a sidewalk, it’s easy to take a stroll to get your produce.

But what if you live in a suburban area, with few sidewalks? These neighborhoods are often designed to include sidewalks in a subdivision, but not along the road. So going outside the subdivision involves a choice between walking in the ditch or walking in the same area as cars that are driving at a high speed. In this case, most people choose to drive to pick up their groceries.

What if you can’t walk? If you get around in a wheelchair but the intersections in your neighborhood weren’t designed for wheelchair access by including curb cuts, you may have to drive or rely on others to run your errands (see Figure 1.6).

Figure 1.6
A curb cut is designed to enable wheelchair users to move easily from the street level to a sidewalk. It also typically includes tactile paving that helps visually impaired pedestrians know when they are about to enter or exit a street.

All of these combinations of roads and sidewalks have been designed, but who designed them? Who is responsible for being so accommodating to cars or choosing not to accommodate wheelchairs? Was it the person who drew up the plans for the roads? The government that approved their construction? The developers of the subdivision? The estimator at the construction company? The workers who built them? The answer is that all those people had a hand in designing them. When you make decisions that affect the experience someone else has, you’re designing.

Nicole Fenton, co-author of Nicely Said, describes her work this way in her article Words as Material:

I work on digital products and physical goods, so I’m deeply involved in the design process. But I also want to call out early that my process is the design process. I don’t write fiction or short stories; I use language to solve problems—whether that’s behind the scenes or in the product itself. I use words as material.

Words build digital experiences, and this book is all about creating good experiences for the people who use software on their computers, phones, watches, and other devices. More and more often, people use that software for personal, everyday tasks: paying bills, sending emails, or requesting a rideshare like Uber or Lyft. You’re designing the interfaces that let them do that.

You can’t create these experiences without words, and every word included in those experiences shares the user’s understanding, feeling, and outcome. That’s why this kind of writing is design.

The Words Are Everywhere

Right now, pull out your phone and open up one of your favorite apps. Take a moment to tap through it and take note of all the words you see.

That app you use every day relies on words. Yet, as you can see in Figures 1.7 and 1.8, if you take away the words, how much interface is left?

Figure 1.7
Screens from the DoorDash mobile app with words.

Figure 1.8
Screens from the DoorDash mobile app without words. Designer Mig Reyes did this to popular websites in a 2015 blog post, illustrating how much interfaces depend on writing.

Think, for a moment, about that food delivery app—the one that would cease to function without words.
There are countless companies that will deliver food to where you live. These companies accomplish this through software products that have to be designed, developed, and then used by customers.

The people who use these products call them “apps,” and that almost makes it sound like someone’s weekend project, but this is serious business. Grubhub, for example—one of the biggest food delivery companies in the U.S.—pulled in over a billion dollars of revenue in 2018. Figures 1.9, 1.10, and 1.11 show a few of the different ways a product like this is used.

Figure 1.9
Customers often order from a mobile app (exactly which app depends on their operating system), but could also use their internet-connected watch, voice-activated assistant, smart TV, or anything with a web browser.

Figure 1.10
Restaurants receive orders through a different app (usually running on a tablet or laptop next to the cashier), and the people who deliver the orders use the mobile version of the restaurant app to see customer addresses and update the delivery status.

Figure 1.11
Offices may offer group ordering for their employees, so admins need a place to choose the restaurants, employees need a place to order before the cut-off, and the accounting team needs a place to view the records so they can audit payroll deductions.

It’s a complex ecosystem of software, business, and people working together to get that cheeseburger to your door quickly and easily. There’s a lot to write, too. Here are some of the components in a food ordering app that rely on words:

• App store listings (for each app store)
• Release notes for new versions
• Onboarding information (orientation instructions for new users)
• Login screens and forms
• Account recovery mechanisms
• Account areas and settings
• Payment screens
• Button labels and interface elements
• SMS notifications
• Push notifications
• Email notifications
• Confirmation emails
• Account recovery emails
• Email validation emails (emails about emails)
• Re-engagement emails
• Help content
• Terms and conditions
• Privacy policy
• Contact forms
• Contact form confirmation screens and emails

That’s not even an exhaustive list—each company handles it differently. The words that appear in these areas are part of the experience of ordering food now, and someone has to write them.

The Need for Writing

It’s not just about the apps on your phone, either. Any web app or website has interactive elements driven by words.
Every button has a label. Every form has error states. Every sign-up process has instructions. The words are everywhere, and it’s a mistake to treat them as an afterthought—something that can be filled in later.

In fact, when it comes to certain types of interfaces, words are all there is. For natural language technologies like smart speakers and chatbots, there are rarely—if ever—visual elements involved in the design process (see Figure 1.12).

Figure 1.12
You don’t need any fancy prototyping software to create a design for this thing—just a text editor.

Teams in this situation rarely need someone with design experience in the traditional sense. They need writers with design experience.

Writing the words in an interface first, before any kind of visual design, helps a team understand what they’re working on and gives them something to respond to.

Writers won’t be replacing visual designers anytime soon (or even at all), but on teams where the writer and designer are two different roles, both should be aware that they’re serving the same users and working toward the same goals. It’s not a question of one or the other. One doesn’t come earlier or later. It’s a collaboration that creates the user experience.

Katie Lower is very familiar with this type of collaboration. She has been working with words on various digital design teams for more than 15 years, and she’s found it empowering when her employers recognize her work as design. “I think it gives you confidence—you just show up differently,” she said. “I felt like if someone was calling me a designer, it leveled the playing field for me.”

Lower didn’t set out to design things, but she wanted to make a bigger impact on the product she was working on and the team she was working with. On a project early in her career, a usability specialist shared research findings with her that dictated what words customers were looking for at a certain point in the experience. She became curious about not just what she was supposed to write, but why she was writing it in the first place.

“I know we have these different specialties in design, but that experience, it all felt too chopped up and disconnected. The bigger picture got lost,” she said. “It made me feel like there was something more to this work than being directed and told ‘We need words in this space, put words in this space.'”

She pursued a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science, which gave her an understanding of information architecture—the importance of content structure and how systems retrieve information—all of which are relevant to digital design.

“I wanted to be more than just the writer, and decided at that point in my life another degree was one way to get on that path,” she said. “For me, it was a way to gain some experience and confidence.”

Because Lower was focused on writing, the biggest challenge she faced was being brought into a project too late to have an impact. She would often ask questions to understand the decisions that had been made, and sought out teams that would welcome those questions as part of design.

“I feel like I always need the full context of what I’m solving for, so it’s best for my work when I’m able to be in environments where I can get it,” she said. “If you’re joining a project at the very end and there’s low tolerance for questions, it’s a sign your role as writer hasn’t been well positioned or isn’t well understood.”

Don’t Apologize for Yourself

True story: A group of UX team members sat around a table, getting ready to participate in a design-thinking workshop. It’s the kind of session where the team generates ideas for how to improve a user’s experience with a product.

All but one person in this room had the word “designer” in their job title at some point: the person who didn’t have the title was a writer.

The group opened with an exercise where they were each supposed to create a rough sketch of a solution that would improve a piece of software. One by one, each person presented their idea and explained how it would help the user.

When the group got to the writer, he began with an apology. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not a designer, but here’s my idea.”

It’s a small thing, but it’s important. This person clearly felt self-conscious, even though he was hired to be on a UX team at a large company. He was in this meeting because his ideas were good. In fact, his design sketches were just as good as everyone else’s, but at some point in his career, someone made him feel like his identity as a writer made his skills inferior to his teammates.

The point isn’t that you should immediately start conversations with your manager about changing your job title or that you should insist on people referring to you as a designer. Job titles are fluid, and most often, they depend on internal company politics.

The “writer” is whoever is doing the writing. The writer could be someone who specializes in the craft: a UX writer, content strategist, content designer, or one of many other variants. The writer could also be someone who works primarily in another discipline: a designer, developer, product manager, or a UX researcher.

Titles don’t matter when you’re trying to do the writing. What matters is that your team delivers words that meet the needs of your users throughout their experience. Writing is part of delivery. To create good software, you need words in it.

Some of the work of a writer involves giving other people guidelines or coaching so they can do their own writing. That’s important work, but it still requires that you think through the problem from the perspective of a writer who is designing the experience—someone who is using words to give meaning to each user’s experience.

Describing writing as design isn’t a power play. It’s a reality of any UX writer’s day-to-day work and an important way to approach your job. Like any other designer, you should be doing a lot more than writing. The best way to spend your time may be by researching user needs, prototyping solutions, testing your ideas, creating a strategy, or building rationale for your decisions. You might even be leading the product team and driving alignment around the direction of the product development.

Treating writing this way is new for a lot of people (and maybe you’re one of those people). That’s okay. It just means that your first task is to embrace your identity as a designer and help your team see it as well. Explaining your work and why it’s important isn’t an exercise in navel gazing or stroking your own ego. It’s part of helping everyone involved understand how words fit into the experience you’re creating.

Build Better Places

As you design with words, you’re creating digital places where people spend their time. It’s a big responsibility. One person who has spent a great deal of time thinking about, working with, and writing about using language this way is Jorge Arango. He’s an information architect and the author of two books on the subject.

Arango believes that one way to learn how to use words more effectively is to learn another language. “The reason I advise that is that it forces upon you, at a very deep level, an understanding that language is contingent on historical factors we take for granted,” he said. “Language is so important to us, and we acquire it so early on, that we can lose sight of the fact that it is a construct, and one that is evolving.”

However, Arango believes that writers have valuable skills to offer the technology industry—especially when it comes to creating names and labels for digital products. “I suspect that most people come to these decisions with vocabularies that are not as broad as the job demands,” he said.

As an example, Arango described how something like a News Feed (used by Facebook and others) brings certain user expectations. “News is the feedback mechanism of our society; we vote based on the things we learn in the news,” he said. “When we take a concept like that and we subvert it for commercial use, that’s something that should give you pause.”
This is the greatest responsibility you have when you use writing to design experiences. You’re not simply coming up with labels for buttons and navigation—you’re changing how your users think.

“Persuasion is a powerful thing,” he said. “If you are the person who controls the form of the environment by defining its boundaries through language, the persuasion will happen without me even knowing it’s happening.”

Writing the user experience may be difficult at times. It’s a skill that’s often underestimated and undervalued. However, it’s exactly what the world needs.

Finding What’s Right for You

Just like a designer designs the user experience, writers write it. There are many ideas in this book that will help you do the work, but it’s even more important that they help you think about the work. Your needs are unique, so don’t try to find one right way to do things. There isn’t one.

Instead, find what’s right for your users and your team. Adapt these ideas to your own work, and then expand on them and develop them. That’s how you go from writing to designing.

back to Writing Is Designing

Sample Chapter: Changemakers

This is a sample chapter from Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland’s book Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World. 2023, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1

The Imperfect Future

When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, the concept of progress was almost universally popular. Few people protested the arrival of new vaccines, faster food, advanced appliances, or more powerful cars. The envisioned future had its own neighborhood in Disneyland and popular television shows imagined even more transformations on the horizon.

In this context, “change” was synonymous with “improved.” New companies were created to commercialize inventions, while older companies focused on what could be enhanced, remodeled, or extended. Ambitious graduates sought emerging fields like computer science and genetic engineering as sure paths to prosperity, and young children pretended to live in a world with flying cars and robot dogs. Underlying all this was a promise—inferred but nonetheless clear: change, and those who led it, would deliver a positive trajectory of technical, social, and organizational advancements that consistently produced benefits and left all longing for more.

Nobody is living on the moon right now, but some of the envisioned advancements arrived as promised. The 21st century started with flip phones, cable TV, and encyclopedias on CD. In barely 20 years, phones morphed into supercomputers with immediate access to near infinite knowledge. Billions of people rose up from extreme poverty, and medical advances improved life on every continent. World leaders communicate on Twitter for anyone to follow and women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks finally have a modicum of power.

This is progress by any definition, and much of it was on display in that long-ago Disney exhibit, but its trajectory has not been smooth, and its benefits are countered by unanticipated outcomes. Tech behemoths barely out of their adolescence connect the world beyond physical barriers, but also distribute a daily tsunami of misinformation and lies. People worry that their phones track them, their smart homes spy on them, and their personal data is being sold to the highest bidders. Employers are likely to reorganize every other year, and employee skill sets need constant upgrading because a replacement can come from anywhere at any time for almost any reason and may not even be human.

Change now happens so pervasively, so exponentially fast, and with such erratic impact that it is as likely to cause stress as it is to bring delight. Ask a cross section of people how they feel about change and you’re unlikely to hear the uniform support it once enjoyed. Instead, from those who lead change, you’ll hear that’s it’s inspiring and frustrating, stressful and satisfying. From those being changed, you’ll hear that it’s needed and threatening, beneficial and frightening. Unquestioning support has disappeared, along with the assumption of a positive trajectory.

But change is needed—perhaps even more and faster. It’s needed for existential problems like managing climate change and morally important issues like administering social justice. Organizations need change in order to stay relevant and competitive. Institutions and communities need change to help shift them to new priorities and to embrace new tools. Governments need change to help them meet a range of challenges from economic security to environmental sustainability and more. Change is needed at all levels and in many diverse circumstances. It just needs to happen in a way that creates more benefits than damage.

What’s in the Way?

The 1960’s vision of progress as a smooth flow of relentlessly positive innovation was certainly a fairytale. It focused too keenly on optimistic outcomes and ignored challenging realities. But it is worth asking why change that’s imagined and desired by so many people rarely happens as envisioned. Why do innovations disrupt and distort social norms instead of fitting seamlessly into everyone’s lives? Why are business, community, and political leaders blind to obstacles that result in unintended consequences? Why are high-level goals like peace, inclusivity, and an enhanced experience of life considered out of reach?

What’s in the Way?

These are deep and difficult questions to answer. Somewhere a grad student is developing robust arguments and reams of evidence supporting a well-rounded theory of how progress inevitably descends into chaos. That analysis will be enlightening, but in the meantime three obvious suspects stand out: a fragmented world, intractable problems, and outdated approaches to making change.

A Fragmented World

When significant cultural or technological transitions take place they often produce messy, conflict-ridden divides. Consequential advancements, like the advent of printing, electricity, or computerization, deliver significant benefits but also cause disorder and resistance as they impact people’s lives. Some people learn of and adapt to a change early while others remain unaware of what’s happening or actively resist adapting. As a result, the world fractures into different segments where some people have advantages that others don’t have, and some fear problems that others don’t see.

It’s hard to imagine an era more fragmented than this one. News, books, and media have splintered into a mosaic of perspectives that all reflect a different version of truth. A constrained set of respected thought leaders has been replaced by an army of influencers, and shared experiences are increasingly rare. At least five generations of adults compete for relevance and authority in organizational hierarchies, on moral issues, and through lifestyle choices. New definitions of gender vie for acceptance, and new recognitions of sexual preference confound traditional perceptions. On a more foundational level, some world cultures are living in the 21st century, while others are barely out of the 10th. In some countries, women are regarded as equals; in others, they are equated with pets. On some roads, people drive Teslas; on others, they ride donkeys.

Fragmentation inevitably leads to tribal inclinations urging people who think or act similarly to band together and try to ignore those who are different from them. Forming a tribe or sect may calm tensions, but it creates an almost impermeable barrier to problem solving and progress because it’s impossible to gain consensus. The chasm between world views is too wide to cross.

Intractable Problems

This increasingly fragmented world is also awash in problems that resist straight-forward resolution. They are suitably labeled as “wicked,” “untamed,” or most recently “VUCA” (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.) Where the cause of a traditional problem can be isolated and analyzed, a complex problem is linked to multiple other systems, each of which contributes new inputs and intricacies. Often, the true source of a wicked problem is hidden or misunderstood, and cause and effect are extremely difficult to identify or model. A solution may require imaginative leaps and several iterations to get right.

Each era has its challenges, but as technology bleeds into every aspect of life and interconnects people, their thoughts, and their things, straightforward problems become multidimensional and increasingly daunting. Solutions need to address not only the stated problem, but also its context and potential ramifications. Often, the only course of action is a “best guess.”

Building suspension bridges and skyscrapers were feats of incredible engineering in their time, but the underlying rules of physics as they applied to construction were reasonably well-understood. Compare those instances to the current development of artificial intelligence, which is being implemented before it is fully understood, or climate change which is exceeding the extent of scientific knowledge. Similarly, conquering smallpox and decoding DNA required amazing ingenuity and perseverance, but the pioneers who led these pursuits could count on a relatively receptive population.

Compare those accomplishments and their public receptions with the more recent need to create a Covid vaccine. To experts around the world, the difficulty was scientific in nature: find a means of protecting humans from a deadly virus. They did it in record time, employing novel technology and admirable collaboration, but that didn’t turn out to be the full problem. Other problems branched out from the original. Some were predictable, such as how to reach people in remote areas or how to make the vaccine affordable to poorer countries. Some were not predictable, such as how to convince celebrities that the vaccine wouldn’t reduce male virility or that horse paste was not a viable alternative.

There are wicked problems galore right now in all countries, among all communities, and at all levels of organizations. Should nations pursue democracy, socialism, or authoritarianism? Should cryptocurrency become the foundation of all transactions? Should populations be compensated for past discrimination? Should the prices of life-saving drugs be subject to market forces? Should work be done remotely, in offices, or a hybrid of the two? Any solution to these problems will have upsides and downsides. Any solution will have people in favor and people opposed. Any solution will result in unanticipated consequences.

Outdated Approaches to Change

Contrary to what some people think, significant or systemic change doesn’t just happen. Minor change can occur quickly and relatively easily if a need is urgent enough or an opportunity rich enough. But more notable change requires extensive effort, substantial resources, and highly capable leadership. Traditionally, it follows a process or a specific approach endorsed by change management specialists who frame the way an organization defines and implements any desired transformation. Interestingly, these approaches tend to reflect the function or specialty that businesses value most at that time.

For example, when Disneyland showcased progress in the 1960s, the approach to change endorsed by most executives mirrored a mid-century emphasis on manufacturing: change was carefully planned and precisely executed in an assembly line fashion. To modify anything meant to “freeze” the current state, make the revision, and then “unfreeze” it. Leaders were similar to military commanders. Whatever top executives decided, everyone else had to follow.

When companies shifted from manufacturing to service offerings in the 1980s, finance became the dominant function. Change was newly branded as “re-engineering,” and was sought as a way to improve capital allocation and increase per-share value. Leaders were strategic visionaries. Top executives still made most decisions, but employees wanted to follow them so as to not get left behind.

Corporate and social attitudes toward change management morphed again in the 1990s, as the Web spread beyond Silicon Valley. Echoing the attributes of startup culture, companies were birthed in garages, and products were created overnight. Change became innovation—a concept that promised to renovate tired companies into transformative juggernauts capable of keeping up with the dizzying pace of technological growth and global competition. Leaders were inventive renegades who moved fast and broke things. Everyone else hoped they could be like them.

The process of making change evolves

Each of these different approaches to making change depended on the tools and mental models common to corporations and their dominant business function at the time. Each new proposal developed different philosophies and theories of how to help people adjust and how to ensure that the envisioned outcomes turned out as planned, and for a while each had some success. But notably, each approach began to lose its dominance and relevance as the times, the tools, and the techniques changed.

That’s happening now and it’s adding to the conflict and confusion. Most organizations and communities continue to push change in a siloed, top-down manner, ignoring the social, educational, and technological shifts that have made people more independent and less willing to blindly follow leaders. Outdated approaches to change remain rigid and rule-bound, despite technology that enables expansive connectivity and fluid communication. While popular culture and younger generations emphasize the importance of empathy and inclusion, these entities fail to consider how improvements for some might worsen situations for others. They rush experimentation, turning invention into a contest where the biggest and boldest initiative wins, regardless of what is lost in the race.

This misalignment between expectations and delivery leaves individuals struggling to understand their role and responsibility in making change. Empowered and overinformed by the web, cell phones, and social media, many people lack any training on how to use these gifts effectively. In an effort to contribute, they spread their thoughts like seeds, casting ideas and complaints broadly across networks, hoping to land on fertile soil. Others give up and retreat. They consign the future to forces beyond their control, crediting a deity, science, historical precedent, or random luck. With no role to play, their only responsibility is to warn or critique and hope for more favorable trends.

Startup culture is still popular, and innovation is still a potent buzzword, but the environment of change is rapidly evolving. Respect for authoritative, top-down approaches is losing favor to laterally connected, distributed collaborations. Wealthy tech gurus are still idolized, but so are humbler, values-driven leaders who spur collective action. Strategy documents are shrinking to the size of posters, and grand visions are being diminished by an explosion of experimentation. Little improvement is possible if leaders and the teams that support them continue to promote change haphazardly and impulsively as though everything is a startup. Nor is there any benefit attained when people assume they have no power to alter course and resign themselves to whatever happens. In a fragmented world struggling with complex challenges, the current approaches to making change have largely stopped working.

What’s Next?

The transitional era fragmenting the world has only begun. People everywhere are still digesting the impacts of the internet, and it’s about to be served up artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and a whole new version of the web. Climate change, the needs of emerging populations, global conflicts, and the god-like powers of gene-editing will provide a steady stream of new complexities. These conditions are impossible to ignore or to modify, but how change is implemented is a choice and there’s some early evidence of how it might be evolving.

Chef Jose? Andre?s noted the patterns of poor disaster relief response amid an abundance of underutilized food resources. He tried working within existing hierarchical structures, but quickly realized that the problems were often due to the regulations and bureaucracies that enforced them. As an alternative, he founded World Central Kitchen, and led an ad hoc community of chefs and food providers to rapidly focus resources exactly where needed without hierarchies, strategic plans, or ROI concerns. He continues to iterate, learning from failures or flaws.

Black Lives Matter united a like-minded, but highly diverse population of activists, with no headquarters, no central planning, and no official leader. Noting that nothing had changed despite decades of promises, they identified the problem of invisibility and found ways to gain attention. Using social media, they united powerful coalitions of people who shared the same experiences and frustrations—not only blacks, but all ethnicities. This collective action has prompted more change in response to systemic racism than traditional organizations pursuing that identical goal for over a hundred years.

Web3 is being developed by a devoted crowd of engineers and community leaders working together to shape the future of the internet. Ridiculed by some as naive and delusional, they are steadily building the Web3—a distributed, iterative assemblage of networks with the potential to disrupt and reorder nearly everything. The loose collection of believers building this space have noted the growing desire for transparency, distributed ownership, and authentication. They share an appreciation for the problems that technology has created and seek to address them. They work collaboratively in different roles and with different approaches, iterating as they go. The ecosystem they are building is nascent, but its potential has attracted some of the brightest minds of this generation and earned massive venture investment.

None of these organizations are perfect in the expression of their vision or execution, but each is making change in a new and significant way that’s worth unpacking. Each of these examples hint at a new approach to organizational or community change that suits the time and fits the evolutionary trajectory of corporate change management. These are approaches that don’t slow change down but ensure a higher quality outcome. They leverage newly connected communities and help people channel their passion and ability. These approaches pursue methodologies that encourage a deeper appreciation of people and their perspectives. They embrace processes that pay attention to potential downsides and consciously avoid disastrous outcomes. They offer an improved approach to change that uses the tools and technology needed to build an inclusive future that works for more than just those in charge.

These real-time instances of how to make change in today’s world is further bolstered by early insights from Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka, an organization that helped define the social entrepreneur movement. His thoughts captured the value of these recent examples and spurred our thinking about what this new approach to change might demand in terms of leadership and process. Drayton described modern changemakers as those who would no longer treat problems as if they were fixed in time, but rather seek solutions suitable to evolving and complex circumstances. In 2006, he defined this new breed of change leaders as:

People who can see the patterns around them, identify the problems in any situation, figure out ways to solve the problem, organize fluid teams, lead collective action, and then continually adapt as situations change.

This insight is a compelling description of people capable of building a more desirable future amid an increasingly complex and irrational world. It is also a very accurate description of how good design leaders think and behave, whether they are changing a graphic, a platform, or an institution.

Designing Change

“Design” is an ambitiously flexible word. It can mean a dozen different things as a noun, another dozen as a verb, and for good measure, it can also be an adverb. It refers to both a process and its end result. To design can include doing, making, having, seeing, or formulating. A design can be a thing, a place, an interface, or an experience. It can be done by businesses, households, schoolchildren, even nature.

In this context, where it is central to change, it means to develop or bring about the existence of a future state or condition in collaboration with those affected by it.

This is a mindset and capability increasingly adopted by large organizations seeking to survive and thrive in a rapidly evolving world. While manufacturing, finance, and innovative zeal still matter to organizations, the function currently taking center stage is design. Apple, the world’s most valuable company, began touting the value of design in the 1990s. For a while, it was the only technology firm courageous enough to bet its business on this claim. But when cell phones, social media, and the cloud began connecting everyone, the world’s attention shifted from a singular focus on technology to one that included the user’s experience of technology. It was not enough for phones and apps to work; they also had to be desirable and intuitive. That required design.

As digital connections wrapped the world, the corporate move to design-driven innovation gained urgency. IBM conveyed legitimacy by hiring thousands of designers as part of reorienting its business. Facebook and Google flooded their campuses with UX and UI designers. Nearly every large consulting firm bought a design firm to augment its offerings, and companies everywhere hired at least one designer—if only to say they were design-driven. This transition continues to benefit every design school graduate and many who have converted from other fields, and it shows no signs of slowing.

Elevating design from a job to a strategy shifts perspective. Problems become opportunities and customers or stakeholders become important contributors in the search for viable solutions. Experimentation, captured in renderings, comps, hypotheses, and trial balloons, mitigates risk. Iteration delivers refinement and failure offers guidance. Imagination rises to the same lofty height as analysis and intuition is no longer just guesswork. The strategic use of design respects the context, constraints, and requirements of business but marries them with the abstraction and openness of inventiveness. Most importantly, it recognizes that authoritative directives are more a hindrance than a help, and that the most innovative solutions arise from diverse collaborations, not singular dictates.

A Modern Mindset

Design provokes and responds to change. No one hires a design team with the goal of keeping everything the same. Designs enter the fray when a problem needs to be solved or something needs to be improved. Good designers become adept at identifying benefits in change. They can imagine a better way to communicate, a simpler means of creating engagement, or a different function that addresses a hidden problem. As a result, they are more comfortable with change as a continual flow in their life. Each new client, new tool, new material, or new perspective represents the possibility of positive change.

Design is famously useful in addressing issues that are ill-defined, unknown, or insanely complex. Perhaps because designers are trained to see every challenge as a problem that can be solved, they’ve developed tools, techniques, and processes that help them uncover insights, experiment and prototype, and deliver clear, valued results, regardless of the context. They push to look beyond what’s expected or what’s been done before, connecting to novel approaches and ideas.

In addition to embracing change and thriving on tough problems, design is collaborative. Few designers work alone. They have clients, customers, or colleagues. Depending on the assignment, they engage with engineers, authors, suppliers, coders, color experts, and more. While some designers may prefer to dominate collaborations, that’s a remnant of the past that is rapidly becoming the exception. Most are comfortable as contributors, taking the lead when their expertise is most relevant.

Lastly, but of equal importance, design is “human-focused,” meaning it is squarely focused on the behaviors, beliefs, and motivations of real people. Decades before neuroscience confirmed the importance of understanding people’s mental and emotional states to connect and communicate better with them, designers were interviewing, surveying, and observing people in all aspects of their lives. They do this because a design only succeeds if people adopt it.

It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that design’s power and prowess can be extended from making products, services, and experiences to making change in an era struggling with fragmented perspectives and complex problems. Treating the future as a design space is a viable approach. Using the processes common to design is an appropriate choice. Employing the tools and techniques that designers value allows new perspectives and enables more creative solutions.

Designing the future doesn’t mean swapping out MBAs for MFAs or shifting from learning statistics to learning to draw. It means adopting a practical, beneficial framework that encourages and incorporates diverse input and creative output. It means embracing change as a constant and directing it toward a carefully considered purpose, weighted to benefit the people most impacted.

Why This Book?

As your authors and guides on this journey, we have a deep familiarity and respect for designers and their abilities. We each ran successful, independent design firms in Silicon Valley for 30 years starting in the 1990s. We led research, development, and execution of design projects for startups, nonprofits, community services, government agencies, academic institutions, and hundreds of large corporations. We regularly transitioned our practices, moving from graphic design to experience design, from press visits to zoom calls, from printed page to VR environments.

We led change relentlessly for our teams and our clients throughout every decade, always cognizant of its cost and doing our best to make sure that we weren’t leading others off a cliff. We made countless mistakes and learned a lifetime of lessons. We also benefited from others leading similar charges in different companies, many of whom shared their experience and wisdom with us as we created this book. We appreciate their generosity and note many of their observations and advice in the chapters ahead.

We no longer lead teams exploring what’s possible or building experiences on the latest technology platforms. Others have assumed those roles, and we actively support and coach them. Our role now is to share what we know, to pass forward what we gained in those 30 years of designing change, and hopefully to stimulate a new appreciation of what design can do.

Perhaps the Disney version of progress was naive, but its opposite is worse. To cling to the past and refuse to change is to invite atrophy and eventually fade from relevance. Smooth progress with no bumps along the way is unlikely, but none can afford to simply shrug their shoulders and accept a future that spins increasingly out of control. The future can’t be a perfect expression of a meticulously calibrated vision. There are too many unforeseeable variables for that type of optimism. But there’s a lot of middle ground between unmanageable chaos and godlike manifestation. It’s that middle space that seems attainable—a balance between the rigid funk of stagnation and the craziness of chaos.

For these reasons and others that we’ll explore in this book, we anticipate that the next approach to change will be design-driven, and its leaders—at all levels and in a wide range of circumstances—will be changemakers.

These changemakers will be people who can view the future of communities, companies, and even countries as a design problem: an opportunity space that can be clearly defined, intentionally studied, and reliably addressed. That’s the goal of this book—to describe the leaders and approaches appropriate for this time and its uniquely complex challenges, and to encourage those who can make change to act in the right way, in the right place, and with the right support.

Takeaways

The future needs help.

Fast-paced and chaotic change has divided the world. Partly this is due to the messiness and fragmentation common to transitional eras, the increasing complexity of problems and challenges, and outdated approaches to making change.

A new approach to change is emerging.

To progress in a more inclusive and less damaging way, the traditional approach of pushing change down from the top needs to be replaced by a process that doesn’t slow it down but ensures a higher quality outcome. An approach that is based on a deeper understanding of people and problems, which tries to anticipate and adapt to potential downsides and encourages cooperation and partnership.

Design—in its broadest definition—fits this need.
It provokes and responds to change, is famously useful in addressing issues that are ill-defined or insanely complex, and is almost always collaborative. It empowers human-focused solutions and is increasingly accepted as the preferred approach to innovation.

back to Changemakers

Sample Chapter: Deliberate Intervention

This is a sample chapter from Alexandra Schmidt’s book Deliberate Intervention: Using Policy and Design to Blunt the Harms of New Technology. 2022, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1

A View of the Future

A father in a suburban U.S. town returns home after dropping his children off at school and unfastens his seatbelt, just in time to receive a package delivered by a drone. He walks inside and checks his retirement account on his phone, using facial recognition to log in. In a large city a few hundred miles away, an undocumented immigrant walks into his job at a restaurant. He has his movements tracked through his smartphone, unbeknownst to him, so that the spread of a new viral infection can be traced by health experts. Overseas, a deployed member of the military checks her social media feed and sees political ads regarding an upcoming election. She puts her phone in her pocket and walks to a nearby barracks for training on a new piece of military targeting technology.

Invisibly, these individuals are experiencing a designed world of technologies, tools, and built environment. Policies have in some cases brought these tools into being—think of government-funded GPS and the internet. And then, once the private sector promotes uptake among the public, policies constrain and shape those designs to varying degrees. In some cases—like a seatbelt in a car—policies that inform the design are well formed. In others, like the online bank account and health tracking, they are just beginning to emerge and take shape. And in yet others, like AI used in military technologies, few policies exist at all. As a result, the impacts of these technologies are felt in both predictable and unpredictable ways. Society is shaped by the technologies as they emerge, and in turn, society responds and shapes them back.

The act of forming policy to drive outcomes “in the public interest” (which we’ll talk more about in Chapter 2, “Policy and Design Basics”) has never been a simple undertaking. Both policy and design work on shaping the future, and they do so in varied, overlapping, and sometimes unpredictable ways. This book doesn’t propose an elegant solution that will help the future come into being in a neatly planned-out fashion, which causes no harm to anyone. Rather, it offers a way for people working at the intersection of policy and design of new technology to think more clearly about these issues and understand their place in the puzzle better.

Increasing Speed and the “Pacing Problem”

Many thinkers and writers have detailed the increasing speed of technological progress. In the 1940s, economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote about the concept of “creative destruction,” which he posited underpinned all societal progress. Creative destruction is the process by which existing business models are disrupted by newcomers, which Schumpeter called “the essential fact about capitalism.”

Such business growth has an extra fast, exponential flavor in the digital age, as Douglas Rushkoff observed in his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. Venture capitalists buy companies not to own them, but to sell them at a steep profit. Because of that, there is a need by VC-backed companies to show quick disruption and exponential growth, rather than to build a slow and steady, sustainable company with a reliable customer base. That’s why thriving companies like Twitter, which produced over $1 billion in revenue in 2020, are considered a failure—they produce revenue rather than growth. “A more realistically financed company gets to grow whenever it’s appropriate,” Rushkoff stated. “You get to grow at the rate of increasing demand rather than the rate demanded by your debt structure.”

The speed of tech development is exacerbated by the development of technology itself. Gordon Moore, in what came to be known as Moore’s Law, theorized when describing the development of semiconductors that the computing world would dramatically increase in power and decrease at a relative cost, at an exponential pace. Building on that insight came writers like Ray Kurzweil and his “Law of Accelerating Returns,” which extrapolated Moore’s insight from computing power more widely to all technology. R. Buckminster Fuller, an American architect, designer, and philosopher, theorized in his book Critical Path that human knowledge was increasing at an exponential rate—it doubled every 100 years in 1900, he theorized, then doubled every 25 years by the end of World War II, and so on.

Pull it all together, and we have a tech world evolving at a rapid pace. This trend has led to what’s known as the “pacing problem,” where technology moves ever faster, but policymakers move at the same speed as they always have. Regulatory agencies typically collect facts over a long period of time and engage in trial-like processes that go through multiple levels of oversight before being codified. When the U.S. Department of Justice sought to break up Microsoft in the late 1990s, for example, the case dragged on into the 2000s. By then, competitors like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox had appeared, rendering the case all but moot. Our current model of top-down enforcement, thoughtful as it is, may not be ideal for the rapidly moving technological environment we find ourselves in.

A run-of-the-mill UX’er is thinking 6 months out. Product innovation teams are looking 2-3 years out, standards people are 5 years out, deep academic research is 10 years out, and policy probably looks 15 years out.
—Whitney Quesenbery, director and co-founder of the Center for Civic Design

Proactive and Reactive Policy

A key concept to start out with is proactive and reactive policy, which we will revisit over the course of this book. Proactive policy shapes the future ex ante, before it has transpired. A current example of this involves the bans on the use of facial recognition software, with the IRS pulling back on a facial recognition scheme for tax filing before it had been tried. Reactive policy is post hoc, in response to something that has already occurred. An example of this could be safety requirements for refrigerators, which were implemented in 1956 in response to children getting caught in the appliances! As we’ll see, most policy responses throughout history are reactive in nature. Indeed, facial recognition is widely used in the private sector, with proactive bans being far rarer.

The province of new designs is, typically and appropriately, that of the private sector. With their expertise in understanding customers and building things people want, marketing them and getting them used, it makes sense that private companies would work on creating “the new.” Entrepreneurs and private companies do not typically ask for permission in creating what they do (though there come points in the development of any company when laws come into play, some of which may even halt progress). And herein lies the messiness—stuff gets built out there in the world and, if and when something goes wrong, policymakers step in to “intervene.”

At this point, we must ask: “Who gets to decide which interventions are appropriate and when they should be attempted?” Consider the Winston Churchill saying: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for every other one.” The idea is that, even if policies are not perfect, if they are implemented by leaders whom people have elected democratically to foster shared values and serve their interests, policies will be about as good as they can get. (Of course, whether particular democracies, including the U.S., are healthy and well-functioning is up for debate.)

Every new thing brings with it indisputable problems. “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution,” according to cultural theorist Paul Virilio. There is no objective right or wrong about whether a new thing is or was good or bad, the thinking goes. Likewise, in some cases (particularly in the digital world), there is not always a clear answer as to what constitutes a “harm” of new technology, or what the right intervention should be to address it. Instead of coming up with the “right” answer, if we decide on these things together through transparent debate and a democratic system, we are more likely to achieve an outcome that the majority of us are happy with.

The Inscrutability of the Future and Reactive Policy

One of this book’s arguments is that we typically cannot know the impacts of new designs or technologies until those things have had some time “out there,” among people in the world, to make themselves known. History is littered with examples of worry about new things that later came to be assimilated and accepted as normal. For example, there was the fear that television and radio would lead to dangerous addiction, that photographs would lead to people collecting “fake friends,” and that roller-skating could lead to charges of impropriety. See this excerpt from The Chicago Tribune of 1885, defending the roller skate against charges of impropriety (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1
A newspaper clipping expressing fear of the roller skate’s negative side effects.
Twitter account Pessimists Archive @pessimistsarc

Writer Douglas Adams nicely sums up the worry about new things: “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Adams’ theory doesn’t mean that new technologies can’t have negative side effects—they can, and they do. Think of the misidentification of Black people by facial recognition software leading to false arrests, or the countless deaths as a result of automobiles. But the point is that, from our subjective individual perspectives, we can’t know which technologies will have mass uptake by the public, we can’t usually know for sure what their negative effects will be ahead of time, and we often can’t predict what the right policy interventions might be. There are too many unknown links in the chain of future events. This view means that policy tends to be “reactive” to the harms that we see emerging from technology.

The unimaginable is ordinary, [and] the way forward is almost never a straight line you can glance down but a convoluted path of surprises, gifts, and affliction you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.
—Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Notably, as policy attempts to shape the world, like design, it too produces unintended consequences. An example of an unintended consequence of well-meaning policy is cookie pop-ups (those notifications on websites asking you to “accept cookies”) brought forth by EU regulations including the ePrivacy Directive and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Because giving users control over their data has long been seen as the most ethical way of protecting privacy, it logically followed that every website should inform users of how their data would be used and seek their consent. Some years on, the pop-ups are widely panned as ruining the experience of the internet (see Figure 1.2). Future privacy legislation may seek to ban mass data collection outright, rather than put the onus on users for giving “consent”—thus removing the need for a pop-up at all. Just like design, policy is iterative as understanding evolves and unintended consequences make themselves known.

Figure 1.2
Cookie pop-ups have received broad criticism for “ruining” the experience of the internet, although they were intended to help protect user privacy.

Making Reactive Policy as Proactive as Possible

The future’s inscrutability does not mean we can’t be a bit wiser about it as it starts to come into focus—about bias and other harms. By bringing policy and design closer together, society can attempt to shape technology more thoughtfully, rather than (just) the other way around. While we often can’t know the impacts of technology until it’s had some time in the world, we can make reactive responses as proactive as possible. This book will run through proactive and reactive responses to harms of tech, both in the private and public sectors, as well as provide some ideas for how these can move closer together.

The funny thing is that the tech world is very much fixated on the future and attempts to “hack” it—it’s just that they’re not trying to hack harms, but rather hack product-market fit and figure out which products will have uptake by users. VC firms run hundreds of “anthropological tech” experiments at a time to see which few ideas might stick, as a way to hack the inscrutable future and make it move faster.

And well they should focus on product-market fit. Without something that lots of people can use, we wouldn’t be having this conversation about policy interventions to begin with. And there’s the rub at the core of progress: We don’t want to thwart innovation and progress, but as a society we need to also understand the trade-offs, and if and how to intervene. Makes you wonder what might happen if these firms ran similar experiments to anticipate future harms. Could we perceive them faster?

If we learn from revenge effects [or unintended consequences of technology], we will not be led to renounce technology, but we will instead refine it: watching for unforeseen problems, managing what we know are limited strengths, applying no less but also no more than is really needed…I am not arguing against change, but for a modest, tentative, and skeptical acceptance of it.”
—(Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences)

Pulling It Together

The world we live in is invisibly shaped by designs we interact with and policies that go on to shape those designs. But in many spaces, humans are not good at predicting the impact of the new. On top of that, the speed at which new technologies enter society is increasing at a rapid pace. Thus, with some notable exceptions, policy tends to be more reactive than proactive in nature. By being a bit more thoughtful and collaborative, we can hope to be as proactive about our reactions as possible, and address harms as they emerge.

back to Deliberate Intervention

Advancing Research 2021 Program

Featured Trainings

Interview with UX Expert Steve Krug

We’re thrilled to have Steve Krug speaking at our upcoming conference, 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips!

Register yourself—or your team&#8212for the May 29th day-long (10am-5pm ET) virtual conference. You’ll learn from and interact with UX experts you know and respect: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Whitney Quesenbery.

This week we pick Steve’s brain about UX tactics and DIY Usability. Here’s what he had to say:

Rosenfeld Media: You’ve always been a big proponent of DIY Usability, i.e. the fact that it’s not rocket science so anyone should be able to do it. We understand anyone can do it, but does that mean they can do it well?

Steve Krug: Actually, my trademarked slogan is “It’s not rocket surgery,”™ but why quibble? You’re right: it does mean I believe that most people—with a little instruction&#8212can do much of what I do as a usability consultant. They can’t do it as well as I can—hopefully&#8212because I’ve been doing it for 25 years, but a lot of it is just applying common sense.

And that’s particularly true for running some basic usability tests. Someone with experience–especially a professional–can probably do a better job than an amateur. But can an amateur do it well? In my experience, almost anyone can do at least a halfway decent job right away. After all, it mostly consists of just giving someone a task (or tasks) to do using whatever you’re building, and then watching them while keeping them thinking aloud.

In fact, the hardest part for beginners is biting their tongue and resisting the impulse to help, to comment, and to ask leading questions.

RM: But does this mean they can do it well enough to make it worthwhile?

SK: I think so, for a few reasons.

First, someone beginning to do DIY testing probably hasn’t been doing any testing before, and some testing is infinitely better than none.

Second, if they haven’t been doing any testing, then there are probably huge usability problems just waiting to be found. So even if the facilitation is less than perfect, the participant is still going to run into the worst problems and the observers are going to see them.

And finally, I’ve been asking people for years to send me examples of cases where testing by amateurs made a product worse. And after all this time, I haven’t had anyone send me a convincing example. In fact, most of the examples I’ve received have been where supposed professionals did a shoddy job. It makes sense that these are the ones I get, because professionals are—correctly&#8212held to a higher standard.
So I guess my answer is that amateurs may not do a perfect job, but they almost always do it more than well enough.

RM: If anyone can do it themselves, when would you need an expert or consultant to come in and help?

SK: I’ve always said that if you can afford to hire a professional, by all means do it. It’s just that the vast majority of the people out there developing “stuff”—sites, apps, etc.&#8212can’t afford to hire someone. That’s why I’m always trying to teach people how to do it themselves.

But if you have any money for it, I’d highly recommend at least hiring a professional to do two things:

1. An expert review. Having a pro look at your stuff and apply their years of experience is enormously valuable. In particular, they’re likely to have a lot of knowledge about what’s worth fixing, and what kinds of fixes will actually work. It’s a great investment.

2. Coaching. Even if you’re doing DIY testing, it’s great to have someone with experience looking over your shoulder and mentoring while you get started. They can help you formulate task scenarios, show you ways to recruit participants, observe your sessions and critique your facilitation skills, and decide what to fix and how to fix it.

Like I said, professionals are going to be better at it than you are. But if you can’t afford to have one around all the time, get them to teach you.

RM: Thanks, Steve!

There’s still time to sign up for 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips! Join Steve along with five other experts for this awesome virtual event on May 29th.

Explore Rosenfeld’s Newest Release, Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice

As the world becomes increasingly more digital, design systems are becoming increasingly more important. With roughly five billion daily internet users, designing websites and apps at scale is critical to meeting the increasing demand for online information and services. But building successful design systems is no easy feat, and limited resources exist to support designers, engineers, and product people as they advance in their careers. 

In his forthcoming book, Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice, design-systems expert Dan Mall draws upon his experiences helping popular brands create sustainable, successful design practices.

What will you gain from reading Design That Scales?

Design systems are not just for designers. Mall notes that these systems are highly valuable because they “serve the proverbial three-legged stool of design, engineering, and product.” Unfortunately, however, “most design systems fail because they aren’t integrated early enough into the grain of how an organization operates.” Design That Scales serves to guide readers away from that pitfall.

Not only will you learn how to create, manage, and sustain a successful design system, you will also gain a comprehensive understanding of the various components of a design system—and how they contribute to success. You’ll foster a culture of collaboration by discerning where each contributor fits within a design system team. You’ll learn how to measure a design system’s impact and demonstrate its value to stakeholders. Plus, end-of-chapter questions will help you steer your design system towards a profitable outcome. 

Design That Scales is a must-read for:

• Individuals involved in building and maintaining design systems, regardless of size
• Designers, engineers, and product managers seeking more efficient ways of working
• Leaders and executives looking to drive meaningful change within their organization
• Those who have experience designing web forms and tables but are unsure what’s next

What readers are saying about Design That Scales

Nadine Sarraj, Product Designer at 365 Retail Markets, says, “Dan’s book is a game-changer for our approach to design systems, leading to significant changes at my company, making it a must-read for streamlining anyone’s complex design systems! This book equips you with everything you need for your next design system transformation.”

Afyia Smith, Design Manager at Epic Games, says Design That Scales “will be my go-to resource for creating and managing design systems as they grow.”

Take a sneak peek inside the book

Design That Scales is a treasure trove of wisdom for both design system novices and seasoned practitioners alike. It not only provides guidance on building a successful design system, but also delves into the crucial aspects of measuring its success.

Want more? Check out a sample chapter for a taste of what you’ll find.

Happy reading, and enjoy your journey into the world of design systems!

Order the book

Meet the author

Hailing from Philly, Dan Mall is a multi-talented creative force: an esteemed teacher, creative director, designer, founder, and entrepreneur. To help enterprise teams design at scale, he crafts, collects, and curates curriculum, content, and community at Design System University, his brainchild. Previously, he helmed SuperFriendly, a renowned design system consultancy. Dan discusses design systems, process, leadership, and more on his website, danmall.com.