Future Practice Interview: Luke Wroblewski
As part of our new Future Practice webinar series, we’ll be interviewing presenters to give you a preview of what they’ll cover.
Expert Interview: Caroline Jarrett
We’re thrilled to have Caroline, author of Forms that Work and our forthcoming book Surveys that Work participate in our network of UX experts. Like what she has to say below? Then consider having her work with your organization; check her profile page for information on her consulting and and full-day courses.
RM: What’s a common misconception people have about the design of forms?
CJ: That it’s all about visual design, things like where to put the labels compared to the boxes. Whereas the questions are far more important. It’s amazing how users can survive really terrible visual designs of forms—including horrible mistakes like putting the labels inside the boxes—provided they can understand the questions, find the answers easily, and consider that the questions are appropriate in the context of their goals.
In Luke Wroblewski’s book Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, I contributed a piece, “People before pixels,” that dives into this in greater detail—and there’s even more in our book Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms For Usability.
RM: What’s one thing you wish everyone knew about survey design?
CJ: You’ve got to test—and preferably, test and test again. The professional survey methodologists are obsessed with testing; they test the topics of the survey on stakeholders, subject matter experts, and data users, as well as on respondents. They test the questions with everybody, and extensively with respondents. They test the heck out of the questionnaire itself (“the instrument”) in usability tests and pilot tests. And they iterate: make changes, test again. And again.
I realise I’m not going to persuade everyone to do that much testing for most surveys, but I’d dearly love to persuade everyone to do a bit of testing. “Write, send, and hope” is a recipe for poor quality data at best, and alienating your users at worst.
RM: Thanks Caroline!
A Guide to Success for Content Designers and Strategists
The following article is based on a recent interview conducted by Lou Rosenfeld, Publisher of Rosenfeld Media from his podcast, the Rosenfeld Review. In this episode, Lou speaks with Natalie Marie Dunbar, author of From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice, just published by Rosenfeld Media. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
[Lou] Welcome to the Rosenfeld Review. I’m your host, Lou Rosenfeld. I’m very happy to have today’s guest, Natalie Dunbar, author of the newest Rosenfeld Media book, From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice. Now, Natalie, first of all, welcome.
[Natalie] Thank you, Lou. Thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here.
[Lou] So we’ve talked about this topic before. I know it sounds to people listening like it might be somewhat technical. And actually speaking of engineering, well, really maybe architecture, you’ve got a lot of construction metaphors throughout the book visually as well as textually. And yet when we talk about this subject, a lot of it kind of boils down to how someone is feeling about the prospect of building a content strategy practice and building one that’s sustainable over time.
Why is this more of an emotional topic than I had expected?
That’s a great question. I think in my experience, and experience of people that I’ve spoken with while writing the book, the process can be lonely. If you are a solo content strategist attempting to build a practice, you’re by yourself as the lone content person in the room and you’re trying to figure out who the people are that you can talk with that will help in understanding what it is that you’re trying to build and then come alongside you when you’re building it.
If you’re leading a team in a larger organization, you may be interacting with levels of leadership that you may not have had to interface with on a regular basis. And all of a sudden you’re like, “This is how we’re going to do it. This is the process. These are the things that I need. This is the resource that we need.” So I think having a companion and a guide surfaced as I kept hearing, I wish I had a narrator or a guide telling me, “Okay, take this step. Take this step.” And then to step back and take a breath before you move on and keep pushing. I think that’s where the emotion comes in.
Have you found any inspiration or lessons from the growth of design practices that’ve been useful for you as you’ve tried to work your way through building content strategy practices.
I don’t want to simplify the ways that design has come to this place of being at that product development table with the developers and everybody else. But I’ll say that I think as content strategists and designers, we’ve got the seat at the table and we’ve also started building our own tables. It depends on how your organization or agency is set up. You may be seated at the table with people, or you may have your own table and people are coming like I said to sample whatever you’ve got there. What I’ve learned over the years is how to speak the language of all the various cross-functional teammates. There’s a whole chapter in the book about how important it is to build alliances. And that’s a theme that runs throughout the book. This is not something that you do in a vacuum.
I made the rookie mistake early on of going into an agency like I’m here to save the day. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that I was the first content strategist at that agency. So everyone was asking me, what exactly is it that you do? I was talking about things that the team had already done and after a couple of weeks of back and forth and not really having any forward motion, I thought, okay, so let’s start again. Let’s sit down and figure out where does the product development cycle begin? How does it kick off and how much lead time do we need? So, from that, I remember sitting in a conference room that had whiteboards all the way around. Lots of markers, lots of post-it notes. And we created a process framework and figured out where are those crucial handoffs. And at every moment that we identified another cross-functional teammate, it was like… How can I speak to that teammate? How can I speak to a designer? I can use design thinking language. I can use service blueprint language. I can use different language that helps everyone understand what it is that I’m trying to do as a content strategy.
Are you having to be the one who learns that language everywhere you go?
Yes. There’s something that I call the “Persistent Principles” that I wrote about in a book and one of the very first ones is “Always Be Educating.” So even when your practice is established, someone new is going to come along, a new developer, a new IA, a new designer, and they’ve maybe never worked with a content strategist or content designer before.
Maybe they’re used to tossing designs over the proverbial fence and asking for the words to be plugged in instead of the other way around, which is particularly difficult in highly regulated spaces. Insurance and healthcare, in particular, you’ll have this lovely design and then the content breaks that design because it’s required. And then there’s this big kerfuffle and we’ve got to start over again.
How does “Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice” get started? How do you build? How do you scale?
So the steps of building the practice are going to be the same, whether you’re solo or building with a small team. I’ve provided a blueprint called the “Content Strategy Practice Blueprint.” There are five components to that blueprint and they include making the business case, building strong relationships with cross-functional teams and departmental partners, creating frameworks and curating tools to build with right-sizing the practice. So now we’re talking about starting to scale the number of people or practitioners. If you’re at an agency like I was when I built my first practice, that might mean bringing on contractors for a specific client relationship that you have.
And then the final component in the blueprint is establishing meaningful success measures. We’re talking about what are the practice OKRs? What are the goals of the practice? Not at the project level, but at the practice level. And once you have gone through those steps, that’s when you step back and you look at those success measures and you say, “Have I been able to meet these goals that I told leadership that I was going to?” And, “Do I need to go back through any of these steps and shore things up?”
Then you can decide if the structure is healthy enough for us to start scaling. That’s where the growth happens. That’s where, if you’re at an agency, maybe you’ve established yourself as a solo practitioner and you don’t need more bodies, but you have people coming in as contractors as you are bringing on clients who are establishing this demand for the content strategy work to happen.
Within an enterprise, that might look like all of a sudden, more and more teams are asking for content strategy expertise. And all of a sudden, your project list is growing, and you need to bring in more people and more practitioners. There’s never anything that’s really basic about a content strategy project, but there are some where we’re going to launch this new feature. We need content. We need copy. But we also need to figure out, where does it live on the site? What’s the nomenclature that we’re using? Is it consistent with other topics that might be similar on whatever digital experience that we’re building in?
I think this is a good point, as you’re looking at bringing in and scaling your practice, to look around your product table. Look around the practice that you’ve established and consider the importance of bringing in a diverse team. When you start to diversify your practice team, you’re going to start to hear different perspectives. And then that will broaden your reach as your audience starts to grow.
Let’s say you have a 15-person practice. Is there like any type of ideal ratio of UX writers to information architects to something else?
Ideally, we would have all the above embedded into product teams. That’s a tricky question because there are so many names that we go by. I’m a purist. I stayed with content strategy because that’s how I learned it and that’s what I know. But I also have worked in roles where I’ve been a content designer. I’ve done IA work. I’ve also been on teams where I was the strategist. I figured out the strategy and handed it off to a UX writer.
So now we’re talking about diversification of skills within a content strategy practice. Your practice may include only people who produce content, but you may find that in order to scale, you need to consider what Ann Rockley refers to as your “frontend and your backend content strategist.” So, your people who identify more as a frontend – I like being in the research. I like the closest I can get to the user, or the audience that we’re creating experience for. That’s my happy place. And then someone who is more than happy to sit down with developers and engineers who is perhaps more comfortable working on the backend. So, as you scale, you might find that in order to continue to sustain a healthy practice, you need to diversify in those specialties within content strategy.
I think it’s good that you’re also framing them, not as roles, but more specialties or skills. Would it be safe to say that if you’re building that practice, you have to hire people that are ultimately willing to wear different hats? They may have their comfort zones, their happy places, but ultimately, it’s a new enough area that sometimes in a given day, one of your people might have to be doing Ann Rockley’s frontend work, another day backend work?
That’s right.
Is that still the case even in a mature content strategy practice?
Yeah. I did a fireside chat recently about the fact that there’s so many specializations within the content world. And it really boils down to understanding what it is that I think that you are passionate about. And also being very honest about what areas I am passionate about. For example, content modeling is still a world of wonder for me. If I don’t have anyone else on the team, then I have to do it. And if I get a little stuck, maybe there’s an architect that I can confer with on a previous job that I was on.
I sat down with the project manager, who had passion for the backend piece of content strategy. He walked me through a couple of examples and all of a sudden, I’m doing content monologue documentation. So just be open and get out of your own way. Certainly, if you are more comfortable with certain aspects of content strategy, don’t try to shoehorn yourself into something that you’re ultimately going to get stuck. But instead of immediately fleeing from a different job, see it as an opportunity instead of a weakness.
There’s so much to developing a content strategy practice and I know we just really scratch the surface here, but I’m really glad that those who are overwhelmed by it, including myself now have a handy guide, From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice. It’s been delightful to spend time talking with you about it.
From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice is now available from Rosenfeld Media.
The Rosenfeld Review podcast is brought to you by Rosenfeld Media. Please subscribe and listen on iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast platform. Tell a friend to have a listen and check out our website for over 100 podcasts with other fascinating people from the UX community. You’ll find them all at RosenfeldReview.com.
Podcast: Preview the Design at Scale 2022 Conference
Covid has fragmented our teams, workplaces, work rituals, and in some circumstances, our self-confidence. It has also forced us to learn, adapt, and improve our work at a stunningly rapid pace.
It’s a great time to take stock of what we learned these past two years, and get ready to apply those lessons in the years to come. In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Lou speaks with long-time Design at Scale conference curators Kit Unger and Lada Gorlenko to discuss how the conference presents the perfect opportunity to make that pivot—and make the case for you to be a part of the conference program.
Topics discussed include:
• How closely-aligned teams can forge ahead despite the challenges Covid has presented
• The importance of reconsidering how teams currently support objectives
• Learning to work together in new ways that help shift the existing work dynamic into a positive and more powerful frame
• Uncovering drivers that allow teams to surpass pre-established boundaries around collaboration
• Shifting how we perceive ownership—across all levels—in organizations
Life and Death Design by Katie Swindler is available now!
Grab your copy of Life and Death Design: What Life-Saving Technology Can Teach Everyday UX Designers today!
Katie Swindler’s new book will help us redefine how we might view a core human function—specifically, the stress response—and how stress can be an informative tool for designers.
As an experienced presenter who has spoken on UX topics internationally at industry events, Katie believes that brands who wish to truly connect with consumers must expand utility through emotion. She illustrates how leveraging stress-informed design enables users to perform optimally during high-stress or traumatic experiences.
Important questions Katie tackles in her book include:
- How does understanding the stress response help designers deal with high-stress situations?
- How can designers leverage redundancy and biomimicry to enhance a final product?
- How stress-informed design can support experts in a way that preserves an organic workflow?
- How did conscientious attention to detail in design help save the lives of heroic users?
- What is “abusive design,” and how do we avoid it?
- And much, much more!
Life and Death Design contains these and many more fascinating examples that serve as beautifully counter-intuitive resources for designers. Life and Death Design is available to order!
Learn more about Katie here.
QuickPanel: Digital Cocooning
With our eyes on our screens more and more, what’s happening to our public spaces? Are they less congenial, less bustling, less safe? A number of recent books, such as The Circle by Dave Eggers and Ambient Commons by Malcolm McCullough, cast a critical eye at an always-online society. And in a tragic turn, a San Francisco State University student was killed in September while leaving a crowded train; passengers, engrossed in their devices, hadn’t noticed a man on the train waving a gun around. We asked a panel of UX experts to weigh in on the ramifications of digital cocooning.
With smartphones, we walk around with the capacity to be talking to, texting, or tweeting each other all the time. Yet we’re missing out on what’s happening right in front of us. Why does social media make us, in some sense, antisocial?
Christina Wodtke: Everyone is talking about our need to be connected all the time, but no one (as far as I’ve seen) is talking about our increasing cocooning of ourselves from each other. The police procedural constantly provides us examples of bad things that can happen to us, with shows like “CSI” illustrating that apparently safe people can become our kidnappers and killers. But to be continually hyper-alert is exhausting. So instead we put up digital “do not disturb” signs so we don’t have to deal with strangers, which makes us more vulnerable to significant harm.
They also shield us from the petty guilt of not helping our fellow humans who are less fortunate, such as the homeless, the beggars, and old folks in need of a seat. In San Francisco, where a recent shooting occurred, one is continually asked for money. Even the kindest of us can’t give to everyone who asks, so it becomes easier to hide.
‘Down time’ used to mean a chance to relax and look around. Now it’s considered ‘dead time’ that needs to be filled.
Randy Farmer: Attention is a scarce resource, and it can be dangerous to focus inwardly all the time. I first noticed this before smartphones. Airports used to be social/public spaces (and I liked to spend time interacting with people there) before cell phone and Bluetooth headsets. Now, time spent at airports is seen as “down time” that could be more efficiently used for business/personal relationships (texting), so these public, “third” places are quickly losing their efficacy as a way to interact with the greater community. And it’s only getting worse. The FAA is allowing more use of electronics on flights, and all the parks in NYC have Wi-Fi.
“Down time” used to mean a chance to relax and look around. Now it’s considered “dead time” that needs to be filled. Heads up has become heads down. Sad.
Brenda Laurel: At the memorial of the 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, we saw King’s great speech at the Lincoln Memorial over and over again. I was haunted by a picture of what that moment would have looked like today. Everybody would be taking pictures or texting with their phones. Dr. King might himself have felt isolated. To paraphrase Cassius in Julius Caesar, the fault is not with our cellphones but with ourselves. This is a failure of civility—of plain old manners—as well as a failure of mindfulness. As interaction designers (paradoxically), I think we can make some interventions in this space.
What are some design approaches that could mitigate the effects of digital cocooning?
The iPhone already has a ‘do not disturb’ setting; maybe it’s time for a ‘please disturb’ setting.
Christina Wodtke: Design could help this problem in a myriad of ways, from having a “public place” setting that allowed only audio or only visual. When I run or bike, I only listen to porous audio like podcasts so I am alert enough to react to danger. Once we shut off our ears and eyes, we are utterly defenseless. The iPhone already has a “do not disturb” setting; maybe it’s time for a “please disturb” setting.
Design could also help in a much more significant way by reminding us of the humanity of our fellow passengers and making sure places like trains and subway read as safe so people would not feel such a strong urge to psychically hide. Ride a Skytrain in Bangkok. Bangkok has the same degree of homelessness and crime, same varied socioeconomic status of riders, yet the Skytrain feels safe and a only handful of folks hide in electronics. The trains are well designed, well maintained and comfortable, with many signs reminding you to give seats to children, pregnant ladies, older folks, and monks. As well, there is always a TV on, and while in Bangkok only shows commercials, I can imagine a world in which news or sports are shown as well, encouraging people to be eyes up. When places feel safe, we can relax and people-watch, and this makes those places even safer. Jane Jacobs, in her amazing treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, points out that what makes a place safe is “eyes on the street.” Our public transit needs eyes on each other to keep each other safe.
Randy Farmer: Though technology has been developed to prod us into changing new potentially harmful behaviors (such as smartphones auto-disabling texting while moving in a vehicle), it’s no replacement for changing our culture.
We need to consider designing our environments to remind and teach us how to interact and consciously seek “down time.” Some businesses have taken on the role of etiquette guardians:
Brenda Laurel: Both Christina and Randy make good points. I imagine “public interactives” that might allow us to see together our own public environments and gatherings in different ways. Mindfulness meditation apps already exist (for example, Smiling Mind and Take a Deep Breath). Beyond this, design applications or environment remind us to breathe and be present.
Do you engage with strangers when you’re in a “third space”—standing in line at the post office, waiting out an airplane delay? Or, in those cases, are you grateful to have an electronic device at hand?
Christina Wodtke: Most of the time, my biggest fear is being put into that situation. I’m intensely introverted. On a recent flight back from Prague, the entertainment system was not working. When the food heating system also broke, my neighbors and I started talking. We ended up connecting, but it took a shared misery. As well, it helped that I was playing a game on my iPad. The iPad is a big surface, easy to peek at, and games are inherently social. If I had been watching a movie, especially if I’d had headphones on, my seatmate wouldn’t have used the game as a social object to start a conversation. He was really interested in watching me play Frontier Rush, asked about how to play, and started to suggest moves I should make. (He was a man in his 70s whose wife was trying to talk him into an iPad. I made the sale that night.) I wonder if the post office or the airlines could create similar play spaces where it would feel safe to connect.
Our tools are teaching us a new kind of social helplessness.
Randy Farmer: Recently I was in a fast-food restaurant and an older woman came in, looking lost and asking for driving directions. The twenty-year-old at the register was at a loss for helping her, even though I am certain he was carrying a smartphone. I was waiting for my order, so he asked me to help her. I quickly loaded my maps app and told her the step-by-step directions (which she wrote with pencil on her physical map). The cashier was grateful and a bit embarrassed that he didn’t know the directions (how would he, growing up without paper maps?) and that he didn’t even know how to handle the social encounter well enough to figure out that he had the solution in his pocket.
Our tools are teaching us a new kind of social helplessness, and also providing us an easy means for escape when we can’t cope with the fact we’re directly interacting less and less. This is a vicious spiral.
Social rules design has helped in the past and can help us today. Our technologies can, and must, take a role in this, but we must start with the goal in mind. We’ve started using tech for physical exercise, something that was also declining, and we can do the same for social health. One might imagine a Fitbit for socialization. Or you could just get a t-shirt:
Sometimes excellent interaction design isn’t technological.
Brenda Laurel: Randy, I want one of those. I do see many folks staring at their phones when waiting in line and the like. I love observing and talking to people in those situations, so I rarely bury my head. On the other hand, if the wait is two hours or something, I’ll certainly end up grabbing my iPhone. I agree with Randy that this is really about socialization. I don’t think we can design social “rules” (although we might model more civil and sociable societies in things like multiplayer games).
One of the best social times I’ve had lately was at the LGBT luncheon at the Grace Hopper Conference. It seemed like the usual conference lunch scene—sitting next to people you didn’t know, some of whom knew one another. But the “emcee” suggested topics for discussion and eventually we got into making comments to one another publicly on a variety of subjects. I felt the community draw closer, and I had special buddies throughout the conference because of that experience. At Grace Hopper I also learned about “lean in” circles as a way to enhance our engagement in discourse as well as community.
Sometimes excellent interaction design isn’t technological.
Like what our experts had to say? Guess what: you can have them bring their brains to you. Randy Farmer, Brenda Laurel, and Christina Wodtke are available for consulting and training through Rosenfeld Media.
Survey book of the month, August 2011
If you love looking at wonderful information design, you’ll enjoy this book of the month:
Looking back: a century of Dutch statistics by CBS Statistics Netherlands
It’s in English and it’s free as a .pdf download, or you can pay a small fee for a printed copy.
So far this year I’ve chosen survey books that are about information, either key concepts or practical how-to. This month’s book is about inspiration.
The design of survey forms at GOR 2014
Where does a form end and a survey begin? That was my challenge when I was invited to lead a half-day workshop on forms design at the General Online Research conference 2014 in Cologne, Germany.
The group included survey methodologists from government, health topics, market research, and independent consultants.
We had a lively discussion as we shared examples of:
- forms that introduce surveys,
- aspects of questionnaires that are similar to forms, and
- forms that survey methodologists use to keep track of survey data.
View the slides from the workshop: Survey forms GOR14 by @cjforms from Caroline Jarrett
Workshop series to visit NYC, Silicon Valley
Wondering how you’ll ramp up your UX team’s skills? (And spend that training budget?)
Look no further: our spring 2012 workshops are now open for registration. They cover some delicious topics: web form design, prototyping for mobile devices, DIY usability testing, and a very pragmatic take on information architecture. And our instructors ain’t bad either: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Rachel Hinman, and Lou Rosenfeld. Small full-day classes and lots of hands-on work—what more could you ask for?
We’ll be visiting Mountain View March 5-7, and New York City May 23-25. (Stay tuned; we’re working on adding a third city.) Discounts available for early registration and groups. And we’ll be giving away lots of goodies from such sponsors as TechSmith, UserTesting.com, MailChimp, and Balsamiq.
Please help spread the word, and let us know if we can answer any questions.
What’s Next for UX? Research Results (and New Conference) Revealed
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