Building a Unified Content Strategy

Quentin Dietrich is a UX Writer at Workiva. Spends time contemplating and creating content for customers a Workiva.

Content is a crucial part of your product.

Is our world like HGTV, where there's an entertaining before and after with someone else doing all the work? Or is it like YouTube, with small budgets focused on process and outcome with you doing all the work?

It's really just a before and then a series of next, next, next.... Just an iterative process of finding the next thing and growing.

Did 4 things:

• Find and join people
• Start small, and don't stop
• Show, do, tell
• Create frameworks as you go

Find and join people

Be both smart and pleasant. Become friends with designers, product managers, developers. Understand their pain and challenges. Learn about what they are trying to solve (first, you'll have plenty of time to solve your own problems). Ask how to help.

Good ideas don't know what discipline they come from.

Start small, then don't stop

Just begin. Pick one problem to solve, then solve the next, and keep going. Like change just one thing on our help website, such as change the font for headings to make them scannable. Break big things into small things with small plans. Look at what is desirable, usable, feasible, and how to get the intersection of all three. The hard one can be a feasible one. Use the skills you have to solve a small problem to build skills for tomorrow to solve the next problem. Then, keep going.

Show, do, tell

Content equals design. As Jared Spool says, "Design is the rendering of intent." Could substitute "Content' for "Design." Rendering is the visual, intent is the verbal, can't have design without intent/verbal. "For products made of words and pixels, words are at least 50%." Where are words? Everywhere! Tooltips, confirmation messages, error messages, labels, buttons, empty states, feature names, confirmation screens, transnational emails, and more. Take a look at a screen in your product, eliminate all the words, and then see what you can do. Of course, words without design is just as unusable. Really need both visual and verbal for great product experiences.

Often, content comes at the end of the development process. Find ways to get involved in the beginning. Always content that can be worked on. Consider words early and often. Designers speak in terms of fidelity. Can apply low, medium, and high fidelity to writing. Have conversations, then write. Focus on verbs and nouns. Create prototypes and test. "Write bad so you can write good." Make words earn their place, and throw away bad work. Can even prototype and test words.

Opposite of finding and knowing people, now go back and tell them about your work and your challenges. Ask for help from them. Value in getting new eyes on your work.

Create frameworks as you go

Start with a basic foundation. Creating a style guide can put a strain on the ability to move fast. Only create the styles you need. As issues come up, add to the guide. Get feedback as you go. Create spaces to move things forward, such as time on your calendar and channels on Slack.

After all that, still current challenges. The team is the same size, more content to manage, need to empower and educate others, and the struggle is real. Sometimes just have to let content go to production. That said, it may be there only briefly, especially in "agile," before you can get it fixed.