And so I really do feel like that might be the problem that we are facing, is where should this live? And when we're talking about things like design systems or even design teams and functions within an organization, I don't know, let's call it design ops, that those have been established and that they live within a solid part of the organization and they are the source of truth when it comes to design, and establishing some kind of a source of truth for content when everybody can write. I mean, that's the magical mystical pursuit, right? What are your hopes? Tell me a little bit about what's going on at Content Design London. What is the work that you all are doing right now? Because I know that things are not great in the UK right now, it's not great. That's what I read. That's what I read in the papers. Things are complicated. So there's just that disconnect I think between, at the moment in this country because not enough people have a good strong content strategy that the content designers can work to. So we say that if you have a content strategy, your bank of user needs and your research and your style guide, I should be able to give those three things to somebody and if they are trained, they should be able to produce good content, first time out. If they can't, one of those things is wrong. And it's usually, in my opinion right now in the UK, it's the content strategy. There we go. So that will come out. There's going to be one on research and content and how to do that directly. There's one on delivery and content. I feel like I've fallen into everything! I think there's a 'core', where there's my family and my kids - so 'I need to have this house', 'I need to have enough money to feed them' and 'I need to get them to school'. That's my core. Everything else is possible because it doesn't wobble my core; you get near that, and I come out fighting!

Job stories are a better choice if you only have one audience to deal with. You know you need to switch from user stories to job stories, if every single user story you write begins with the same thing. If you’re writing ‘As a shopper, I…’ in every user story, switch to job stories.Mark manages our business and client relations. He leads on operations and contracts with clients, as well as overseeing CDL’s strategy and growth. The internal political landscape at Directgov at that time was such that if the senior managers didn't like what people in content were doing, they'd simply stop it and/or threaten to stop paying for Directgov. In conversations with colleagues, Sarah realised that the way everyone spoke about content had to change and be 'elevated' somehow. The playing field needed resetting, so that people working in the discipline could have a stronger voice. I feel like in much larger enterprises, especially that are dealing with legacy products, that I almost would like to see either organizations that have a Chief Digital Officer, or a Chief Customer Officer, that it sits there. So that it is something that is truly centralized and that is being served up as the beating heart of content within an organization and that it sits between and connects across all these different silos. That's my vision. Who can make that happen for me?

This is the content strategy podcast and I’m your host, Kristina Halvorson. On each and every episode I interview someone I admire who’s doing meaningful work in content strategy and all its adjacent disciplines. If you care about making content more useful, usable and inclusive for all, welcome in, you have found your people.

Rich Prowse

So that's where the term content design came from. And then I just went shopping around all the disciplines. And so I was watching these designers and product managers doing journey mapping, and I'm like, we should be journey mapping and we should be doing language mapping across the channels. We should be knowing what people say and do and think at every point of this journey. So you know what? Content team are going to be here. I did crits when I was at art school, and crits for me were like, you put your work up and then everybody just hammers into it and makes you cry. And I saw the designers doing crits at GDS and it sparked off that memory. And I was like, why are we not doing that actually as a content crit? Why are we not doing that? And so I went round and just went shopping through all the disciplines and pulled it together. Editors edited and publishers published - you could say it was really easy for people to understand. Everybody knew what that meant. Eventually, after working on the Beta project for a while, and after many internal protocols playing themselves out, Sarah was officially appointed as Head of Content Design at gov.uk. You need to be able to analyse data. You need to be able to go and do desk research, even if you're just looking on social media for language, sentiment, scoring, empathy mapping. Webinar: Lightning fast content design 101 Sarah shares a couple of techniques on finding out what information your users want from you.