Things I’ve been doing
- Planning for the next Content design community. It follows our last session where we shared experiences by filling in an experience map. I’m excited to see how we can take some of these and turn them into actions for the community next year
- I’ve been working with Dani and Josh P on future community planning (mostly how I can be more organised – story of my life!
- I’ve been getting some training booked for the team, with help from colleagues in CDPS to get that over the line
- I’ve been starting to form ideas about our future approach to translation. This will evolve, but I have some firm ideas how to give that momentum and boundaries.
- Met with Monica of the Cabinet Office again with an update on how their approach to bilingualism. There’s some more help they need from us in an unofficial capacity, so we’ll plan that.
- Lots of catching up with emails and bits of work that often get lost in between meetings and BAU work
Things I’ve thought about
Communicating uncertainty in a remote workpace
As content designers, we spend time thinking about communication and its impact.
I’ve been thinking about how important this is in remote organisations like CDPS. When we need to announce things or share news online, we need to be careful how we communicate. Slack might be useful but I often find it harder to craft a careful message on a platform that’s made for quick, throwaway communication. People can ask questions of course but I find that happens less than if we were in a meeting or face to face.
What you don’t say is just as important as what you do. If there are gaps in a narrative, people might fill them in with their assumptions.
Saying too much is also a problem. If a hint of a possibility is given about what might happen next, people take that and hang their hopes and expectations onto them. Then when their hopes and expectations aren’t met, they’re disappointed.
This sounds like (internal) comms 101 but this is especially challenging in remote organisations.
I’ll be taking extra care as a manager to plan messages that I share with staff but also challenge other messages that aren’t clear.
Beyond using words carefully – having clear governance and workflows for planning, creating and publishing even short communications could solve a lot of these issues.
Signing-off design work
I’ve heard the word ‘sign-off’ a lot recently. As a content designer, hearing this word often makes me feel queasy. ‘Sing-off’ sounds like a process that happens after I’ve done my work, out of my control. Who’s signing off? What are they expecting? What are their criteria?
As content designers, we’re not working to an exact specification or technical acceptance criteria. We do, of course, have guides, formats and strategies we follow but they’re rarely hard rules which we can tick-off. Other aspects of product and service delivery will have tighter criteria but it’s rarely a tick-box exercise.
The answer to this is to make sure that quality assurance happens throughout the project in other ways:
- Stakeholder mapping and early engagement: setting the expectations, agreeing on how they’ll be involved and on the decision points throughout
- Content crits
- peer reviews (and this can be peer reviews by other content designers, technical peer review with developers or product managers)
- user testing (involving the stakeholders)
- show and tells (as feedback methods, not presentations)
Whether the person who signs something off is a service owner, product owner or just the most senior person in a department, then I’d rather know we’re thinking the same thing from the start. And then I’d rather realise if we’re deviating from that after a week, not a few months later.
So, I’ll be advocating for this – less talk of ‘sign-off’, more involvement and clear governance.
And with those thoughts, I guess I’ll ‘sign-off’ my weeknotes…