At Lloyds Bank I had the chance to develop a content design system, write, manage the site build and clarify financial products for business and retail customers.
Project background
I joined Lloyds Banking Group to work on a large website migration. A small agile team had been created to work on a reusable design system for the brands in the group (Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland).
My role as content strategist was to plan the content work needed to move to a new Adobe Experience Manager platform, designing new content templates and improving user experience along the way. I worked on user research, content design and coaching copywriters and the website build team.
Getting into the project at the early stages meant I could help with auditing current content, recommending change and designing new content types and components.
We borrowed some principles from gov.uk, a great example of evidence-based design and creating simple content around complex topics.
Understanding customers through research
The relationship between content and user research is key to designing successful digital products in an agile team.
Working with researchers and learning about customers is one of my favourite things, and I was able to do some copy testing in the lab myself.
We revealed some important user needs, like understanding ‘small print’, the life of a small business owner and which product features to prioritise.
Managing a quality build
Any content strategy and content design system can be made or broken by the implementation. I was able to coach copywriters and manage the website build team to produce high-quality content.
With copywriters I acted as an editor and advisor, helping them to understand the content strategy, purpose of each content element and produce user-focused copy.
With the build team I used my previous experience as a content manager to coordinate batches of content being built. We reused JIRA very successfully to track the progress of each page and I provided an overview of quality for each page that was built.
Wins and lessons
Working as a content strategist on this project was a great experience, and I was happy to be able to manage the process as well as design content.
- An open approach to product small print. Creating an understandable version of legal information was a big learning experience for me, and I think a challenge for the digital space in the future.
- Managing people. I enjoyed coaching copywriters to keep them aligned to strategy, and CMS authors to make sure we produced top-quality content.
- Planning and delivery. I repurposed JIRA to log every page of the migration, and was able to track them through each stage of the work.
