6 years of content design at Scope
Content design at Scope is 6 years old and it’s my last day here. This is what I’ve learned.
To go far, we must travel together
About half of my 6 years at Scope has meant doing ‘crisis’ content. First coronavirus, now compounded by rising energy, food and housing costs. Both built on the long-standing politics of austerity.
Even before that, there were times when we felt like was important to try and move fast. We usually dealt with that by giving 1 person ‘ownership’ of a problem or piece of work. We would ask them to travel as far and fast as they could. And they would. But then we’d have to go back, because no one else understood it.
More than 1 person needs to understand work for it to:
- scale
- age (well)
We learned, as the saying goes, to travel far, we need to travel together. And that we must be kind if everyone in the team is going to understand, remember and contribute.
It’s much easier to research, try and get useful feedback when people feel safe. Feeling safe means people are more likely to be kind. And if other people are kind, they are more likely to feel safe.
The work on this was constant and probably always will be. The best approaches use trauma informed leadership to help people to be more consistent.
Everything changes: the job, the team, the work
6 years is the longest I’ve worked anywhere. But it’s always changed:
- who is in the team
- what we work on
- how we work
It’s been at least 4 jobs during that time:
- setting something up from scratch: exciting and scary!
- growing the team and settling back into a management role: a whole new learning curve!
- managing crisis content and doing more asynchronous working at the start of the pandemic: one of the proudest, saddest and most stressful times
- helping the team mature and designing a paid internship to be as accessible as possible
And we’ve had team members come and go on to do great things. Everyone who has joined us, learned and grew. And everyone who joined us shaped our work.
Managing?
I started at Scope because I wanted to do content design. But it was also a chance to step back from being a manager.
In my previous job, I became a middle manager partly by default. I was the last person standing in a team. I was a few years into a career in charity content, it was the next step. But it wasn’t a good fit, then. I didn’t like how I was in the role. Stepping back for a while was great.
The 6 month pilot content design project at Scope went well. For the next phase, we needed to grow the team. This meant becoming a manager again. I was nervous. But it was better this time because:
- more of our work was planned
- the whole team joined in setting and sticking to work in progress limits
- our performance metrics included traffic quality and improvements (which included deleting pages)
I’m still learning how to be a better manager and leader, but I learned how to enjoy it. Now I like being a manager and ‘just’ an experienced contributor for different reasons.
My writing has changed
My writing used to be much more complicated. My sentences were longer. Some long enough to have en dashes in them. Paragraphs were longer. Thank you senior editor, Alex. You were right!
Directing attention is hard. Structuring text so that people can scan and have to remember as little as possible. This means:
- more H2s (subheadings) and fewer H3s (sub-subheadings) to make a more ‘shallow’ structure
- shorter paragraphs
- very few inline links in the middle of paragraphs
Our early content had a lot of large yellow warning boxes. We hardly ever use these now, only when there is an immediate threat. There are often less alarming ways to show something is important, like moving content further up and using a subheading.
What ‘correct’ means can be complicated
If you’re an expert making content with Scope, you know how to help disabled people with complex problems. Usually because society is being hostile to disabled people.
Complicated problems do not often have simple answers. And you can be comprehensive without being useful. Sometimes, when we started working with a subject, helping them to understand this was hard.
We work with subject experts to:
- scope work: find out how the answers to the problems people are trying to solve overlap and connect
- pair write: write rough notes on how people should try and solve a defined problem
- get feedback during ‘crit’ workshops: we need them to check anything that’s written to make sure it’s correct
These questions helped us to work with subject experts:
- What do people need to understand to work out what their next step is? This can include getting advice, if it’s available.
- Will this content harm the reader?
We got better at asking for the feedback we needed most at each stage of our workflow.
Good insights are more than user stories
We started with job stories and acceptance criteria to describe the problem that people want to solve. They describe the scope of content.
The best thing about them is that they are short. If they’re vague or ambiguous, you’ll find out quickly. And if you’ve got a good one, the content is easier to write and test.
Our user stories are longer now, and our wonderful researchers include rich search data and notes on:
- the people who had this problem
- triggers that cause this problem
- contexts
Change processes slowly
When we were starting out, we were just making new content. Eventually, the question of how to improve and maintain content came up. We were excited. A chance to make iterating a real part of the job!
We came up with an improvement workflow. It was beautiful. It used multiple data sources. It was complicated. The team couldn’t use it.
We stripped it back. Took out most of the complexity, and started adding bits slowly to:
- check if they worked
- experiment with how we represented the work on our team planning board
Doing things slowly is almost always better than doing them fast. There’s more time to remember and understand. And it’s easier to revert if it doesn’t work, which does happen sometimes!
Supportive managers are everything
I got to try ‘proper’ content design at Scope because of:
- a programme manager who asked if she could try doing content design
- an amazingly supportive director and head of department, who both said ‘yes’ (thank you, Lisa and Harry)
We had a user researcher on the team. We got to design our own performance metrics, which meant that traffic quality was part of that from the start.
There are still supportive managers at Scope. And early work means the qualitative feedback and traffic quality stats for our content is good.
Use the best data you have today, get better data tomorrow
At the start, we only made content only if there was a need backed up by evidence, either:
- forum posts
- interviews
2 years later, we did an SEO audit. We found that some pieces were not getting traffic because there wasn’t enough search volume. Often 2 or more pieces were competing for the same search traffic. These pieces were trying to help people with real problems that they had, but they were not searching online for help with them. And our design hypotheses mostly started with people searching online to help them fix a problem.
The insights from the SEO audit became part of our content creation and maintenance workflows. Which means that we check that there’s some search volume before we make a piece.
We merged a lot of pieces. And these were counted as improvements, not failures, by our supportive managers. And improvements were counted as achievements, along with our new content.
It’s nice when it’s easy to do the hard work
This work has always been hard. It’s hard because we’re helping disabled people to solve high-stakes problems by moving through hostile systems that society has made for them. But user researchers are part of the team. Together we work out why we make content and why we don’t. When we improve it and when we delete it. That part is easy now, at least.
I’ve tried to do ‘under the radar’ content design in a couple of other organisations before Scope. It meant doing small pockets of user centred work, with like-minded middle managers, customer support staff and other content folk. It was exciting. Sometimes it was clandestine. It was always challenging. Endlessly making and re-making the case for not just making things to reflect the mental model of the highest paid opinion.
Growing together is wonderful, saying goodbye is sad
We get to know each other so we can work together. And we do. Knowledge work means understanding how people think, what they like and what they are like. We are never the same after we’ve worked with someone. It goes both ways.
On our best days we do things together than we couldn’t do separately. We learn. We grow. And then, eventually, we part. And it’s always sad. But it was always joyful when we were joined by someone new. And I hope someone else will get that chance, soon.
The team is so capable now. I am so proud of us. Of them. So go and find them, follow them if you haven’t already. Because they’re doing amazing things.
- Alex White, long-standing editor (he’s been at Scope for at least 7 rebrands)
- Chloe Tear, content designer
- Ema Thornhill, user researcher
- Memona Ahmed, team coordinator
- Nina McAninly, user researcher
- Stephanie Coulshed, founder of the team and programme lead
When to go
Someone once told me that a lot of people peak in a job after 18 months because you spend:
- 6 months learning the job
- 6 months doing the job
- 6 months doing your best work
I think that’s true for me. But because this job has changed so much, I’ve been able to repeat the cycle a few times.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end, as someone more American than me once sang. It’s the end of this beginning, for me. I am sad because it was one of my very best. But I am so excited about what’s to come.
For now, so long and thanks for all the fish (and chips). Particularly the chips.
