My first pair write and crit

I was given my first piece of content to write for Scope. This was a small piece about benefits and having someone stay over. I didn’t know much about this before getting the work.

Our user researchers, Grace and Ema, gave me a user story. This was the brief for the content. I used this to pair write the piece with a subject expert.

Starting with user needs

The brief was a user story and acceptance criteria:

When a friend, partner or family member is going to stay with me temporarily

I want to find out whether my eligibility for benefits will be affected

So that I can decide whether they should stay, and plan for any changes to my finances

As a disabled person

The content is ‘done’ when I know:

• how long someone can stay over without affecting my benefits
• how long I can stay with someone else without affecting their benefits
• how having people stay at my house could affect my benefits
• what, if any, action I need to take if I am having people stay at my house

The pair write

I prepared a list of questions to ask during the pair write, based on the user story. For example:

• Is it different for each benefit?
• Does it matter who the person staying over is?

I had the pair write with an expert from Scope’s helpline and got good information to answer my questions.

But looking at my notes I realised I needed to reframe how I thought of the piece. At the start, I had thought it was about answering the question:

“Does having someone stay over affect benefits?”

The answer to that is “no, it shouldn’t”. But that was not the complete answer.

Somebody who reads the piece will use it to decide what they should do. So, the piece also needed to talk about how having someone to stay could affect them even when it shouldn’t. I did not have this information.

I emailed these follow-up questions:

• Do the benefits continue while an investigation is happening?
• Is there any other consequence while it is happening?

The answers were that the DWP could stop benefits while they look into someone’s living situation. This is before they know whether the person is breaking the rules or not. Someone would need to know this to assess the risks.

This ended up being an important point in the piece. It seems unlikely that I could ever think of everything I might want to ask in advance. But I also think that with more experience I will get better at this.

The crit

We have feedback workshops called crits to say when a piece is done. We use them instead of sign off.

In crits at Scope, each person has their area of expertise where they have the final say. For example, the subject expert should make sure everything in the piece is true.

First rule of Crit Club: Talk about the content

This means that for each piece of feedback I had to think about who should be making the decision. I had to fight my instinct to defer to other people and think about who I should be deferring to.

This was often simple, but I found it more challenging when I was the person with authority. As content designer, I was in charge of any content decisions that did not come under someone else. This was hard because I had written the original piece, which made it more difficult to see how I should change it. But I think this will get easier as I build confidence and gain experience of making the decisions.

Also, it was more challenging than I thought to make changes based on the feedback. I understood the feedback, but I was focusing on the solutions people had suggested. I needed to think about what problems people were trying to fix and come up with my own solutions. I was able to do this by thinking about the goal of each piece of feedback. I could then see other ways to achieve the same goal.

What’s next?

The page is now in testing. I will write about responding to the testing feedback in my next blog.