Rewriting our social care content
At Scope, we write information and advice content that helps disabled people and their families solve problems.
Most of the time, the topics are complicated. My job as a content designer is to make it easier to understand. Our content on social care was a few years old and we had lots of new evidence.
With 25 new user stories, around 20 pieces of existing content and lots of evidence, how did we rewrite our social care content?
I’ll be honest, it’s the biggest piece of content work I’ve ever done. All the user stories linked together and seemed to be tangled. I didn’t know where to start. I’m now halfway through writing the content and have managed to untangle it all.
Understanding the user stories
Once we had the user stories, I had several meetings with the user researchers. We call these refinement sessions. We used a huge Word document that had:
- new and existing user stories
- keywords
- existing content
- evidence
We went through 1 user story at a time. I was able to ask questions and begin to understand what the needs were.
After this, I had a meeting with a subject expert. I had some broad questions about the topic and how the user stories linked together. We call these scoping sessions. It can be helpful when you have lots of user stories but you’re not sure how they fit together.
Grouping and tagging
Once I had a better understanding of the user stories, I decided to put them onto a Trello board. Each card was 1 item, whether this was a new user story or an existing piece of content.
Tagging
I was then able to move the cards around and try to group them. Initially, I created a tagging system. The tags included:
- personal budgets
- NHS continuing healthcare
- direct payments
- financial assessment
- personal assistants
- challenge or complaining
- change of circumstances
- respite care
- needs assessment
- care agency
Although these appear to be their own topics, a lot of the user stories would mention several of them. I needed to see the patterns to know which user stories would live on 1 page and the order which the pages would be written in.
At Scope a user story is only assigned to 1 page, even if the acceptance criteria are met by having a link to another piece of content.
For example, user story 21 was about paying for care. I gave it the following tags:
- personal budgets
- NHS continuing healthcare
- direct payments
- financial assessment
All these tags ended up having their own page, these pages would be written first.
This is because I needed to link to them when writing content for user story 21. If the other pages were written after user story 21, I wouldn’t be able to meet all the acceptance criteria.
Grouping
Grouping the user stories was often based on the main tag.
For example, here are the user stories that ended up in the personal assistant group:
- user story 5 was about getting a support worker
- user story 9 was about finding a carer or personal assistant
They both are about personal assistant, but also had tags like:
- needs assessment
- financial assessment
- care agency
When I had the groups, it gave me a better overview of the content and the things I’d be writing about.
Pages and batches of work
At this point I could clearly see how things were interlinked with each other.
Using keyword data and the groups I had made, I put the user stories into pages and gave them a working title. This was my best guess based on the data I had.
Some user stories relied on others to be met first. This tended to follow the order in which someone gets social care.
For example, a page about hiring a personal assistant (PA) would explain how someone gets a PA. First, they would need a needs assessment, then they would need some kind of funding like:
- direct payments
- personal budget
- continuing healthcare
I had to understand the user journey and write the pages in the stages that people would need that content.
The stages were:
- qualifying for support
- types of funding
- using that funding
- complaining or challenging your care
Batches of work
When I started this project, it was unclear how many content designers would be working on it. Therefore, I wanted to create batches of work.
A batch of work would be a group of user stories and pages that could be worked on by 1 person.
I then put the batches into an order based on where they came in the user journey of getting social care.
The end result
Here are the batches of work and the order that they’ll be written in.
- Needs assessments (3 pages)
- Advocacy and support (1 page)
- Respite care (1 page)
- Personal budgets (1 page)
- Continuing healthcare (2 pages, but might become 3 after testing)
- Direct payments and personal assistants (at least 2 pages)
- Challenging or complaining about your social care (1 page)
- Care agencies and residential care (1 page)
- Social care if you move (1 pages)
I am still working through the batches and have made changes as I’ve gone along.
Nothing is ever set in stone, that’s the beauty of content design. Sometimes you need to start with a plan and see what happens.
