Aimee Quantrill, Deliveroo

Hello! I’m Aimee, content design manager at Deliveroo. Originally from sunny Newcastle, I was previously at Booking.com in Amsterdam before moving to London in April 2017 to work with Deliveroo.

Our team works across a range of products and features for riders, restaurants and customers.

How did you get into content design?

With content design being a relatively new discipline, it was more of a gradual thing. I studied media and journalism at university and then worked at newspapers and magazines for a few months. After a stint working in PR, I made the slightly unexpected decision to move to Thailand to teach English. Being one of only a few English speakers in the area, I had to come up with some pretty creative ways to communicate with people. It pushed me to think more about the way we use language, and how it’s intrinsically linked to our culture and habits. I also started freelance writing for websites and really enjoyed the challenges of writing short content that needed to work in multiple languages. A content designer was born!

What does a normal day look like?

It usually starts with the cycle to work and several coffees. Most days I’ll be catching up one to one with my team to find out what they’re working on and chatting about the direction their content is going in. My days also involve meeting with product managers to talk about new releases and how content plays a part, spending time in usability testing with our research team or working on the documentation and tools that help us create amazing, consistent content.

Wednesdays are the exception. It’s when we all come together for Content Day — a ritual that we’ve built into our working week. We spend a lot of our time thinking about products, features and releases, so it’s great to come together and talk purely about content design. We’re also one of the newer disciplines at Deliveroo, so there are things we need to create together to make sure we have a strong foundation to continue to build the team and grow our skills. We do this by hosting a crit, where everyone shows what they’re working on to get feedback and critique from the wider team, and then spend the rest of day workshopping new ideas, creating frameworks for things like error messages and product naming, or learning new tools.

What are the top 3 apps you use?

Slack — our team is all about Slack. We’ve also recently started using Figma and it’s been a real game changer, with the functionality for content designers and product designers to collaborate in real time on the same designs — I think the team uses the words ‘I love Figma’ at least 5 times a day. The third app is obviously Deliveroo, to make sure I always have something tasty for lunch.

Where do you go and what do you do for inspiration?

I usually bounce ideas off the team either in person or via Slack (we really do love Slack) and that’s incredibly helpful. Otherwise I try to look at other apps and products to see how people have tackled certain problems.

I also sometimes do Sudoku or random sums when I have writer’s block — it really helps to get my mind off words.

Are there any books or blogs you’d recommend?

Sarah Richards’ Content Design is brilliant, and a must for anyone who’s writing for websites or products. Or anyone whose job involves communicating using words, for that matter. I also love Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The zero tolerance approach to punctuation by Lynne Truss — making punctuation fun.

What have you worked on that you’re most proud of?

While there are a lot of big, multi-team projects I’ve worked on, a small and meaningful improvement I’m particularly proud of is a feature we worked on that allows customers to say if they need cutlery or not. Small changes like this, which help to reduce the amount of plastic we’re all using, are very cool.

I’m also really proud of the team we’ve built here. We’ve gone from 2 content designers across the whole business, to having a team of 8 within 9 months, with content designers embedded in teams and working closely with design and research. It’s been an intense few months, but it’s really paying off.

How do you approach getting stakeholders on board?

Encouraging stakeholders to connect with their users, either by testing products themselves or by going to user testing, is super important. It helps them see the kind of language that’s being used and understand why that’s being reflected in the product.

We also take stakeholders and everyone in the team on the user journey when we’re showing our work in our content, research and design crits. Talking them through how the user is feeling and why we’ve designed the content the way we have really helps get people on board.

What are the biggest challenges you face as a content designer?

We work extremely fast at Deliveroo, usually in 2 week sprints, so it can be hard knowing that you don’t have time to fully immerse yourself in a feature. I really do think done is better than perfect, but sometimes it takes a lot of effort to balance the demand for quick work with the need to be thoughtful and thorough.

What’s your biggest content pet peeve?

When people think writing is something only professional writers should do. I think it’s amazing when people are interested in writing, whether that’s product writing, blogging or any other medium. It’s great to mentor people and help them learn the best ways to communicate ideas through words.

Do you have any advice for aspiring content designers?

Learn to speak product design. Knowing what designers call each step of their creation process makes it easier to talk about how content design works. Another piece of advice is to get into the habit of documenting your work. Writing out your thinking and why you made certain decisions is really important, along with things like language choices and any research notes. It makes it easier to go back and understand your choices, and helps your team to know what’s going on inside your head.

Is there anything you want to promote?

You can check out our twitter here to find out about upcoming events, and we’re also hiring. If you’re interested in having a coffee and a chat about what we’re up to and the challenges we’re working to solve, feel free to get in touch!

Where can people find you?

I hang out on Twitter way too much — @aimeequantrill.

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Thanks again to Aimee Quantrill for taking the time to answer these questions.