This year I’m embarking on an adventure. It’s been 13+ years since I started working in content design, and I’ve decided it’s time for a change.

I’m writing this as a handy guide for future work partners, plus to document this preciously naïve moment in time.

Where I’m going

I don’t know! But what I do know is that I’ve signed up for a month of clown school at Ecole Gaulier, and a diploma with Barefoot Coaching.

Since leaving my permanent job at Meta in 2022, I’ve been on an amazing adventure:

• working for myself
• working with a huge breadth of organisations
• meeting amazing people
• doing my best to solve really hard, diverse problems

But I’ve had this overwhelming feeling that I want to bring more play into my working day, and work more closely with people outside of the structures and systems of companies and organisations.

So I’m trusting in myself that I’ll find my sweet spot somewhere between clowning and coaching by spring 2025.

What it means for the next year

• I’ll still be working with ZOE until the end of June
• I’ll be at clown school in July, and I’ll take August off to reflect
• I’ll be looking for 3 days/week of content design work from September until February — something to run alongside my diploma
• From there… who knows

What I’m scared of

• I’m taking a big gamble by leaping into the unknown without a plan, but I trust my intuition and know myself well enough to push through
• I’m nervous that Sep-Feb will involve a ton of context-switching, without enough time to reflect

Why I’m excited

• Life is so precious. I 100% made the right move in going freelance — I love working for myself, and the variety it brings.
• I don’t know what my identity looks like as a coach. But after undertaking an incredible 12-week career change coaching programme myself (shout out to Claire Brown), I feel stronger than ever in my identity and values. So it’s time to create a work life that fits around those, rather than the vice versa.
• I came to this ‘plan’ completely organically—based on how I feel, not the destination. So if I can’t trust in that, I don’t know what I can trust in!
• If it doesn’t go in the direction I vaguely intend, that’s OK! Content design is a fantastic fall-back. I’m not leaving because I’m done with it — I just really crave change.
• Clowning brings out something in me that feels so vulnerable and brave at the same time. It’s ego death. It’s about getting comfortable in ‘the flop’, and doing everything in service of an audience. Plus it’s stupidly funny. So I’m hoping for a learning curve in my month of 6-hour classes every day.
• I’m so sure I’m going to meet some interesting characters along the way.
• I’m already reading some amazing psychology books, and I’ve been fascinated by my last year in therapy (Jungian psychoanalysis). I can’t wait to learn new things.
• Coaching is broad! And while I’ve got a ton of upskilling to do, I believe my work in behavioural change design puts me in good stead.
• The main one: I love adventure.

1. Being freelance has brought about a whole new relationship with work. What I do to earn money is a huge part of me, but it’s no longer my identity. I simply don’t stay with clients long enough for that to be the case. I’m able to be passionate about work but within bounds — and without becoming apathetic, as I’d irrationally feared.
2. Going freelance is somewhat opaque as a career path, and I’m finding a lot of value in openly talking about what it looks like — either here or through 1:1s. Please folks, continue to reach out and I’ll share all that I can to make it more transparent (especially if you’re in the UK, where I have the most experience).
3. I’m trying new things, but it’s up to me which direction I try at any given time. Over the last month I was offered work that I could probably have done but hadn’t done before, and I felt empowered to turn it down — because I had personal things I knew would take priority over the next few months instead.
4. I’ve taken around 7 weeks’ holiday over these last 6 months, and it felt SO good. By holiday, I mean I completely switched off. Being away from screens feels phenomenal. Special shout-out to Boom Festival.
5. I’m more readily able to distinguish between things that truly require my full force, and things that don’t. This applies to work and non-work alike. Because the people and constraints around me are constantly changing, I have to rely way more on myself. And it feels good.

How I might do better

1. Only recently have I avoided the pull into panic mode towards the end of a contract. I’m putting a lot of work into meeting awesome people, and it’s paying off as work starts to come to me. But it’s still somewhat of an unnatural feeling to trust the process so much when I’m not sure where my next pay-cheque is coming from.
2. I love the variety of work I’ve taken on, and I’ve managed to find work that’s almost 85% within my strengths zone this year. But I’m still not able to readily articulate the conditions I need to thrive. I don’t know if it’s luck or instinct that’s got me there, but I think I could do a better job of framing up the types of work I look for, and reflecting on the 15% that drains me.
3. I want more 4-day weeks. I’ve created the right conditions for this over the next 6 months, and I’ll be trying my best to stick to it.
4. Keep leaning in to community. I created a WhatsApp group of principal/lead-level content designers, and it’s been a powerful way to ask anything and share learnings amongst ourselves. This was a goal of mine at 6 months, so I’m planning on continuing that vulnerability.
5. Be more mindful of the amount of clients I work with at any one time. 5 clients in a week was too much; one client for 5 days a week isn’t varied enough for me.

How does this resonate? What will I be reflecting on this time next year? I’m nervous and excited to find out.

I’ve had quite a few folks reach out to me recently to talk through my experience going freelance as a content/service designer, especially folks who’ve been laid off from permanent jobs and need to think differently because of the current state of the market.

I wanted to share some of the top things I’ve learned since making the switch last August and share that working freelance can be wonderful — and extremely different from a permanent job.

For context, I’m a lead/principal with around 12 years of experience in this field. So I’m not sure this scales if you’re earlier on in your design career.

1. Being somewhere for less time means way, way better work/life balance. I set my hours. This is essential given the geographical spread of my clients (USA, Argentina, South Africa). It means I’m in control. Also, I decide whether to seek out longer-term projects or go for fractional engagements.
2. There’s less external validation and a stronger need for self-assurance. There are no performance reviews, and I no longer have a manager. No one tells me whether I’m doing a good job or how to improve, so I need more confidence in my instincts — especially if my work ends before there’s data to see its impact.
3. With less time on a project, you tend to cut through the noise faster. With less time to spare, I ask the harder questions faster. Instead of wondering “why?” and trying to find the answers myself, I’ll instantly escalate and raise gaps as blockers.
4. There’s no need to be boxed in by a single job title if you’re a generalist. This is a big one for me. I’ve been a content designer by job title for most of my career, with a service design slant. Now I’m taking on work where I do both — my title matters way less as I’m not calibrated or trying to get promoted according to a single track.
5. You meet tons of incredible people, really fast. I’ve worked with 12 clients in 10 months and met some amazing people — all of whom have extremely different experiences to me. It’s helping me learn and grow.
6. You always need to have one eye on what’s next. It’s hard to relax. I’m constantly looking out for what’s ahead, especially when I’m working shorter-term. Lead times for new work tend to be very short, but I’m always meeting folks and scouring LinkedIn for the next opportunity.
7. You invest less time assuming you need to win people over. You’re hired on the assumption you can do this. My experience in permanent jobs or even changing teams within a permanent job is that I’ve got a lot to prove. Coming in as a consultant, I’ve found that doesn’t tend to happen. It’s very freeing.
8. You need to find your own community. Moving around so much, it’s hard to find a stable community of go-to people. Slowly I’m connecting with WhatsApp and Slack channels and creating my communities, but this isn’t something that was all that intuitive or easy to find initially.
9. You’ll rarely be the one to see something through. This means it’s more important than ever to communicate not just about my work, but also my approach — and take on mentoring/coaching work to ensure that things keep running once my engagement ends.

This is a companion piece to my recent blogpost, 6 reasons why generative AI, LLMs and tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney won’t replace content designers.

Over on LinkedIn, that blogpost sparked a lot of responses along the lines of:

• “You’re kidding yourself if you don’t think it’ll affect us”
• “It’s a matter of time before it can do the things you’re saying it can’t do”
• “We all know where this is heading”

While I disagree with these statements because as of yet there’s no replacement for human empathy and context, I do acknowledge the role AI might play in ideation. In many ways, we’re at the centre of the most significant technological shift since the cloud or mobile.

I wanted to take a step back and write something more hopeful about how the core content design skillset translates to a new world of work. So here are 7 things I see content designers being ideally placed to drive in a world driven by large language models and generative AI:

1. Internal-facing information architecture. LLMs are deep-learning algorithms trained on enormous amounts of data. Data that lacks structure is harder to human-verify, and companies will want to derisk ‘hallucinations’ (ie AI getting something wrong). To do this, data will need to be in order and auditable. Content designers are well-versed in information architecture — the skillset needed to get data in order.
2. Structured data and product governance. The way teams document these things is often scattergun, and the language often full of jargon. To help teams make sense of systems, this information will need to be more coherent, consistent, better maintained and easier to understand.
3. Speculative design. Conversational models aren’t easily able to explore future social, political, technological or ethical issues with specific detail, let alone generate new ideas and solutions. Content designers have great intuition here, and it’s an opportunity for us to push into a more visionary space and define long-term product direction. And this is something that’ll keep us ahead of AI’s bias and gullibility.
4. Product specs. Ideation requires needs and business context to be clearly defined, in plain English. We’re extremely well placed to be the glue for our cross-functional teams and cut through the noise to clearly articulate a spec.
5. Trade-offs. AI might be able to optimise content for growth, but what about ethical factors like impact on mental health or other things that can’t easily be measured? This requires a human touch, and ensuring that particular combinations of words won’t make a person’s day worse.
6. Privacy models. Without clarity here, we’ll see confusion and litigation. LLMs are valuable tools, but raise massive data privacy concerns. There’s huge sensitivity here, and content designers should be involved early in making sure that privacy policies are not only explainable but defensible.
7. Design system work to show when content was developed with AI. I’m thinking about AI-supported blogposts, voice content like podcasts and so much more. I’m hoping to see industry-wide standards emerge here, as companies have a responsibility to help people understand this new world.

More content at PlainEnglish.io.

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7 new ways content designers can lead in an AI-forward future was originally published in Artificial Intelligence in Plain English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve seen some chatter about how ChatGPT might replace content designers, and I want to debunk it and give other content designers a reference point.

Here are 6 reasons (probably an incomplete list) why it’s not our time to go:

1. Part of content design is about understanding the facts. These facts aren’t usually well-documented and tend to become apparent through conversations and workshops. This is a human skill.
2. Even if the facts are apparent (eg the system behind the experience, the adjacent research), it’d take longer to compile them in a readable way than it’d take a content designer to produce great content design.
3. Even if the facts are apparent, we shouldn’t feel comfortable handing them over to a third party. It risks breaching confidentiality and most likely handing over personally identifiable information that could be misused.
4. Being a great content designer requires empathy and intuition, and being able to anticipate how words might land the wrong way or be interpreted badly in a stress case. AI can’t understand this nuance.
5. AI isn’t self-governing. Good content design requires maintenance, to make sure that words still reflect the facts and surrounding context of a scenario.
6. AI doesn’t do stakeholder management. It can’t predict legal risk, nor can it do the work of ensuring that a particular product experience is consistent with another and adherent to content standards.

So… share this with your teams anytime they suggest replacing you with AI.

6 reasons why AI/LLMs won’t replace content designers was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My 3-month reflections kickstarted some super-interesting conversations, so I’m going to keep sharing periodically.

What I’ve learned

1. Familiarity is comforting. Over the last few months I’ve found new work through people I know, and after making a leap into the unknown it’s been great to have a solid baseline coming in to a new project.
2. As a contractor, I’m tending away from exploring organisational design challenges and staying more focused on product work. As a permanent employee I’d naturally stray into this territory, but on shorter-term engagements I’m more likely to remain laser-focused on product work. Turns out I love doing product work so much more than the rest, and I’m finding this freedom extremely empowering.
3. Working with the same clients longer than 2 months means building deeper relationships, and this feeds my soul. I’m working with fantastic humans at Headway and Sidechat, and I’m especially loving the close partnership between content and product design.
4. There’s no perfect moment to take a holiday. But at the same time, there’s always a chance to do it — if you’re able to take the leap of faith, and you can cover yourself financially. To celebrate my 6-month freelance-versary, I’m taking off the whole of March and travelling to Japan. I’m very excited, and I won’t be thinking about work at all.
5. I’m contracted to work a certain number of hours per week with my clients, which completely changes (a) how I spend those hours, and (b) how much time I have left in my week. I’ve been using my time outside of work to push my curiosity — and it’s been so, so great. I’m taking a 3-day backing vocals course this week with Lurine Cato, and I recently did a clown course with the incredible Mick Barnfather. I have SO much energy for things outside of work now that I’m freelance!

How I might do better

1. Even though I’m on the precipice of a month off, the longest block I’ve managed to take off since making the leap has been a week over Christmas and new year. I did 4-day weeks for a period, but it’s no replacement for fully switching gears. I’ll work harder on this once I’m back from Japan at the end of March.
2. I’ve been blessed with wonderful clients and fascinating work over the last 6 months, and I’m a person who naturally lives in the moment. But I still find myself anxious about what the summer holds, given that when I started exploring opportunities last July everything seemed pretty quiet. I’m not sure how to solve for this, really. But it’s on my mind.
3. I’ve got a lot on the go at the moment. As well as my 2 main clients, I joined a band and I’m working on a book proposal (more on that soon). I tend to thrive when my brain is flooded with new input, but I’m conscious that the context-switching can lead to burnout and a brain that’s not quite firing on all cylinders. I need to think about how to make this work better.
4. I’ve reconnected with some amazing former colleagues recently, and been meeting wonderful new people too. As per my 3-month post, I’m still craving that sense of community. I’ll keep thinking about that. I feel like I now have a better sense of where my people are, which is huge progress from the last update.
5. I need to find a new therapist. Ongoing therapy is so important for mental health. When I was in the structure of permanent employment, I used my private health insurance to find a therapist. Now I’m alone, it feels a bit overwhelming. But it’ll be worth it, and I’ll be trying to find someone for the long-haul.

What I’ve learned after 6 months of freelancing — and how I might do better in the next was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As designers, it’s on us to represent what our teams are building and make it make sense to the user. But users often don’t need to know the ins and outs — so we have an extra task in figuring out what to focus on, and what’s best to keep out of the product.

I’m opening up a framework I’ve been using for the last 5+ years of my career when deciding what to be transparent about.

The framework

It’s simple. There are 3 questions:

1. Does transparency add value to the user? Eg does it support people, empower them or inform them about something useful.
2. Does it create risk? Eg brand, legal, adversarial, human rights.
3. Will it be understood? Ie is it built on an existing mental model, and will it complement the product’s primary objective.

If we ask this question for every bit of transparency we’re exploring adding to a product experience, we’ll go a long way to making sure that product experiences remain useful, uncluttered and comprehensible.

If the product you’re building has multiple audiences, consider each question per audience group to make sure the decision scales.

And it’s rare that there’s no risk, but from here you can start a conversation about trade-offs and make a decision that takes the whole picture into account.

The benefits

Here’s a few:

• It speeds up decision-making
• It helps us be consistent
• It aids alignment
• It helps us move forward with principled product development even without perfect metrics

Where you might use it

I’ve applied it to product experiences like:

1. Error messages
2. Content takedown experiences
3. Messaging about outages
4. Changes in billing
5. Explaining how personalisation works

Arguably, you might even want to apply it to things like press releases, speeches and internal presentations.

Using the framework to push for systemic change

Sometimes you might find that transparency reveals flaws in products and practices. This is a moment to step up as a content designer and push for systemic change — as we can’t write around a system that’s not defensible.

How to implement

I suggest thinking about this framework applies to your work—and kickstarting a conversation with your UX research, data science, product and eng partners about how it might fit your products needs.

If you’ve got interest, do a quick audit on what’s live and see what information might be superfluous—plus what transparency might be missing.

See my deep dive on the Meta content takedown experience for a closer view on an experience built on top of this framework.

I went freelance at the end of August, for the second time in my career.

First time around, I took on full-time freelance content design projects that just kept getting extended. I naively assumed it’d be similar as I returned to self-employment, but my path so far has been vastly different.

I’ve been doing a real mix of roles so far, as well as content design — including product strategy, service design, product design, scriptwriting, design sprint facilitation, and helping founders with pitches.

My clients have been extremely varied, too — taking in big tech, public sector, small charity and start-up.

This is a candid share of my journey so far.

What I’ve learned

1. Being a generalist is a super-strength as a freelancer, in a way that might feel limiting/confusing while in-house. It means more opportunities, more variety and more ability to flex while on a project.
2. You tend to have to ask for feedback. It hasn’t come to me as readily as I’ve been used to. That’s OK. Maybe it’s because we’re less incentivised as freelancers, because feedback doesn’t ladder up to a performance review? If so, that makes me sad.
3. Seeking out similarly-minded peers and companies is super-important. I’ve invested blocks of time having virtual coffees in between projects, and it’s been so worth it — to build my network, and also to find inspiration.
4. Saying no to things is so liberating. I’m using my gut instinct here and have said no a couple of times . It was scary at first! So long as I’m confident I can financially handle it, I’ll continue doing getting kicks out of saying no.
5. It’s really nice being able to take on different flavours of work. I’ve really enjoyed working on a mix of things that ship quickly, early pre-discovery work, and futures/vision projects. Shifting headspace by ambition has kept me on my toes.

How I might do better

1. Even though being a generalist has its pros, role-switching within a project can be hard. I think I’m still a little institutionalised from being in-house, and feeling like I constantly need to justify output up a reporting chain.
2. No matter how much experience I have, doing short-term consulting can trigger imposter syndrome. There’s not much time to get to know people, which means I have to find at least a baseline of trust within myself. I’m going to work on ways to do this.
3. My focus on short-term projects means I’m always thinking about the next thing. This caused me some anxiety, which turned out (so far) to be unfounded. I need to get better at understanding timelines — and that the best opportunities sometimes come out of nowhere, very last minute.
4. Book holiday. I’ve been doing 4-day weeks most of the time, and taking long weekends out of London. But this isn’t a substitute for longer periods off. I’ve got my first break scheduled in around the new year, and intend to take a bigger block away in spring.
5. I miss having the same day-to-day collaborators and confidantes. Freelancing can feel quite lonely. So I’m going to explore different ways to get that connection back (ideas welcome!).

This post documents important context as well as some very practical recommendations. You may want to read it alongside my post on the 5 things that can hurt comprehension and readability in difficult moments, to set context.

Hiring and org structure

1. Hire diverse teams. This is the most important thing you can do. If your teams are a monolith, you won’t predict the types of harms that people will experience on the products you’re building — and you probably won’t prioritise the work when you find out about it either.
2. Product and policy should work hand in hand from day 1. Design policies in a way that’s fair and clear for individuals affected. Think not just about how you’ll communicate company-level data, but what you’ll say to the person who’s borne the brunt of content moderation. Whether it’s someone whose report wasn’t actioned or someone who’s had content taken down.
3. Make policies actionable but reduce complexity. They don’t need to be written in legalese for this to happen. Look to GOV.UK for inspiration.
4. Machine learning engineering, data engineering and user-facing product teams should work together on governance. It’s imperative to log facts about enforcement to answer users’ questions — so that the user-facing product team can be transparent to users without having to unpick a spider’s web of technical terminology and interwoven tooling.
5. Don’t silo integrity work. It’s everyone’s job. Every feature can be misused, or used in a harmful way beyond its original intent. Get all teams thinking about this from the get-go — make it work like muscle memory.

Product strategy

1. Prioritise the work. If not on the basis of metrics, on the basis of principles — and if necessary to get buy-in, regulations and legislation (though you should be compelled for human-centred reasons).
2. Don’t stall while you search for the perfect metrics. Integrity work can be hard to measure, as the impact may stretch beyond the realms of your product and be longer-term than you’re able to easily track. Guide feature development on the people problems you identify in research.
3. Get your analogies right. Think not of users as criminals and yourselves as the police or a legal system. It’s often not that deep. Sure, some people will behave egregiously — this is life, after all — but you don’t want to condemn everyone who violates to a future without digital privilege. There’s so much that’s broken about prisons and policing, and there’s no need to carry over that burden into a new space.
4. Understand that perfect models and AI will never be enough. There’ll always be a delta between what a company wants on its platform and things that cause safety issues and discomfort in the user base. Especially with global products.
5. Don’t assume that users will opt in to controls. Create the right defaults to keep those at most risk of harm safe.
6. Remember — high severity, low prevalence harms can put lives at risk. Impact-sizing and prioritisation isn’t as blunt an instrument when working in this domain.
7. Do everything in plain English. Bits of your product strategy will inevitably end up user-facing, and need to be localised. If there’s jargon, this will delay you and create risk — as well as operational inefficiency as you hire new people.

Design work

1. Get out of the abstract and prototype fast. Put together rough mocks and test with people — it’s the fastest way to challenge your own assumptions and get closer to people’s mental models of whatever you’re building.
2. Focus research on underrepresented groups and those with low literacy and digital literacy. These are different audiences.
3. Look at what’s being done elsewhere — there’s some great work out there. I always looked to Twitter, Nextdoor and Airbnb — they do a fantastic job of putting the right nudges in the right places.

—

I’m a freelance designer/product strategist, and I’m available for short-term discrete consulting projects on this topic. Get in touch if you’d like to chat.

Building integrity by design: what I’d do if I were a start-up was originally published in Startup Stash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m sharing my tried-and-tested framework on how to design products and services for behavioural change. It’s applicable to all types of behavioural change, though my experience is connected to real-world problems—for example things relating to health, education, bullying and hate speech.

I always look at this framework alongside Figma, and I use it to ground myself. It’s not prescriptive enough to tell you how to design — that’s where research and data come in. But it will help you identify specific moments of a journey to ideate and push work further.

Step 1: Get people’s attention

There are 5 things I like to follow:

1. Help people recognise themselves in the message. Address people’s emotions and identities.
2. Address things competing for their attention — like self-doubt, competing demands, social pressure.
3. Use familiar language—the words that people use. This is what resonates, otherwise you’re creating an unnecessary barrier.
4. Be a trustworthy source. Attribute a voice or an actor where you can, so that the person has a reason to focus on what you’re trying to say.
5. Be captivating. This makes the message harder to ignore.

Step 2: Tell people what they have to do

This is how this one breaks down:

1. Be specific — help people picture themselves carrying out the action. Make this as concrete as you can.
2. Give people all the info they need to move forward. If there are dependencies or complications, don’t hide behind them.
3. Create and signpost next steps. Leave no room for ambiguity.
4. Convey appropriate urgency and timelines. Without a deadline, people are unlikely to move forward.
5. Be clear who takes responsibility. If there’s something that the company or a third-party actor needs to do, acknowledge it.

Step 3: Motivate them to act

Finally, you want people to actually make the change. Here are some things that I’ve found to work:

1. Show people consequences of not doing the thing. This applies the necessary pressure.
2. Make following the instructions very compelling. Words of encouragement help here, but make sure to be tonally sensitive.
3. Help people feel empowered to act. Put the ball in their court.
4. Make the next steps sound fun, interesting or intriguing. It doesn’t have to be all three though.