Starting conversations about content design

Part of my job leading the Content Design team is to firmly establish content design as a valued profession at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Content design is still relatively new to DWP. In fact, it’s a relatively new role altogether. We’ve found it useful to highlight the main differences between a traditional editorial role and the content design role for people joining our growing team, who might be new to working on services.

Conversations we’ve had with the content communities within the department and across government have helped us identify 5 content design principles. These underline our user-centred, evidence-based approach, and are proving to be a useful way of helping people in other roles understand the value of working with a content designer.

One of these principles is ‘Help service teams communicate clearly’. One way we’re doing this is to help them to define their focus, by working together to identify and write a mission statement, a service description and a service name.

Sharing our approach and setting standards is proving a good way of starting conversations. More people are talking to us about how we work, asking for our help and wanting to find out more about content design. There’s still a lot to do, but we’ve made a good start.