A day in the life of… Ellen Gofton, UX Writing Manager
I’ve been at John Lewis for just over 2 years and I manage our small but mighty UX writing team.
A typical morning
I have a nearly-4 year-old, so my day always starts somewhere between 6 and 7am. Once I’ve managed to wrangle him to preschool, I take the dog for a quick walk. Getting outside before starting the working day is a huge plus for me and as cheesy as it sounds, really sets me up for the day.
Once I’m back home and have brewed enough coffee to get me going, work usually begins with Slack and emails. Confession time: I don’t join any stand-ups at the moment. We’re a very small UX writing team and while I’m currently supporting a couple of teams, I consciously deprioritised attending multiple stand-ups every day in favour of having more focus time.
Into the work…
My to-do list at the moment is pretty evenly divided between one large project I’m focusing on, and a swathe of operational things we’re working on as a team. This includes stuff like updating our style guide, overhauling how we receive ad hoc requests, and improving our blogging guidelines.
In an effort to reduce context switching, (the biggest pain point for UX writers everywhere!) I plan tasks on a day-by-day basis and carve out serious deep-thinking time. Because I only have a small amount of time outside of meetings today, I pick off a couple of quick things on my list: finally replying to a Figma query where someone wanted something clarifying, trying to arrange a speaker for our Accessibility Champs meeting, and sharing memes on Slack.
Today’s first meeting is a prioritisation meeting with the other UX writers. This happens weekly where we review all incoming/ad hoc requests and catch up on the status of what’s in progress. These ‘reactive’ requests aren’t the bulk of our work, but we want to support other teams where we can and it’s a great time to talk through any tricky requests we need each other’s help with. They often turn into a bit of a mini crit/show and tell and we always have some great chats.
Straight after this it’s the weekly showcase — an Omnichannel-wide meeting where the different Product areas demo their work. As someone who is inherently nosy about the work that happens in the teams we’re not directly supporting, I love these. And selfishly, they’re so essential for understanding work which might impact what I’m working on, so I always try to attend.
What’s on your plate?
Lunchtime is my favourite time of day. This is no secret to anyone I work with, I even started a Slack channel about it. Today I’m feeling lazy so I had some frozen gyoza while listening to a podcast. Often, lunch will also consist of another quick dog walk or some Yoga With Adriene. Or, on a sad day, I’ll put some washing on. There is always washing.
Back to it…
After my non-negotiable lunch break, I have another show and tell, this time for the main project I’m working on right now. I’m supporting and contributing to a couple of product teams within this much larger project, so quite a lot comes out of this meeting that I need to take a look at. Some is very quick and actionable: microcopy feedback I can turn around very quickly. Some is much larger and needs a lot more thought.
Doing copy changes or giving thoughts on the fly can be an impossible task, so I regularly say if there’s something I need to take away to look at. In this case, I’m thinking about help content for users which will be available across points in their journey, so there is no quick answer.
Meetings continue into the afternoon, including a one-to-one with one of the UX writing team. While this can often fall into a ‘run through your to-do list’ chat, most of the time we also talk about bigger picture priorities and what’s going on across the Partnership. As we are lucky to have a bit of freedom in where we put our focus, we are constantly reviewing our priorities, and in the spirit of John Lewis democracy, we do this as a team!
I have a meeting-free window at the end of the day (the joy!) where I put some music on to try and help with focus. This generally has to be vocal-less ambient sounds, and today I’m enjoying one of the many mixes available on NTS Radio. How people listen to podcasts when working, I have no idea.
This time is spent organising my thoughts from the team show and tell earlier so they’re still fresh in my mind. I have a huge Miro where I’m mind-mapping the help content conundrum and trying to improve how we do it for this new project.
I end the working day feeling smugly organised, but knowing it’s something that’s a long way off being resolved.
And so, to bed
After the working day is over, I have some kind of easy dinner with my husband and son, before watching the latest season of Drag Race and going to bed very early with whatever book I’m reading. At the moment it’s The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan.
Being a UX writing manager is extremely rock ‘n roll.
