Holy Water

23 March 2023

Water you looking at?

I’ve never lived more than a 30-minute drive from a large, salty body of water. I’m not really sure what life would be like without that access. I know there’s a cliché about coastal bias, but this is different. And I will fully admit that I am biased for the coasts. Whether it was during my early years in Florida, or my current ones in San Francisco, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be land-locked. And this is where we make a dramatic change in direction, and head straight into content strategy!

See, I think one of the most important attributes for a good content strategist is to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Whether you do that through user interviews or customer data or even persona explorations, we need to be able to build for people outside of our own lived experience. Like baking accessibility fundamentals into product launches, rather than trying to tack them on afterwards. We need to build for everyone, not just for ourselves.

Sometimes, all that takes is some imagination. Other times, it’s really questioning the assumptions we have about how people will use what we’ve built. And, occasionally, it’s stepping in to say that what we’re building is not ready for public consumption because it could put people in harm’s way. There’s a lot of that kind of discussion happening now around AI tools and large language models, and I highly recommend you digging into those ideas on your own (try following Timnit Gebru and Mia Shah-Dand as a start). But we should be that skeptical about everything we build, making sure we’re not making design decisions based on narrow perspectives and unquestioned assumptions. It’s why I believe our design teams need to be more diverse. It’s also why I think we need to move away from attention-based metrics, and more toward ones focused on task completion. And, most importantly, it’s why I hope that if you read anything in these posts which misses the mark, you call me out on it; I can’t see my own blind spots until someone points them out to me. And I want you to!

This push for expanded perspective, though, isn’t limited to just building new things. It can come into play when looking at our own habits, too. I have a story which rattles around in my head that I don’t really know the source of. It feels like family lore, and for someone, maybe it really is. But on a…