5 things I’ve learnt in my first year as content designer at RNID
I joined RNID’s digital and innovation team in September 2020. Here are the 5 main things I’ve learned in my first year.
1. Don’t try to write the perfect first draft
My team works in two-week sprints. I’ll often have to write and publish a new piece of content within a sprint. I have to write the first draft quickly so my team, subject matter experts and any other relevant stakeholders can review it.
Before I started at RNID, I tended to pore over a first draft, trying to write it perfectly the first time. Working in an agile, iterative way has taught me to get over the idea of a perfect draft. Whatever I write will need to be edited according to my colleagues’ feedback. Once it’s live it will need to be iterated continually according to user behaviour.
Joshua Rudd’s blog Embrace terrible first drafts has some great advice, including this quote from author Anne Lamott:
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper.”
2. Share your work early and often
I need to share my work several times throughout the content design process. This is to make sure:
- it meets the user need it’s designed to address
- it’s factually accurate
- subject matter experts and other stakeholders can sign it off.
We reserve time in our calendars after our daily stand up to allow any member of the team to demo something and first-look feedback. We also hold content critiques (or ‘crits’) with subject matter experts. If a demo or a content crit isn’t possible, we share work in a way that allows colleagues to feed back in their own time.
At the end of a sprint, we hold a review where we demo our work to subject matter experts, stakeholders and other colleagues from across the charity.
Sharing work early and often has helped me be less precious about and protective over my work, more objective and better at editing. Presenting my work regularly means I’ve gotten better at describing how, and why, content has changed between iterations.
3. Document your work as you go
Documenting different iterations of content makes it much easier to demonstrate how it’s changed from version to version.
It’s a good idea to make a note of the rationale for each iteration. For example, if you change a webform because participants in user interviews find copy on a button confusing, take before and after screenshots and annotate them with relevant quotes from the user interviews.
4. Let your users tell you what they need
My team accesses user insights and feedback through the following ways:
- Our user researcher conducts research with users to help us understand their experiences, needs and pain points
- Our Information Line Team keeps a log of things they’re asked about
- We have a feedback form embedded on every page of our website
- We use data tools like Hotjar and Google Analytics, Optimize, Search Console and Trends.
In previous roles, I’ve worked as a copywriter and content creator at organisations that were less user-centred. In these roles, I essentially had to guess what users wanted to read. My guesses were shaped by my own assumptions and experience.
Sometimes I’d get lucky and create something that users engaged with. But just as often I’d produce content that didn’t meet a user need, and as a result, wasn’t used.
Sarah Winters writes about something similar in her blog post ‘Copywriter to content designer’:
“The way I used to do copywriting was to draw people in using only the ideas in my head. I would pull my audience through a literary path of imagination towards a product I wanted to sell […] For me, copywriting is inwards, out; content design is outwards, in.”
If you give your users the opportunity to tell you what they need, you have a much better chance at meeting that need through your content.
5. Make time to reflect
At the end of every sprint, we have a team retro to discuss:
- what went well
- what didn’t go well
- what we can do differently in future sprints.
It’s helpful to have a dedicated time to speak about how we can make our work more impactful and work better together. Something that came up regularly was the idea of blogging about our work — which is why I wrote this post.
My niece and uncle are both deaf, and I find my role genuinely purposeful and rewarding. I’m looking forward to another year of work to help make life fully inclusive for deaf people and those with hearing loss and tinnitus.
We’re currently hiring for several design and product roles. Find out about jobs in the Digital and Innovation Team at RNID.
