Episode 49: Sarah Winters, Content Design London - Unpacking content strategy and content design

Kristina Halvorson:
This is the content strategy podcast and I’m your host, Kristina Halvorson. On each and every episode I interview someone I admire who’s doing meaningful work in content strategy and all its adjacent disciplines. If you care about making content more useful, usable and inclusive for all, welcome in, you have found your people.

Friends and neighbors, welcome back to the Content Strategy Podcast. It is officially rolling into winter at this point. Here in Minnesota, the days have grown unfairly, unreasonably short. It's dark when I get up, it's dark when I'm done with work, it's dark all the time. But there is a little bit of light that I'm about to bring into your ear canal right this very minute, and it's our guest today who is Sarah Winters, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about her.

Sarah Winters is the delightful CEO and founder of Content Design London, a content design agency that works around the world helping governments and organizations to transform the way that they communicate. She is also the author of this seminal book, Content Design, and a respected and in-demand speaker who shares her expertise to audiences at conferences, meetups, and events around the world. Sarah, hello.

Sarah Winters:
Hello. I'm shining light in every direction.

Kristina Halvorson:
See? You can't see her, but she's emanating a rosy glow of good health and good intentions and warmth. Okay, that's all I got. Should we just wrap there?

Sarah Winters:
Yeah.

Kristina Halvorson:
Sarah, where are you today? Where am I speaking to you from?

Sarah Winters:
So I am at home, which is just outside of London, near Twickenham, and I have a cat on my lap who is purring outrageously.

Kristina Halvorson:
Are you also drinking tea?

Sarah Winters:
Of course I'm drinking tea, I'm British, hello.

Kristina Halvorson:
Okay, good. Thank you for confirming stereotypes everywhere.

Sarah Winters:
Absolutely.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's right. Sarah, I usually start off our podcast interviews by asking folks to share their career path to content strategy and content design. So I wonder if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit with our at home audience about where you come from and why you do the things you do.

Sarah Winters:
So I'm going to take you quite far back. When I was at school, my teacher told me that I wouldn't amount to anything and told my parents that in front of me. And so I had a little bit of belligerence going on there and they said, you're rubbish at art. So I went and studied design. So I went and I had Batik printed dungarees and a half shaved head, and then I found out that copywriters earn more money. So I went to art school later on and mixed the two. And so suddenly the rest of my career path makes more sense. I went into the government when there was a thing over here called Foot and Mouth Disease, and I used to go to 22 Whitehall, which is just off the back of number 10 at five o'clock in the morning and talk about cows quite a lot to the cabinet.

And then I was hooked. Hooked, I tell you, on government communications and the way the government told citizens, or subjects I should say, of the UK, what they should be doing and what they shouldn't be doing. And then fast forward a whole bunch of years, many different government contracts, and I ended up at the Government Digital Service, and I worked there until all the men underneath me were being paid more than me and I decided to leave. And I produced a course based on all the content design techniques plus more that we did at GDS. And then I wrote a book to go with the course and just put it up, just to see. And then I started an agency, and here I am talking to you with my cat on my lap.

Kristina Halvorson:
That just is... There was a whole lot that we're going to need to unpack in that, because you tell that story as though it was just like, and then I got this job and then I thought I'd write a book and now I have a cat. But truly yours is the first book that really worked to codify content design as a practice, as a group of activities and roles that organizations and individuals could take on to get a thing done when it comes to getting to content that helps people do what they need to do online. A thing that did not happen in the book that you wrote was that there were loose definitions of content design as a thing. And that was the thing that folks were trying to pin you down about for years. How today are you defining the work of content design?

Sarah Winters:
This is where it all gets very sticky. Do you know what? Content design, let me go into this for a bit. You can always cut it, Kristina, just cut it all out.

Kristina Halvorson:
Just your having said that guarantees that I absolutely will not.

Sarah Winters:
So when I was at Directgov, so this is around 2010, in government there was a big orange website called Directgov. And this is when the Government Digital Service was starting up and they had an alpha. I went down to lead the content team at the beginning of the beta. And the director there was like, what do you want to be called? What do you want your team to be called? And I just went off on this massive rant. You've heard my rants, most people have heard, I can't not rant. And I went off on this rant about how we could do so much more than words, which is what we've been trapped into in government for years. And because I had access to designers and developers who were sitting right next to me and they only cared about getting out something that was good, I didn't want the word editorial or writer in the title because I really wanted to change that conversation.

So that's where the term content design came from. And then I just went shopping around all the disciplines. And so I was watching these designers and product managers doing journey mapping, and I'm like, we should be journey mapping and we should be doing language mapping across the channels. We should be knowing what people say and do and think at every point of this journey. So you know what? Content team are going to be here. I did crits when I was at art school, and crits for me were like, you put your work up and then everybody just hammers into it and makes you cry. And I saw the designers doing crits at GDS and it sparked off that memory. And I was like, why are we not doing that actually as a content crit? Why are we not doing that? And so I went round and just went shopping through all the disciplines and pulled it together.

Now at the time I was looking for books and interviews and videos and stuff about this kind of thing. And from what I saw, and I don't read everything obviously, but from what I saw, everything was from a design perspective and from an interaction, I'm doing silent air quotes here, interaction design perspective. It wasn't done from a content perspective. So by the time I left GDS, I was like, this is content design in and of itself. It's the journey maps, writing to a user needs, we can run a whole organization off of one bank of user needs. It's language mapping, it's sentiment scoring, it's using empathy maps. So we didn't start any of that, but we pulled it all together and it was like, this is what we do. So content design. So that's what I mean, you can just cut that out if you like. That's a very long waffly answer to the fact that it is a content perspective on user centered design.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, that is actually very well put because I often will describe content design as coming at design challenges through a content lens. And that's exactly how you've just described it. So what's interesting about that explanation is it's not unlike how I describe how I first started talking about content strategy, which is that none of these were things that I made up. If anybody's like, here's Kristina, the inventor of content strategy, I'm like, no, no, no, no. These were all practices that were already in place and it was literally just a matter of assembling them underneath a tent that people then could enter and talk about all the things at the same time.

And I think that it's so interesting too that you were like, wanting to stay away from the words editorial and writing, et cetera, and really focus in on the relationship between the content and the design. Because of course, elsewhere the phrase content design was being used already. And so it's not like anybody can say, I made this thing, I invented this thing. People were talking about areas of this topic and areas of this practice, cobbled together in different ways, all over the world for a really long time. It's just that you wrote the first book with content design on the cover. Yeah. And that's a pretty big deal.

Sarah Winters:
Well, and just remember that the term content design came from changing government conversations around what we as a content team should be doing. We needed to get them to stop thinking we were going to proofread their work. We were going to design that thing from end to end, whether it was a tool, a calculator, a calendar, an app, a video that we would go and commission. It is not just words.

And then like I say, the book was just supposed to go with the course that I produced that I was doing after I left there. So I think also that, particularly over here, I'm not sure if it's the same over there, but there is just this gap between what your title is and what you do. And you know that you and I have spoken a number of times and you did finally write those blog posts, thank you, spelling it all out. What would a content strategist do? What would a content designer do? What is the difference? And I think there is this just massive gap and lack of understanding of the skill sets required in different organizations.

Kristina Halvorson:
That is so weird because we don't have that problem over here at all. I am just kidding. That was just a little joke. It was just a little sarcasm right here on the podcast. Thank you very much. Yeah, it is a huge... I actually want to use that to roll into another part of this topic that you and I have danced around previously. It is a huge challenge to look across different organizations and say, okay, you're saying content strategist, but what I think you mean is that person is supposed to do marketing content. Or you're saying UX writer, but really I think what that person is doing is writing product support content. Or you're saying content designer and I think what... you know what I mean?

Sarah Winters:
Yeah.

Kristina Halvorson:
And so the titles just matter within an organization and they can say, well, this is just what it's called here. But it creates such a massive headache not only for organizations who are trying to recruit for the right skill set, but also for people who are trying to find work that matches their skill set, and figuring out how to position themselves in the marketplace.

But what I want to talk about is this. When you talk about, and the conversation around content design that has come up in the UK and in parts of the EU, really came up around content work that was being done on websites or on digital services specifically, again, within the government. Content design as a practice here or as a job title or as a role or as a team or department, organizational function, specifically is really evolving as a thing that happens for and within digital products. So software as a service, apps, that the folks here are sitting on or supporting product development teams.

And that I think has caused, I've spoken to a couple of folks in the UK who are a little bit tearing their hair out because a lot of the folks that are walking through the door to interview are coming from this GDS practice, or they've worked at the GDS and they're saying, here's what content design is and here's exactly how it needs to be practiced. And the folks are like, actually, I need you to learn how to work on a product team, which can be a very, very different beast. That I think is creating a challenge, especially now when you can attend a meetup anywhere in the world. You can attend a conference that's hybrid, from wherever, or virtual, It's just causing some confusion. I won't go so far as to say conflict, but what are your thoughts about the differences in terms of how content design is being discussed in practice and potentially how you are teaching it at Content Design London, versus the conversation that is happening around the field of content design here in the US?

Sarah Winters:
So I've heard similar things, and I don't know, I find it really strange. So as Content Design London, when we do content strategy, we teach people how to run their whole organization from one bank of user needs, one set of research. And I'm talking about their social media, their press team, their website, all their apps, all their digital services. And it has roots into what happens on the phone. So this very niche thing that people have got going on, I do not understand. I also do not understand this purest view of content design. There can't be one, there just can't. If it is a set of user centered techniques, it is literally a way of just thinking through a bunch of problems to get to a solution, you cannot have that as formulaic. So how can you have it as a purest discipline? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

Kristina Halvorson:
So you were talking about, I want to go back to something that you just said, which is that you are working with and teaching organizations to build out content and communications, which is going to include the roles that people take on, the routines, the tools that they use, the way content gets discussed and considered and ultimately delivered and cared for, et cetera, around a single set of user needs. Isn't that just user experience design?

Sarah Winters:
Pretty much, from a content lens.

Kristina Halvorson:
So what's the danger then between just calling it user experience design and then working with UX writers on these teams to say, okay, here are the needs that need to be met, here are the scenarios you need to write for. Go do that.

Sarah Winters:
So I just don't know. I don't where this snobbishness is coming from. I have, maybe it's a privileged position that I'm in. I don't really mind about the titles. I care about the job and the end result and the environment that you're working in. And from what I can see, so we have people come to us and say, I would like a content designer. Because we find people and we embed them in other companies.

So they'll say, I'd like a content designer, and then they will actually just say, look, here's some work. I need you to translate it. Here's some work, can you just edit it for me? And that's when I think you can't do that, whether the editing is in an app or whether it's on a long form website or whether you are feeding into the letters that go around your service, a content designer will look at the whole experience and do it from a content perspective. Where I think particularly over here, and I'm happy to be told wrong, but if you say user experience designer, it is only design and it's not any kind of words or communications. It's not just the look and feel, but the way that you interact with it. Yeah, so I think it's a different lens to it.

Kristina Halvorson:
You have mentioned in past conversations that we've had, because we chat, we check in quite regularly, that it's just very frustrating to you, and I think this is what you're pointing to, about how many organizations are like, let's get to the content and the content design and the writing, but they don't have anything grounded in content strategy. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about that and the role, when you talk about content strategy, what are you talking about?

Sarah Winters:
So we have the content strategy. So for example, just pulling out two of the elements. One will be the proposition. So what are you publishing and what are you not publishing? And then we track success and value and we track them separately. And that's both internally for the organization and externally for your audience. Without knowing what you're publishing where, why, and how you are going to see if it's successful or not, I do not know how content designers, UX writers, writers, whatever you want to call them, I don't know how they can see what they're doing is considered good work, because what are they benchmarking against? Often in this country, people see, I've published a thing, as success. That is not success. You need to know exactly why your company is doing whatever it is that they're doing. How many people are they getting through this app? How many people are signing up for it? How many people are uninstalling it?

So there's just that disconnect I think between, at the moment in this country because not enough people have a good strong content strategy that the content designers can work to. So we say that if you have a content strategy, your bank of user needs and your research and your style guide, I should be able to give those three things to somebody and if they are trained, they should be able to produce good content, first time out. If they can't, one of those things is wrong. And it's usually, in my opinion right now in the UK, it's the content strategy.

Kristina Halvorson:
Where do you think the content strategy should sit? Who should own that?

Sarah Winters:
Do you know? I don't know, often hear content strategy sits in comms, and it's not what I would call a content strategy anyway. I would like to see, so at the GDS, Ben Terret, who was Head of Design, took user experience out of everybody's title because he said, that is your whole job. Everybody in this digital team does user experience. We just all do it in different ways. So stop calling yourselves user experience. And I really agreed with that at the time, but maybe actually that is our job, and that I would like to see a team that does user experience from different lenses, and the content strategy I think should sit with at least one foot in that team. But I also have a problem with the silos that are between comms, marketing, the digital teams, the developers, whatever it is. Here particularly, very, very siloed working. And so having it in one team or the other isn't going to work, I guess. I would like to see something that works across the board.

Kristina Halvorson:
I think that that's the whole thing though, is that when we talk about we need a content strategy, a shared content strategy, an organizational, an enterprise content strategy. If it sits in marketing, comms is going to feel like they're not being accurately represented or that their user needs are being overcome by whatever user needs slash persona slash demographics marketing is concerned about. If it sits in user experience design, they're going to minimize what marketing needs. And so I have yet to see where a solid content strategy, without there being a product, like Slack or QuickBooks or that there's just this one product where there is a finite set of users, where content strategy writ large, can actually sit within a specific area of the organization and be visible, be accessible, be well practiced, that people are well versed, and that it can have some kind of a governing effect across the content that is being created and cared for.

I feel like in much larger enterprises, especially that are dealing with legacy products, that I almost would like to see either organizations that have a Chief Digital Officer, or a Chief Customer Officer, that it sits there. So that it is something that is truly centralized and that is being served up as the beating heart of content within an organization and that it sits between and connects across all these different silos. That's my vision. Who can make that happen for me?

Sarah Winters:
Yeah, just sign me up, whenever someone says I'll do that.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's right, sounds great. But see, this is where we're all going though, right? It's constantly, I can't remember who wrote about it, but somebody wrote a post many years ago that content strategy is organizational change.

Sarah Winters:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But I do wonder, right? So say you put it under Chief Digital Officer, and I would love to see more content people taking those type roles.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's a whole other episode, yeah.

Sarah Winters:
That's a whole other thing. But it doesn't just... Digital effects, for larger organizations, the kind of people that we work with, the content strategy affects so much more than the digital world. So for example, with government, if you're in a service, you are going to get a letter somewhere. You're going to get something somewhere. You are going to see, I don't know, a newspaper ad. It is so much more than digital. Digital is, and I know it's our worlds, and it's my world, and it literally keeps a roof over my head. So I'm not having to go at it. But it is just one part of the puzzle. And I would really like to see a content strategy that an organization signs up to, that everybody runs off of. Because it's steeped in user centered design and it's really strong on the proposition, it's really strong on the success and value. You really know where you are going, and then everybody can just take their lens off it. There doesn't need to be, I don't think there needs to be the silos, the concrete silos that we have at the moment.

Kristina Halvorson:
No. And I truly think the problem to solve is who should own it. That I think is, I mean, I worked with a giant computer manufacturer two years ago, and the website had been handed to marketing, and the SAP that called me for marketing was like, we're going to change the world and we're going to make this amazing content strategy and everybody is going to love it and use it. And come to find out that there was this massive website transformation project. They were pulling thousands of microsites in different properties under the one URL, and the project sat in tech. And tech was the one driving all of the deadlines and the decision making around what was essentially a huge content project. I was just like, my dude, you cannot have a content strategy that is going to have any effect on this train barreling down the tracks, if the project itself sits in tech. And so in that instance, we could create the best content strategy, but it would have no teeth whatsoever.

And so I really do feel like that might be the problem that we are facing, is where should this live? And when we're talking about things like design systems or even design teams and functions within an organization, I don't know, let's call it design ops, that those have been established and that they live within a solid part of the organization and they are the source of truth when it comes to design, and establishing some kind of a source of truth for content when everybody can write. I mean, that's the magical mystical pursuit, right?

Sarah Winters:
Yeah. I'm just sitting here thinking, okay, so we should just do that. We should just have more content people up there in higher positions that can just make this happen.

Kristina Halvorson:
And listen, this is actually a thing that is happening right now with a lot of content design leaders that I'm talking to. Because here in the US, content design as a practice has just exploded. I mean, I don't know any products that we use daily and love and trust, again, digital products that don't have active, if not robust, content design teams sitting within the organization. And the folks that are leading those teams are now starting to wrangle with much larger questions than, how do I advocate for my team's work? They're now, how do I create career pathways for these folks so that they're not hitting the content glass ceiling? How do I adequately participate in and meaningfully participate in conversations about the future of this product as a whole and not just this feature, for example. And they don't have any well worn pathways. They are needing to make stuff up as they go along to move into those leadership roles. So do we need more content people in those roles? Yes. Is there a path to those roles in those organizations? There is not.

Sarah Winters:
You're quite right, there isn't. But I do wonder how much... So the thing with content is that everybody can write. I still don't think it's particularly valued as a skill, but when we are trying to move up into those upper echelons, actually what does stop us?

Kristina Halvorson:
I think it is the people who are above that who, they're either super excited and attracted to bright shiny objects that design can create. They are looking for people that can point to very, very hard data, which can also be a difficult thing for content designers and content design leaders to grab onto and say, this is data that we impacted. Because of this thing that we did, these numbers shifted.

I think that just the idea of having somebody who is quote, a writer, who's actually leading is just completely foreign to these organizations where design, design is complicated, design is the future, design is solving big, messy problems through design thinking. I mean, it's just like a sexier pursuit. I mean, why don't we have more research people in leadership positions? And these are the folks that know what's going on with the users and the customers and within the larger marketplace. Why aren't they running the show? I don't know. I mean, I think it's values, I think it's politics. I think that it is the way things have always been done. I think there's a lot, but it's not to say it's not happening. And I think that for the people it is happening for, we need to get them on this podcast to share their stories.

Sarah Winters:
Yes, we do.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yes, we do.

Sarah Winters:
We need to learn, people. Teach us.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. 

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What are your hopes? Tell me a little bit about what's going on at Content Design London. What is the work that you all are doing right now? Because I know that things are not great in the UK right now, it's not great. That's what I read. That's what I read in the papers. Things are complicated.

Sarah Winters:
Not quite. That is the most British thing ever. They're not quite.

Kristina Halvorson:
Not quite. Yeah. You're welcome. How are you all navigating what's happening over there as an organization? Are you changing the focus of your services? Are you steady on? Are you looking at growth? Talk to me about what Content Design London is doing in terms of services and activities and pursuits.

Sarah Winters:
So training is going very well. We have more and more people coming on, which is great. And we are expanding the courses that we're offering. So we have been doing an online course for, I don't know, five, six years. And we have never actually got to a point where we've recorded it and got it out and we have now, so that will be going before Christmas. So we have that and we have a pipeline of other courses that we want to do because we've got so much, but we just don't have the time as an agency, as a practice, we don't have the time to put them into a course format and get them out. But we are working on that. So stay tuned. We have some great people working with us now and we're creating good things. We have books coming out.

Kristina Halvorson:
What? More books?

Sarah Winters:
More books.

Kristina Halvorson:
It's time.

Sarah Winters:
There's not enough books.

Kristina Halvorson:
I'm so glad somebody else is writing them so I don't have to. I love it. There you go.

Sarah Winters:
So the first one that will go is in January, and it's by Hinrich von Haaren, who is our Director of Training, and he's written a book. It's called Content Transformation, and it'll be out in January. And it is how to run a content transformation project from start to finish. It's a really concrete, do this, do that, do the other, this is why you are doing this and getting your organization towards content transformation.

Kristina Halvorson:
Now what does that mean, though briefly? What does content transformation mean?

Sarah Winters:
So it's a hybrid, it's got some content strategy in there. So what are you publishing and why? But it's also how to deal with people, like you were just saying, right? It's culture change, it's organizational design, it's that sort of thing. So it is how to run a project end to end, because a lot of our market are single content people sitting in organizations doing it themselves, and they're trying to change this huge behemoth of an organization by themselves. So it is particularly for those types of people to be able to say, right, I will do this and then I will do this, and then I will do this and this is why I'm doing it. So that's the first one.

Then at some point next year, you will get the second version of my book, which is being written by me and my whole team.

Kristina Halvorson:
Also smart, make other people write books for you.

Sarah Winters:
There we go. So that will come out. There's going to be one on research and content and how to do that directly. There's one on delivery and content.

Kristina Halvorson:
My gosh.

Sarah Winters:
And I've got one more for you. I've got one more. And this one is amazing. So we've got one coming out that at the moment is still in draft, but this is one that I'm really excited about. It is like conversations with, and we are bringing some neuro divergent people up, and it's just conversations about their experience, because we don't have concrete recommendations to make for content people for certain conditions. So for example, aphasia, ADHD, and deaf, blind, because we will give you advice for one person and it won't be right for somebody else. But we want to really bring some of that neuro divergent or disability type awareness into your practice, and then you can take away whatever it is that you want to take away and apply it to what you're doing. So that one's very exciting too. So next year is book central and other exciting things that I can't tell you yet.

Kristina Halvorson:
Well, I can't wait to hear about them. Come on.

Sarah Winters:
No.

Kristina Halvorson:
You can tell. Okay, you don't have to tell me. I understand. I understand. All right, well, our time is up. You are a force of nature, my friend. Thanks for digging into some of that stuff with me. I have so much more that I want to talk about around content design in the UK versus slash and content design in the US. So maybe we can tackle that a little bit more in another conversation.

Sarah Winters:
That would be amazing, yep.

Kristina Halvorson:
Terrific. Sarah, where can people find you online?

Sarah Winters:
So we are ContentDesignLN on Twitter, we are also on LinkedIn, and you can come to the site. We have a new one going live in a couple of weeks. Thank you very much.

Kristina Halvorson:
You're welcome.

Sarah Winters:
Contentdesign.london

Kristina Halvorson:
I can't wait to see that either. Sarah, you are a delight and congratulations on all of your extraordinary achievements and for hanging in there during these last few years and sticking by the content community and just for your ongoing work and knowledge share. Professionally and personally, I'm just really grateful for you and I am grateful that you spent time with us here today. So thank you.

Sarah Winters:
Thank you very much.

Kristina Halvorson:
Bye bye.

Thanks so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Content Strategy Podcast. Our podcast is brought to you by Brain Traffic, a content strategy services and events company. It’s produced by Robert Mills with editing from Bare Value. Our transcripts are from REV.com. You can find all kinds of episodes at contentstrategy.com and you can learn more about Brain Traffic at braintraffic.com. See you soon.