A presentation at SofaConf 2020 in in London, UK by Jonathon Colman
FAILURES AHEAD
STRONG OPINIONS
THIS WON’T END WELL
How we destroyed content design Jonathon Colman Senior Design Manager, Intercom
How we destroyed content design @jcolman
How we destroyed content design go.inter.com/destroy
What Happened
What Went Wrong
But Why?
Eight core Problems
one No focus
two No context
three No one knows what you do
four Less depth of work
five Less opportunity for product impact
six Less opportunity for career growth
seven Unequal pay
eight Burn out
5 Less opportunity for product impact 2 No context 6 Less opportunity for career growth 3 No one knows what you do 7 Unequal pay 4 Less depth of work 8 Burn out 1 No focus
How We Destroyed Content Design
t n e t n o c h t i w s m e l b o r p n g i s e d d n a t c u d o r p e v l o s t ’ You can
It’s hard to tell where content ends
It’s hard to tell where content ends and design begins
1 One product at a time, no more office hours 2 Full-stack content design 3 Equal accountability for all designers 4 Equal pay across design
Trade-offs & Implications
Coda
Kelly O’Brien Content Designer London 🇬🇧 go.inter.com/kelly
Meredith Castile Senior Content Designer San Francisco 🇺🇸 go.inter.com/meredith
Most content design leaders stretch their teams to cover many products at once, or sometimes 5-10 or more. This unintentionally causes the team to constantly switch context, drive less product impact, lag in their career development, earn less pay, and ultimately burn out and leave, only to repeat the cycle elsewhere.
This is normal… but it shouldn’t be.
I’ll show you how we redesigned content design to increase people’s focus and depth of work, multiply their product and business impact, and even accelerate their growth and compensation—all by working on just one product at a time.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
Full video of this talk on Vimeo.
The talented illustrator Zsofi Lang created these sketchnotes that highlight the key points of this talk. You can see more of her work at https://www.instagram.com/zldrawings/
“Today, we’re making those conversations quicker and easier by introducing a new way to share and discover music, TV and movies.”
In 2008, Zeldman made the case for a content-first approach to design.
Amy is the Chief Design Officer at Gusto, a former UX director at Shopify, and we used to work as content strategists at Facebook. In this talk, I reference her metaphor of how content strategists sometime “dust” the content rather than actually solve the problem.
This profile of Mark Zuckerberg includes a quote that’s often cited as part of the foundation for Facebook’s “Move fast and break things” motto: “Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”
By day, Ella works in technology, leading a product design team working on augmented and virtual reality. Ella also writes her family allegory, exploring how memory creates meaning beyond generation and culture.
Emmet’s the senior director of product design at Intercom. He hired me and asked that fateful question: “How would you build a world-class content design team?”
Originally published in 2002, this book contains one of the most famous conceptual models of UX work in the industry and it’s still relevant today.
“The Double Diamond is a visual representation of the design and innovation process. It’s a simple way to describe the steps taken in any design and innovation project, irrespective of methods and tools used.”
Alex Schleifer, VP of Design at Airbnb, talks about the “three-legged stool” model of product team leadership, made up of engineering, product management, and design. At Intercom, we’ve added content design as the fourth leg of the stool.
The complete list of competencies, expectations, and career paths for designers at Intercom, including both product and content designers. Note that the expectations and career paths are almost exactly the same for both disciplines. Funny thing, that, considering what a strong distinction most organizations make between the two roles.
The home of Intercom’s product design team. Includes our design process, principles, levels & career paths, how designers have product impact, and more resources that are all licensed for re-use through Creative Commons.
In her 2012 book “Writing for Animation, Comics, and Games,” Christy Marx states: “It’s [game design and writing] so intertwined that it can be hard at times to sort out where writing ends and design begins.”
In August of 2019, the UX Writing Collective surveyed the industry to learn about compensation. Among other insights, they found that “74% respondents as identified as female, or ‘mostly female’” (n=208).
Kristina Halvorson’s 2008 article in A List Apart codified and popularized the practice of content strategy for the web.
I paraphrase quotes from Jesse’s closing plenary at the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis, Tennessee. Specifically this one: “There are no information architects. There are no interaction designers. There are only, and only ever have been, user experience designers.” You can watch a video of Jesse’s plenary talk at https://vimeo.com/4304573
“The $1.28 billion customer messaging platform Intercom announced to employees Wednesday that it’s letting go of 39 people globally and relocating some roles to Ireland. The layoffs impacted about 6% of its 649 total employees amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.”
You should hire Kelly O’Brien, a hybrid product/content designer specializing in chatbot design and automation based in London, UK.
You should hire Meredith Castile, a hybrid product/content senior designer specializing in conversation design based in San Francisco, USA.
I paraphrase this quote at the very end of this talk.
“Jonathon is speaking on the Content Strategy day at SofaConf but before he joins us we caught up with him on the sofa.”
A stay-at-home conference! Welcome to SofaConf, a five-day online design conference from Clearleft, the folks behind UX London, Leading Design and Content by Design.
This was the alpha-version prototype for the talk you’re looking at right now. It was given at the Sydney Content Strategy Meetup in August of 2019.
Here’s what was said about this presentation on social media.
