Digital

Building confidence in content design

December 18, 2024 by deborahamzil No Comments | Category Content Design, Digital Scotland Service Standard, Social Security Scotland, User-centred design

Guest blog from Claire Robertson, Senior Content Designer, Social Security Scotland.

Over the next few months, Social Security Scotland will be sharing a series of blogs from our User Centred Design team. We’ll give an insight into our ways of working and share some examples of our collaborative, user-centred approach.

At Social Security Scotland, working in the open is helping to build confidence in the process of content design – both inside and outside our team.

The idea of working in the open runs through both the Digital Scotland Service Standards and Government Digital Service. At a basic level, it’s about sharing code and common components. If we dig deeper, it’s about sharing ways of working, processes, data, user research – everything that goes into creating the final piece of work.  As designers we should be transparent about how these shared outputs are created. This is how we can build trust and confidence in the content design process and create a consistent user experience across our 15 different benefits at Social Security Scotland.

What do other teams think we do?

Content designers rely on working with multiple teams. For us to be effective, other teams need to understand how content design works and the value it can bring. But content design is a misunderstood discipline. People often have experience of working with ‘content writers’ and assume it’s the same thing.

When people don’t understand how content design works, the natural inclination is to engage us towards the end of the project. We are brought in to ‘add the words’ after the major design decisions have been made. However, our work starts in the discovery stage. The writing of the content is one of the last steps in a long process involving research into user needs and behaviours, data evaluation, consideration of content placement and testing. By being involved at the right stage we can shape the journey and make it simple for the user. Content affects the user engagement and experience. It might sound obvious, but for a client using our services the content is the tangible thing they engage with.

Content design is new though. How will other teams know how it works, and the value it can add, if we’re not telling them? Our job as content designers, in very basic terms, is to give people the information they need, at the right time. This should be applied to stakeholders, and how they work with us.  People in content often naturally gravitate towards working quietly, and in the background.  Our team want to change this.

Being more open as a team

So, what are we doing differently? To start, we’ve adopted a more collaborative working environment within our own team. We can’t spread the word about the good work we’re doing, if we don’t know what that work is. We do this by:

1. Sharing our content
   Our team now has content crits for nearly every piece of content. This is where three or four colleagues all discuss a content draft on screen. We’ve found that having an open dialogue about a piece of work opens creativity so much more than a single person proofreading. It’s also a great way to expose team members to a range of content quickly.
2. Sharing what we’re working on each day
   We share a daily work update on our Teams channel with what we’re working on. This not only helps us see who has availability for reviews or new work. it also helps us identify any crossovers in our work. Another opportunity to make our content consistent.
3. Expert areas
   In our team we’ve assigned ‘expert areas’. These are things like:
   1. content operations
   2. patterns
   3. style guide
   4. stakeholder engagement
   5. data
   6. accessibility

Having an assigned expert for these areas means there is someone making sure we have processes and tools in place for our team to follow for these vital areas.

As well as expert areas, sharing our work means we now naturally know where specific skills lie within our team. For example, we know who to go to if we need help with Word and templates, or who is best at auditing.

4. Content checklists
   We’ve introduced step-by-step checklists that our whole team uses when creating content. This means that we are creating content in a consistent manner throughout the team and ensures the content design standards we advocate for are consistently applied. These are shared on our organisation-wide platforms too
5. Shared spaces
   As well as updating our organisation-wide facing pages and writing blogs, we also do all our work off a shared drive. Again, this means we can help each other apply standards and can look for crossover.

These changes in our ways of working have made a huge difference. We’re constantly learning from one another and keeping each other motivated.

We want to be transparent about our workflow. This demystifies the content design process and shows all the work that goes into creating our content. Having these standards and processes in place has also resulted in a huge shift in confidence within the team. We can feel assured that we’re working in the right way.

Bringing others on the journey

We’re working in a more open way with stakeholders too. As well as monthly show and tell sessions, we’re taking our ‘Content Design 101’ sessions round different areas to explain what it is we do and the difference it can make.

We also want to bring stakeholders along on the content design journey with us. For a recent project looking at improving our letters, one of the aims was to co-design changes to letters with client advisers. Client advisers are both a stakeholder in, and end user of, these letters and their input into the project was crucial. Client advisors got involved in activities such as journey mapping workshops and sketching sessions for prototypes. We’ll use the outcomes of these to feed into future co-design activities.

Working in the open is an ongoing process. Blogs are another way for us to try and spread the word about our work.  We’d love to hear new ideas about how we can work more openly too. How do your teams work in the open? Email us at contentdesign@socialsecurity.gov.scot to get in touch.

Tags: content design, digital, digital public services, scottish government, Social Security Scotland

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