Stephen is leading the content strategy, and I would love to hear what are your perspectives on some other roles that we described here.

There's the UX writer, content strategists, and now there is a conversation designer, what are the commonalities or differences here.

Content strategist career hack: “Watch the research sessions, especially in the usability stuff, because you will hear how people who are using your product are talking about your product. And they are probably going to describe it in a way that makes sense to them. So don't reinvent the wheel, use their language back to other people who are like them.”

When I think about the different roles right now, like content strategy, UX designer,  it's  all different flavors of “how do I communicate something that a person needs right now”

What it comes down to is what part of the process is your role and how do you want to influence it? And then the other part is the career and the professional piece, which is like, what do you want to put on LinkedIn versus what do you want to put on your own website?

And because recruiters are going to look for certain phrases, or you're going to look for certain kinds of people who have those skills when you want to work with them. And so that's a balance that you also need to find, if you want to find somebody who is going to help you create an app that is easy to use or intuitive, even like, I would look for people that have a UX writer in their background, but some people will just say, generically, I'm a content strategist.

What are some memorable projects in the past that you have collaborated with designers on and how was that collaboration like?

One of the things I liked when I collaborate with designers, but I'm going to broaden it and say user experience, which is to me it's like the trio, design, research and content strategy, because then you have people who specialize in why we're building, what we're building looks like, and what we're building sounds like. I always wanted to come to any project as a trio, to solve a user experience problem. 

The most memorable one for me was Twitter, when we expanded from 140 characters to 280 characters and that growth in how many characters you can use was based on data that we had seen, where people were getting to the 140 character limit.

Instead of going back and editing, once they reached that limit, they would just abandon it. Yes, there was a business case to be made for - if we have fewer tweeting, there'll be fewer people reading tweets. There'll be fewer people on the platform that will be fewer ad revenue dollars.

What do we do to change that? What's the project plan? How do we roll it out? Where do we test it? One of the interesting things for that project specifically was when we started to explore different designs and things, it was this constant back and forth with the designer where we could say - let's create an experience where we still have a 280 character limit, but most people aren't going to get there anymore. And so how do we convey that in a less direct way? And I wrote up all these different error messages that we could show once they got close to 280 and like, where would we pop it in? How would we display it?

One of the great things about working as a collaborative team was I got to hear things like maybe words are not the answer for these error messages. And the solution we came up with was this little circle. And as you got close to the edge, you know, the circle would fill up and then it turns yellow and then it turns red. And then you have a number that says how many characters are over. And so the new interface doesn't even tell you that the limit is 280.

It was that exploration and that back and forth constant contact with the designer is what led us to say, Hey , words are not the solution to this.

And I really loved that kind of back and forth that we had. It's a project that took a long time, but I'm really proud.

Please fill in the blank. As a researcher, I love it when designers do _____?

I will definitely agree with that. Like getting involved early as a team, it will definitely help your design. I filled in this blink a little bit differently.

As a strategist, I love it. When designers write, because writing is thinking, and even when I start out with an idea and I start writing it out, the process helps crystallize the idea, but it also points out where I might have gaps. When I work with designers who write, I'm looking forward to them doing a couple of things.

One, I want them to actually start filling in the blanks themselves. For instance, like if we're working on button copy, I want to see where their mindset is and how they would solve this problem, because they might have a lens that I don't have. And so I want to make sure that I am not focused in a very myopic way on what this button should have. 

We can say, great, we need to add that accommodation into the style guide, so it could expand our options for future work. But the other thing that it does more broadly, is bigger than just like button copy. It's this idea that we are all user experience people, we are all trying to sell our ideas to people who are going to make the decision about whether we should launch something or not. 

Here's why we made these decisions. Here's why we went away from these other things. And if you can jot those down. It helps the process and it helps everybody who is involved in the process, like having this single source to come to. Like, they don't have to ping you all the time. Like, oh, did you try? Or why did you, or what you know. You have all of this stuff documented, but you've also done this thing where you have encapsulated your brain at some point in some ways to say, here's the institutional knowledge that existed at the time and people can come behind you and build on top of it.

Especially in a digital space, like nothing that you build today is going to last more than two to three years. And if it does, there's probably maybe some problem with that because we are evolving in a lot of ways, very quickly in a digital space.

For designers who have an interest in learning more about content strategy, what resources or suggestions do you have for us?

The recommendation I would give to you is conferences. There are some design conferences like the Erika Hall book put out by Book Apart and they also run conferences called An Event Apart. One thing I liked about their events is that they bring all of these disciplines together into one space. There are content strategy specific conferences that I love to go to, but I learn more when I go to design conferences. Because I see how designers work and how designers talk, and then I can better understand what they're looking for in collaboration, especially as we grow as an industry and as we evolve as an industry, now I know not everybody has a content strategy or a conference budget for a long time.

The other recommendation is to find the conferences that you're interested in and follow this hashtag. Because you can see the conversations going on on Twitter for people who are at the conference, but also people who are interested in the conference. And that's how I learned about Erika Hall and Kristina Halvorson and Steve Portigal.

All of these other kinds of ecosystems of people who are willing to help and who give you links to their talks later or who you can reach out to for questions. Most people who are giving talks are open to talking about themselves and their work a lot more openly online as well.