As part of Product Week, I went to a day all about content design (or UX writing as it’s sometimes known)
https://techcircus.io/en/events/ux-writing-conference-london
🔨 Getting Real: Tangible Tools for Better UX Writing - Sandra Simon & Barbara Kofler
🍐 The Power of the Pair - Lindsay Rubino & Janna Lawson
🎭 Don't Fear the FOMO: Leveraging Emotional Triggers for Positive UX - Ningfei Ou
📣 Secrets to Storytelling Success - Daniel Magill
🕊️ Cultivating a thriving content design practice - Tim Hetland
🤝🏻Avoiding the content trap: Fostering team collaboration - Rachel McConnell
📄 How to break trends and influence stakeholders - Ben Davies-Romano
⚖️ Content design systems: strategies for scalable implementation - Sílvia Grisó Sayas
It was a packed day and I am referring to my hastily scribbled notes a fair bit, but it was definitely worthwhile and I came away feeling enthused and excited about content design, and the great work that is going on in the digital world.
We were treated to a great talk on how to incorporate content design techniques, tools and principles into your wider team and organisation. It was great hearing what was going on in different organisations and not just within the UK. We were also given a very endearing, useful and portable content design pocket toolkit which I intend to whip out at every meeting, unprovoked.
The ‘content design fan’ - a useful and practical gift from Sandra and Barbara (and idealo!)
We moved into a talk about the power of two (or more) content designers, instead of just one. There were a lot of great tips in this (get to know your coworkers well, discuss your strengths and interests, organise yourselves well and use templates!)
I went from Government Digital Services (GDS) where I was in a team of around 50 content designers to being the only one (for now…) in the BFI, so a lot of this resonated with me. However, I do believe that the beauty of content design is that it’s an open source practice, with no end of skill sharing and has a grassroots, community feel to it - so I never really feel alone.
The next part of the day was all about emotions, storytelling and the new wave of design scepticism. These talks brought it back to thinking about who our users really are (humans), how they respond to what we tell them and how we should design with that in mind. I delved into a rabbit hole about the colour wheel of emotion at lunchtime.
Colour wheel of emotion for designers (Plutchik)