Kate Saul & Andre Francisco: The 18F Content Guide – Episode 32

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Kate Saul and Andre Francisco work at 18F, an internal government agency that helps other federal agencies improve their digital services, including web content.

Soon after the agency’s founding they discovered that they would benefit from having a reference guide – the 18F Content Guide – for both their organization and their clients.

We talked about:

• Andre and Kate’s backgrounds
• the origins in 2015 of the 18F Content Guide – driven by their need for a standardized resource for their team
• how their content guide serves as a “ready-to-go” resource for their clients, as a template for their clients’ guides
• how clients adapt and customize the manual for their needs
• the content guide’s adoption beyond federal government websites
• the composition of their team at 18F, and the group of them who created the content guide
• the “Content Guild,” an internal working group that offers content guidance to the rest of the organization and maintains the guide
• how frequently they update the guide (approx. monthly)
• the organizational structure of 18F and how it fits in the GSA
• how well-followed their content guide is (pretty well)
• the benefits of their “co-design” process, involving collaborators of all kinds from day one in all parts of their process
  • gets buy-in
  • streamlines and accelerates their process
• how there is no “typical” project in their portfolio
• how scope change from project to project while principles remain the same
• their belief that “involving content from the start is a really great way to go”
• how they work with stakeholders to organically uncover the right solution
• the role of research throughout their content strategy process
  • highlighter testing, for example, having users highlight paper print-outs of content to let readers show how clear they find the content
• how their focus on cross-functionality and drawing together folks coming from different backgrounds creates an awesome team
• about 18F’s huge number of open-source resources, including:
  • more than 1,000 repositories at GitHub
  • their collection of technical guides

Kate’s Bio

Kate Garklavs Saul is a content team lead at 18F, where she helps federal agencies with strategic planning and crafting impactful, user-centered content. She has worked on my.uscis.gov, standards.usa.gov, usaspending.gov, and more.

A longtime lover of language, Kate earned her MFA in fiction writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and had her first chapbook (“Diffusely Yours”) published in August 2018. Before joining 18F, she led editorial and education strategy at Scripted.com, and also designed online fine arts coursework. Find her on Twitter as @ueberkatester.

Andre’s Bio

Andre Francisco is the Acting Director of Outreach at 18F, helping the federal consulting office better communicate with other federal agencies. A graduate of Northwestern University, he’s previously worked at a government reform non-profit and as an English teacher.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to Episode number 32 of the Content Strategy Interviews Podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Andre Franciso and Kate Saul. Andre is the head of outreach at 18F. It’s a digital… I’ll let them describe it. I understand 18F to be sort of like a digital services company within the Government Services Administration and the US Government. And his college, Kate, Kate Saul, is a content strategist there. And I what I want to talk to them about today is the content guide that they created there. But first I want to let Andre and Kate talk a little bit more about each of their backgrounds. So whichever one of you wants to go first.

Andre:
Yeah, I’ll start. So this is my first government job, which is common at 18F, before this I was at a government reform non-profit actually that kind of talked about ways to improve the government and then switched side and got to work on some of those things. Also kind of a common path.

Larry:
Oh, cool. And Kate, how’d you end up at 18F?

Kate:
So, similar to Andre, this is my first government job as well. Before joining 18F I was actually at a startup that provided a platform for freelance writers to find jobs with Enterprise clients and before that I designed online fine arts coursework. But my background, actually, is in creative writing. I got my MFA in fiction writing, so I kind of come to this from a storytelling background, if you will.

Larry:
Well, that’s what I love. I’ve done, well, this is my 32nd interview now and everybody has a different path and that’s a super-common one. The storytelling, creative path and there’s also the journalistic path, the publishing path, the tech path. There’s a lot of ways into this.

Larry:
I want to get right to your content guide. I was telling Andre just before we went on the air that I was able to read pretty much the whole thing in less than an hour this morning. That’s a pretty impressive accomplishment right there. And it looked comprehensive. Where did that come from and how long has it been around? The content guide?

Kate:
The guide it’s self actually was launched in 2015 and the idea for the guide really came about because we, as content creators at 18F, when we first joined the organization didn’t have an internal style guide. We were using AP and government references for creating content. But we really thought it would be useful to have just a standardized resource for our team as well as our partner agencies to use so it came about because there was a clear need for it.

Kate:
And, as I just mentioned, we use this internally for 18F specific content, but it’s also the basis for all of the project specific style guides that we create. When we’re working with partner agencies we like to talk to them about whether they have a style guide already. What resources they use and if they don’t have something in place we like to offer this as a ready-to-go resource that they can adopt.

Kate:
The nice thing about the style guide is that, as you mentioned, it is open source, but we actually encourage folks to modify to reflect their organization’s goals. Parts of it that agencies want to adopt they definitely can for someone to modify. That’s also great. We really want it to be as useful as possible and we find that when agencies tailor it to reflect their particular areas of focus, that’s when people really adopt it more strongly.

Larry:
Right. It’s a great manual just as it is. I think it’s a good, generic guide to how to create good web content. Do you have a feel for how many people just adopt it as is versus how many people adapt it for their own? Like, for example, I’m assuming everyone would do the one section that’s specific lingo for each language and abbreviations and things like that. Do most people change that or do they change other parts of the manual as well?

Kate:
I think so. Definitely the words to use, words to avoid jargon specific sections people do tend to customize that because, as you know, each agency has it’s own specific language. Different teams within agencies have terminology that they use. So that’s definitely a highly customized section.

Kate:
I think in terms of some of the other sections concision and sign language, things like that. My son says that book adopt those as they are. I don’t have any specific numbers, but that’s just anecdotally from working with different agencies that’s what I’ve seen.

Larry:
Right. And one thing I’ve found in all these interviews is few people in content roles have extra time to do a lot of extra work. I can picture being very delighted to just grab it and run with it.

Larry:
Has it rippled out further than 18F and your direct clients? Do you get a sense that other folks elsewhere in government, or even the civilian world, are using it?

Andre:
Yeah, we’ve seen a couple of instances of that. The guys up on Get Hugs you can see tracks for you, people who copy the content. We’ve seen a couple of cities. City of Lexington, Kentucky. Dubuque, Indiana and a specific NASA research center have all copied it and made their own versions. It’s fun to see it get out there and it’s one of the best parts about making these resources for the government is that they’re open source, they belong to the public. They can really spread a lot further than if you’re making them in other places.

Larry:
Gotcha.

Larry:
You know I’m curious how this fits in. It’s in the overall governance of government content, both at 18F and in your partner agencies. So both, in terms of how this document fits in there, but also just the te-

Larry:
Actually, let me back up and ask about the team at 18F. The content team there. You’re a content strategist, Kate and Andre you’re involved as an outreach person. How many other people are specifically content people and then how many other subject matter experts or other folks contribute content?

Kate:
That’s a good question. I believe right now we have eight content strategists. I’m counting in my head. The numbers have shifted a little bit over the years. One really cool thing about the guides is that when we were creating it our content team was very small. I actually joined 18F as the first official content strategist but there are lots of other folks at the organization who are working in content specific roles. So Andre was doing content strategy work in addition to outreach work and some of our former colleagues, Greg Boone, Melody Cramer, other folks. Even though they weren’t by a title content strategists, they were already doing that work.

Kate:
The team that created the guide, Andre, would you say it was maybe four of five people total who created that initial version of the guide?

Andre:
Yeah, that sounds right.

Kate:
It was a small group initially. We kind of worked on it bit by bit in our spare time. In terms of other subject matter experts, we do have something called the Content Guild at TTS. And internal working group that offers content guidance to the rest of the organization and maintains the guide. And one really neat thing about the Guild, which Andre can talk more about later, if you’re interested, Andre, is that it’s open to anyone who’s interested in content. So you don’t need to be a content designer or strategist to join. In fact, we’ve had folks from engineering team join. Folks from other disciplines as well.

Kate:
We really welcome additions to the guide from folks from all disciplines. We find that it really adds a unique perspectives and makes the content it’s self a lot stronger.

Larry:
I love that. And I love that you have a formal guild. Andre, can you tell me more about that? Is that part of your role? Doing the outreach around engaging and working with other content creators in the organization?

Andre:
Yeah, it’s separate from my outreach role, but yeah, totally the Content Guild and we’ve had a number of leaders over the history of it. Guilds, there’s probably half a dozen of them in our larger group of Technology Transformation Services (TTS). Which is a large group 18F is in. They’re leadership supported groups around different disciplines. There’s someone accessibility and diversity and front end development and content and like that. And they create guides, they set some standards, they get practices. And it’s really helpful to grow your skills as a content designer or engineer and also to set some guidelines so we are doing the work in the best way we can for all of our partners across government.

Larry:
You say in the Content Guide, you talk about how it’s not a static document, that it’s constantly evolving. With all these people involved, how frequently does it evolve? Are all these people constantly making improvements and suggestions?

Andre:
Yeah, I’d say we add something to it probably every month. One of the big additions that Kate was talking about, somebody that was not a content designer was a big section on URLs and file names. Which is something that, as a content designer, I might not think of first when I’m thinking about writing, but is really important if you’re designing websites or if you’re an engineer. And it can make a big difference in how people find and search information.

Larry:
Right. Not a classic, typical thing you’d see in a style guide, but completely appropriate in an online style guide.

Andre:
Yeah.

Larry:
Online content guide.

Larry:
Yeah, interesting.

Larry:
You mentioned all those different, like the accessibility people a lot of front end people, different folks involved in the Content Guild. Do you meet formally? What’s the mechanism by which the Content Guild happens?

Andre:
Yeah. We meet twice a month. And then we have a place where we talk about things between meetings. People can come to a channel and ask questions about specific usage or whatnot. And then we coordinate with leadership position, the Chief of Staff for TTS, who helps make sure we’re supported, we’re doing the right content work to spread through the mission of TTS.

Larry:
Gotcha.

Larry:
I was looking, a little bit, at 18F in general. You’re a government agency, but how are you paid?

Andre:
Yes.

Larry:
You don’t have your own budget. Do the agencies that you work with pay you? How does that work?

Andre:
Yeah, yeah. We’re kind of an unusual organization in government but not very unusual in GSA, General Services Administration that we’re a part of. We are funded through something called the ASF is funding GSA. They pay the bills up front and then we charge our partners for our work and pay money back into the fund. So we’re not appropriated by congress. We do charge an hourly rate for our work. We operate kind of like a business. We have profit and loss statements, but we are all federal employees and we are serving federal clients.

Larry:
Gotcha.

Larry:
Kind of like an agency but in the government.

Andre:
Yep.

Larry:
Got it. Okay. Nice. Yeah.

Larry:
I love that it’s called a guide, not a prescription or a dictate or a mandate or a Magna Carta or whatever. Do you have a feel for compliance for your guidelines? It’s built in to the good content, but if somebody strayed from these guidelines, there’s a mechanism to bring people inline. How well do people abide by the guidelines.

Andre:
Well, I can talk to the 18F internal side. I would say pretty well. I think our web content and the other guides we produce, beside the content guide, are well edited and performed real well. And because we had this constant upgrade nature of our guide and other pieces of content it’s a really natural thing to change wording or fix style stuff. It was an easy way to always improve them and then show them following out guidance.

Larry:
Got it, yeah. Kate, did you have anything about that? I saw you nodding your head a little bit.

Kate:
I would agree with Andre that adherence to the guide within 18F and TTS is really strong because we’re constantly updating the guide and there’s a lot of buy-in. I think, also, on the partner agency side, because we’re not handing the guide over in its current state but using it as a jumping off point to really help create customized content guidelines for our partner agencies and with them. I think following the guide is also pretty strong.

Kate:
That’s part of our larger co-design process. We like to work with our partner agencies to help them find solutions that reflect their existing work flows and work for their team. So really it’s not about handing over guidance but it’s about working together to, as I said, find solutions that work with existing structures and work flows.

Kate:
It’s also nice, I think, that people know that the guide is a living document. That there’s a sense of, I don’t know, relief in that. Like, okay, this isn’t a static thing. If we find that one section becomes outdated or isn’t working for a certain purpose there’s this freedom in knowing that it can change.

Kate:
So I think a lot of people like that aspect of it.

Larry:
I love that term you used, “co-design”. It’s obvious what that means, I think. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and how that manifests in your content projects.

Kate:
Yeah, so I think it’s a really great process. Content strategists and designers are involved. Visual designers. But when we’re working on projects with the partner agencies, we really like to get them involved in the design process from day one. From the kick off meeting onward collaboratively brainstorming, having sketching sessions early on. We do stakeholder interviews to get people’s opinions out there right away.

Kate:
We also like to involve our partners in research and synthesis and design critiques. So really making sure that they’re part of the process. They see what goes into the process and as a result people feel involved. They feel like they’re being heard because we’re all part of the same team. We’re all doing the same design work.

Kate:
We found that it really helps create much stronger buy-in. When people see the day-to-day rather than just the initial ideation and then the end product it really helps people understand the process and understand what goes into creating designs and creating content. It’s really great.

Larry:
Right. And I think that buy-in, however you get it, is so important and the way you described that I can see everybody’s ideas, opinions, contributions are baked in right from the get-go. Doing it that way instead of a sequential thing or process.

Larry:
Do you think that slows things down or speeds things up doing a co-design process?

Kate:
I think actually it speeds things up. When people are involved in all phases of design there’s a much tighter feedback loop so we’re not waiting around, sending something off and then waiting for feedback. When people are involved in those critique sessions directly we can get immediate, or near immediate, feedback.

Kate:
When people are, for example, involved in research and they’re listening in on usability tests or user interviews, we don’t need to spend time on conveying those results to partners because the partners are already involved in how it works. I think it actually speeds things up quite a bit.

Larry:
Got it, yeah. Most government agencies are pretty good sized. Are most of these projects fairly significant and what would be the scope of the content associated with them? Are we talking dozens of pages, hundreds of pages, thousands of pages in a typical project?

Kate:
That’s kind of hard to say. I think the tricky thing is there is no typical project. We definitely had projects with thousands of pages. We’ve had much smaller projects where we’re addressing just a few pages. A home page and a few other pages. So it really kind of varies project to project. I feel bad that there’s a more straightforward answer, but really it just depends on the engagement.

Larry:
Yeah. No, but I get that. Part of my intent in asking that was I’m curious about how the process probably doesn’t change much with scale, I’m going to guess, right? Maybe just the details get a little more complex. Or are there things that happen with bigger projects that entail more need for different aspects of content strategy? I can’t think of an example of the top of my head, but do things change at all with scope as you get to the bigger projects?

Kate:
Yeah, I think so. I think it’s all about the smaller projects that we might, for example, have more focus on making updating or replacing copy or rewriting or re-evaluating smaller bits of copy. It’s through the larger projects, and I can think of a few that were multi-year projects, there might be, for example, big content migration that takes a long time. That said, even though the specific activities might shift based on scope, I think the principles remain the same. We’re always focusing on meeting user needs and representing our partner agencies missions and goals. Using human center design to meet those goals. Working iteratively and also in the open. The scope shifts a little bit, but those specific activities might shift, but we’re always working from that same baseline.

Larry:
The same playbook. Gotcha. Yeah.

Larry:
Content teams are sort of integrated in different ways in organizations. Are you side by side with UX people and other technology people? How does content fit into 18F and is it parallel across the agencies that you work with? Does it fit in in a similar way in most government projects?

Kate:
That’s a really good question. I’m glad you asked.

Kate:
At our organization content strategists and designers work right alongside everyone else on the design team. We’re actually part of a design team. And we’re involved from the start ideally. We work with UX researchers and visual designers and front end designers. In some organizations content might come later on, but we really believe that involving content from the start is a really great way to go just because content informs design so strongly. And vice versa.

Kate:
Specifically or personally I like to pair with designers and we either co-work or send things back and forth just to make sure the visual design and content are working harmoniously.

Kate:
In terms of whether that’s similar to the agencies we work with, once again it varies agency by agency, but one thing we’ve found is that the agencies we work with are really excited about bringing content in early in projects and getting content strategists involved in the design process because they see the benefit of that. When all aspects of design are addressed simultaneously the end result is a lot stronger.

Larry:
Got it. That’s part of why I brought the question up is that notion of “content first”. All of us who are content strategists would love to see that just rigorously adhered to in every organization but I know it unfolds differently in different places. But it sounds like you’ve got a seat at the table right alongside everybody else right from the get-go. Which I’m assuming that helps the projects.

Larry:
Are most of these projects you work on, are they mostly what we think of just like web pages and information content, or are you working with things like calculators and tools and things like that? What kind of content are the… I’m sure it’s all over the map, again, by agency, but are there common or typical types of content that you’re dealing with?

Kate:
As you mentioned there are a lot of web pages and some form design. We have a lot of research heavy projects. So, I’m thinking one project I was on a several years ago where, even though I’m in a content role, I was really involved in researching how folks, members of the general public, perceive ideas around government information sharing. So that was a more research focused project.

Kate:
Yeah, a lot of web pages and, as you said, forms, calculators, things of that nature. It’s kind of all over the map. Which is really what makes it exciting. When we sign on to work with an agency the most exciting thing is really getting to know that agency and the stakeholders and talking to the stakeholders to find out what are the most pressing problems. We don’t enter these engagements with a solution already in mind but we like to work with the stakeholders to get to know their organization and work flows.

Kate:
We sort of organically discover what the problems are. Because we find that when you give people that space to share what’s going on and what they’ve been dealing with it just really helps us uncover, with the partners, what the proper solutions might be.

Larry:
Got it. You mentioned that organic discovery that is real common in that kind of collaborative interaction. Do you do much formal research as well? Like customer research or early on do you do customer research to guide content creation and then later on do you do any content usability testing?

Kate:
Yeah. Research is a huge part of our process. On all of our projects research is involved. We always have stakeholder interviews. Most of our projects do involve usability testing. Creating prototypes and then actual testing the end product.

Kate:
And in terms of content-specific testing, that’s something else that we also really like to do. Depending on what the project it’s self is, we’ll do either close testing or highlighter testing. Or we’ll actually build in some kind of content specific questions to larger usability test. So if we’re, for example, showing, I was actually just doing this earlier today, leading interviews, looking at different design directions for a site that we’re working on. So even though the test it’s self is a more general usability test, we also have some content specific questions. Or if people focus on certain headings, we’ll ask questions into those aspect to see what about this heading versus this one is more appealing.

Kate:
We give some very specific content testing as well as weaving in content questions to more general testing.

Larry:
Right. You mentioned, what was it? Highlighter testing? I’m not sure I heard that right. Can you tell me about that?

Kate:
Yeah. I love highlighter testing. It’s a really great way to test the effectiveness of short bits of content. And the way it works is, You’ll isolate a section of content from a specific page and you can administer these tests remotely, which we often do, or in person.

Kate:
So once you’ve isolated your chunk of content, I’m looking around here for something, but let’s say you have a paragraph. What you do is you have your test participant use one color of highlighter to identify everything that seems unclear or might need more detail. And then another color of highlighter to identify everything that seems clear that doesn’t need more detail.

Kate:
What that helps you do is really pinpoint specific areas of text that need additional clarity. So then once someone highlight two sentences that they feel are really unclear you can ask more targeted questions about like, “Okay, what about these sentences is unclear? Is it a certain word? Is it the structure of the sentence? Is it where the sentence appears in the paragraph? Is there some sort of lack of continuity between the previous sentence and this one?” So it really helps you drill down and get very precise information about what’s not working within a small chunk of text.

Larry:
Right. Also I’m wondering how many people, I can picture a stack of those, and if they all highlight the same thing. How many different people would you do that kind of test with?

Kate:
Ideally as many as possible. As many as time allows. Once again, it depends on the project and what kind of amount of time allocated for research. But definitely as many as possible. Because obviously the more data we have the better.

Larry:
Right.

Larry:
Years ago I met Jakob Neilson at a conference and was working on an underfunded start-up at the time and asked him about, like, “I don’t have a budget. You guys have this gazillions of dollars. What can I do to do some basic usability testing?” He said, “Just bring in five of your users, look over their shoulder, don’t say a word, watch what they do, learn some lessons.”

Larry:
It sounds like that pragmatism most people have… Would that be a part of your style? That kind of get what you can?

Kate:
Yeah, definitely. We have a lot of different recruiting methods and what we found is a lot of folks are really excited to share their thoughts and opinions to help make government resources better. Definitely that pragmatism is something we rely on.

Larry:
As you say that I can picture a whole other episode where I grill you about research methods and content testing methods and things.

Larry:
We’re getting close to time, I can’t believe this. These things always go quicker than I imagine.

Larry:
I always leave at the end of an episode an opportunity if there’s anything I haven’t brought up that is some insight you’ve had or some struggle you’ve got or anything like that lately. Is there anything, Andre or Kate, that you’d like to bring up before we wrap up?

Kate:
I guess this is something we touched on a little bit earlier, but I think one thing I love about our content, and there are many things I love about our team, it’s an awesome group of people, but one thing that’s especially great is our focus on cross functionality and folks coming from different backgrounds, as you mentioned earlier. Some come from journalistic backgrounds or research backgrounds. Some folks come from the private sector or from other government roles. I think one thing that’s made the team really strong, and the Content Guide by extension really strong, is that diversity of perspectives and experiences and opinions. I also really love that as content strategists meet can get involved in research and other disciplines and I think it just makes the team a lot stronger. It’s been a really great experience. The team is rad. That’s all I can say.

Larry:
Nice. That sounds great.

Larry:
Andre, did you have anything?

Andre:
Yeah, I’ve always been struck by the projects that our teams work on with other agencies how much difference in content it has design work to make. We’ll often wonder if they need wildly new technologies or a whole brand new organizations have fulfilled the digital services they’re providing. But some content work, some design work we’re really is a long way in making easier people to access services or find information. It’s like if you think your website or services so far from needing the goals you want to I would say it’s not necessarily that far, having the right people work on some of these aspects can really move you a lot further than you might.

Larry:
Right.

Andre:
Also, to reiterate, we talked about earlier, again, all 18F stuff is open source and free for anyone to copy or build upon or take and make your own. We really love that and encourage it. So go for it.

Larry:
Great. If I just direct people to the content guide they’ll be able to find any of the stuff we mentioned today in the shareable stuff you just mentioned or you said you have a GitHub repo, I see a lot of interesting code there.

Andre:
Yes. There are hundreds of repositories so there’s a lot to dig through. But on our main 18F website, 18f.gsa.gov, we have a pane for a number of other guides that are like the content guide that are all a different aspects of our work and those are all free to adapt or copy.

Larry:
Okay, cool. I will find some of those. Well, thanks so much both of you. Really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. I appreciate you coming on the show.

Andre:
Thanks so much for having us.