Ginny Redish: Content, Usability, and UX Pioneer – Episode 159

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There are a lot of pioneers in the field of content strategy. One of them can make a strong case for being a true original.

Ginny Redish was among the cadre of usability-testing professionals who founded the discipline of UX design.

She was making government content usable, readable, and accessible decades before the famous GOV.UK makeover.

She was talking about content as conversation years before chatbots and voice assistants became common.

Her book, Letting Go of the Words, guided content practitioners and UX designers in the decade before the second wave of UX writing and content design books arrived.

It’s truly difficult to find an aspect of modern content practice that Ginny hasn’t influenced or informed.

We talked about:

• her pioneering role working in content and usability since the 1970s
• the origins of modern documentation and plain-language advocacy in the Carter administration
• her role in creating documentation for the first personal computers, including the first docs to take task-oriented approach
• her take on content as conversation
• her insight that we have mistaken the web for a giant filing cabinet when in fact it’s a replacement for the telephone
• the origin of the title of her book, Letting Go of the Words
• the three legs of the stool that support content in her book: effective navigation and search, clear and usable design, and tech that works
• the origins of the UX profession in technical communication, cognitive psychology, and design
• the origins of service design, customer experience, and user experience in usability testing
• the importance of the personal-computer developments of the 1980s in setting the stage for the arrival of the web
• her delight at the growth of content strategy, content design, UX writing, and UX design

Ginny’s bio

Janice (Ginny) Redish has been a passionate evangelist for clear content, plain language, and usability for more than 40 years. In her numerous papers, book chapters, and webinars, Ginny has given insights and guidance on content strategy, content as conversation, user experience design, writing for the web, and other relevant topics. Reviewers have called Ginny’s most recent book, Letting Go of the Words — Writing Web Content that Works, “amazingly helpful,” “the best book,” “the definitive book for web writing.” Of her many awards, Ginny is particularly proud to have been one of the first people whom Kristina Halvorson inducted into the Content Strategy Hall of Fame (Confab 2023).

Connect with Ginny online

• email ginny@redish.net
• redish.net
• LinkedIn

Some of Ginny’s other books and articles

• A Practical Guide to Usability Testing
• User and Task Analysis for Interface Design
• Overlap, Influence, Intertwining: The Interplay of UX and Technical Communication
• How to Test the Usability of Documents
• Readability Formulas: 7 Reasons to Avoid Them and What to Do Instead

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 159. Content strategy, content design, and UX writing can all trace their roots back to user experience design. And UX design can trace its origins back to early technical documentation and usability testing. Ginny Redish pioneered all of these practices and shared them in her book, Letting Go of the Words. The principles and techniques that Ginny set out in her book more than a decade ago continue to guide content and design practitioners today.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone, welcome to episode number 159 of The Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am super extra delighted today to welcome to the show Ginny Redish. Ginny is a legend in the field of writing for the web and usability, and she’s one of the true pioneers of UX practice. I could go on forever, but welcome Ginny. Tell the folks a little bit more about how you ended up being this amazing writer that you are.

Ginny:
Thank you, Larry. I’m really excited and pleased to be here and be part of your podcast. As you said, a pioneer and that’s just because as you can see from my white hair, I’ve been in the business since, actually since the ’70s. I’m a linguist by training and what does a linguist do? I got into consulting very early and I had the opportunity when in the United States, president Jimmy Carter really was concerned about people being involved in the government. And he put forth an executive order that led to a project called the Document Design Project. That was the name the government gave to it, out of which the group I was with at the American Institutes for Research formed the Document Design Center. And in those days it was print, it was before the web, but it was about plain language, about making sure that products, documents worked for the people who had to use them.

Ginny:
So it was about usability. And I stole from my instructional design colleagues at the American Institute for Research, AIR, a model that said, in order to create something usable, you had to first figure out who your audience is, what you were trying to do, so purpose. You had to understand that audience and you made something that worked for them by drafting and then trying it out with them. And so we were doing usability testing I think before it had a name and out of that came a product that worked. And it’s the same model, it’s the same idea that we’re doing today with all kinds of products, hardware, software. And of course the web, which is where my work has been for the last 20 or more years on the internet.

Larry:
Yeah. And see you go, I love that you go so far back before the web, but it was all the exact same things that we’re concerned with now which I guess it’s just human beings communicating with one another in some kind of a computer-augmented medium. And you figured that earlier. One thing I want to point out, you’re kind of modest there. You mentioned your linguistics background, you have a PhD in linguistics from Harvard, which is for a group of word nerds like us, I just want to make sure people know that. But tell me a little bit about the transition from this original, and I didn’t know about the Jimmy Carter program, that government kind of driving this drive to usability. Tell me a little bit more about the origins of that and what was it called, the Document Design Center. What was your purview there?

Ginny:
Well, as I said, if you think about the United States government, and I don’t know, we’re talking to people all over the world, so other countries may have a different situation. But here we seem to go back and forth between an administration that really caress about people and wanting people to be able to participate in government and understand what government does and people who honestly don’t want that. But Jimmy Carter was a person, and I don’t know if you know, he’s still with us, almost a hundred years old, doing wonderful things for people. But one of the things he did as president was say that people should be able to participate in government, they should be able to understand it. And in a lot of ways that’s the origin of the modern documentation move and also of the modern plain language move.

Ginny:
There is a lot of activity in plain language now around the world. We’ve just gotten an international standard on plain language, like there is an international standard on usability. It was very exciting and it was wonderful for me because as you said, I had done a very esoteric PhD in linguistics. And ended up in the Washington DC area because my physics professor husband got an appointment here in the days when the two body problem was a problem. And you couldn’t have to… Nobody tried to help get two academic jobs. So even though I had a doctorate, it didn’t help me get an academic job. But I found a wonderful life in the consulting world, and I know that many, many of our listeners are in fact consultants and ended up working for a consulting firm called American Institutes for Research, which is a not-for-profit think tank basically. That does good work. So that’s my background.

Ginny:
I’ll say the other thing that happened is we spent three years on that government project helping to bring plain language and usability to government, which it took a long time to do. But there’s now a great deal of activity in the United States in plain language and usability for government forms, documents, websites, et cetera. But the other thing that happened in the early 1980s was that the personal computer arrived. And I’ll tell you how I got into documentation. A vice president of IBM called me up, having gotten my name from someone else as the person to ask about documentation and basically said to me, “We’re about to put a computer on the desk of every executive in America. We have no idea how to communicate with them. We’ve been communicating with the system administrators in the back room all this time. Will you help us communicate with ordinary folks.”

Ginny:
And my team as well as others, we were partnering with a New York forum called Siegel & Gale on the document design project and with Carnegie Mellon University, which created a computer design center. And you may know Karen Shriver, who is very active in this community. Karen was actually a graduate student who then became basically the communication design center at Carnegie Mellon when she was finished with her graduate studies. But I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at a computer manual from the 1970s. You had to know the command to use to look it up in the index. It was not task oriented, it was not user oriented. And I think one of the things we did in the early ’80s was create the task oriented, user oriented computer manual. And I’m very proud of my team for having done that.

Larry:
You should be, because everything you’re talking about, the task orientation, the user orientation, the methodology you described earlier about research and understanding your audience and all this stuff and the focus on plain language. These are all the top concerns in user experience design and content design and UX writing and technical documentation today. So I promised not to fanboy about this before we went on the air, but I just can’t help it, sorry.

Larry:
But one thing about that, and I also want to point out for the younger people who are listening, that getting a call from IBM in the ’80s, that would be like Satya Nadella or somebody at Google or Meta or something calling you today and saying, “Hey, we’re about to do this new thing.” It’s like IBM was the top of the tech pyramid at that point. Another place where I feel like you’ve been ahead of the curve and we haven’t talked about it yet, is the notion you’ve talked for, I don’t know, the last 10 or 20 years as much as I can recall it, about content as conversation. Can you talk a little bit about that and how does that… I’m curious now how that unfolds from all that you’ve said so far.

Ginny:
Well, if you think about it, everything that we do, everything we write is part of a conversation. So even a form or the letter you get from your health benefits company is part of a conversation you’re having with them. And writing is one of the things that content is conversation, makes you realize is that in the kind of writing we do, we’re replacing a telephone. I think when the web started way back, decades ago, people were thinking of it as a file cabinet. That’s why we have so many just documents dumped on the web, it was a way of opening your file cabinets for people. But that’s not a good metaphor for making a usable website. And a much better metaphor is saying you want people to go to the web to do what they would otherwise have done on the telephone.

Ginny:
And so it really is, content is conversation. I’ll make one more point about that though. One of the interesting things about websites is that in the print world, when you get your mail, the person sending you that mail has started the conversation, you open the letter and say, “Who is this from? And what is it they’re trying to say to me?” Whereas on the web, it’s always the user who starts the conversation because your website doesn’t exist until somebody goes to it, and they go to it with their conversation in mind. And if you think about the web that way, you are always in a conversation with somebody.

Larry:
A couple of things you’ve just said make me really curious, now that one, the web is like a document sharing place and that is a place that people go to start these conversations. I feel like one of the reasons your book is so successful is that you implicitly have those assumptions in mind, whereas a lot of us are just feeling it like this kind of interactive gadget that you’re doing things through, not conversing with. I think that’s an important distinction. And I wonder, has it been easy to explain that to people? Because it seems to me like one of those things where you’re like the fish swimming in the water, trying to explain water to yourself. Have you had any moments like that?

Ginny:
I do think people connect to it. I mean, they may not have thought about it beforehand, but if you say content is conversation… And actually when I was doing a lot of workshops, I would always start my workshops by having people think about a time when they recently went to a website. Not a game site or an entertainment site, but a functional, do, task, or information based site. And think about their experience, what was in their mind when they went and how did that go? And then they wake up and say, “Well, of course it was a conversation. I went because I had to find out the schedule for the latest podcast from Larry. So I had a question, ‘What was the latest podcast? Should I listen to it?'” Again, I’m starting a conversation, I’m asking a question. So when you present it that way, I think people really get the concept that content is conversation. And as you say, I’ll hold up a copy of the book if you don’t mind.

Larry:
Of course.

Ginny:
It’s called, Letting Go of the Words, but the theme is content is conversation, and I’m trying to have a conversation with people through the book. So a lot of that was in my mind, as you said, when I told writing it.

Larry:
I think a lot of people… I have a lot of curiosity about the book. First of all, the title Letting Go of the Words, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard you talk about the origin of the title. It seems like it’s getting at something. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Ginny:
Well, I wanted an interesting title rather than just… And actually I also want to give a shout-out to Steve Krug and Don’t Make Me Think, because I originally wanted to say Don’t Make Me Read. But it is one of the main guidelines I would say for thinking about content as conversation, is how simply do we talk compared to the way that we write? And the world has become so much more informal than it was a century ago, say that we really are in a conversation. We want to be as simple as possible. So I think that “letting go of the words” helps people think about, “Can I write this more simply? And fewer words, give people less to read.” Because we know that people skim and scan, and it’s not that they don’t read. They read what they find that is going to satisfy the next step in the conversation.

Larry:
And that reminds me, I’ve been studying service design recently, and I don’t know if you know that discipline, but you basically described it when you described your methodology. It begins with user research and really understanding your user, prototyping, iterating, building, testing, all those things you talked about. Well, I guess, but even before that, before service design, before UX design was articulated as a discipline, there was all the stuff you were doing. Can you trace for us… Because I think a lot of people think about Nielsen/Norman and Jared Spool and Steve Krug and those are all… And I think it’s correct that those folks all come out of usability backgrounds much like yours. Is that sort of the pathway into modern UX practice because you bring the document side, you’re like the original content designer, it seems to me. And that you have a similar, as much cred in the usability world as any of those folks, but you also have a PhD in linguistics.

Ginny:
Well, I think that you’d have to talk to all of those people, but I know that I really come from the same generation, and we’re all friends. I guess I first met Jakob through Ben Shneiderman, who was one of the founders of CHI. Jacob’s background, I’m not sure, it’s either psychology or usability. I think Steve Krug comes out of a writing background. Jared first worked with the folks who… Karen Holtzblatt, Dennis Wickson, they’re the folks who really were very early on and also in usability and in both documents and software. Yes, I come from a linguistics, you come from journalism, I think journalism is a great background when thinking about that. I was thinking about the fact that back in high school when we had to do a project on careers, we were interested in, the two things I went after was a professor of linguistics and a journalism editor. I really did think about journalism because I do enjoy writing. Not everybody enjoys writing and content, but content is so important.

Ginny:
One of the things I think on page one of the book is my little stool. It’s critical to have good navigation, good search, because if people can’t find it, you might as well not have written it. It’s incredibly important of good design. And one of the things that I really push for is designing, for example, the book with lots of white space, lots of pictures, lots of color. That’s critically important. And the technology is critically important because if the backend doesn’t work, the whole thing doesn’t work. But think of that as three legs of a stool. They don’t stand up by themselves. They’re all there to support the content because the content is what people come for. They come to finish a task or to get the information they need. So bringing the content people is critical. I’ll say one other thing, when you’re talking about background, today there are so many young people who actually can go to school in usability, in design, in content. But Janice James started the Usability Professionals Association, which is now called the User Experience Professionals Association, UXPA.

Ginny:
She started that actually in 1992, was a Birds of the Feather meeting at a CHI, Computer Human Interaction meeting, but then started the organization itself in the summer of 1992. And there were about a hundred people at that meeting. Jared Spool was one of the speakers. I was one of the speakers. I would say a third of the people there came from tech comm, from writing. About a third of the people came from cognitive psychology, which is a way a lot of people came into usability. And a third of the people may have come from design, usability, et cetera. And there’s also a journal from that organization. The journal is now called Journal of User Experience, it was originally Journal of Usability Studies and it’s available online, open access. And Carol Barnum and I published an invited essay a couple of years ago talking about the background of people coming into the field and how much tech comm, how much writing people, content people have been part of that.

Larry:
That’s really interesting to me because one thing… I have a lot of, not a lot, but several friends in tech comm, and when I look at the current, folks at the big software companies and stuff who are doing the writing, they almost all come out of journalism and copywriting and things like that. And there’s surprisingly few people who’ve kind of crossed over from tech writing into those things. But you demonstrate that that’s the best possible place you could come from. Do you have a theory, like what’s going on there? And the heritage you just described of a third of the people being at the original CHI meeting, the original birds of a feather gathering, being out of tech writing. It seems to me those poor folks have been kind of sequestered in old tech writing jobs and haven’t been as influential as they might’ve been in the growth of content design and UX design?

Ginny:
Oh, I think they have, I think you would be surprised at how many people whom you now think of as content strategists, content people come out of a writing background, be it journalism, be it tech comm, be it marketing. Kristina Halvorson really brought marketing in. But Rahel Bailie, who’s now in England, comes out of a writing tech comm background. So I think you don’t realize how many people who are content strategists, content specialists actually do have a journalism or writing or a tech comm, rather than a psychology. And there really wasn’t a UX background for…. I mean, you didn’t go to school in UX back in the ’80s, for example.

Larry:
Hey, when did you first identify as a UX practitioner? Do you remember the… I’m trying to remember when it became like a thing. It seems like it was kind of first on the radar screen, late ’90s, early 2000s. But I don’t remember when it became codified as a…

Ginny:
Well, I don’t know when it became codified. And one of the things you might consider is when the international standard on usability came out. But again, in the early ’90s when UPA started and also in STC, the Society of Technical Communication, Janice James and I petitioned for and got one of the special interest groups that was usability, is now called Usability and User Experience Special Interest groups. So again, and we were doing usability testing with a lab. I mean, I actually built a lab in the mid 1980s. So I think what is now, as you say, service design and there is customer experience, user experience, they’re all broadening of the idea that I think originally started with people doing usability testing. And in the early, early days we were doing usability testing much too late because people didn’t think about it.

Ginny:
They thought about it as quality assurance, and it was more acceptance testing. And we pushed and pushed and pushed to say, “No, no, no, it has to be in the front end.” It has to be iterative. And that’s where Jakob was very influential in talking about it, and Jared being very influential in saying, “You have to do it iteratively. You can do it small scale. The important thing is to do it during the process and not wait until it’s too late to make any changes.” And then that spreads to saying, “It’s all about the whole experience, so UX.” And actually even the idea, I mean, your podcast is called The Content Strategy podcast. Well, content strategy owes a lot to Kristina Halvorson and her book, but a lot of us were thinking strategically long before that. So I think takes a while for things to get a name, even though people are actively involved in doing it.

Larry:
What doesn’t? And then when we do get the names, we can’t sort them out. Maybe you can help us as a linguist. I am always struck by the inability of the word people to label themselves. Anyhow, that’s a whole other podcast. And I’ve talked with Kristina and others about that a lot.

Larry:
But I wanted to ask you one thing about timing seems really interesting on some of this stuff you mentioned. And I don’t know how much of it is just the nature of the tech world at the time, but you mentioned 1992 is when that Birds of a Feather Group formed. That was also, I think the year that Tim Berners-Lee had just launched HTML and the Worldwide Web, and I think Mosaic came out the following year. So you’re poised right on that cusp of the beginning of the whole interwebs thing. Was that just fortuitous timing or do you feel like there was something in the air at the time?

Ginny:
I think that a major part was actually earlier in the 1980s when the personal computer came out. And all the stuff that was happening at PARC, that is Palo Alto Research Center, where the mouse was invented and the graphical user interface was invented. And again, usability testing, IBM was doing usability testing in the early 1980s. And I did what was probably the first usability test at Hewlett Packard in about the same time without a lab or anything. But again, from the model we had developed in the Document Design Center and came to the issue, HP hired my team to revolutionize the documentation for their PC, which is called the Vectra at the time. And we said, “Well, we have to test what we’re doing to see how well it works or it doesn’t work while we can still make changes to it.”

Ginny:
So I think that if I were to say a time, the early ’80s was a huge time, and then a decade later, the early ’90s was, as you were just saying, was another huge time. And then I think the early 2000s was another huge time because that’s actually when I and a lot of other people got into the internet. As you said, the internet existed in the ’90s. Actually, I was part of ARPANET before that, that the universities were using, again, because I’m married to a professor who was into that very early. He and Jobs were keynote speakers at a conference on computers and education in probably the late ’80s. But the idea of real websites really came up in the early 2000s. And so my practice for the last 20 years has really been totally web focused, whereas before that it was really, as I say, originally, very document focused and then very computer-manual focused. But I think it’s really the last 20 years that have been the internet.

Larry:
That was another interesting piece of timing, because your book, I think the first edition came out in 2007, right?

Ginny:
Yes.

Larry:
And then you revised it in 2012, which makes perfect sense because 2007, the iPhone is introduced, social media Twitter and Facebook and all this stuff has come along. You do this brilliant book, and then the whole world changes. And then arguably, a lot of people have talked about how little change there’s been the last 15 years. So you kind of had the, not misfortune, but the interesting timing of publishing your book just at the start of this. And you immediately went, “Oh, wait, there’s more.” Can you tell me a little bit about that revision process?

Ginny:
Well, actually, I didn’t totally revise the book, although the first edition is also I think really, really, really useful because it is about content is conversation, it’s about writing. It’s full of examples. It did have, even in the first one, I was very concerned about accessibility, but it didn’t have nearly as much about… well, it didn’t have content strategy, which the second edition does. It didn’t have nearly as much about SEO as the second edition does. As you say, I think it’s still valuable, I think it works. The one huge addition in the last decade has been UX writing, but I think the book works for UX writing too. It has lots of examples of small pieces of writing as well as larger pieces of writing. But yes, the big new thing has been UX writing, which I think is a way for those of us who are really concerned about writing to get into the process even earlier, which we’ve always pressed to do.

Larry:
Yeah, and thanks for pushing for that. I mean, it’s great that that’s kind of established as like, “Yes, you need to get the writers involved as early as possible.” Hey, Ginny, I can’t believe it, we’re already coming up close to time. I could literally go on forever with this. So maybe we’ll have to have you back on at some point. But I want to wrap up today, but before we wrap, you were just talking about the book. I’d love to maybe wrap up with if there’s anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation or that you just want to make sure we get to before we wrap up.

Ginny:
Well, I would just say I think it is wonderful how the field has expanded so much. There are so many people in usability today. I can remember being brought in by the one usability person at a company I won’t name, but that is now a huge company. When it was much smaller and I was being brought in by this gal to try to convince the executives that they needed to focus on usability and content – and content… I didn’t have the word content strategy, but I was talking about usability strategy, content strategy. And they basically were, if you know the book Crossing the Chasm, they were before the chasm.

Ginny:
They weren’t ready yet. They now have hundreds of content strategists and hundreds of UX people on staff. And I just think that is so wonderful, and I hope that my work and my various papers and the three books that I’ve been part of have been part of that expansion and influencing some of the people. And if you’re not familiar, I will say, if you’ll allow me to push the book called Letting Go of the Words, it is full of pictures, examples. I think people learn by seeing and by making the book as usable and accessible as possible, I would really love to have that further influence as I move further and further into retirement.

Larry:
Nice. Well, I’m not surprised that you’re walking the walk, you’re walking the talk, as you do that, all the accessibility, usability, everything you talk about is exemplified in the book, and I heartily recommend that. And one thing I’ll do, because I don’t really have time to talk about it today, but that brilliant, you added the content strategy kind of a little primer, I think in the second edition. And I think that’s available on the web, I’ll link to that in the show notes so that folks can check that out. But they should definitely buy the book too.

Larry:
Hey, one very last thing, Ginny, what’s the best way, if folks want to get in touch with you, how should they reach out?

Ginny:
Well, I do have a website. It’s still there, and actually very, I hope, easy to find. And my name is Redish with only one D. It’s pronounced like the color, but not spelled like the color, R-E-D-I-S-H. And so the website is redish.net. And you can reach me through the website or by email at ginny@redish.net. I’m on LinkedIn and happy to connect with people on LinkedIn, and happy to respond to email as well. So I hope that people will contact me. And again, thanks for having me on the podcast, Larry.

Larry:
Well, thank you so much, and I really do hope folks will reach out, and I really appreciate your semi-retirement. Thanks for hanging around and helping us all out.