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Hinrich von HaarenContent work is never done. Among the most common, and challenging, types of content work are big transformation projects that consolidate, reorganize, and re-conceptualize big web properties.
Hinrich von Haaren has worked on many content transformation projects, including the famous GOV.UK website makeover in the early 2010s.
His new book, Content Transformation, is a manual for managing these big, complicated projects.
We talked about:
- his work as a content strategist at Content Design London
- his work on content transformation projects and how it led to his book on the subject
- unique stakeholder management challenges that arise in big government projects and how to manage them
- the preference in his projects for workshops over meetings
- how he and his team set intentions around, and prepare for, workshops
- how they measure customer satisfaction and progress toward business goals
- the way content strategy emerges from his content transformation work
- how content transformation and culture change go hand in hand
- three key take-homes that he hopes everyone gets from the book:
- the need to be simultaneously realistic and boldly ambitious
- the importance of being transparent with the team about goals and expectations
- the crucial role of communication
- his intent for the book to be more like a handbook for reference than a procedures guide
- the vital role of cross-disciplinary collaboration in any content project
Hinrich’s bio
Originally from Germany, Hinrich moved to London to work in publishing and later in online content. Hinrich worked on all sorts of content from news to financial information before becoming part of the original Government Digital Service (GDS).
Working within a small team and with hundreds of sticky notes, Hinrich helped turn the unwieldy BusinessLink website into easy and practical content for the general public. Subsequently, he worked on the NHS transformation and many other bigger and smaller transformation projects in the legal sector, the arts, academia and lots of other content areas.
Hinrich is the co-founder of the Content Design Academy which offers training for people around the world.
Connect with Hinrich online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 153. A content strategy career often includes big, transformative projects that serve a variety of customer needs and touch wide swaths of an organization. Hinrich von Haaren, a content strategist at the prestigious agency Content Design London, has worked on many of these projects, including the famous GOV.UK website consolidation in the early 2010s. His new book, Content Transformation, is a handbook for content practitioners tasked with managing these kinds of projects.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 153 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to welcome to the show, Hinrich von Haaren. Hinrich is a content strategist at Content Design London, which has to be one of the coolest jobs in the world. But welcome, Hinrich. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re doing there.
Hinrich:
Hi, Larry. Nice to be here. So yes, I’m a content strategist at CDL – Content Design London – and my job is sort of a mix of three things. I work on projects for the companies, so where mostly we do transformation jobs, which is what the book is about. And I also do training. We have training courses. I develop and run part of the training program, and then I also write about content design, write online and write books. Book so far.
Larry:
That’s right. And I totally buried my lede I realized. The whole point of having you on the show is you wrote this great book. Oh, I’ve got my focus. Anyhow, so for folks watching on YouTube, trust me, it’s called Content Transformation. Really interesting book about, like the first thing you mentioned is that you do big projects around content transformation. Can you talk a little bit about your work as a content transformation practitioner and how that led to the book?
Hinrich:
So my journey as a content designer/content strategist started at GOV.UK, so the government website here in the UK, and that was 12 years ago now, where this massive website where all the government departments published to was transformed into something completely new at that time. So a user-centered site with content based on user needs. And at that time, I remember being in one of the departments and we had this email from the Government Digital Service saying, we are now working with user needs. And we were all terribly excited about this thing called user needs because we had never heard about of this before. And then I worked for the Government Digital Service, the kind of central organization that transformed and made GOV.UK. And that was kind of my initial training as a content designer. And it was terrific training because now, unbelievably, within 18 months, we transformed this massive website.
Hinrich:
And then I worked on smaller projects. And then the next big thing that I worked on was for the National Health Service here in the UK. So again, a huge website with medical information – a kind of central system here – that we transform to make it more user-friendly, make it easier for people who are under a lot of stress, lots of difficult emotions, often going on to find and act on the information they read. So those were the big things that I worked on. And then there were other small- and medium-sized transformation projects that I was involved with in CDL across loads of different sectors.
Larry:
Nice. And as you talk about that, I’m thinking those two projects, especially the GOV.UK And then the NHS projects, those are massive, that implies a lot of investment and a lot of different stakeholders. Can you talk a little bit about the you were happy to hear this new focus on user centricity? So there was some alignment right there from the start, but can you talk a little bit more about the setting the scene around those, especially those two big projects,
Hinrich:
Especially at GOV.UK I don’t think we really knew as a content team what we were getting into in terms of stakeholder management because we basically went out to departments, policy teams and said, “Okay, there’s content that’s been sitting on this site for 15, 20 years almost, and we are going to rip this all up and do something else with it.” So obviously we were much more diplomatic about this, but this was a huge shock for people. Because suddenly someone said, “You have to think about those people out there who this is for.” And at that time, now this is a given – on most projects anyway – but at that time, this was a completely new thing for people. Policy teams never cared about who this content was for, they didn’t care, they just sort of banged up their content on these websites.
Hinrich:
So we had a lot of difficult conversations with people. There was shouting, there was storming out, there were tears or the whole range of emotions was going on. But for us, or for me as a content designer, for us as a content team, this was an incredible learning curve because you learned how to approach people with this. You can’t just, well walk into a room and say, but now we are doing a user-centered approach. That doesn’t mean anything to people who work in comms or policy or marketing. You have to step into their shoes. So you have to treat them as your users and think about what do they want out of this? And I had to learn how to do that, what are their goals, and try to almost sell this approach to them thinking about what they need to get out of this.
Larry:
Right. As you say that, I’m reminded that I counted the type number of workshops that you list in the appendix of the book, and there’s 17 different workshops that you run during these transformation projects. Is that the main way that you’re aligning people and discovering their needs and doing all the work for this?
Hinrich:
Yeah, absolutely. So our approach is basically workshops over meetings or sometimes you’d need meetings with people to update them and introduce them to the project, but generally I find that sitting around a table and discussing things isn’t always very fruitful. So instead we try to run workshops where people, so for example, I’ve just done a user needs workshop yesterday with a group of stakeholders and I used to run these workshops where people just arrive and we start from scratch. Now I find it more useful to have a bit of an introduction with them before, tell them what this is for, give them maybe a bit of an introduction to user needs if they need it. And then they go away and think about this and they come prepared to the workshop so that we can put up needs on the board kind of straight away looking for themes and trends and start grouping them. And that is what a lot of this transformation work is about, to go into the detail and then extrapolate bigger rules from the details, looking for patterns, looking for themes around the user needs for example.
Larry:
And so now I’m wondering about each of those workshops. Do you go in with a specific intent? Well, first of all, I want to say a couple things about that. One, I love that there’s so much obvious preparation that you don’t just walk into the workshop and start from scratch that everybody, it sounds like everyone’s showing up having done some homework and preparation. But then do this workshop sort out, does each one have a specific desired outcome or target for what they’re hoping to accomplish?
Hinrich:
Yeah, absolutely. So the prep is on both sides really. So as someone who leads these workshops or my colleagues, we have a really clear outcome in mind. So what do we want to get out of this workshop? So for example, a small bank of user needs for this particular area of the business that can be an outcome. But also often an outcome, especially early on in transformation, is to involve stakeholders in the work. And workshops are a great way I find of doing that.
Hinrich:
So for example, at the NHS, we did sketching workshops with doctors and nurses with the digital team, so a big mix of people and we had sort of user needs prepared for them and we were sketching sort of solutions for particular user needs. And it was great for them because it was something completely different, something they had never done before. It’s a bit playful, it’s fun. And it also sort of bridges the gap between we’re working in policy or we are working on a hospital ward somewhere and you are doing this weird digital thing over there that’s got nothing to do with us. And suddenly these two sides come together in those kind of workshops.
Larry:
Well, and I’m guessing it might not always just be those two sides, because there’s all your internal collaborators as well. Did you work with much with engineers and designers and business partners as well as the end users?
Hinrich:
Yes. Yeah, the book is focused on content transformation, but of course content transformation is only possible when you work with design, UX, research, engineers because you are making a new digital product. So content is just of course one part of that. But I’m not a product manager or an engineer, so I’d kind of left those things out. Plus there’s sort of great books about those things out there anyway.
Larry:
Yeah, no, exactly. And I think that’s where it’s one of the big intents of this podcast is to share how people do this stuff, how we collaborate with our collaborators, because it’s always different. And the more we know, the better prepared we can be to go into whatever the next thing is.
Larry:
One thing, as you’re talking about that, how do you know, it sounds like you’ve got a good process for sorting out these user stories and the jobs that the folks want to do. How do you measure progress or success along the way to actually helping people accomplish what they’re coming to your products for?
Hinrich:
You mean the end users after transformation or while those projects are going on?
Larry:
Yeah, I guess either and/or both. How do you measure customer satisfaction, I guess, or customer ability to accomplish what they want to do? And then also it is right back to content strategy. I realize that I have content strategy hardwired in my head. What are the business needs? Are you making your boss happy and are you making your customer happy?
Hinrich:
Yeah, in terms of customer satisfaction, we would sort of test new ideas all the way through. I mean, there’s obviously a part at the beginning of these kinds of projects where in discovery you just need to learn things, you just need to find out what are the exact issues, think, start to think about solutions around them. And then in the next sort of alpha, beta phase, you’d start prototyping, putting things in front of end users and testing them, testing your ideas, your solutions with them. And on these big projects like GOV.UK and NHS, we kind of did that all the way through. We constantly refined the ideas, constantly refined the prototypes, et cetera, and then started publishing some of this new content. And again, then we had surveys on the side. So there was kind of a split. Some people were still looking at the old content, some people were looking at the new content, then we had survey results.
Hinrich:
So there was a constant dialogue, so to speak, with the end user. And in terms of internal success, I think you can’t do content transformation completely in a bubble. You have to think about what is it the organization, the business wants to get out of this? So the way we started to develop our content strategies is we basically have one strand running that does the actual transformation work. And out of that strand come insights that we use for the content strategy. So, for example, we run a content proposition workshop or workshops with stakeholders. What is it you want to publish? What is it you don’t want to publish as an organization? And the outcomes of those kinds of workshops then inform what goes into the content strategies. So there’s some people working on that and some people working on the actual project, if that makes sense.
Larry:
No, that’s right. And it makes me wonder, is there an explicit intent in any transformation project to have your content strategy emerge from the learning in the alpha? Is that one of the main intents of the whole thing?
Hinrich:
Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Larry:
Yeah, I see.
Hinrich:
And that is, I think for me that that’s a nice way to develop a content strategy because it involves the actual content team. So it’s not like a contractor is a consultant is shipped in and they sit in the corner for two months and write up this massive document and then it’s handed over to the team and they go, “What the hell is this? This hasn’t got anything to do with the way we work. It’s just someone telling us to change.” This is a more organic way of developing that.
Hinrich:
I’m obviously not saying that it’s all smooth sailing. Course you have to convince stakeholders to change, to change the way they think about content, for example. That is always one of the big things that we are coming up against because when you start this kind of transformation, whether it’s a big project or a smaller-scale project, it’s also culture change. Because if you want people to think about content as a digital product from the start, people who work in Word and write long documents and then hand them over to the digital team, that’s a big leap to think, “Okay, how is this actually going to look on a page? What’s the structure going to be like?” And that is something we still 12 years after GOV.UK still come up against in every sector, private everywhere.
Larry:
If it’s any consolation, everybody’s struggling with it. I think we’re in, yeah, 25 years into the whole web and everything. But as you say that, when you’re talking about one of the impacts you’re hoping for is a culture and kind of organizational change around this, that starts with the individuals I’m assuming. Is there sort of a mindset or behavior changes among individuals that kind of start that cultural and organizational transformation?
Hinrich:
I think, again, it goes back to stepping into your internal users shoes. I spent years sort of going into meetings with big guns saying “This is the way you have to do it and because this is the right way and it’s based on research.” And I never got anywhere with that approach. And I really did have to learn to think about, “Okay, this person is from marketing, what do they want to get out of this content? They’re publishing onto the site or onto the app? What are their goals?”
Hinrich:
And that is really then about business goals, isn’t it? And looking at these two sides, here are our user needs and what they want and here’s what the business wants. And often I find when you put them side by side, and we literally do this, we put them on Post-Its side by side and we go, “Okay, let’s have a look where there’s commonalities and where there’s discrepancies between these two columns and look at where there is discrepancies, why is that?” Because if you have people who want to buy bananas and your shop only sells blueberries, you’re kind of in trouble, aren’t you? And so you need to bring these two goals together. You need to think about your user as a business, but also you need to drive revenue, for example. So you need to mash those two goals up in some way.
Larry:
Right. And it sounds like the newer thing, even like you said, even after 12 years, that focus on user needs and doing things that way is maybe still the newer part of that. I guess I’m trying to remember. The book seems very pragmatic and practical and very, it’s like you could just pick up this book and run and do a content transformation project. Are there any top level take homes you hope people would leave, like if you just remember two or three things about the book, here’s what I hope you take home from it.
Hinrich:
I think one is you need to be realistic about what you can achieve, but at the same time, you need to be bold and ambitious. And that might sound like a bit of a contradiction, but I find that if you don’t push things at the start of a project, you will not get where you want to be because you will always get pushback. So ask for 300% more than what you are expecting to get, I would say, because then you can always sort of roll things back. The second thing is around the team, because the team you’re working with, and I’m not just talking about content designers, a multi disciplinary team.
Hinrich:
I think the team needs transparency. They need to know where this is going, what is the goal? And that might change that There can be flexibility, but they should have an overview of what this project is trying to achieve, what is the sort of general roadmap here.
Hinrich:
And then the last thing also to do with the team is that you need to communicate constantly. And I find that in a lot of teams, there are a lot of assumptions that people know stuff and people forget to say, “Okay, we just developed engineers here. Oh, here just developed this thing. Content designers over here just mapped this workflow.” This thing that we built for the CMS isn’t actually communicating with this workflow in any way because they hadn’t talked to each other. And that isn’t because they didn’t want to. It’s just because people assume everyone knows what’s in their head. And I find the longer I work in this job, the more I find this is one of the crucial things in any team. And it might sound like a very simple thing, but you have to constantly tell people, “This is what I’m thinking we should do. This is what we’re up to now.” And that’s hard.
Larry:
It is. And as you say that, I’m reminded of that we all get bit by assumptions all the time. And it also makes me wonder about the composition of a content transformation team. Is there a project manager somewhere in there who’s doing that over-communication?
Hinrich:
Yes. Yeah, I think a good product manager who sort of holds it all together is absolutely crucial because like I said before, content is just one part of this transformation. But I focused on that in the book because I’ve been on so many projects where everybody stood around at the beginning and said, “Okay, how do we do this again? We’ve done this before, but we can’t quite remember.” And the book is not meant to be sort of like, “This is how you have to do it.” It’s more like manual. “We’ve got this particular problem. Oh, let’s have a look in Hinrich’s book and see what he says about, I don’t know, stakeholder engagement or user needs workshop.” So it’s like I envisage this to be on people’s desks and they have certain issues they want to solve and they just have a look in this handbook and then they adapt the workshops to what they need to do.
Larry:
I was just looking at the cover of the book to see if it says anything about a handbook. But the way you just said that, I was going to ask you earlier a question about documentation of this and I’m like “Oh, that’s what the book is.” It’s like, “Here’s all those things that you wish you’d had when people were asking questions and all that.” Yeah, no.
Larry:
Hey, Hinrich, I can’t believe it. We’re almost coming close to time. I want to make sure before we wrap though, is there anything last, anything that’s on your mind about content transformation or just that you want to share before we close?
Hinrich:
I think be generous with your ideas. The best projects that I’ve worked on and that had the best outcomes were in teams where people were constantly sharing their ideas and no one was precious about “I’m a designer. Don’t come near my stuff.” Or “I’m a content person. Don’t tell me how to write anything.” I think sometimes this crossover between the disciplines is the most creative thing that happens on these projects. And also it’s the most fun because you make new friends, you work with people who think in a completely different way from the way you think. And that is where really interesting things happen in terms of making a product.
Larry:
I love that. The cross-fertilization benefits and then you can have fun doing it too. And that the foundation of that is generosity. And I think back early in, I started in book publishing 30 years ago, and it was just like everybody kind of had their place and everybody did their thing. And there was more like handoffs. Everything is so much more collaborative now. And I think we’re just, maybe that’s one of the main discoveries, like, oh, collaboration’s better and one of the things that makes collaboration work is generosity. Does that make sense?
Hinrich:
Yeah, yeah. And sometimes it takes guts, I think, to share your ideas because people think, “Oh, maybe people will not take my ideas seriously because I’m working in content.” But we all need to get out of our corners, I think
Larry:
Here’s to getting out of our corners. Well, thanks so much. Oh, hey, one very last thing, Hinrich. What’s the best way for folks to stay in touch if they want to connect online or follow you?
Hinrich:
LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn and also Content Design London is on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Larry:
Great. I’ll put those in the show notes as well. Thanks so much, Hinrich.
Hinrich:
Great. Thank you. Great talking to you.
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