Jared Spool: UX Content Strategy – Episode 25

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For nearly 40 years, Jared Spool has been helping publishers and software developers create better experiences for their users. Along the way, he has also helped companies apply UX design principles to the process of creating content for their customers.

Jared is one of the best-known and most widely cited practitioners and educators in the UX field. We had a wide-ranging conversation on content strategy and how it manifests in user experience design.

We talked about:

• his definition of content strategy (including Karen McGrane’s content-as-gift analogy)
• the relationship between content and design
• how the evolution from static content to template-ized dynamic content at first messed things up but ultimately demonstrated the importance of content strategy
• the big push to sophisticated and highly customized content management systems at big media outfits like Vox, the New York Times, and ProPublica
• tools that support editorial workflow and examples of companies using them
• the importance of tracking editorial success and how to measure it
• the dearth of off-the-shelf third-party tools for tracking and improving editorial operations – “everything is bespoke”
• how the shortage of well-trained UX and content strategy talent led to the creation of the Center Centre
• his thoughts on the new “UX Writer” job role, and on the inadequacy of job roles in general
• who on a UX team can/should write the UX copy
• how to assess the skills set of your team
• the availability of his first cohort of Center Centre students for residencies (contact them if your company might have an opportunity)

Jared’s Bio

Jared M. Spool is a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre/UIE. Center Centre is the school he started with Leslie Jensen-Inman to create industry-ready User Experience Designers. UIE is Center Centre’s professional development arm, dedicated to understanding what it takes for organizations to produce competitively great products and services.

In the 39 years he’s been in the tech field, he’s worked with hundreds of organizations, written two books, published hundreds of articles and podcasts, and tours the world speaking to audiences everywhere. When he can, he does his laundry in Andover, Massachusetts.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 25 of the content strategy interviews podcast. I’m really happy today to have on the show Jared Spool. Jared is a legend in the user experience world. He’s been doing it since before it was a field. I think it’s safe to say he was there at the start of it. He’s best known as the found of the User Interface Engineering company. I’m not sure how long ago that was started, but it’s been around for a little while. More recently, a couple years ago, he founded a school, a university, for user experience professionals called Center Centre down in Chattanooga. I’ll let Jared tell you a little bit more about what he’s up to these day, and a little bit more about his background.

Jared:
In 1988. That’s when we started UIE. Center Centre was started in 2013 and we merged in 2016.

Larry:
Oh. Okay.

Jared:
So, we’re now Center Centre UIE.

Larry:
Nice. Very cool. I guess maybe you could talk about it in the context of the Center Centre curriculum or just in general, how you think content strategy … First of all, how would you define content strategy, and then how would you contextualize it within the field of user experience design?

Jared:
Well I would ask a content strategist, that’s how I would define content strategy. It’s easier when you let somebody else do it. To me, content strategy is all the work that has to do with the words. From a UX perspective, a user experience perspective, it’s very easy for designers to just focus on the delivery of the stuff without thinking about what the stuff is.

The trap that people fall into is that they’re basically … Karen McGrane has this great saying of it’s like creating a beautiful gift box, but never putting a gift in it. A lot of design work can fall into that trap, where you’re creating this beautiful gift box, but you’re never figuring out what the gift is and who it’s for and whether it’s a meaningful gift and will it always have meaning and all those things.

To me, content strategy is all those things. Thinking about how you figure out what content will make it best, what the different forms of that content needs to be, the different context that that content has to show up, when that content goes away, all those things.

Larry:
Right. You mentioned that Karen McGrane gift. I think it was … I read a whole bunch of stuff preparing for this so, apologies if I’m conflating things here, but-

Jared:
That’s okay. You should do all your homework. That’s very good.

Larry:
One of the things I think it was … Anyhow, there was an article you did about how content and design are inseparable.

Jared:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Larry:
That the two of them go together, and I think that’s where I first saw you talk about the Karen McGrane story about the gift, which I love. You could take that metaphor all over the place, like how much thought went into that gift, how-

Jared:
Exactly.

Larry:
The content as a gift is a great thing. I think it hasn’t always been that way. There are still designers who just think lorem ipsum place holders, stick it in there, get going. How have you seen content and design come together as disciplines like content strategy and content design and content structure and UX practice? Is that a relatively new thing, or is it something that’s just been identified or how do you articulate that relationship?

Jared:
I don’t think it’s a new thing. Content has always had to think about its context. I mean, design has always had to think about its context. Right? Design is about … If you wanna design a park, you could just take a bunch of trees and say “okay, now that’s a park”. There’s a plot of land and say that’s a park, but no, you start to think about well, wait a second. Some parts of the park should have easy to walk areas, and some parts should … Maybe there are trails. There should be things to explore. Some of those should be well marked. Some of them maybe shouldn’t be so well marked. There should be open areas. There should be wooded areas. There should be benches. There should be trash cans.
Now you get into all this sort of infrastructure thing. If you’re gonna have grassy areas, you have to have a way to cut the grass, which means you have to have an access road for the lawnmowers to get there, which means you have to have a place to put the lawnmowers. You don’t want the places to put the lawnmowers as sort of ugly, so you don’t want them to be in the middle of the park. There’s all this sort of stuff that has to sorta emerge. You can’t just say “Well, we’re gonna make a beautiful park” and not think about all those things.
I think that design is always thought of content. If you think that a lot of what we consider to be visual design today, came out of the graphic communications world. Graphic communications was producing everything from posters to annual reports. Those aren’t designed without the content at all. I mean, you can’t design a poster without the content. You can’t design an annual report without the content. There’s nothing to do.
They’ve always had this relationship. Where things got problematic, was that that content was always static. In the world of the annual report, sure there’s a new annual report every year, but you redesign the annual report every year and an art director created a new annual report. A magazine had an art director that created a new magazine with every issue. It’s not the case that you open the physical magazine and the article changes out from one month to the next. Once that magazine goes out of the building and into someone’s life, it stays exactly the same forever.
Websites don’t do that. Software doesn’t do that. Software allows you to replace content into a template. Nothing else really has that property in real life. That messed us up for a while because we got so fixated on the templates, we forgot that there was content that was supposed to live inside them. I think that that was a giant step backwards for design for a while and content strategy sort of shook the cage and said “No, no. Yes, you can swap out content in the same thing, but there’s actually a strategy to it. That strategy has to be intentional”. It’s part of the design.

Larry:
What comes to mind … I think we all come at this from different directions, and I come out of the publishing world for example. You’ve been pretty ensconced … Your original career you were in the computer world, right? You were doing user interface stuff for-

Jared:
Well, yeah, except I was doing publishing. I was writing software for publishers. I was doing publishing software and desktop software and I worked on the first email systems and the first spreadsheets and word processors and typesetting systems and things like that.

Larry:
Okay. So your background is more like mine than I might’ve imagined I guess then. I think the point I was trying to get there is that-

Jared:
I don’t have that giant owl behind me that you seem to have.

Larry:
Oh, is that showing up in my … Oh good. I’m in a coworking space in Seattle. There’s a moose on the other wall, but the lighting’s not good. I prefer the moose-

Jared:
Oh good. I was gonna be embarrassed ’cause your whiteboard is so empty I thought “My gosh, this guy has no ideas”.

Larry:
No. It’s a shared room. All the ideas are in my computer.

Jared:
Got it.

Larry:
Anyhow, but I wanted to get at that. I think everybody, we’re all at varying places on that journey of understanding what you just talked about. We’ve gone from static templatized sort of content, to now we have like … Sara Wachter-Boettcher would call it content everywhere and we have to be prepared that they have content not just in mobile device but maybe a voice interface to get to it-

Jared:
Oh yeah.

Larry:
Could show up anywhere. Yet, part of what you were just talking about also reminded me of like how crummy I guess a lot of CMS’s can be in that they sort of impose … They’re maybe a half a step into that world. They’re dynamic, they’re generated by a database, but they still have that sort of templatized like the old IT guy in the background making you do things a certain way. I think content strategy, both content strategists and designers I’m gonna guess are pushing back at that. Do you see much progress in that world? Do you see progress from the technical side of things to help both publishers, designers, content strategists …?

Jared:
Oh sure. I think that there’s a big push. The designers at Vox just published their new publishing system and how they created, they took five separate publishing apps that a writer and editor had to use at some point, and they unified them in a single set of functionality with a common system and they really sat down and did a lot of work on the publishing of things because the tools that they had organically cobbled together in their history were so crude.
I think there’s a lot of work happening in that. New York Times just redid their internal system. ProPublica just changed their internal system. There’s a tremendous amount of work because journalism is moving so much faster now that they can’t screw around with really inefficient tools. A lot of the tools that they have, haven’t changed since the 90’s and have been organically modified to do things like take headlines and tweet them out, but they’re so clumsy to work with and so fragile that they don’t work well at all.

Larry:
Right. That kind of gets at when we think about content, what are we even talking about? I think a lot of people have always thought about like the website content or like in the case of an e-commerce site, the product catalog or whatever it might be. Now we have this need both for integration on the back end, that all the content is accounted for, and then out at the front end, you’re not just publishing it to a website, but you’re publishing it to all these other devices. Also, you’re publishing to different purposes. The marketing people wanna compose their tweets and then … Is that what the Vox system did? Did it integrate some of that like content promotion stuff into it as well?

Jared:
Yeah. I’m not 100% sure what the Vox system redesign did in terms of the underlying software. I focused more on the process by which they did it.

Larry:
Got it.

Jared:
Yeah. I mean that … Publishing is no longer sitting down, banging out four graphs and running across the room to the editor saying “Hey boss, I got this in just before the deadline”. I mean, that’s gone away.
The Clark Kent newsroom no longer exists.

Larry:
A quick aside on that. I just last couple weeks ago, some friends showed the movie “Broadcast News”, which-

Jared:
Right.

Larry:
Was in the late 80’s and there was one scene where a woman’s dramatically running down the hall banging into things trying to get the video tape to the producer just in time. We’re way past that.

Jared:
Yeah. So because we’re no longer there, the newsroom and other publishing things are in this bigger sort of editorial flow thing. Once you start to go down the nasty road of what’s our editorial flow, you begin to realize that there is no unilateral single editorial flow. Something that’s a 20,000 word thought piece has a very different editorial flow than something that is responding to the president’s latest tweet.
The tools necessary are there because in the thought piece, the newsroom has to do fact checking and they’re doing art direction and they’re really taking a story editing approach to it and looking to see is this the most compelling elements. What can we do? What do we still need to research? Whereas in the response to the latest tweet, you have to look up what fact he lied about, and then you have to find a link to it, and then you publish that. The tools you need to do that are completely different.

Larry:
Right. Hey that gets into something else I wanted to ask you about, which is this little meta I guess in a sense, but I’m wondering how and whether UX practice is being applied to those kinds of things like editorial work flows in big organizations?

Jared:
Oh yeah.

Larry:
Yeah. Do you have any examples of that, like big organizations that … Because as you mentioned, every-

Jared:
Oh, you should talk to … Why is her name escaping me? Mandy Brown over at Vox.

Larry:
Oh I think Sarah Wachter-Boettcher mentioned her.

Jared:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They used to work together on A List Apart.

Larry:
Okay. Yeah. Maybe she’ll be at Confab. . .

Jared:
Actually Mandy, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. They’re doing amazing work on their editorial work flow. I know the Times is doing work. I know that the Knight Ridder has a whole bunch of stuff on this. There’s a ton of folks working on this. This is a big deal. NPR has incredible resources put on this.

Larry:
Right.

Jared:
So, yeah. No, the Guardian, the BBC. I think any major publishing house has to be thinking about editorial work flow stuff at this point and they feel completely like this is the priority because this is the thing that prevents them from getting the scoop out.

Larry:
Right. Yeah, the instant gratification demand is so high now and the competition to break stories must be huge.

Jared:
Yeah. Yeah. Then, tracking what worked, right? Being able to go back and look at “Well, when we did it this way, we got this response. When we did it this other way, we got this other response”. How do we run the experiments?

Larry:
I guess that’s kinda what I was getting at too is that sort of built in UX research into your editorial process, where you have that kind of feedback coming back. Do most people do that sort of by customizing their CMS or by using third party measurement tools like Google Analytics-

Jared:
Yeah, there aren’t any good third party tools for this because everything is bespoke. The problem with any two news publishing organizations is that their entire operation runs completely different one from the other. So you can’t have a generic package to measure stuff. Now that said, I know that NPR has a whole bunch of tools that they give to their affiliates to help their affiliates be more effective. The affiliates are basically adopting the NPR process instead of building their own, and so the tools work if that’s what you’re gonna do. If you’re not gonna adopt the NPR process, those tools are not gonna be very effective for you.

Larry:
Got it. I guess that’s where … When you say how customized it has to be for every place, that maybe gets back to the importance of having people who are versed in the process working in each of these outfits in organizations, which is probably why we’re seeing the growth of UX and content strategy and disciples like that. Are you seeing strong demand for people with those kinds of skills like that you-

Jared:
Oh yeah, I mean, that’s why we started a school-

Larry:
Yep.

Jared:
Was because there was way more demand then there was supply. We knew we could do a good job of training folks so we started a school to make that happen.

Larry:
Nice. So that school, you said it started about five years ago and you just merged a couple years ago. Just in that five year span, has the curriculum evolved? How-

Jared:
Well the first three years was developing the curriculum, and the last year and half or so has been teaching it to our first cohort of students.

Larry:
Gotcha.

Jared:
It hasn’t evolved very much, though today we were talking about changes we wanna make for the next cohort. It’s in the process of evolving I guess.

Larry:
I took a look at the curriculum. It’s very project oriented, like what 80% of the course work is working in teams with actually-

Jared:
Yeah.

Larry:
Yeah. How do you integrate content strategy into the curriculum? Do you tease out and educate people about particular aspects of content strategy or is it just baked into the whole process?

Jared:
No, we teach the students about content very early. We have a content strategy and a copywriting course. The students are taught those skills and they are taught to treat copy as an essential core piece of the user experience. They’re always thinking about what the content is and how it works.

Larry:
Right. Hey that gets at something else I wanted to ask you about. There’s this new title, this new job title you see floating around, “UX writer.” I’m assuming that that’s like the person who’s writing everything from the microcopy and labels and navigation tools and stuff to well any kind of guidance kind of copy, but also … I guess, do you have thoughts on … You smiled a little bit when I had mentioned the term. What do you think of that term UX writer and what does it mean to you?

Jared:
Well what it means to me right off is that it’s a technical writer that wants to get paid more, which I’m sure I’ll get emails about. I’m not a big fan of job roles. I think we have a lot of role inflation in the design side of things. Information architects and visual designers and researchers and content strategists and UX writers. I think a UX writer is probably a content strategist that doesn’t actually do the strategy part.

Jared:
Two years ago they would’ve been a strategist, but two years before that they would’ve been a copywriter. I think that’s the wrong way to think about it. I think that what would should be doing instead is thinking in terms of skills. I think there’s a lot of writing, content, written word content that has to exist inside designs. If you are an app, say Dropbox or Google Calendar. While neither of those technically have … All the content is technically user supplied, they’ve got prompts and labels and a sign in process and a up your subscription process and a setting screen and all these things that need words on them.
We can let the developers write those words. Do they have the skills to do that? We can let product managers write those words. We can get people who are trained writers to write those words. We can have those trained writers create a voice, a tone. They can start to give the application a persona. Now, do they need to be called UX writer? No, you could actually have a product manager who’s got those skills, who can do all those things, who would be fantastic at. Why not? Let them do it, or a designer, or even a developer.
I have met many developers in my career who are fantastic writers and why not let them craft that? It’s a set of skills, and it’s got a craft associated with it, and craft means that you have mastery associated with it. How does someone master that set of skills? How do they master that craft? I’ve got a friend who loves to make beer in his basement. He takes great pride in the beers that he makes. He bottles a certain number every year and he gives them to his friends. He has gotten really good at making his beer. He’s mastered his craft, but he’s a software developer.
This idea that well, software developers can’t be writers, well software developers can’t be beer makers either I guess. I mean, I don’t understand why they can be master beer crafters, but they can’t be a master writer. I don’t think that that limitation exists.

Larry:
Right. I’m wondering, it almost then becomes more like of a management problem, if when you’re putting together a team that’s creating a product or an app or whatever it is you’re doing, for whoever’s got the ultimate authority over putting the project together, to make sure that okay, no we’ve got Joe is a really good programmer and he writes really well, so we have fewer needs there versus like oh, brilliant programmer, but she can’t write her way out of a paper bag. We better bring somebody in. Is that sort of how it’s manifesting?
Things are so collaborative nowadays, and like what you were just saying that there’s all these what you would call unicorns, people who embody a lot of the skills in a particular milieu but do you have any thoughts of the management process of like … I guess it’s a management issue. How do you make sure that all the skills you need are involved in any one project?

Jared:
Right. So what you have to do is you have to do an inventory of the skills. You have to look and say what are all the skills we need to apply to the set of problems that we’re gonna face and do I have the team that has those skills? Are those skills present in my team? Are they present in everyone on my team? Are they present in only some of the people, but enough that I can get the project done? Are they present in too few people, so that I’m always running out of resource to get important things done? Are they not present at all and we’re gonna have to go outside?
One of the exercises that I do with teams is take all the skills. I have these cards that list the standard skills that come for a design team, but then I have all sorts of blank cards and I have them write down all the things. The things might be how a newsroom editorial process works, how our editorial process works, how it changes from breaking news to sports, to long form thought pieces, Sunday magazine stuff. You know, how advertising works, because if you have a newsroom you probably have some sort of advertising element to it.
So do we have people with all those skills? Do we have enough people with all those skills? Would it be useful to have everybody have those skills? Then you can start to make a strategy around okay, where I don’t have anybody, I need to hire somebody. Where I don’t have enough, I need some sort of training. Where I have decent skills, but if everybody had the skills we’d be more efficient because … Here’s the thing, you need a set of instructions to go above a particularly complicated idea that’s now part of a new feature. You need to somehow communicate to the user how that set of instructions work.
Well, if I only have one writer on the team, and that writer’s off doing something else, and no one else can write a sentence, then that part of design has to wait until that resource frees up and I can now put that resource on that activity. Or, I can interrupt them from the thing that they’re doing that’s probably really important, and put them on this activity, but then they don’t get the important thing done either. If I had a couple more people who could write that sentence, even if they could just do a mediocre job, maybe I don’t need William Shakespeare to compose that piece of instruction. Maybe I just need something that is good enough to send to the usability test, so that we can get some feedback on whether it’s clear or not, and then we can iterate on it. If everybody had the skills to compose sentences, if we focused on that, I could grab any free resource and have them work on that.

Larry:
Right. Actually I just looked at the clock, we’re almost coming up on time, but thanks, that’s a whole other conversation about what you were just saying ’cause now I wanna know way more about the curriculum at Center Centre. Anyhow, I’ll save that for a next conversation, but before we wrap up, I wanted to give you … Is there anything last, anything we haven’t talked about or anything that’s on your mind these days you’d like to share with our folks while I have you here?

Jared:
Anything that’s on my mind? We’re all gonna survive this, I know that.

Larry:
Thank you.

Jared:
I have faith that whatever this is, we will survive it.
What would be my last thing? I mean, what I’m focused on these days is our students are coming up on what we call their residencies. So when is show coming out?

Larry:
I’ll have it up by Thursday or Friday.

Jared:
Oh. Okay. Yeah. So we’re in the process of collecting companies who might want to have a residency with our students. A residency is … An internship would not be a fair description. It’s more like a six week contract than an internship. The idea is that the student comes to your organization and they join a team and they tag along on that team trying to find as many ways to be useful as possible. The goal is for them to show you what they’re capable of and for you to show them what your team does.
The idea behind all of that is to give them exposure. The students do multiple residencies for the rest of the program before they graduate in October. We want them to just see what different companies are. They’ve been working on real world projects, so we don’t need them to have project experience. They actually have quite a bit of project experience that they’ve been working on now for a year and half, but the residencies give them a chance to see what life is like outside the boundaries of the school and really be immersed in an organization.
So, that’s what I’m focused on these day, so if organizations are interested in that, that’s-

Larry:
I will certainly get the word out among like the local UX community here in Seattle and-

Jared:
Yeah. Yeah, ’cause the students will travel.

Larry:
Yep. Yeah, no that sounds great. I think I can picture a huge benefit of having ’cause these people … It’s like they’ve essentially done most of the course work you have and they’re just kind of chomping at the bit to get going and-

Jared:
Oh they’ve done all the course work at this point. They’re done with their core courses. We’re now in what we call special topics and directed topics where they’re really sort of refining and mastering their craft.

Larry:
Yeah. Well, if only here in Seattle, there’s a really active UX community here and yeah, I’ll get the word out there and-

Jared:
Well that’d be fantastic.

Larry:
Hopefully, yeah, and among … Yeah, I’m just thinking of my buds at Facebook, Google … Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I’ll spread the word.
Well thanks so much Jared. This was super great to catch up and appreciate your insights and we’ll have to hold out the chance for another conversation – ’cause like I said I really did have 100 other questions right at the very end.

Jared:
Oh yeah, well you know how to find me.

Larry:
Exactly. Yeah.

Jared:
I’m the one who looks like me.

Larry:
Exactly. You haven’t changed a bit, I gotta say. I met Jared 20 years ago, and he looks the exact same and talks the exact same-

Jared:
I might’ve had a beard back then but-

Larry:
I don’t remember … Anyhow. Well thanks so much Jared.

Jared:
Thank you. This is a lot of fun. Thanks for encouraging my behavior.

Larry:
Anytime.