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Kaysie GarzaBuilding a content design team is typically a long process. At Hotjar, Kaysie Garza has had the chance to build a new content-design practice with two colleagues at her side from the very beginning.
Hotjar offers a variety of research products, so Kaysie and her team have also been able to inform their work with plenty of research insights.
We talked about:
- her work as a Content Design Lead at Hotjar and the origin story of her team
- the growth of their content design operation
- how she worked with product leadership to establish a successful content design practice
- her take on the relationship between UX writing and content design
- how her team works with the researchers at Hotjar and with the Hotjar product, which is itself a research tool
- how research insights help her team balance word crafting and task accomplishment
- her thoughts on democratizing content design and how to ensconce content guidance in documentation of design systems
- how her team applies behavior and other research insights
Kaysie’s bio
Kaysie has spent more than 10 years working on words for digital experiences. She’s consulted for agencies and companies of all sizes, worked in-house at InVision, and now leads the content design discipline at Hotjar.
Connect with Kaysie online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 143. Building a content design team is typically a long, painstaking process. At Hotjar, Kaysie Garza had the chance to build a new content-design practice with two colleagues at her side right from the start. As they’ve built, operationalized, and democratized UX writing and content design, they’ve also had the opportunity to apply insights gleaned with their own products, a suite of research tools that lets them quickly test the impact of their work.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 143 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show, Kaysie Garza. Kaysie is the Content Design Lead at Hotjar, a company you may have heard of, but Kaysie, tell us a little bit more about Hotjar and your work there as a content designer.
Kaysie:
Thank you for having me. So Hotjar is a company that makes software for all kinds of teams to learn more about their users essentially. So you can see what they’re doing on your website or in your product. You can survey them, you can collect feedback, and then more recently also recruit and interview users. So that’s a quick summary of the product suite.
Larry:
Cool. And we connected a while back and you told me about the origin of your content design team, and I think so many teams are scrapping and fighting to get one or two people at the table. You just jumped in with this instant content design team. Can you tell that story because I think that’s a great place to start this conversation?
Kaysie:
Yes. So I am the Content Design Lead at Hotjar, lead role as a manager, but I do think of myself a little bit more as just the cheerleader. We joke about this on our team. So I actually started as the first, I was a freelancer for about six months and the attention was to hire a team. I think this was part of an initial wave to mature all of product design. So they had introduced a design system, got engineering teams on board and were really rolling this out within the company and then building out research and then also content.
Kaysie:
At the time that that was happening, it was positioned as UX writing and I think that this is okay and maybe it’s a touchy thing for people. So I was a freelance UX writer and then came into the team as a full-time person and at the moment, I originally said no because I didn’t want to be the first person, I didn’t want to be the only person to go at this alone and burnout, which is kind of how most teams introduce UX writing or content design to their organization.
Kaysie:
So I said no. They carried on interviewing other people, got two really great people into the pipeline and at that point I was like, “Okay, this is too cool for me to say no to. I’ll take one of the roles.” And I thought that they would just choose between those two people, but they ended up taking them both. That’s Jess Ashworth and Sam Brown. So we became this little trio. We all started within a month of each other and then we just sat down a little bit and talked about what we wanted this to be at Hotjar, what we liked from previous teams. We had all worked on teams around the world.
Kaysie:
So I am from the states, Jess is in Barcelona, Sam was in Amsterdam at the time, and we had all worked with startups and big companies and huge content teams or been the only person. So we wanted to sit down together and talk about what would this be as we go on to shape it at Hotjar. And then I moved into a little bit more of the ops work, just setting up how do we take content requests, who do we talk to and when, and how do we divide up the work? And so that was, I guess, the starting point of our team was here. We had arrived and we are just going to go ahead and get started.
Larry:
The way you described that, the makeup of the team, the impact is probably more than three people. There must be a lot of synergy the way you described the kind of similar but overlapping backgrounds. And I think that was one of the things that grabbed me about your story is that this seems unusual to have just coming in like that. But you also mentioned just a minute ago, and we talked earlier about how thoughtful you were about how you wanted to build the practice, not only about what you wanted to be doing, but working with product leadership on allocating resources and stuff like that. Can you talk a little bit about, and you’re the ops person so you’re probably the best person to ask about this, how the whole little content design operation came together?
Kaysie:
Yes. So because we were originally hired as UX writers, I think the intention at the time was to, “We’ve got three people. Our ratios are not too bad compared to a lot of places we’ll just divide and conquer.” And then there was a moment where we had some change in leadership and there was no design leadership for a bit. So that was the point for me to slide in and be like, “We’re not going to actually do this. It’s not going to work.” So that was the point that I met with the head of product essentially and just asked, “What do you care about the most? What does Hotjar care about the most? What’s going to be the most impactful and where could content do the most?” And this came out with three kind of areas or specific projects. That’s where we put the content designers.
Kaysie:
And it was not a two-week project, it was many months or an initiative that was going to take the company probably up to a year. So we put the content designers in these work streams and that took, I would say, the majority of their time. And then we service desked the rest of the… We use squads at Hotjar. We helped them out just doing surface level, give you a copy check. What I would say is just the UX writing. And then on these larger initiatives, really try to partner with product and design from the moment that we were saying, “What do we need? What is this project about? What is successful? What do we already know? What do we need to discover? How can content add to this conversation that normally happens without content?” So that was the integration, deeper, I would say, into the product development process. And then this worked really well, obviously.
Kaysie:
I think content works best when people can see it and feel it. And you don’t just have to tell them. So this was my whole thing is I didn’t want to get burnt out just beating that drum and preaching the content gospel when I could just put two really awesome content designers in these work streams and let people say, “Oh, I get it. This is how it works.” And then the upside of this is when these projects wrapped or we were shifting into new initiatives, I had product managers advocating for content. I had engineers who were like, “We get this, we understand.”
Kaysie:
At that point our little pilot of embedding them was supposed to be over and we were supposed to pull them back out, but I had their teams coming and saying, “Hey, what happened to our content designer?” So people started to expect this and wanted to work in this way. And so I was like, “We won’t turn back. We’ll push for this.” And then I think this led to a natural opening in headcounts. More people than me could see why we needed this. So that that’s helpful to have other people talking about your own pain.
Larry:
You just described the best evangelism approach ever. Just show them. And then in its absence, if you say, “Well, that’s okay. Project’s done. We’re moving on.” And they’re like, “Whoa. Come back.”
Kaysie:
Yes. If you take away a good thing, people are going to complain about it, whereas I could advertise the good thing, but if you haven’t had it, then maybe you’ll care.
Larry:
A couple of follow-ons to that. One, it seems like you were super clear in your mind about the difference between UX writing and content design. And I wonder if that has anything to do with the thing you said earlier when we were talking about pushing content deeper, do you see UX writing as the more, not superficial, but further out and content design going deeper in the process?
Kaysie:
Yes. I’m almost scared to say this on the record. I don’t want to be that person who’s like, “This is the definition.” Yes, I see UX writing as part of content design. And what I mean by we wanted to go deeper is that we didn’t want to just divide everyone up and collect tickets to JIRA and do the words and give them back. We didn’t want to be this service desk because as content designers, UX writers, no, this often uncovers while you’re using the wrong component, you don’t need words here at all, you need to redesign this thing. And so I just didn’t even want to go through a year of that. So I see content design as UX design, but it’s like we’re showing up to the same job site. We have just different tools in our toolbox is how I think of it is we can both solve this problem, but sometimes content is better equipped to do it.
Kaysie:
Sometimes UX designers are better equipped to do it, or we just bring different things to the table. So when I’m saying deeper, I’m meaning doing some research, doing some discovery, doing a workshop, or starting completely with content and then handing off the structure and the order and the content hierarchy to a designer to… That’s where the handoff is, that’s where the pickup point is for the collaboration, not once a really high fidelity component is already done and you’re just filling in the words. And we also talk about this on our team, it’s aiming for meaning, designing meaning and information and not just perfect writing. So I don’t really care if we misplace a comma.
Kaysie:
I don’t really care if we have a tiny grammar mistake because you could have a perfectly written sentence. It could be beautiful, it could be this, we’ll say, Slack worthy copy where everyone admires it on LinkedIn, but if it’s not solving the right problem or if it’s not the right message, it doesn’t matter how good that text is. So for me it’s looking a little bit beyond the text and making sure, is this a solution? Is this what people need? Is this accessible and inclusive? Giving function to the form of our product. And that’s how I think of content and that’s what I want us to be designing and creating and not just looking at text across empty boxes.
Larry:
The way you just described it, I think that really brings home that difference that I agree with about the distinction between your-
Kaysie:
Oh good.
Larry:
… Content design-
Kaysie:
So we’ll both go down if it’s wrong.
Larry:
… And it’s not like either of us are going to codify the definition, people can continue. We were just two of the many voices in the conversation. But to that, so much of design is about collaboration. And you mentioned a couple of times like research and also there’s this sort of meta thing about you is that Hotjar is a research tool. So research must have a really interesting role there. Can you talk a little bit about how you work with researchers and how you apply research insights to your content design work?
Kaysie:
Yes. This is a question I ask when I’m interviewing people. So it’s weird to be on the other side. It is meta, it’s going to sound like a product pitch, but it was so empowering to come to a company like Hotjar, as you said, start with instant content team, but also have this access to recordings of people using our product. We talked before, it’s like that meme on the internet where you see what you intend your users to do and then what they actually do. I can see this every single day on content that I work on. So it’s like that gut check, that ego check of, look how wrong you were. So we can do this research on a very regular basis where we can see what people are doing. We can use heat maps to see obviously hotspots, I would say a bigger one for our team is a product at Hotjar called Ask, which is built of tools for surveys and then feedback.
Kaysie:
So surveys have been amazing for us because we can just go ahead and create them. We can ask about anything from naming. So I did a lot of naming work in the last year, and so this was a lot of multiple choice sourcing ideas. Then flipping that, fill in the blank. And then once I’ve got my word testing, “What do you think X does?’ Trying to test the comprehension or the assumptions that people would have about this. Just really going through all of the different ways that someone might interpret this word to see if it was going to be what I wanted it to be and what we needed it to be. We can also do this on a regular basis, preference test kind of things. You can put an image in and just ask which one of these… So this is basic surveying, but the fact that we can do this in Hotjar, at the moment you could trigger it, at the moment someone is in your product or they do something you want, they click a button, you ask them a question is very useful for our team.
Kaysie:
So this gets into, “Well, if we can do this, what is our research team doing?” So this is a team of four people led by Paula Herrera, and I think she has also been very intentional about, because we can do this and because research is democratized at Hotjar, what’s the difference? What do they do? What do we do as well as the designer? So I think we can do this continuous discovery, tactical stuff on a very daily basis. And then their team, the research team would do very strategic complex stuff that often informs product strategy or the company in general. So that’s I think the delineation. There may be points where either of those overlap. So that that’s what it would be is the content designers on our team are just very empowered to ask a question, to watch recordings.
Kaysie:
I do this all the time. People say, “No one reads. People don’t read on the internet.” And I worked on an education component for onboarding. It was, I would say, text heavy which for us it was three sentences and then there was an image or a video. So a lot of content. But I can watch recordings and see if people read this or if they ignore it completely, this kind of thing. So we use it on a daily basis. I would say we do more of the tactical down into the details, what do you think of this? What is this word? Kind of information that we’re trying to gather. And then our research team would do more of the very strategic complex stuff.
Larry:
As you’re talking about that I want to try to stitch together, I don’t know if this’ll work, but when you were talking earlier about meaning and meaning being more important than wordsmithing and wordcrafting. Is some of that driven by these research insights? Is that where that comes from or is it related or?
Kaysie:
Absolutely. I can give you an example of content that I worked on that failed. So there’s this moment where once you set up Hotjar, you have to install a tracking code and this is how you get your session replaced. So I worked on some text, which is an empty state. So you’ve installed Hotjar, but you don’t have recordings yet. It just hasn’t happened because you haven’t had visitors on your site or whatever it may be. So there’s this message and I worked on it and it was really nice copy that says something like, “Recordings are on the way.” Easy, one sentence very clear to me, tested at the correct reading level. All of these things. I see feedback about this submitted through our feedback tool all of the time where people are very confused about recordings are on the way. “I don’t see anything. Did I install something wrong? Hotjar’s not working.”
Kaysie:
All of these things where they’re perceiving that they’ve done something wrong or the product is broken because of this nice sentence that I wrote. So this is an example where the meaning is wrong, I’m giving them the wrong message, we missed the mark here. If I were only looking at content standards of reading level and voice and tone and stuff, we may have missed this. So it’s also really nice that people can surface the meaning that they want for us and submit it, which we see sometimes we’ll get feedback with a screenshot that says, “Should this say X, Y and Z? Or do you mean X, Y and Z?” Or I thought this meant something and then we can tweak the meaning. So very much so this is what I want us to be working on, not just like, “Oh, was the voice delightful here.” I don’t care as much about that right now.
Larry:
So many of us come from, my mom was an editor, my aunt was a newspaper editor. I was just raised with Strunk and White and just the crafting of words, which is so all important. And then to flip it around and go like, “Nah, we just want to help them do what they need to do and we’ll get the words right down the road.” Is that sort of the attitude?
Kaysie:
That’s mine. I don’t know if I’m wrong. And it feels scary to say that because a lot of us do have writing backgrounds and we grew up the same way or came from copywriting and obviously these things are important. I wouldn’t promote like, “Oh, typos are fine.” Because that affects the perception of your brand and if there’s typos, how reliable is your product? So I wouldn’t go that far. But what I would say is if we’re talking about divvying up a team of UX writers and just having them cover the surface, it’s probably going to be this kind of stuff.
Kaysie:
It’s going to be just focused on crafting text. And I don’t think that’s as impactful as if you get in and say, “Is this the right message? Are we creating a survey in the right order? Are these steps in the right order?” This kind of stuff that affects how people use your product. So if you can’t use it at all, Sam on our team actually uses this metaphor of it’s giving the car a fresh coat of paint before it has tires. You’re still not going to drive it. It doesn’t matter how nice it looks because the car still doesn’t work.
Larry:
That’s a great image. Hey, I want to revisit what you were talking before about democratization. It sounds like the research team in particular has democratized that, but you also mentioned earlier that you still don’t have enough people to do everything, to have content people embedded in all the products that Hotjar is doing. Are you democratizing content design as well or?
Kaysie:
We would love to. So of course we have a style guide and we can start doing workshops for things that are very pattern-ey. So what I would say is an error message or success message. We do have these. We do work on them and then go to try and put them in the design system. So delete 500 recordings, there’s a message for this, anytime you’re deleting. So this step I would say helps us spread. And then part of saying no means that we have to democratize. So it goes back to this. When you take someone’s content designer away, the designers on that team have to do the content. So in those situations we would say, here are the resources that we’ve created. Take a first step at it, let me give you notes, and then you revise it so that I can teach them to revise in a way that I would naturally work anyway so that I’m not the person having to do it, but they don’t learn anything, they just get their copy and then they move on.
Kaysie:
So this is what we try to do in the areas where we don’t, is to essentially say no if it’s not going to… So we do use a framework to prioritize which includes the type of work and the impact relation to an OKR, relation to a user need. So if I get just a quick copy request and it’s not super in line with any of those things, we can say no. And I want them to be able to say no, or we can say you do it, aim for this messaging, send it back to me. I’ll give you notes so you can revise it and go from there. Because again, I don’t care if it’s not perfect, I want them to be learning. I do think that content design or UX writing, we’ll say UX writing.
Kaysie:
I do think that UX writing should be a skill that UX designers have and work on the way that they do other things. So if I can coach them on this writing stuff that I do think is very learnable, then yes, we would like to democratize this way and then keep content designers for the more strategic stuff earlier on or this research stuff because then you’re mixing the writing background with inclusivity and accessibility and the unique content perspective that this person has as a specialist and reserving that for the really, I guess, deeper work that happens earlier on. And then anyone can do the writing.
Larry:
Hey, I’m circling back all the time today I realize, but you mentioned a couple of minutes ago design systems and working with that. And then I want to reconsider my democratization question, is some of this operationalization getting things into design system or other internal systems so that they can be democratized? Does that make sense?
Kaysie:
Yes. I think this is a goal. This would be nice. And I think one, as I’m looking at headcount and looking at the future where the next best place is to put a content designer, I do think it’s a design system team. So a lot of people or a lot of companies, I guess if they’re going to hire one, they do this right away. They just put them in the design system and try and spread kind of content horizontally this way. I think there are pros and cons to every approach, including ours, but I think this is a good place for our content designer to be. I can give one example, I worked on something, was in an activation squad with a design partner, Alessio, we just needed onboarding components, something that was just for education and would always be used this way and they didn’t exist.
Kaysie:
So we created them and put content guidelines in them. And my perspective is you can’t choose the component if you don’t know what the content’s going to be. So if it’s just different shape kind of boxes, how do you know what goes in them? How do you know when to use it, where? And so this is why, yes, I do think this could be fairly operationalized. This could always be the case if designers then read these guidelines and use them this way and learn to think about content differently than they’re thinking about just text.
Larry:
You didn’t know this when we went on the air, but just the last episode before this one, I was talking to Rebekah Wolf at Microsoft who does content design for design systems stuff there and has worked on the Fluent design system there and was talking about that exact issue. And more to the point, just the need for more than one content designer in a design system team, then that’s a whole other… I love that we’re-
Kaysie:
It’s a whole other thing.
Larry:
… Reinforcing adjacent podcast episodes. So another thing, we didn’t want to make this a Hotjar product pitch thing, but some of this-
Kaysie:
I know.
Larry:
… You’ve mentioned a few times of the… And I’m like, “Fine.” And I would do the same thing with UserTesting or UserZoom or other stuff that’s out there.
Kaysie:
Absolutely. All of this is true. Obviously yes, use Hotjar. I love Hotjar. But it’s true for any of these things. So accessible for someone who’s not the data owner to go create your own information and bring it to the table.
Larry:
And I’m just curious, one of the things you said that some of the insights you get from, and it could be any research tool, is the behavioral insights. And when I think about things like task analysis or customer journey mapping, it’s like that’s where you can validate that you’ve done that when you look at their actual behavior and see how well it aligns to what you were expecting or thought you had discovered. Does that line up with how you all work with the behavioral insights you discover or?
Kaysie:
Yes, absolutely. And I do think this is kind of the key, here we go, back to the pitch, the differentiator for Hotjar. Those components, that mini activation component system I just mentioned when we put this up, I wanted to see if people are going to read three lines of text so I can go back and watch, do people ignore this? Do they use this? Do they click the CTAs? Are they confused afterwards that they need to go into the menu and navigate to find stuff or do they understand what I’ve just told them? So, yes, absolutely. I think we use this every day on a regular basis and it’s not just the content team, I would say, the whole company uses Hotjar in this way.
Larry:
I got to say, it almost seems like an unfair advantage because I’ve been at so many places where you’re fighting to get budget for the tools like that. And-
Kaysie:
Exactly.
Larry:
Good for you though if you have the… And like we talked before, we went on the air about dog fooding, just eating your own dog food. And you’re doing it every day.
Kaysie:
Yes. And that’s what I think is exciting to me about, we’ll say a tool like Hotjar, because for a very long time, I think a lot of content designers were pigeonholed into the writing job and it’s very hard to get anyone to listen to you if you don’t have data, if you don’t have research, if you don’t have a perspective that’s informed by people. So people I think a lot of times just looked at you as like, “Oh, the word person. You know a lot about grammar, whatever, this is what you’re bringing to the table.” But it’s still easy for anyone to create a survey and get the data and then, whatever, bring it to the product owner. I think it gives context beyond a number. So if you’re just looking at the high… We designed something, a step in the activation flow. So creating your account on Hotjar, we ask, “What’s your primary use? What do you want to use this for today?”
Kaysie:
And it’s a multiple choice question. You can only choose one thing. So we get numbers from this hard numbers so we can see whatever, 40% of people choose this. I can go back and watch recordings and this is what I did to see that people often click between one or two different tools in Hotjar, and they don’t realize that they can only choose one. So they’re going between one and then they see the second one, they’re like, “Oh, actually I want to use this.” But then they realize they can only click one, so they go back to the beginning. You do not get this context in your numbers alone.
Kaysie:
But now as a content designer on this project, I can see we need to change maybe the way that we ask this question, maybe we need to make it multi-choice or use a value prop instead of a tool name. All of these different ideas to see are people looking for a tool or they’re looking for a solution? How many are they wanting? All of this kind of information, and this is where the behavior comes into it, is where I could ask people this very straightforward question and get a nice clean statistic, but it’s not telling the full story. And I think that’s where something like Hotjar comes in and it’s very useful to a content designer.
Larry:
That’s the classic thing of what users report and versus what they actually do.
Kaysie:
Yes. Exactly.
Larry:
Hey, Kaysie, I can’t believe it, we’re already coming up on time, but I always like to give my guests a chance. Is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation or that’s just on your mind about content design that you want to make sure we talk about before we wrap up?
Kaysie:
Yes. I think my thing is just for content designers out there who feel like they can’t get heard or they’re only contributing the words, is that you don’t have to wait for someone to give you data. You don’t have to wait for permission to do your job really well. You can go create a survey, you can watch recordings. Obviously these things still take some kind of budget for you to get a tool, but there are ways for you to incorporate evidence and data and user perspectives in your work that will make you, one, more strategic. Everybody cares about the business value of content designer UX design, but this is what’s going to help you unlock a deeper than writing level of work where you can go on to design meaning and create change and affect behavior, not just for your company, but for the people using your product beyond just the words that you can write by yourself.
Larry:
Nice. That’s a fantastic summary of our work and so great note to end on. Thanks so much, Kaysie. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Kaysie:
Thank you.
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