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Patricia Gomez and Mario Ferrer lead the content design team at King Games, the makers of Candy Crush and other popular mobile games.
Patricia Gomez
Mario FerrerThey operate at a scale that might intimidate some people, designing experiences for nearly a quarter of a billion users. Serving that many customers forces them to be thoughtful about the tools they use and about how they work with their colleagues.
They and their team have become the “glue” that connects designers, developers, product managers, support staff, and other teams at King, always keeping in mind their motto: “make friends, break silos, build bridges.”
We talked about:
- the rise of the content design trade (and how it’s always been there, just maybe not called by that name)
- Patricia’s evolution from localization practitioner to content design leader
- the unique challenges of running a content operation in a product organization
- the origins of the content design team and UX writing practice at King
- the unique meaning of the word “content” in the game world and how it affects how they label their work
- the differences between narrative design and game design, and its relevance to their work
- the relationship between content design and product design
- how the evolution of content design fits with the evolution of product design, interaction design, and UX design
- how content strategy fits into their work
- their role as “the glue” that connects trades at King
- how, despite all of their accomplishments, they are still a relatively young craft at King
- how they show their collaborators how content design can contribute at each stage of the product process (and how copywriting is only about 20% of the contribution)
- how the variety of experiences on their team enrich their operation
- the surprising effects of the COVID pandemic in democratizing their team’s access to stakeholders
- another surprising result of the pandemic: better documentation of what happens in meetings
- how their localization needs and the need to scale helped guide the creation of their CMS
- the evolution of the tools and technologies that they use
- the motto they’ve adopted – “make friends, break silos, build bridges” – and their commitment to challenging the status quo and trying new things
Patricia’s bio
Patricia Gomez is Associate Director of Content Design at King, based in Barcelona. She is building the first Content Design craft at King, managing a team of content designers and leading content operations. Previously, Patricia was the Head of Content at eDreams Odigeo, leading a team of UX Writers and Localization specialists. Patricia started her career in the Localization industry and worked 6 years as Localization Manager at Google Spain and Portugal.
Follow Patricia on social media
Mario’s bio
Mario Ferrer is a Lead Content Designer at King Games, the makers of Candy Crush. He strives to help and guide people across digital products and services with the content he designs. He’s a firm believer that the collaboration between research, design, content, and development is what allows teams to solve complex design problems.
He started Content Design España, a local community of practice that helps newcomers learn more about Content Design and UX Writing through mentorships, workshops, and events that explain how the role provides value to product teams and their design processes.
Mario is always trying to find the best tacos in town, listening to stand-up comedy, and teaching his two kids about Mexican Lucha Libre.
Follow Mario on social media
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 97. When you play Candy Crush, you see very few words in that game’s user interface. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a content strategy guiding the design that you see and the experiences that you have in the game. Patricia Gomez and Mario Ferrer lead a team of content designers and UX writers that help create Candy Crush and other games that are used by 250 million people around the world. Listen in to learn how you, too, can scale your content design practice.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 97 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Patricia Gomez and Mario Ferrer. They’re two of the main folks on the content design team at King Games. They do the Game Candy Crush, and some other games you might be familiar with. So welcome, Patricia and Mario. Patricia, tell the folks a little bit more about your background and what you do there at King Games.
Patricia:
Hello, thank you so much for having us today. Well, my role is associate director of content design at King. I joined the company about two years and a half ago, before that I was working in eDreams ODIGEO, which is an online travel agency. And this is when I got familiar or I started getting familiar into the content design craft because I was leading the UX writing and localization team. So I come from a localization background and I worked six years at Google as localization manager in Madrid.
Larry:
Oh, nice. And Mario, tell our folks a little bit about your background.
Mario:
Sure. First of all, muchos gracias for having us here. It’s great to have this conversation. So, well, I’m originally from Mexico. It’s been spent 12 years since I had moved over here to Barcelona. And my background is I started as an agency copywriter, and then I moved over to a little bit of more B2B copywriting and then about eight years ago or so I had my happy accident, which turned out to be UX writing and then just time kept moving on.
Mario:
And now I’m the lead content designer over at King. I work with Patricia. I’ve been doing this for awhile and it’s very interesting to see how the landscape is changing, because a few years ago I was one of the founders of a Content Design Spain, which is one of the largest Meetup groups here in Europe.
Mario:
And it’s very interesting again, how, I don’t know, in the past three to four years, the amount of people that are transitioning over from copywriting and journalism and content writing over to UX writing and content design. And it’s great. It’s great to have outlets like this to share our stories with more people across the globe. So thank you again for having us, Larry.
Larry:
You bet. And Mario, I think you’re being a little bit modest there about like, oh yeah, this just came along a few years ago, but you’ve been doing it for five or six or seven years. You’re one of the genuine pioneers. Tell me a little bit about how that, or do you feel folks have finally, or not that folks have finally caught up with you, but finally you have some peers and colleagues to talk about this stuff with?
Mario:
I mean, I think there’s always been peers and colleagues to talk about this stuff. It’s just, we had different names and we didn’t know each other existed. So for me, creating this group was sort of a beacon of hope because in a way it’s like, when you’re the only one doing that at your company, you feel a little bit alone. So even though that you’re working with other designers and they understand, but they don’t quite get all the nuances of what it means to be a content designer.
Mario:
So when you start reaching out via Twitter or via LinkedIn or even via Reddit and you start meeting other people, that’s when you realize that okay, so there’s way many more people out there that have not the same similar problem, so let’s get together and understand how they’ve solved these things. And you realize that thankfully the content design and the UX writing community out there is full of people that are super generous with their time and with their knowledge and with their learning.
Mario:
So, I mean, I’ve been doing this for a while, but it’s great because from all the mistakes, all the learnings that I have now I can share with people that are coming in. So we make sure that the craft as a whole grows because it’s not about just one person or one team of people. It’s how do we make this whole craft grow and become a much more established part of product design.
Larry:
Cool. And Patricia, you lead this team. And a couple of things I want to ask about. One is that Mario mentioned the very common pathways into this like copywriting or other writing professions, but you come from localization and now you lead this team. Can you tell me a little bit about those two things coming together in your role at King?
Patricia:
Exactly. What a journey? Well, I started my career in localization, but as I started in eDreams and I was managing the content team both on the content creation side, let’s say UX writing and then the content localization, I actually started to … I had to create a team. So at that time I had to hire for copywriters because a few years ago, the role was named a copywriter.
Patricia:
But thankfully over the years I learned more about the craft and I realized that the different type of name for the role. And actually it was at this point when I learned so much about what it means working in a product organization with UX writers, what are the challenges, how to sell this to management, how to make a UX writing team work together with a localization team, because there’s so many things they can learn from one another, because normally many companies have an English first mentality.
Patricia:
And like right now, most of the traffic comes from outside of English speaking countries. So, the more you start thinking about how your copy is going to be localized into other languages, the better, especially for your users, because right now they are more and more diverse. And language is just another element of diversity. And now at King, actually, I started as head of content in the player support department.
Patricia:
But last year I made a total shift to the team and I created the UX writing craft because I spot this need in the organization. And I said, “Hey, in other companies, there is a content design team. Why isn’t there a team like this in King?” So I set up the craft. It was a really interesting journey. And later last year I called Mario and said, “Hey, do you want to join me? We have some work to do here in setting up the foundations and continue building the craft and joining forces with other teams.”
Larry:
Nice. Well, there’s a couple of followups. The one main thing is your job titles have you as content designers, but you’ve mentioned UX writing is the role. And I know that there’s an ongoing discussion in the field about labels versus roles and responsibilities. I guess, do either of you … can you tell me about the background of how you came to be called content designers and the role of UX writing in that? Does that make sense? Or how do you sort things out there?
Patricia:
One of the peculiarities of working in a video games company is that the word content means levels. So everyone, when they hear the role, title content designer, they think that we are level designers. So in order to avoid confusion, we decided to call ourselves UX writers. In the end, the work is the same, but internally we call the craft UX writing just to avoid this confusion.
Larry:
Mario, did you have anything you wanted to add about that or? Oh, are you muted?
Mario:
There we go. No, the whole idea with that is it’s this two speeds thing that we always speak with Patricia. So internally we’re called UX writing just for the purpose of not having this be strange with the craft, which is game design, but externally we’re known as the content design team, just to follow the shift that the whole industry is doing.
Mario:
I mean, I know you’ve spoken with Patrick on a few episodes back about how this whole shift with the huge companies that’s happening and for us, it makes sense because we want to be there at the forefront of what’s happening with the industry. So for us, it makes sense how we have this difference. And it ties in really nicely to one of the things that we wanted to discuss is working as a content designer/UX writer within a games company is very different than what you do in SaaS or any other products and services, because there’s something that Patricia and I always discuss about is, we have this kind of a layers metaphor, right?
Mario:
Because if you think about it at the core, you’ve got both narrative design and you’ve got game design. Narrative designers are basically the people that come up with the stories and the universe and game designers are the people that come up with the mechanics. What makes the game fun, right? What’s that core loop that gets you really into the game? It doesn’t matter if it’s a mobile game or if it’s AAA game and by AAA game normally we’re going to be talking about consoles.
Mario:
For the purpose of us, we’ll focus on mobile games because that’s our bread and butter. So that’s kind of your core, right, of the product, but then you have the outer layer, right, or the next layer of the onion, which is where we come in. That’s where product design and content design come in, because product design obviously has to take care of that interactions. But us as content designers, we need to understand pretty much everything.
Mario:
We need to understand what that story is, what the universe is so we can kind of take that story and bring it into the way we write for that tone of voice. We also need to understand what those game mechanics are and how the actual game works so we’re able to explain it to players, but we also need to understand how the app works and how the interactions work and how people are actually going to tap where to do what and how we explain that thing.
Mario:
So that’s why we’re always talking about these two levels that we’re working on, because we need to make sure that we’re servicing that core, that we understand what’s the nucleus of everything that we do, but we’re also packaging it nicely into the app that people have millions and millions of peoples around the world have inside their phones.
Larry:
Thanks. You really helped me because I’ve been trying to wrap my head around because what, 98% of the conversation out there around UX writing and content design is about SaaS apps or, kind of transaction-oriented mobile apps or something like that. But you’re in this unique space. Patricia or Mario can either of you speak to that, a little bit more to the uniqueness of game design, because the way and I think it comes back to that term content, that is such a useless term in so many ways. And yet it has a very specific meaning in a lot of places. Is there some legacy use of the word content in the game design industry that informs your need to be specific about whether you’re doing narrative designer or game design?
Patricia:
I’m actually thinking that the word content in other industries can mean different things. So the video games industry is not unique in that sense, because for example, I’m thinking of my last days in the travel industry, content means inventory, it means the flights or the hotels that you sell. So actually video games industry is not that unique, I would say.
Larry:
Now I want to see a concordance chart of what content means. In the big media world, it’s videos, programming, and then in the game world it’s levels and in the travel world, it’s inventory. Is there a generic kind of content design concept that comes out of that for either of you? Does that make sense? That notion that there’s this place at which the core content thing that you’re working with, that I don’t know, maybe I’m just grasping it, I’m still trying to get all the labels squared away in my head, I think but-
Mario:
We all are Larry. We all are.
Larry:
Thanks.
Mario:
Don’t worry about it. We’re all just trying to figure out. It’s like everything, right? So we’re humans and our brain works in a way that we need to tag stuff. We need to give things names so it’s easier for us to identify. So, I mean, this is a conversation that will keep on going, because this happened 10 years ago with what are now called product designers, it would be called interaction designers, it would be called UX/UI, and now they landed up here.
Mario:
So we’re seeing how this evolution of people that work in content, that work within the UX space, how they’re coming up to become content designers. And I mean, I’m guessing, depending on where you go in the industry, it doesn’t really matter because you need to identify what is content for that industry and how you make it work. So, in the end, it’s like, when we explain to people the rest of our teammates or our stakeholders is like, content goes way beyond than just words, because it could be an animation, it could be a video, it could be like Sarah, it could be … Sorry, Sarah Winters now.
Mario:
It could be whatever is needed at the right moment at the right place. So I’m not sure we’ll have a definite answer anytime soon, but at least, and I mean, I can’t speak for Patricia, but we’ve kind of have been having this discussion for ages, it seems like things are steering over there just basically to have this area, this equality with product designers. But I mean, only time will tell.
Larry:
What you just said, you’ve said this a couple of times, and it’s come up a few times already in this conversation that a lot of this is about the conversation that you two are having about reaching consensus on stuff like this, that kind of gets at the overarching dynamic in anything about content strategy, but it’s always mostly about people. And Patricia, as the manager there, you must do a little bit of people stuff, I’m going to guess.
Patricia:
Yeah, so in my role, I am the people manager in the team. And I also work on the team strategy objectives. And I also make sure that we build sturdy relationships within the company, especially with the crafts that we work with, but also with any areas that we need to partner with in order to work on, as I say, content strategy projects or initiatives, because it’s very important.
Patricia:
Or maybe the way that Mario and I work is that we try to understand the business, the company and the team’s needs. And we try to identify what are their problems? What are their challenges? What are their needs? And then come up with solutions. If it’s in our remit, fine. If not, it doesn’t matter because our goal is to actually help the teams that we work with. And that’s why we partner with content … with narrative design, sorry, with game design, product design, UI development, et cetera.
Larry:
That’s a lot. And one of the things we had a preliminary chat a couple of weeks ago about this, and you used the term that you two think of yourselves as the glue that kind of stitches, adheres these different disciplines and crafts to each other. Can you tell me a little bit about how you do that and how you came to use that? I love, it’s a very evocative name for what you do. Did that come out of some of the work you’ve done in that area or?
Mario:
Yeah. I mean, I think we’re very lucky because before working together, we’ve been friends for a while because we’re really both into content design. So we’ve started having just conversations out of what the roles are, what’s coming up, how we can make this better. And now that we’re working together, it’s like all these conversations, all those hours that we’ve had, it’s like, let’s see if that actually works in the real world, right?
Mario:
So we do mention that we’re kind of the glue where it happens because we’re currently working, or our main focus is between Candy Crush Saga, which is the biggest game and Candy Crush Soda Saga, which is the second biggest game in the company. And they’re part of the Candy Crush franchise, which is huge at a global level.
Mario:
Now, the fact that we’re spanned across several areas within Candy Crush, because just Candy Crush itself is a huge product, gives us a lot of visibility because we’re working with several layers and several teams. So what helped us with that is we’ve become really good at kind of connecting the dots, because we can see things that happen across areas and that helps us bring people together in order to design a solution in a way that’s collaboratively.
Mario:
Because since we have those points of views from different perspectives, in a way it just flows, it becomes naturally. And a great example is there’s sometimes we see things that work really nice in a game that we can go to the next game and say, let’s see, this works really nice, let’s see if we can apply it here. Obviously we would need to tweak it. We need to do the research to make sure that it fits within the context, but allowing us to be, let’s say the eyes and ears for these folks across several areas has become really helpful.
Larry:
Nice.
Patricia:
And also since, I mean, I think we are the glue because we work with so many different partners we are so cross-functional that there’s no other way to work with so many people, which is actually connecting the dots and help other people connect with one another as well, because sometimes we get questions and we’re like, huh, have you asked this to this person? Or have you discussed that with other person? We kind of recommend people so that conversations continue.
Larry:
I love that because the way you said that, the way both of you just said that like, connecting dots and getting people to collaborate around doing stuff with those connections, that’s kind of one of those core, it’s sometimes called a “soft” skill, which just drives me nuts. It’s a super hard skill and really fundamental and foundational to this kind of work, because the benefits must just be, to what you were just saying Mario, about the sort of skill, the knowledge transfer from one division to a unit to another about oh, this worked well there and all of a sudden you’re doing a product that wasn’t doing as well is doing better. Do you have results like that, that you have that can show from your work, from your gluey connecting work? I assume that you’ve got some good case studies and things there?
Patricia:
We are working on them. So we are a young craft. So we are still kind of laying the foundations. At the moment, we are focused on creating ways of working in a collaborative way with the rest of the craft and kind of establishing best practices so that we can share with the rest of the teams. We want to become the source of reference whenever someone has a question about content, or even how to use a given tool, how to think of our content and maybe in case they have to write themselves, they can come to us for help and references.
Larry:
Cool.
Mario:
And I mean, you’ve said it before, Larry. It’s about people, right? So right now as Patricia was mentioning, we’re a very young craft. So for now, for us, it’s how do we reach out to these folks? How do we reach out to the different areas in the business, not just from a design perspective, because obviously the product design people, they are our partners in crime, right?
Mario:
So that is huge air quotes here for the people at home, “easier” than some of the other crafts. So it’s having those conversations, understanding first, what are their needs, and then figuring out what is it that they consider that we do. And sometimes we see there’s not a match. So we try to figure out what’s the best story to tell, how can we help people understand what is it that we do and in what way we can help them achieve those goals.
Mario:
Because once they figure out, hey, so these folks can actually help us from this other perspective that we were just not even considering it’s like, let’s bring them in. Let’s see how together through that collaboration, we can provide a much better solution to our players out there.
Patricia:
Most of the people that I was talking to, they were asking me also your team writes the copy? And I was like, yes and no. Let me explain it to you. Because what I wanted them to understand is that writing is just 20% of the work that we do. There’s so many other things that we can do. And that’s why I work with the different craft leads to mark the product development and the design process, and actually explain to them where our team can add value at which stage, which step.
Patricia:
And always providing examples of specific tasks and areas we can collaborate with so that this help them understand, so when we are working at the research phase, I didn’t know that we can work with you guys. So now I know that I can reach out to a UX writer and actually work together on a mock-up to put it in front of our players for a user test.
Larry:
I want to selfishly adopt your whole practice as a role model for the rest of the profession, because to what you were saying about, oh, it’s just the words, you can fill in those boxes later on. It’s like, no, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that we can help you with. And I think in some places that’s harder to demonstrate, but so much of game, the end user’s experience is really, there’s not a whole lot of word stuff going on at their interaction.
Larry:
So that game design and narrative crafting that you contribute to as well. You both must feel like you’ve advanced as design practitioners, because a lot of these experiences don’t have words associated with them, and yet you’re bringing these narrative skills and other creativity to it. Do either of you have thoughts about that?
Mario:
Yeah, and actually, it got me thinking about, again, quoting back this episode you had with Patrick about having this T-shaped content designer, right? So the beauty about for me is it’s been a jump going from being the only one a few years back to having a team over at Skyscanner and then having a team now, because that means I don’t have to cover all the bases.
Mario:
So I know what my strengths are, and I definitely know what my weaknesses are, but for example, now in our team, we’ve got Chris, who’s an amazing guy. You give him a tool, he’ll figure it out. He’ll figure out the system and he’ll make everything that you need so the system works for you and not you work for the system because sometimes he would see me doing my own work and be like, dude, come here, let me show you how you can do this in 3.5 minutes instead of the 45 minutes you’re taking.
Mario:
And then we’ve got Bob, for example, Bob comes from, he used to be a player support agent. And now he’s turned into a content designer. This guy knows so much from all of our players and from the game itself. I just tell him, I was like, Bob, you’re a goldmine, it’s like his head goes so fast and everything that you want to know about Candy Crush, just ask Bob. He has an answer to everything.
Mario:
And the fact that he brings this to the table, it makes us as a team richer because one, that takes off load from Patricia and myself that we don’t have to know everything, obviously we’re not pretending and we would never pretend to do that, but we can also lean into these folks to understand, great, so we need a little bit of systems thinking, we need deep knowledge on this how we pair that up with whatever the project in front of us is. So, that’s becoming super helpful.
Larry:
Cool.
Patricia:
This is why having diversity in a team also in skills, it is very important because we can bridge each other’s gap. And I remember Bob telling me about being in meetings with UX designers, product designers, which were amazed by the level of knowledge that he had about our players. And this is amazing because this way he can make sure that in every single thing he works in, there’s player centricity. So the player is always at the center of everything that we do.
Larry:
Nice. A couple of things have come up in this last couple of minutes about that I think even before COVID you all were a distributed remote team and collaborating with people all over the place. Do you feel like you were ahead of the curve in dealing with the remote work that COVID made necessary?
Patricia:
Actually I think that the whole pandemic gave us an opportunity to be more embedded in the kind of things, because by working remotely, I think it democratized the access to the stakeholders because maybe in the past, it was very important to be in Stockholm next to the teams working in Candy Crush and Soda. But now it was actually beneficial for us to establish the relationships to be able to just be in a phone call.
Mario:
And you have to think, I mean, the big Candy studio is based in Stockholm, but we still have studios in Barcelona, which is the case of Patricia and myself. We’ve got people in Malmo, Berlin, London. So we’ve always been kind of a distributed team. So for us having stand-ups at 9:00 AM in the morning with people connecting from several places that was kind of our bread and butter.
Mario:
So the change, yes, you feel the change because you’re in your house and you don’t get to see these people as often in person as much because we used to travel a lot too between offices. And obviously now, that’s not a possibility for the moment. So in a way, yes, we were kind of prepared for it, but still, I mean, we’ve learned so much. For example, one thing that Patricia and I joke about a lot is I used to carry post-its all the time, now I don’t, because now we’ve got Miro boards. So it’s like, great, I’m saving trees now.
Patricia:
But the good thing about that is not only you’re saving trees, but you’re making sure that everything is documented and I know that I say this a lot, because maybe in the past, people were not worrying that much about documented, but now they have to, because otherwise who’s going to remember what was discussed in a phone call?
Larry:
Hey, that reminds me both to what you mentioned earlier, your colleague, Chris, Mario, who sounds like he’s a tools person. And then this need for kind of more advanced tools than post-its. I still love post-its, I’ve giant piles of them around my office here, but this still is a 90% people thing, but technology and tools definitely help, to what you were just saying, Patricia about Mural or Miro, I forget which one you used and the ability to kind of capture things, that the knowledge capture that comes from that kind of thing.
Larry:
But I’m also curious about the technology, how do you manage the strings that show up in the product, the onboarding copy, all the content and copy that’s associated with your products? Do you have a CMS for that or is it embedded in the code or how do you handle that?
Patricia:
Well, thank God it is not hard coded. We had a CMS that was developed internally and this is where we are uploading all of our strings.
Larry:
Nice. I think is that Mario, you said you were at … Where were you before you were at King and then you went to, what was it, sky something?
Mario:
Skyscanner.
Larry:
Skyscanner. Did you have a CMS like that there? Or how did you-
Mario:
Yep.
Larry:
That’s good. I did some research about that recently and nobody has a CMS. I want to steal all of your technology ideas now.
Mario:
I think I’ve been lucky in both cases that the people from localization, globalization or localization, depending on who you ask had always that mindset of creating something that was scalable, that was usable because you have to think that, for example, our games are in 14 to 23 languages depending on the game.
Mario:
So it had to be something that was really scalable and really easy to use. So I mean, most of the out of the box solutions not offers so many languages. So it’s always interesting because in the end, the scale of the stuff that we do is huge. I mean, if you think about right now, we have 240 million active users across our game. So, that’s a lot of people.
Larry:
That’s a lot of people.
Mario:
That’s a lot of people.
Larry:
A lot of users to keep happy.
Mario:
I mean, today, actually, it was today, Candy turned nine years old today. So it’s a nine-year-old game. And we have a portfolio of a whole bunch of games. We have games like Pet Rescue Saga, Farm Hero Saga, Bubble Witch Saga. So we’ve got a lot of people playing a lot of games all over the world. So the scale of that is huge.
Mario:
I mean, at the beginning, when you start thinking about it, you’re like, oh my God. And you start kind of shaking with that responsibility. But in the end it’s like, it’s what uncle Ben used to say to Peter Parker, right? “With great power comes great responsibility.””
Larry:
Patricia, were you going to say something? I thought …
Patricia:
Yeah, I wanted to add that, that’s why we always try to think of systems because everything we do needs to be scalable, not only the way we want to work with other crafts, but how is it going to be replicated across languages. And going back to the discussion, I think of tools and technologies as another enabler for collaboration. And this is why for example, CMSs can be an enabler for collaboration, but design tools are definitely the enabler for cross-craft collaboration. Because if we, I mean, and I’m dreaming here, if we were able to all collaborate into a single tool and do everything in the same place, that would be a dream.
Mario:
And that also lowers the barrier, right? Ten years ago, design tools used to be very gatekeep-ey in a way, right? It used to be like, my precious for product design. Nowadays, we’re lucky that the learning curve for these tools are as much easier. They’re completely online. So sharing things is easier. And the way we’re seeing that when we start working together and those wireframes are everybody’s responsibility in a way it’s like, yes, we have to be careful of everybody’s work, but we understand what are the limits.
Mario:
But we also understand that we can do our discovery work there. We can bring in user research, we can create our wire frames there, we can create our prototypes there. And then we can have all of that based on our documentation all in one same place, which means you’ll have the texts, you’ll have the wire frames, you’ll have the UI, everything is in a single source of truth. So that’s the beauty of how these design tools are allowing us, especially content folks come into the game and unleashing all our potential as designers also.
Larry:
Nice.
Patricia:
And also we see more and more design tools that are able to connect to your CMSs or translation management systems. So that’s kind of the next big thing, because it means that we can manage the content in an even more scalable way in as many languages as possible, because you can actually push things from the design tool into the translation management system and then pull back the translation so that you can see your mock-ups in different languages. This is going to be really useful for teams like QA, because they will be able to see and actually perform QA in many different languages.
Larry:
It seems like it’s more than really useful, but almost essential to be able to do that, right?
Mario:
Yeah. No, because I mean, for example, so I know I’m a weird case, I speak four different languages, which tends not to be the case. So when I’m writing, because my source is always English, right, but when I’m writing, I can start thinking about how is that going to look like French, how’s that going to look in Spanish to sort of understand what are my spacing limits, but unfortunately I don’t speak Turkish, I don’t speak Swedish, I don’t speak German, I don’t speak Japanese.
Mario:
So, when we get to that point where we can get the translations back and we start putting them in the actual wireframes and we can see like, that might be too much, then that helps me with the source code or maybe that helps me create different versions to make sure that whatever we’re doing is the best as possible for all those people out there in their language, which is in the end, what you want to do, right?
Mario:
Do you want to consume your content? Do you want to play the games in a way that you’re comfortable and not everybody does it in English? So we have to keep that on the back of our heads every single day.
Larry:
This happens every episode, there’s a whole other episode there about localization and the implications for product design. But anyway, but hey, we’re coming up close on time and I want to make sure, I always to give my guests before we wrap up, is there anything last that you want to make sure that it’s either it’s come up in the conversation or that you just want to make sure that you share with folks before we wrap up today? Patricia or? Go ahead, Mario.
Mario:
Cool. So, there’s actually this quote from Dan Hon, I kind of saw it on his Twitter bio and if he’s listening, thank you. Actually, I should reach out on Twitter. He says, “Make friends, break silos, build bridges.” And that for the past six months has kind of been our motto because I mean, we’ve kind of just making friends might be a little bit strong sometimes.
Mario:
So we’ve tweaked this into reaching out. And this is basically the way that or the three main pillars that we’re doing to progress how content design as a craft is being introduced at King. So by reach out or making friends, it’s like, speak to people, go towards them, understand what are their needs, but not just as your stakeholders or as your team, also as human beings. I mean, come on, we’re all in this weird situation.
Mario:
So if you’ve got cats, just speak about cats. If you like, I don’t know, mechanical keyboards, go for it. If you like music, just get to know each other at a different plane, because that helps a lot. Then when it comes to breaking silos, that’s the hardest part because that’s when you have to ask people to, like, I know you’ve been doing all of these things for X amount of months or years, would you be open to trying this other thing?
Mario:
And that’s again, through conversation, through showing them nothing’s going to break, I mean, yes, the silo is going to break, but we’re not going to break anything in the process, but rather we’ll try to save time, we’ll try to save money, we’ll try to save frustration and see how that works. And at the end, it’s obviously when you’ve broken that silo it’s, you need to start building those bridges because when you get together with those other areas and you start forming these really cross multidisciplinary teams, that’s when you can start reaching to the different areas on the outside rims of product design, that means your marketing, your legal, your security, to make sure that between all of you, you’re actually coming up with the best solution for in this case, our player. So, thank you, Dan. That’s it. I mean, it’s reach out, break silos and build bridges.
Larry:
I love that.
Patricia:
I mean, after that, we have another model, which is, challenging the status quo because we’ve heard so many times, hey, but this is how we’ve been doing things. And sometimes that’s not good enough because it doesn’t mean that because you’ve been doing that for years, we need to continue doing that if the needs are different or the outcomes are not good enough.
Patricia:
So, that’s something that we try to put in place every day and in every interaction that we have which is actually about thinking, “Is that the best that we can do?” Is there a different way, a better way to get this done? It doesn’t matter if it has not been tried out before, we can try it out ourselves for the first time and see what happens. So we are in this mindset of launch and iterate and try things and see what happens and learn from the things you tried out.
Larry:
That’s perfect.
Mario:
And we’re both Latinos. So, I mean, Patricia’s from Seville. I’m from Mexico. So we’re used to doing a lot with a little, so just give us some space to run and we’ll definitely get there. It’s figuring out that sometimes you might not have all the tools, you might not have all the time and you might not have the perfect process to do things, but you have your wits, right? You have that thing that drives you to trying to make things better.
Mario:
So, reach out to those people and figure out how with a little bit of flexibility, things can actually work because sometimes we tend to be so structured, especially in product design, it’s like, take a step back, breathe and really have a look at everything. So we call it internally, this hashtag Latino charm that gets us places. So definitely try it out.
Larry:
I need a hashtag now.
Patricia:
Done is better than perfect. So first thing, just try it out and if it’s not perfect, it doesn’t matter. Done is better than perfect.
Larry:
Nice. Well, thanks so much.
Mario:
Preach, sister, preach.
Larry:
Thanks Mario. Hey, one last, the very last thing, what’s the best way if people want to stay in touch with you? Do you have social media channels that you favor or how can folks connect with you?
Patricia:
My LinkedIn profile is Patricia Gomez.
Larry:
And Mario.
Mario:
I’m on LinkedIn as Mario Ferrer and I’m on Twitter as ahiteva, which I mean, we can put it on the show notes, but in Spanish means is, “here goes.
Larry:
Here goes. Great. I’ll put those in the show notes as well. Well, thanks so much, a really fun conversation and I wish we could go forever, but we’ll have to wrap it here, but thanks again.
Patricia:
Thanks so much, Larry.
Mario:
Muchos gracias, Larry.
Larry:
De nada. Ciao.
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