Kylie Hansen: Building a Content Design Team at Microsoft – Episode 56

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Kylie Hansen is a tireless evangelist for the field of content design and for her team at Microsoft’s Cloud + AI Studios.

She shows the managers she works with how content design can improve their products. By demonstrating the ROI of content design, she also earns the budget that lets her continue to build her team.

The end result of Kylie’s work is happier customers – and a growing team that is well-positioned to design the conversational and data-driven content of the not-too-distant future.

Kylie and I talked about:

• the scope of her role as Director of UX Content Design, Microsoft Cloud (Azure) + AI Studios
• the growth of the content designer role at Microsoft – she was the first one in 2013 and there are now more than 30, each embedded in a product team
• how content designers are just one of many flavors of designers in their stack of UX talent
• the shift at Microsoft from asking content folks to “please fix this without changing it” to fully embedding content designers throughout the design process
• her work with other design leaders to articulate the ROI of content design – they have demonstrated that including a content designer on a product-design team:
  • increases NPS (Net Promoter Score) by 8 points
  • solves 44% of task failures
  • boosts usability by 92%
  • lifts both active users and customer retention
• how the ensuing “happier customers and more successful products” show that “$1 invested in design is worth $100 to fix something in development”
• their use of “experience analytics,” which links OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) with actual data from customer use of their products, to optimize products over time
• how her diverse background as a copy editor, copywriter, brand strategist, creative director, and experience-strategy director prepared her for her current role
• her take on job titles in the content design and content strategy fields
• how approaching content design strategically makes it much easier to do tactical creative work in a more consistent, aligned, and effective way
• how they distinguish the different layers of their UX design work at Microsoft:
  • strategy (user journey, customer research, terminology, etc.)
  • structure (information architecture, navigation, messaging, hierarchy, wireframe copy, etc.)
  • surface (producing purposeful, conversational UI text that aligns to voice and style)
• the challenges of staffing a UX content design team now that everyone is seeing the ROI and other benefits of including content designers on product teams
• how UX design is not so much a deliverable as it is a mission, to take a product from idea to market leadership
• how in their recruiting they try to “filter people in rather than filtering them out” – looking for folks who can master the challenges of short-form writing and who embody resilience
• how positioning and messaging are embedded in their product experiences, always aiming for “five seconds to sign up and five minutes to wow”
• their success in getting out of silos and collaborating – e.g., her close relationship with her counterpart in the cloud and AI brand content studio
• the three “circles of impact” that they operate in at Microsoft
• the evolution of her approach to selling content design and UX design to engineers
• the emerging opportunity for content designers to lead the way as trends like conversational design, mixed reality, and chatbots shift experience design from screens and toward systems, processes, and data and how they interact with each other

Kylie’s Bio

Kylie Hansen is Director of UX Content Design, Microsoft Cloud + AI Studios.

Kylie is motivated by the belief that design can both transform business — solve problems, create opportunities — and make people’s everyday lives better. Especially when products are crisp and clear, warm and approachable, and ready to lend a hand.

Connect with Kylie on LinkedIn.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

The future of content strategy lies in content experience design, not simple content creation. If you want a peek at the kind of team that is ready to design those new content experiences, listen in on this conversation with Kylie Hansen. Kylie leads a team of 30 content designers at Microsoft. Each of her folks is embedded in a product team, working alongside UX researchers, interaction designers, visual designers, data scientists, and other specialists. This kind of team yields product results that let Kylie keep growing her team inside a company that is notoriously slow to add headcount.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 56 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Kylie Hansen. Kylie is the director of UX content design for Microsoft’s cloud and AI studios. Kylie, tell the folks a little bit more about your background and the exact scope of what you do there, because it’s kind of a crazy job you have.

Kylie:
I guess it is, but first, Hi Larry, and thank you for having me on your podcast. It’s great to be here. Yes, my job spans the cloud and AI division of Microsoft, which is Azure, our cloud platform, and about 600 Azure services, as well as our business applications like Power BI and PowerApps and Power Platform and Dynamics 365. I’ve got content designers across all of those, but we’re still growing. I was the first UX content designer at Microsoft, and that was in 2013. Now we’re about 30 people, and each one is embedded with a single product team. We’ve got full stack teams that include interaction design, visual design, research, data science, and content designers, as well as other specialty skills. We’re all on the design ladder and we’re all just different flavors of designers.

Larry:
That’s great. And so that’s a well articulated model at Microsoft, that stack of talent you just mentioned.

Kylie:
Well yes, but I would say it definitely goes along with the rest of Microsoft’s evolution. Before I think some content roles could be sort of a bolt-on at the end, as one of my PM’s once said, “Could you plus this up?” So there was a lot of, “Please fix this without changing it.” This is a totally different approach where content doesn’t follow design or support design or enhance design. It is design. And I have Jonah Sterling, my a wonderful design leader, to thank for the opportunity to build this team from scratch. It’s been quite a journey, and really the highlight of my career so far.

Larry:
And you don’t just build a team like that with insights and ideas, you’ve got to demonstrate that it works. I think that’s one of your big contributions to content design is that you can articulate the ROI of including content design in that stack that you just mentioned. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Kylie:
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. It’s such a challenge to extract any discipline’s contribution to a product experience out, but we found several ways to do it and rationalize it, but just to contextualize that, our content design approach is to impact design at every step of the way. For us, that’s strategy, structure, and surface. There’s other models there that have a couple of other S’s, but strategy, structure, and surface is where we work because if you have a strategy and a framework, then that surface level UI text is more purposeful and conversational, and you can be really crisp and clear and consistent without as much struggle because you’re not doing it kind of inside out or top down, but rather kind of bottoms up from day one from the whiteboard. So what we found was… And to build a team at Microsoft, head count is always a precious investment.

Kylie:
Microsoft really takes care of their people and we look at when we hire, we try to hire for someone’s third job at Microsoft. We try to hire people who can build a really impactful career there. So hiring necessitates that design convince engineering GMs to give us the head count to hire those design teams. I work with the rest of our design leadership team to walk those GMs through exactly what we can deliver. We were able to isolate that by being very, very, very strict about drawing a bright red line around products that were funded and products that were not funded or resourced with content designers. So what we were able to show was that without full stack design teams, products won’t make their, what we call OKRs, objectives and key results, and they will stay on the red as far as their customer results.

Kylie:
Specifically, we looked at NPS, task failures, usability, active users, daily and monthly active users, and customer retention, and we were able to show that we can dramatically improve the product quality and produce results. Specifically, NPS goes up by eight points when you have a content designer on the product design team. We are able to show on video with research and benchmarking that having a content designer on a product means solving 44% of task failures, which are caused directly by content. And we’re able to show that it boosts usability, almost doubles it, by 92%. And that then lifts active users and customer retention. So we’ve got happier customers and more successful products, and I would say there’s a lot of data out there that shows $1 invested in design is worth $100 to fix something in development. So that’s another win on our side.

Larry:
Wow, that’s an amazing testimonial just for the power of design. That reminds me of Jared Spool’s advocacy of just the whole field of UX design that that’s… You just articulated a huge strong case for that. Can you tell me… You know, part of that stack is research, and this is what, when we talked a little bit before the show and we didn’t get to that, but tell me how research integrates into that. And what would… I guess, can you break down I mean, it’s an integrated team that’s doing all of these interaction design, usability, research, writing things. I guess tell me a little bit about the makeup of the team. Is that a classic UX-looking team, or are there unique things about how you do it at Microsoft?

Kylie:
You know, I think any company the size of Microsoft does have built-in advantages of scale. We still have to be incredibly lean and scrappy, but we’re pretty much all muscle. We’ve got different, I mean every content designer has different strengths and experiences, based on their backgrounds, and that’s similar for our design researchers and our interaction designers. Same goes there. We also have a video UX team and a web team, innovation teams, that sort of thing. So depending on what the project needs, it’s typically in a product design team which is continuous. They stay together and they sit together and they play together and work together. So that is… They’ll have a product design lead who can be from any discipline, they’ll have a design producer or sometimes it’s called a design PM, and you’ll have a content design lead and a research design lead and a data scientist. They travel throughout the product and the different journeys and flows to tell the story of the product and make a product hopefully that customers love and really get a lot out of.

Larry:
Right. You mentioned both a UX researcher and a data scientist. Is that sort of how you divvy up the qualitative and quantitative part of it? Or is it not that simple?

Kylie:
Yeah, it’s not quite that simple. The data science, we also refer to it a lot as experience analytics, and it really gets into performance and optimization and we can see what’s really going on with our customers and their interactions with the product. But Sam Zeiss, who’s my office mate, is our director of data science and would be a great one to do a deep dive. Absolute genius.

Larry:
Right. And the way you just said that, experience analytics, that’s a term that’s not embedded in my head, but I immediately get it and that sounds super important. Is that preemptive and proactive, or is it sort of after the fact analysis of how products are actually used?

Kylie:
They hook up the telemetry based on the OKRs, the objectives and key results that they’re after at the beginning and where they’re looking to move the needle, and then they set everything up with the right telemetry to capture that data, and then they help evaluate it and make recommendations, and then track progress on the optimization of the product over time.

Larry:
Everything is conversation so far has been very UX-y and design-y, but you bring a whole lot more to bear on this. And I want to… I’m curious how you, because you’ve done a lot of work in branding and product stuff beyond this and and even marketing, like social media marketing and writing stuff and you studied journalism. I think journalism was your first career. Can you tell me how that’s sort of like the individual stack of skills and experience and abilities. Tell me how all of that comes to bear in your work.

Kylie:
Yeah, one of my first real jobs was as a copy editor. And you know, a lot of people look down and they think, “Well that’s a nice-to-have now.” But I would say learning the mechanics of English beyond my journalism degree and how to make words sit up and dance by I was paired with great copywriters and then became a copywriter myself, a marketing copywriter and then a brand strategist and a creative director. And then later, I owned my own content agency and we did brand strategy and positioning and messaging and custom content for all kinds of different clients. And then I was a strategy director, like experience strategy, like “Here’s a business problem. Solve it with a technology solution” for all kinds of Fortune 50 companies.

Kylie:
I was across the Microsoft account at that agency and I thought, “Hmm, seems like the giant’s waking up.” And I saw, I could feel that things had changed back to what they were at the beginning when I was there, and I thought, “I want to be part of this.” And one of my old clients called me and said, “Hey, I’m building my dream team. Will you come?” And who’s going to turn that down? So yeah, I was the first UX content designer on the Azure cloud platform and services, and it was a wild ride and it’s been really fun.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s an interesting one too, that UX content design. That kind of makes the most sense to me, but there’s a whole bunch of titles floating around for this work. Like at Facebook, what Jonathan Coleman used to do there, they called him a content strategist, but I think he’s doing very much like what you’re doing. And so . . .

Kylie:
Yeah. Yeah, content strategy, I think it’s been used and repurposed so many times that individual folks bring their own lens to that one. It’s just kind of a really big tent. You know, all contents should be strategic, like Tory Podmajersky’s recent book, but because it’s an inherently impossible to design any great experience with bad content. I think at the end of the day, we’re all passionate about creating better user experiences, and we all care about delivering useful, usable, engaging content to do that. So I don’t think it matters as much what you call yourself, but I do think there are some distinctions.

Kylie:
For us, UX writing is surface, so that’s why we’re on the design ladder. We’re all, our title is UX designers, and we just happen to be UX designers for content. That also helps… It’s hard to leave out your product designer. It’s easier to leave out your content strategist, because that sounds like something that happens at the beginning and then you go back to them and say, “Here, can you scrub these strings?” So we very much wanted to stay out of tactical and stay upstream in strategy so that when the tactical creative work comes, it’s much, much easier to do it in a way that’s consistent and aligned and effective.

Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). You know, actually I want to back up a little bit too. You mentioned that strategy, structure, and surface and you talk about UX writing being closer to the surface of that. And I wonder, like the structure part, is that like information architecture and that kind of thing?

Kylie:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s the structure and the flow so it combines information, architecture, navigation, messaging, hierarchy, and then the copy in the wire frames, and we’re all using Figma together, and that’s how we help deliver intuitive experiences and collaborate in true partnership so everybody’s able to bring their best and trust each other, like with the areas where that really is their vocation. There’s not a lot of ownership. It’s more like “I’m going to take care of this.” But structure is very much, and strategy’s where we start by understanding the user and the journey and landing key terms and feature names and creating clear, coherent content strategy for what’s to come. And then surface is where we produce that UI text and terminology that’s really purposeful and conversational and concise and clear and aligned to our brand voice and style guidelines. So, if we were just to do the surface, we’d be leaving so much value on the table, and I’m not sure that over time we’d really move the needle on the product experiences for our customers.

Larry:
Well just that alone right there is an interesting stack of skills. You know, being a strategic thinker, sort of a structural implementer, and then all the writing and front end skills as well. But you built the team. You were the first UX content designer. Now there’s about 30 people with that title at Microsoft. Tell me about first of all, how do you recruit for that? That’s such a crazy skillset that not a huge number of people have. Do you do a lot of training and onboarding, or how do you bring people up to speed for that role?

Kylie:
Yeah, it’s getting more challenging as the discipline becomes more successful. You know, five years ago it was easy. But now I think folks are really seeking that ROI, so they’re scooping up a great talent out there, and it’s not quite as slam dunk, but I did have a really broad network, and having had a content-focused agency, I knew some of the world’s absolute best copywriters and content strategists and brand strategists and editors. So I was able to sort of… I really had an advantage starting.

Kylie:
I knew who I wanted to hire, like probably the first half dozen people, like I absolutely knew who would be like just the best crew ever. And so getting those headcounts in place, and now I have five managers and so we’re expanding our network. First we came in, we built out a really senior crew with those folks, and then we built out the middle, and now we’ve built out the junior layer so we’ve got a lot of recent graduates, and actually a lot of them will come to us when they’re still finishing their last quarter of say their master’s program. So we’ve been able to really build out a great team for today and for tomorrow, because if we just stuck with seniors, at some point we’d have a real problem.

Kylie:
So, yeah, we’re really trying to filter in for a variety of skills and experience and people who are comfortable with ambiguity and have a scrappy bias toward action, but understand designs systems and style guides and are happy to align to them and see it as the gain that it is. Because when you have a portfolio of nearly a thousand products, you want them to feel like they all come from the same company in the same voice, and that’s going to be a multi-year play, because I think I read once Johnny Ives, before he left Apple, said that someone had tried to hire him away and he said, “I just got started. I’ve only been here for 10 years.”

Kylie:
That’s how UX design is different than any other work I’ve ever done. It’s not a deliverable. It’s really a mission, and to take a product from nothing, from an idea to an absolute market leader like Power BI, that’s at least a five year journey. So you really have to look at it a bit differently. I don’t ever plan to jump around the company. I plan to stay in this role, building out this team and this product portfolio. And that’s a little bit different, I think. And because there’s so many products, the individual contributors can, if they’re interested in AI it’s like “Here you go.” If they’re interested in conversational design of bots, we’ve got lots of that.

Kylie:
So you can really move around and I think give those people have great careers. But yeah, we have pretty good job descriptions and we look at experience, we have a design challenge we give folks to see just how they think and where they’re already nailing it, and where we can show them how we do it when they do onboard. So yeah, we have really pretty intensive onboarding because that’s just so important to get them off on the right foot.

Larry:
One thing you mentioned, because I know I run into kids all the time… Kids, like recent grads and people in like the HCDE program at the UW or things like that. So there’s that. I know that there’s a lot of young UX talent out there. But there’s also this famous research that maybe five or six weeks ago they came out that somebody who looked at 5,000 UX job postings and they were all for like, 4-5 years experience or more, that there’s this perception among the youth and the new talent that there aren’t that many opportunities for new people. But it sounds like there are in your organization, that you’ve got figured out a way to have sort of a ladder going there.

Kylie:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think in our job description, I would have to look it up and read it to you, but one thing we stress is, we try and filter people in rather than filtering them out. We believe that we’re building software for all, for everyone, so our design team should look like everyone. And so we know there are a lot of paths to becoming a content designer so we look for someone, first and foremost, who is incredibly great at short writing. I’ve never had to write so short in my life, and I was a marketing copywriter. But it is so different. You know, you’ve usually got two words, sometimes three. Sometimes you’ve got a little string of six of them, but you certainly don’t have sentences or sometimes even fragments. So we look for somebody who’s a real craftsperson and really loves that and has that nailed, and then we work on, okay, we’re going to teach you how to apply that skillset that you have.

Kylie:
And then we also hire for resilience because the one thing that keeps me going is I always read about, you know, on Medium and all the UX blogs about the trials and tribulations of being in any content role. So we’re getting over the hump of that being so difficult because more and more of our folks have seen, in working with a content designer, how much value that adds. But that does keep me going when I’m like, “Yeah, okay. That’s just about being in content.” I still haven’t figured out why that is. I think it might be because we work with smart people who have 10 fingers and a brain and have typed lots of smart things in the past, but it doesn’t mean that it should go in the product.

Larry:
Yeah. Well that’s cool. I think that whole thing is super helpful. I think there will be a lot of appreciative people out there, just to hear the way you just articulated that, like what you look for. I assume that that’s probably not just a Microsoft thing, but I assume you’d love to get more candidates showing up as well. It sounds like this is an ongoing growth project for you?

Kylie:
Oh yeah. I hope to double our team size again this year, and it’s just dependent on… A lot of my job now is evangelism and selling, and then onboarding. Each studio that we open up is a new practice area with new people who may be really eager to have our discipline as part of their team, but they might not know how to optimize it in the process yet. So there’s a lot of startup. Over and over we start up new content designers within new studios because the studio as a whole, we’ve grown from, I think about 13 people when I started to about 500 today.

Kylie:
That’s a massive amount of scaling, and we’re trying to definitely keep up and instead of peanut buttering, which everybody who’s been on your show has said doesn’t work, we’ve really gone with a fully embedded one product per designer, just like all the other design roles. And it really is paying off because then we have a really bright red line that says, “Look at the results of this product compared to that one” and we can show why that because of the gap. And so we’re having success that way.

Larry:
Great. Hey, one thing that’s come up a couple of times, and I keep wanting to find a way to circle back around to it, so I’m just going to barge into it right now. You mentioned a couple of times messaging, and one thing that I’m finding is, as I talk to people, I think that term manifests slightly differently in the branding world and in the content strategy world. Have you given that much thought, and can you talk a little bit about that?

Kylie:
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the folks on my team do have a positioning and messaging strategy background from working in content strategy for the web usually. And so we’ll start a new product and it’ll be, we’ll go from concept to content, but none of our other cross functional teams are involved in it. We don’t have brand or product marketing involved yet. So the great thing is, with cloud apps, a lot of the onboarding and front door of the product is, it’s the first thing that customers are going to see so we want to make sure that the value of the product is absolutely crystal clear, and that it really embodies our voice and doesn’t overload the customer and helps them get quick wins fast. We call it five seconds to sign up and five minutes to wow, we call it five … lives.

Kylie:
Those are our goals. Yeah, so that messaging and positioning is really important, and we’re tied in very closely with our cloud and AI brand content studio so my counterpart over there and I are BFFs and we’re always connecting over like, “Okay, here’s what the customer journey looks like on the inbound side, and here’s what’s going outbound, and then here’s the product experience that pays that off so that it is an actual journey.” I mean, we’re not there yet. There are so many, so many screen captures that will make me cry, but it’s better than it’s ever been and we’re not working in silos. It’s one continuous effort. Everybody’s aligned around what we’re trying to achieve. It’s a pretty exciting time to be at Microsoft, and things are really, really like everyone’s got their foot on the accelerator and there’s a lot of excitement, I would describe it, and to do, designed better and faster. And we really are starting to solve some of our biggest challenges and really build out design systems. So it’s just a really exciting time to be in this space in design.

Larry:
That’s great. I’m super intrigued about that, because you know, silos are the classic content strategy practice problem. That’s half the… Not half, like 70% of the conversations and the sessions at Confab were about how to bust silos and align people across different things. It sounds like, is this both the kind of the shifting culture with Satya Nadella’s arrival and/or your sort of just making things happen, being out there? What are the dynamics that are permitting you to work so effortlessly across silos?

Kylie:
I wouldn’t say it was has been effortless, but I think it is actually, it’s that dedication to say I had to break down these silos and then to show other people through what you’re achieving and accomplishing by leveraging ideas and work of others, as well as your contributions to the success of others, as well as your key individual accomplishments that contribute to the team or the business or the customer results. But when you show how you’re building on the work and ideas and efforts of others, these are our three principles. We have these three circles of impact that I just articulated. I think it’s a new world at Microsoft, and they really have rebooted the culture to one of let’s see what we can achieve together. And when you see what brand is accomplishing and what product marketing is accomplishing and then the product teams themselves, you’d be silly not to leverage that and put it all together to create some magic.

Kylie:
I’ve noticed that I’m not encountering the headwinds that I used to that make work tougher and that I think everybody realizes we have hard jobs, you know, why make them harder? But we’re also being measured in a different way. We’re not being measured on how big a splash we make as individuals. It’s definitely move the big rocks together. There’s almost nothing that would be lasting at Microsoft impact-wise that one person could do. You really do need everyone to be bought in and to have skin in the game, and that’s one way to do it. But I think also building up awareness to get that equal partnership has been maybe one of our secret sauces, but it’s still such a work in progress. We’re just starting. I would say we were on the mountaintop and coming back rolling down a little bit for quite a while, and now we’ve got over the mountaintop, and now it’s about like individual different levels and layers.

Kylie:
But I think some of those early, let’s establish this brand-new thing, get people to understand it, see it as valuable, understand how much impact it could have. That’s where I’m winning, but we did not win with, you know one afters are decks about quality and content and how design-driven companies outperformed the S&P by 228% of retention. None of that really worked. It wasn’t until we showed them the results in their own products and showed them how we could get them from red to green that we started to get more attraction, because think about it, I’m talking to an engineer. I’m a creative with a background in design, and I’ve got to get them to understand how I can help them rather than convinced them that design is valuable. That’s just… It’s either obvious to them or that’s not really the needle you need to move.

Larry:
That’s exciting that we’re at a point where there’s enough experience that understanding those dynamics and being able to articulate things in the new end the users, the customer, because we have customers for our content strategy and our content design, and you’re doing a really effective job of communicating that. Hey Kylie, we’re coming up on time. I always like to make sure that I haven’t left out an opportunity for you to say anything that’s on your mind, anything that hasn’t come up in the conversation, or just as on your mind about content design or ROI and effectiveness of content? Anything last?

Kylie:
Hmm, yeah. Yeah. I think as we move toward more conversational design and mixed reality and chat bots and Internet of Things, user experience design is going to be more about how different systems and processes and data interact with each other and less about screens. And so we’re always looking forward to what’s coming next and scaling up for that and doing pilots and explorations. Because I think this is a point in time where we have a lot of screens and panels and blades and there are so many experiences out there that will really help huge swaths of people, like say warehouse workers with Internet of Things and HoloLens and that sort of system with AI coming together. That’s what I’m most excited about as as burgeoning UX specialties where content strategy can… They’re really already more about content design than UI creation, and that’s where we can really lead the way.

Larry:
Nice. I need to find that brain exploding GIF, because that list of stuff that you just rattled off I think is super important. So, the good news there is your job security for UX designers and especially content designers going forward.

Kylie:
Oh yeah. I mean, it’s critical that we solve this now because conversational experiences demand a whole heck of a lot of content strategy and planning because you need to define, map, and then design them. But if it’s conversation driven, that totally is a different ratio of folks that you need leading that conversation. And it’s a rich playground for all of us. I think we can invent ourselves each the, you know, five times plus in content and content design.

Larry:
Great. Well that’s a great place to end. Thanks so much, Kylie, for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate the conversation.

Kylie:
Yeah, so have I. It was great talking to you.