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Torrey PodmajerskyIf you stop to really think about it – and Torrey Podmajersky has – everything is content.
We think of content as the words, pictures, and recordings that we view online and in apps and other digital products.
But even when words and illustrations are removed, the graphical elements and technical experiences that surround still them convey meaning, which is the main job of content.
Therefore, everything is content.
We talked about:
- the success of her book “Strategic Writing for UX”
- her ongoing focus on content strategy
- how she grew up with the idea that “everything is content” and how she applies that insight in her content work
- how an empty state is content
- how there can be content in a layout even when there are no words displayed
- the evolving roles represented in digital experience design
- how underlying software architecture can affect content
- the span from globally understandable to individually personalized content
- the enduring importance of the role of content strategy in her work
- the importance of good decision making in content practice
- her take on content curation
Torrey’s bio
Torrey Podmajersky helps teams solve business and customer problems using UX content. She has created inclusive and accessible consumer and professional experiences for Xbox, Microsoft account, Windows apps, privacy, Microsoft Education, and OfferUp, and now works at Google. Her book, Strategic Writing for UX, was published by O’Reilly Media in 2019.
Connect with Torrey online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 135. When you think about the advances on the web over the past 25 years, you might want to attribute the medium’s success to the engineers and designers who get all the headlines. Torrey Podmajersky will point out that all of that code, all of those layouts, all of those digital interactions, all of the meaningful substance that we experience on the internet – all of that stuff is content. It’s a bold assertion, but Torrey can prove that everything is content.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 135 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am super delighted today to welcome back to the show Torrey Podmajersky. Torrey is the author of the book Strategic Writing for UX, which is now three and a half years old. It’s amazing to think about. Congrats on the success of that. She also manages a team at Google. So welcome, Torrey. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Torrey:
Thanks so much, Larry. Well, like you said, I published this book three and a half years ago. I’m still talking about it, so that’s a good sign, I think, that people still want to know more about writing for UX. Now we talk more about content design than UX writing. You also mentioned I’m a UX manager at Google, which is true. And really interestingly, I’m getting back even deeper to my content strategy route, because I’m in the support tools team at Google and I work on the tools that bring Google support content to the customer. So deep in that content strategy across, oh, I don’t know, the hundreds of products that we support. Yeah.
Larry:
Because I’ve been doing some of that kind of work lately, and that enterprise tooling work that supports the stuff that you actually end up seeing, that’s a whole other podcast. I got to be careful because I could go on about that. But the reason I wanted to have you back on specifically is you said something in another podcast, I think on Dan Brown’s Lenses on Information Architecture. You alluded to something that I’ve heard you talk about before, this notion that everything is content. Tell me a little bit more about that, because that’s the most intriguing thing I’ve ever heard. I can imagine and mansplain it, but I want to hear it from the source.
Torrey:
Well, I really grew up with this idea of everything is content, because everything has inherent meaning, and everything that is when you represent an idea, it is content. One could also make a philosophical argument that when you have an idea articulated in your own brain or held in your own brain, that it is content held in mysterious electrochemical ways that we don’t understand, and then you might translate that to a document, or an image, or a video or something else. Yeah, go ahead.
Larry:
No, I was just going to say, that’s so interesting that I hadn’t backed that far up in the stream of when something becomes content. You think about ideation and the editorial process or the design-ey process of expressing an idea, but your concept of this goes all the way back up into brain neurochemistry, it sounds like.
Torrey:
Well, it’s back into neurochemistry, but then there’s also the things, the unintended content. If I go out to the beach and I find a piece of garbage, and that piece of garbage is a bag of chips or was a bag of chips, or crisps, depending on where you are in the English-speaking world, and that bag, maybe it is, I recognize that it has old branding compared to where I am right now, or maybe there are barnacles on it, there is content throughout there because there is meaning that can be derived from it. There’s the presence of the bag on the beach, where it can be found. That can be potentially interesting to people who study ocean currents and navigation, or the presence of plastics in the ocean, et cetera.
Torrey:
There’s also the, how long has this been floating? Well, chances are it’s been floating since it was freshly used, and if the branding on it is 20 years old, oh, look, 20 years old branding. Oh, but the barnacles are only this many years old, so did it blow in from a landfill? There’s so much meaning to be derived there. Now, as I think I talked about on Dan Brown’s podcast, if you’re not capturing that meaning, is it content? That’s where it can be dicey. Do you need to document that in some way? Whether that’s taking a picture, uploading the GPS coordinates to a database, tracking that garbage. At what point does it become content, or is it intrinsically content right there where it is, like your electrochemical idea is content in your brain? Yeah, the philosophy can go all the way back.
Larry:
This is awesome, because you’re working at the place that coined the phrase “things not strings,” and I think that’s what you’re talking about, this thing, this idea, this thought, this bag on the beach, it exists, regardless of any expression of it. So there’s the thing. Does it become content when you describe it with a string? Is that the idea?
Torrey:
Yeah. Does it require description? Does it require capturing to make it content? I think that for practical purposes, sure. If we want to apply strategy to it, absolutely. For example, if we pointed some large software processing capability toward photos publicly available on the internet and said, hey, look for photos that have GPS coordinates, which many of them do, built in, and then of those look for ones on beaches, and of those look for ones where there looks to be something like garbage on the beach, and then you could have a map of garbage just based on people’s vacation photos.
Larry:
Like crowdsourcing.
Torrey:
Sure.
Larry:
That’s so interesting. And something you just said about it’s the application of this, what you do with that? And once it becomes content like that, you could crowdsource a map of beach garbage from photos with the appropriate metadata searching. I actually have a friend who runs an image website service that could probably help us do that. So it becomes content. And then you also alluded to the practical notions of our day-to-day work, because as soon as I heard you say that, I was like, okay, the first thing that leaps to mind is what about empty states? Is that content, like an empty state?
Torrey:
As in there’s no garbage on this beach?
Larry:
There’s no garbage on this beach, or you’re in a point in a flow, in an experience design workflow where there’s nothing there yet. It’s like a blank screen or an empty container of some kind.
Torrey:
That is always a moment of content, because you are saying whether or not you choose to put a string on the page, whether or not you choose to use words there, what you’re doing is saying, I mean, in the best case scenario, you’re saying, look at this open possibility here. Or maybe it’s good that it’s empty, because this is your screen that would be full of errors if – maybe this is your dashboard of things going wrong. Oh, good, nothing has gone wrong. But that itself is its own content. And the purpose of that empty state text if we choose to use it, is sometimes there’s a call to action we can make like, hey, this is where your photos go. Great. Upload them here. Sometimes it’s a reassurance message, like “no errors detected for this domain.” Fantastic.
Torrey:
Always that is implied in the empty state, but we don’t have to, sometimes it’s appropriate to use language to emphasize that so that even people who don’t know its implications yet, even people who are new to it and are like, “Well, do I have no errors because it’s all unplugged? Or do I have no errors because there are really no errors?”
Larry:
And that’s all of a sudden I’m putting on my information architecture hat again, I’m thinking that’s a wayfinding thing like, oops, I ended up at this empty place. I know from prior experience that maybe it’s something like this, but I’m not really sure. Oh, Torrey has just reassured me with this helpful content that explains-
Torrey:
Yeah. And hopefully they don’t know it’s me. Oh, good God.
Larry:
Right. Hey, another thing I thought of when I first heard that thought was that thing that Jonathan Coleman and many other people have done, where you take a user interface in an app or a webpage, and just take all the words off and say, “Here you go.” And then that’s and interesting way to show the benefits of content and how important content is to the web. Have you thought about it from that angle, or is that part of your …
Torrey:
Yeah. Well, and it’s funny because I rarely use that as a party trick any more of, “Look how important we are.” That was super useful five years ago in some groups. Most groups now are like, yeah, we hired you. Why are you taking all our words away? Great. We’ve made progress. But when we do that, when we take the words away, sometimes that’s a great moment to see, oh, regardless of the words, this UX has three different, maybe it has a bar across the top, and a bar down the left nav and a sub bar down the left nav, and then another thing on the right nav and maybe something in a footer. Where is people’s attention being drawn to graphically, visually? Can we emphasize these things? Because there’s information, essentially, there is content in that layout when there are no words there.
Larry:
Interesting. So there’s still some inferred meaning of-
Torrey:
Absolutely.
Larry:
And now I’m all of a sudden thinking of there are so many different layout. The content we work with nowadays, a lot of times it has to be responsive to the situation it’s in, whether it’s a small mobile app screen or a big screen. And what you just described, those cues would change subtly from instance to instance of the content expression.
Torrey:
Yeah. And this is where working closely with my interaction design peeps and my design system peeps to be like, okay, when these things change, what meaning is being brought across here? And honestly, I work with some fantastic people and they don’t need me to bring this up to them. They know what kind of meaning they’re carrying across with these different, literally shades of gray in some cases, and layout, and prominence and things like padding, and type ramp and things like that. Great. But when I come to it and I say, we need to give them three different instructions on this page, because we’re in a terrible spot and that’s what we have to do, but we need to show that these are tiered instructions or that they are four different things, that their purpose is different things, and we need to show that in different places, and somehow the layout needs to carry that. That example just got super ridiculously complicated.
Larry:
No, but it’s reminding me also though of the increasing need for collaboration these days that it used to be that writers, you were writing to a specific format, and so you just wrote a magazine article and you knew that they might do some initial-cap thing or some call-outs, but it wasn’t that crazy. Now it’s we’re designing content for these really intricate complex … You alluded to design systems. We’re looking for patterns and trying to create content to those patterns. And anyhow, I guess, so I’m thinking back to the Madison Avenue team of the creative and the creative person, and the visual person and the word person, and we have that now with the tech, and design and product people interacting. I guess what I’m thinking about is a boundary exercise about where does the content stuff end, the interaction stuff begin? It’s all inextricably linked, but it seems like we want to have some kind of, if only for professional, who does what kind of thing? Does that make sense?
Torrey:
It does. And honestly, I think that there’s a who does what problem at the beginning of relationships, and then that gets worked out more and more as time goes on. For example, I’ve been married for many years now. Doing the dishes does not require either me or my spouse to have any special talents here. However, the dishes need to be done. So great. We share that role. When the kid was in the house, she also shared that role. Great. There are many things in user interface creation that are like doing the dishes. Maybe it’s the going from the wire frame to the Figma, or maybe there’s the whiteboard to the Figma to the shaping up. There’s things that my interaction design partners or my visual design partners are going to be much better at exploring than I am, and I’m going to be much better at exploring how the content can affect that.
Torrey:
And sometimes the content interacts with the layout in ways where I’m like, I’m going to mess with the layout here because I need to get across a different hierarchy or urgency of idea. And I should be able to play with that. To use the same analogy, my husband is a much better cook than I am, world’s better cook than I am. There are still, some times it’s appropriate for me to make dinner. Very rarely and generally I get takeout, but still, there are times where that’s more appropriate. So the analogous thing to that is, it is much better for my visual partners to be working on making the various layouts and exploring those things. They think of many different things than I would. They do it better. It looks more convincing when they’re done. Their alignment is usually right on. I don’t even know how they do it.
Torrey:
I know what the tools are, I just, I’m bad at it, or I’m not as good as they are. But I can still do the equivalent of getting takeout and being like, okay, I’m going to move this over here, and hopefully that will convey enough, that will feed us enough for tonight so that we have a better idea for dinner tomorrow night. And that can inspire my design partner to be like, yes, “Let me play with that and take it further. Let me shape that up.” In the same way, they’re like, I think we need to say this a new way. Let me work on some content and come up with things. And I need to say, great, thank you for doing that. Oh, I see what you’re doing there. Let me make that make better sense. Let me take out half your prepositions, whatever it is.
Larry:
Yeah. And as you’re saying, you’re reminding me of some of the implications of our new collaborative style. That’s often how content can happen. Yeah, you’re doing other content things or whatever, and so somebody else drafts something and then they start working on it. And I’m also reminded of that many of my guests on this podcast have mentioned that everything is bespoke, that every organization is going to be unique. Even within organizations, each team will have its own way of doing things. What’s the constant thing that helps you sort out the content part of it in these mushy … Yeah.
Torrey:
Honestly, to me, I keep leaning on this idea that everything is content. So I’m working in general on the language part, because that’s where my particular skills lie. But we all need to be producing the artifacts that eventually in aggregate turn into the product, including my coders. My software engineers need to be making their backend architecture and communicating it, documenting it, making sure it’s understandable, making sure their dependencies with other teams are worked out. And they need to be writing the code that makes it work. And they need to go through an editorial process with that code, not only finding their own bugs, but having code review from other engineers, and answering the questions, and explaining it and providing their rationale.
Torrey:
And what I’m doing is feeding into that and saying, “Hey, make sure it looks like this by the end. Okay? Make sure it’s localizable.” Bring me back the bugs where it couldn’t be localized, that sort of thing. So if we’re all making content and I’m doing my part of it, my part of it overlaps. And I’m sure you’ve had plenty of guests on your show talking about how the underlying software architecture has huge implications for the content. Whether that’s in the UI, or in the documentation or whatever, it’s fundamental to the assumptions of how it can work.
Larry:
And there’s two things about that that are interesting to me as well. A big part of this collaboration that we’re all doing is communication, and you communicate with content. So there’s this whole meta thing going on here. But also now I’m thinking, is code content? It is for the computer, I heard.
Torrey:
Heck yeah.
Larry:
Yeah. And their audience is the machine that executes it. Is that-
Torrey:
Yeah. Back in the olden days when code had to be compiled and it took a long time, I mean, that still happens, but it’s very different than it was when every programmer got a half hour break every time they needed to compile their code. But when code is compiling, and when we think about it that way, and you think about the compiler that gives you the bugs back that says, ah, this isn’t working, or there’s a missing end parenthesis or something, writing to do a thing for a compiler means that you can always land your code in a place that’s right, that’s quote unquote correct. And when you’re using English, there is no compiler. I mean, even if you use something like Grammarly or Hemingway or one of these things, it’s still not reflective of how individual human brains, on reading that text, will understand it. Our compilers are like, I have billions of compilers that I need to write for, and it’s all in the space between people’s ears. Yikes. And will I ever get accurate bug reporting from that? Oh, heck no.
Larry:
All of a sudden I’m thinking about content personalization, which that would be the end, the ultimate UX solution to that. It’s like, well, we’ll just give you the exact content that you need for how your brain operates, and how you think about the world, and what your current needs are and where you are, all those things.
Torrey:
I mean, but wouldn’t it in any relationship that you’ve ever had, think of this for a moment, think for a specific relationship, for a difficult moment in that relationship where you needed to convey some difficult truths to this other person, is there a perfect way to say that? Is there a perfect way to make it so they can both hear you, and listen and understand that you deeply care about them, even though you’re telling them that their breath stinks, or whatever it is? That was the most banal example. But we are never going to get to that level of perfect communication. We’re never going to be able to personalize to that level. And I’m not somebody who is comfortable in the never language. Oh, but we can do so many things. Yeah. But is it even a reasonable goal?
Larry:
Right. Yeah. Now there’s a whole other rabbit hole to go down there about just the practices that have emerged or the conventions around UX writing and content design. I don’t know that it’s least common denominator or there’s some blobby amorphous persona in the middle that is good enough that you can do calls to action that everybody understands, or things like that. Does that make sense that-
Torrey:
Yeah. Well, I think that the thing to be really careful about is these things all make sense to people if they’ve been using the internet, if they’ve been using mobile devices for a while. When people are brand new to electronic technologies, like gooeys or viewies, and they’re not picking it up as a child when everything is new to them, and I think of this in very rural places, places that haven’t had internet connectivity reliably over the past 20 years, how do you start now? How do you know that the three lines in the corner of a website or an app might mean the same thing as three dots in the corner of a different app? Might mean the same as nine dots? Might mean the same thing as … Oh, I think there’s another one. But definitely doesn’t mean the same thing as an X. Who knows that? That’s not described anywhere.
Larry:
And especially for us, people immersed in it, we just see those things and immediately know. And that’s content too, those little icons that illustrate that. That’s a whole other-
Torrey:
Yeah. And the assumptions that go with it. This is the norm, and we have to leverage the norms that we do have. And we need to be thinking, how do we bring people into these scenarios? And some of it is education. We don’t expect somebody to be able to get into a car and drive it without being exposed to what the various levers, and pedals, and knobs and dials do. But in general, kids have seen other people drive cars. They grow up, they get direct instruction. Here’s how you do the thing, and they can drive it. Oh, this is what this means. This is what it means when you get the idiot light with two snakes driving your car or chasing your car. It’s one of my favorites.
Larry:
No, it is. And again, and I’m thinking back to the very start when you talked about that there’s meaning to be conveyed and content is the expression of that meaning, and we circled right back to them. Another thing I want to just go to get your at least quick take on, Torrey, is that the title of your book is “Strategic Writing for UX,” and there’s this whole Christina Halverson and others have observed that put the specialization in content practice, that is content strategy even a thing anymore? So in your work, is content strategy still a thing?
Torrey:
Oh gosh, it’s all of what I do, frankly. People get into content roles in general because language is easy for them. The language is the easy part. And they find it easy to convey things and understand the nuance of it, and can use it like a power tool. And these people make great content pros in terms of doing the writing. Fantastic. But the writing is the easy part, and it’s the fast part too. And the more practice you get at it, the faster you get at it. The valuable part of what we do is the decision making, is the what is the right content for this moment? What are all the possibilities and which one might work better? Is the right thing to have content here or to not have content here, but to have put it earlier in a user flow, or in an onboarding module or something like that?
Or is it that content isn’t needed right now? Is it relevant? Sure. But is it necessary? No, we’re going to leave it out. We’re going to give it to them when it is necessary. That kind of decision-making, it’s the curating of the content and doing that strategically. And curating means so many different things depending on, are you designing a UX or a user interface flow? Are you designing a how-to content set? How about a set of sales content? How about transient content on a website for statuses? There’s all kinds of decisions to be made there to make it the most effective at what it needs to do.
Larry:
The way you just said that, I think maybe I’ve spent too much time with content marketing people. But that curation almost always means curate lists and listicles. But now I’m picturing curation is more like you’re the curator at a museum or someplace like that where you’re drawing on …
Torrey:
That’s how I mean it.
Larry:
… these precious artifacts and using the right one for the situation.
Torrey:
And the most precious thing in that curation set of ideas. Because at the museum or in a UI, you’ve got these precious ideas. The most precious thing is the person’s attention. It’s their attention and time. So you’ve got this much attention and time, or maybe you know, hey, we’re telling them about a dire thing that just happened that’s going to take an hour of their time. We need to tell them in a way that they understand that, and that they commit to it and do the thing. Great. Or maybe you’ve got that website loading. You’ve got two and a half seconds. You better curate so that they see that two and a half seconds fast. I saw a stat that I have no idea whether it’s true, that people decide to watch a TikTok or a YouTube short video, one of these automatically shown to you video format things, they decide whether to swipe it away in the first few frames, under 10 frames. Now imagine that, you’ve got to make that impact in 10 frames or less.
Larry:
No pressure there.
Torrey:
No pressure there. But that’s a curation problem. And you are always curating. Curation implies strategy, because you’re curating for a reason.
Larry:
Right. And that’s where you’ve shifted my sense of the meaning of the word curation. I’m going to think about it entirely different now. Yeah. Man, I can’t believe it, Torrey, we’re already coming up close to time. I just want to make sure, I always want to give you the last word. Is there anything else, anything that’s come up in the conversation or that you just want to make sure that we share before we wrap up today?
Torrey:
No pressure at all. I really appreciate you bringing me on the podcast again, and for this topic, because it is one of my very, very favorites. The idea that we hear a lot, design is everything, or everything is design. Engineers are doing design. Visual designers are doing design. Interaction can be designed. All of these things can be created with intention for purposes that are measured against those purposes. And that is the design work. But really the thing that we are all designing is content, and we are designing them in different ways so that everything is content. And for me, it has always baffled me, why is design sexier than content? Why is coding sexier than content? Okay. And I shouldn’t say sexy. It has nothing to do with sexuality. It has to do with, is it attractive, or compelling, or gets a higher salary or any of those things.
Larry:
It feels like we’re making progress on that front, but you’re right, we still are the third kid in that little trio most of the time.
Torrey:
Most of the time. But I think we are making progress. And having the expansive view, to me, it makes me more effective at what I do, because it doesn’t let me dismiss the power of what we’re doing and what we’re doing together.
Larry:
I think that’s the key is that I come out of an old traditional publishing background, and it was always, there was a lot of solo geniuses, whether you were a writer, an editor, illustrator, whatever it was. And I just love how collaborative everything is now. And I also want to just want to say, I really appreciate all the things we’ve talked about. I think the fact that we are closer to having that parity or something like parity with the other disciplines is largely because of your book and the other stuff in the literature here. So thank you for that.
Torrey:
You’re welcome. Thank you, Larry.
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