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Sarah JohnsonSarah Johnson asks, “If a digital experience is a conversation with a user, how can you have that conversation if you don’t know what the words are?”
Sarah addresses the crucial role of content in her new book, “Content-first Design,” tackling both the pragmatic aspects of a content-first approach to design as well as how to advocate for content practice.
We talked about:
- her new book, “Content-first Design”
- her definition of content-first design
- her decision to include case studies provided by multiple content experts, part of her efforts to build a community around the “content-first” idea
- how she shows the business benefits of a content-first approach to stakeholders
- her brilliant observation that “digital experience is a conversation with a user and how can you have a conversation if you don’t know what the words are?”
- her practice of sitting in on call centers to discover user concerns and language
- how working with financial and healthcare products and experiences have shaped her content-first approach
- the importance of starting slowly and building good relationships with stakeholders all along the way
- her appreciation for the “Search Inside Yourself” leadership program
- her desire to create a community around the idea of “moving content forward”
Sarah’s bio
Sarah Johnson, a content design leader and teacher with over 20 years of experience, has worked for industry leaders such as Fidelity Investments, Banks of America, TIAA, CVS, and Bentley University User Experience Design Center. She is the author of six books, including Content-First Design, and the founder and director of ContentFirstDesign.com. Content-first Design, the company, offers content services built on actionable, data-driven insights, and workshops designed to enhance practical skills in areas such as content design, AI integration, and more.
Connect with Sarah online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 209. Anyone who works with content knows how important and impactful it is. We also know how difficult it can be to convey the value of content to our colleagues and collaborators. Sarah Johnson tackles this dynamic in her new book, “Content-first Design.” Along with addressing the practical aspects of a content-first approach, she asks: “if a digital experience is a conversation with a user, how can you have that conversation if you don’t know what the words are?”
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 209 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Sarah Johnson. Sarah is the principal and founder and director at content-first design, a company she runs in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the US. Welcome, Sarah, tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re doing these days.
Sarah:
Thank you, Larry. Thanks for having me on the show. I’m a big admirer and what I’m doing is I’ve just written a book called content-first design, which is one methodology and lens through which you can look at this process for developing content and developing digital products. I’m also starting a business called content-first design, which offers all kinds of content services and workshops and content-first design and other content related things including AI. So those two things dovetail nicely together and it’s a lot of fun and I’m excited for the book to come out, it comes out February 13th.
Larry:
Which will probably be, I think if I stay on schedule, that’ll be about two or three weeks after this episode drops, so people will be able to get it right away. I want to start, I want to read there’s, I don’t know if this is your official definition, but there was a passage in the introduction to the book that just to me summed up the whole thing that you say, “Content-first design is the process by which research, exploration and evaluation of content requirements and user needs inform the structure, layout, flow and visuals for a digital product.” That is music to my content ears. How did you come up with that approach and that definition?
Sarah:
I think it started, I mean I’ve been on this topic in my brain for a long time and it started, I first got the idea working at TIAA when we were doing a redesign and re-everything of the website there and some people there went to the D school and came back with design thinking. And one of the things I learned from that was that when I was working with product people, they were trying to write content and I would always have to smooth the road to help them understand that I could write it and make it work. And when I went on to other companies, this continued to be the truth and other companies weren’t having it, they were design-first. And I was asked to teach at Bentley University User Experience Design Center and I had to come up with a course for that.
Sarah:
And in developing the course I noticed that what I was doing was examining and doing exactly what you said in that quote, research on content and then having the students redesign a website. And it was fascinating to see what they came up with. They came up with the greatest things. Now they had a background, they were at the User Experience Design Center, but they also were amazed at what they were able to do by understanding content first. And I realized I was really onto something and I outlined the book and started writing it with the encouragement of Melinda Belcher who was great and I got sick from long COVID and had to put it down for three years. And then I went back to work and I was lucky enough to get laid off and have six months to finish the book and shape it out.
Sarah:
And I had the help of Shannon Geis who wrote the case study, and that’s sort of where it came from. And the other idea around it was that I didn’t want it to be just me, I wanted to include community in it. And that’s why I have the sections called From the Experts. I wanted it to be one take on content-first design, here’s one methodology, one way of doing this thing we’ve been talking about for years, and to both encourage it and to create the conversation. Let’s be talking about this. Let’s broaden the conversation to include more people. And another way I do that, I’m going on and on, is through the blog Moving Content Forward, which you’ll see on our website, and that’s to create community around what are you doing to help move our practice forward? I want to hear about that. And we also do a bi-weekly talk on that. So the idea of the whole enterprise is to create community around content-first design and what people are doing to evolve the craft. Here’s what I’m doing, what are you guys doing?
Larry:
Nice. I love that. I come out of book publishing originally and so I was always aware that it’s never a lone, brilliant author toiling and obscurity and coming, it’s always a team effort. But the way you just described that this is not just a team effort but a genuine community effort to get this together. I’m curious about this. So the moving content forward, I love that, the impulsive, the forward nature of that. Tell me how long have you been doing that?
Sarah:
That idea came as a tagline for the book and the original title of the book was Moving Content Forward. And my awesome editor Richard Hamilton was like, “No, let’s call it content-first design and that can be the tagline.” Because I really loved that idea because that’s what I’m trying to do with the book and I’d love to do a short series of books on that topic, moving content forward. And I’m working on one right now about content-first design and AI and the human connection between content and AI. The moving content forward idea for the blog came up because I just want to so much to create community around what we’re all doing to evolve the craft because I’m on LinkedIn all the time, I see people talking about what they’re doing. I want to create community for all of us to talk about it, to generate ideas, to move it forward.
Larry:
Yeah. And is there a region because you’re in the northeast of the US, is there sort of a regional focus that way or do you attract people from all over the country?
Sarah:
All over the country.
Larry:
Nice.
Sarah:
Yeah, and I’d like to expand that actually because there are people overseas like you doing a lot of cool things and let’s hear about it. Let’s all get talking about it. Let’s see what we can do here.
Larry:
Well, I’ll talk to my co-organizers first, but I help organize a meetup in Amsterdam called The Future of Content. Seems to be some natural alignment there with the way we’re talking about.
Sarah:
Definitely.
Larry:
Yeah. But the other thing about that is it’s like it implies progress and I think there’s a lot of people in the content world who feel, people talk about all the time that there’s this feeling that we’re banging our head against the wall sometime and maybe not making as much progress. Have you found other people in the community, not just, I mean it’s great that a lot of this stuff is showing up in the book, but have people just by dint of that community around the book, are people having better results and getting more accomplished just from having talked about it?
Sarah:
I think so. I had that experience at CVS with someone who was on my team who didn’t know that she was doing content-first design, but she was, and I recognized it, and we did a presentation on it. But it only went so far because there’s resistance from designers and product people who want their say. But what was brilliant about what she did, and she didn’t even know it, was that she included all the stakeholders in every phase. One of the phases is empathy mapping and the stakeholders were in there so they understood what was happening and how they were helping shape design by looking at content. So inclusivity is a huge part of it and I think people bang their head against the wall because they try and do it themselves and there’s obviously time and money, but ultimately starting with content saves time and money because you’re not redoing designs that don’t work.
Larry:
Yeah. Can you elaborate on that a little bit because I have examples I could conjure, but I bet you’ve got many better ones?
Sarah:
I think everywhere I’ve ever worked, we’ve had to redo designs because of content, and look at, if we change this word, it will make a huge difference. If we changed, didn’t Christina Halvorsen have a story where she went to work for Facebook and changed one word and got a bazillion results. And I’ve heard so many stories like that where one little change in content can make a tremendous difference. And of course I’m a believer, but you have to be able to show results to business people.
Larry:
And you mentioned a minute ago that the woman, the example you gave, that she was careful to include stakeholders every turn, and then you just mentioned now being able to show results. Is there, probably not a formula, but maybe a framework for showing the benefits of content first approach?
Sarah:
I think actually doing it and doing the user research, when you finally launch the products to work with the designers, not to exclude designers and you can design it with content, but not to exclude designers, to include them. And to show results, metrics, usability studies, all kinds of user research that you can read about in Erica Jorgensen‘s brilliant book.
Larry:
I love that you quoted her extensively in there. She was on the podcast several episodes back, but I think she was one of the first people to really highlight that content measurement and stuff and the way you just talked, I’m glad to hear that that’s catching on. I don’t recall her specifically talking about content first. I wonder because that might be a way, not that if we’re selling this idea, I don’t know, there’s certainly enough projects in the wild that have started without content first and then you do it with content first. Like you just said, a lot of projects you’ve had to come in after the fact.
Sarah:
Yeah, it’s like Mad Libs. They make the designs and we plunk in the words and it’s horrible. And one of the things that I believe is that, oh, digital experience is a conversation with a user and how can you have a conversation if you don’t know what the words are?
Larry:
That, I’m always looking for Pull quotes.
Sarah:
Melinda Belcher also said it’s like having a movie without a script.
Larry:
Yeah, that’s great. Can you elaborate on that first point? Because the fact that a digital experience is a conversation with the user, I just love that it’s an articulation and an articulation for what design is, but also not a rationalization, but bolstering of, and since that’s the case, you probably want to start with the content.
Sarah:
Yes, exactly. It’s like you could use as an example, a conversation would be a simple chatbot, how can I help you today? A webpage, people come with a task they want to achieve or information they want to get, and it should be super clear how they get that and what order they get that, how they digest it. And the user research ahead of time helps us understand how people talk, what their colloquialisms are, how to reel in language so that we’re speaking in plain language so that we get the broader audience. One of the things I learned at TIAA was that through interviewing customers, we learned that they don’t understand jargon. They want things really simple, they’re scared about their money, they can be super savvy on the computer, but nervous about handling money on the computer. And these were things before plainlanguage.gov, but it was really helpful to us to understand the user and how they spoke.
Sarah:
And the other thing we did was sit on calls from the contact center to really understand user issues, how they spoke, to learn their language and their needs, so we could have a conversation with them online that they would understand. And that involved really breaking things down into simple steps for us because it was financial tasks like how to take a required minimum distribution. And people don’t know what that is, so they’re scared they have to do it, but breaking it down into simple steps with content that explained things that they were afraid of, a little, and it made tremendous difference. I mean, the metrics were crazy good.
Larry:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. We can’t go all the way deep into it, but that’s a really interesting research project right there to figure out in an emotionally laden thing like financial information delivery, ostensibly, there’s just an engineer might just say, “Well, no, it’s real simple. You just go click here and do that and then the money’s moved and you’re all good to go. But it’s way more complex than that with a financial product.
Sarah:
They have their feelings about it and it’s like that anytime someone’s shopping even on e-commerce, they’ll pick things and think this is great and get it in the cart, then when it comes time to pay for it, they get, there’s a more emotional, a more rational, a more different sort of reaction.
Larry:
That’s right. Because it is already fraught enough in e-commerce, just like you’re spending your money on something. But then to add the… It’s interesting. It seems like a lot of, not innovation, but a lot of these insights, I’ve had folks on from Robinhood and JP Morgan and other banks and stuff. I wonder, do you feel like, and looking back on your career, you feel like you learned more at TIAA than you did at other places?
Sarah:
I really did. That place was tremendous and they all went to the D school and learned about design thinking. I leaned toward a double diamond approach that I write about in the book. But yeah, I learned so much there and they were so open to new ways of thinking about creating websites and Andy Knight was leading our department at that time with Scott Simmons and they were really creative innovators even in how they handled our staff. Like every morning Scott would come in and we had a creative talk for 15 minutes and the idea was to just break apart everything we knew and start fresh.
Larry:
Nice. You mentioned I think earlier, I can’t remember if we had on tape, but what we were talking earlier about the fact that this manifests differently in every organization and that what you’re offering here is not so much like a bible, like the definitive how-to guide, it’s just a guide and it may be a model for how other people might practice content-first design. Am I remembering that accurately? And if so, can you elaborate on that?
Sarah:
Yeah, I think of the book is, okay, we all have heard about content-first design. Some of us are doing it. Here’s a methodology that I found works for me. And one of the things we’re doing with the business is coming in and helping people design a content-design process. And it can be content-first design or it might be something else, or we might help them implement content-first design and they may get a lot of resistance and we may do it in phases and get people on board slowly and include stakeholders, even legal, I mean you have product, you have UX design, research, business, whoever you think has a stake in this.
Larry:
Yeah, and the stakeholders vary from place to place. You’ve worked in financial services, you mentioned CVS, I always get that wrong.
Sarah:
CVS.
Larry:
CVS, the pharmacy chain, which is like, that’s another interesting and somewhat fraud area of healthcare information. And so I guess just in your personal experience, you’ve seen different settings in which to manifest this. Are there any general, not rules, but an approach that you might take around, I guess are there criteria that guide what you were just saying? How do you make that decision about whether to just jump right in or phase it in or-
Sarah:
I think it depends a lot on the director of the content department and what they know about how business and product and design will receive the information. Some people aren’t going to want to just wipe the slate clean and say, “Heck with what we were doing, we’re going to do this.” A lot of people freak out. So starting slowly with we’re going to introduce some user research and we’re going to get content at the table. That’s another thing, just getting content at the table, sometimes people are telling me we can’t even get at the table for the kickoff, never mind getting a voice in research and discovery.
Sarah:
So there are challenges and you really have to advocate for yourself. And I write about in the book ways of advocating for content-first design and a lot of it is relationship building, working cross-functionally, building relationships, and I’ve had TIAA, I really had to work with product to help them understand you have to build trust, you have to listen to them and their concerns and through that, work with those ideas, introduce your ideas and build a trusting relationship, a back and forth, something that will work for everybody.
Larry:
You have a couple of points. You revisit the stakeholder-relationship stuff a couple of times in the book, I think early on interviewing folks and then getting them on board or I forget how you articulate it later in the process. That, can you tell me a little bit about your, I think everybody has their little jujitsu style for stakeholder [alignment]. One thing you just emphasize is listening. That’s always a sure winner. Do you have other approaches when you’re going in, or maybe it’s more like you’ve talked about with such a variety of things that’s going on, is it more an approach to figuring out what the stakeholder environment is and how to approach it based on that understanding?
Sarah:
Well, my idea is how I would like to do it is build the relationships with the stakeholders first. And when you go into the meeting in the agenda say, “This is the type of fee. This is what we’ve done, this is the feedback we’re looking for, then we want to hear your concerns.” And really listen, don’t argue, there’s no winner. The idea is to find a solution that’s going to work for the user. So stop trying to win the conversation. Everybody stop trying to win, no matter who you are in the process, let’s figure out what’s best for the user. And if you can lead and facilitate a meeting that emphasizes that, you’re much more likely to get people on board.
Larry:
Yeah, I like the way you said that, stop trying to win because I might’ve been in one or two meetings where I was trying to win or others were-
Sarah:
And we all were.
Larry:
… and they were probably less productive than the ones where we’re all actively listening to one another.
Sarah:
Yeah. I do write a surprise chapter on active listening. It’s called Navigating Difficult Conversations. It’s at the end of the book, like an appendix because we all have to, in the field, it’s one big difficult conversation because there’s so many, we all have such different roles, and finding a meeting of the minds can be difficult. So I developed this course with Google has a, what do you call it, a Mindful Leadership Institute, and I went to one of their programs called Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, where I learned this process. So I developed it for TIAA with Google, and it went company-wide. I started with UX teaching it, and then I offered it company-wide, and then I think almost 3,000 people took the course. It was really, really helpful.
Larry:
Oh, that’s very cool. I remember coming across that course years ago. I used to, I did SEO many years ago. I think that’s how I heard about it, but that’s great. 3,000 people. How big is TIAA? I mean, I know it’s a big organization.
Sarah:
Oh, 5,000.
Larry:
So more than half the people there took it. That’s awesome.
Sarah:
Yeah, it was real-
Larry:
That’s some serious influence.
Sarah:
Yeah, it was fun too. I really enjoyed it and people enjoyed it, and we did it with leadership. UX leadership had a special little meeting and you can teach it in an hour, an hour and a half. You can take as long, as much time as you want. The more time you have, the more people can learn about each other. But people had immediate results. One woman was in tears about a conversation she had to have with this product person, and they had a terrible relationship, and she called the man right after our meeting, our class, and using the tools she learned, she was able to turn the relationship around, and she came running over to me and told me the story, and I was just like, it was heartwarming. It was like, yay, it’s working already.
Larry:
That’s great. Do you elaborate on that in the book? Because I don’t recall that story.
Sarah:
No, I don’t tell that story because she couldn’t remember it, so I didn’t want to get it wrong or step on her toes, but it works.
Larry:
Well, and it’s a great illustration of that point. I think 97% of these interviews, it comes up at some point that, yeah, we talk about all the processes and technology and stuff, but it’s usually people. It’s always a people issue that is the ultimate success determiner in these things. And it sounds like there’s something in that program that really resonated and certainly helped that woman with that relationship, and it sounded like helped you a lot in the organization, found enough value to do it 3,000 times.
Sarah:
And I give Andy Knight a lot of credit. He was leading the, and Scott Simmons, who were leading the UX team, which grew tremendously while I was there. It grew from 10 of us to 70 or something, and Andy was open to sending me to the workshop. It was a two day thing in New York, and they paid for me to go and come back, and they supported me in teaching it company-wide and hooked me up with the right people and had everyone in UX take it, and he was very forward-thinking.
Larry:
Nice. One thing just occurred to me as we’ve been talking the last few minutes, you’ve said a couple of things that sent me back down to, I just have a little quick outline of the book down below here. And we talked about this before we went on the air, that when I first, if you just looked at the table of contents for the book, you’d think it’s like a comprehensive and not novel, but original approach to content design and in particular content-first design. I wonder, the scope of the book, once you have this content-first, your glasses on, with that approach, how much did that affect the organization of the book and how you approach the topics around content design?
Sarah:
Oh, that’s interesting. I think using the double diamond, once I described different approaches, the human factors or design thinking or double diamond, and we developed the double diamond based on things I learned at Tia and at CVS and other places, and the double diamond approach, I sort of went through define, discover, design, deliver, and I went through the things under each category. So I let that lead me in writing the book.
Larry:
Okay, I’ll go look at it again. Okay.
Sarah:
Yeah, so it makes it easy to follow for people too. They can say like, oh yeah, what was she saying about empathy mapping? And go to that section, and then the case study sort of supports it and shows how it might play out in an organization.
Larry:
That’s one thing I really appreciate about the book is that I think every chapter, you anchor the lessons in the chapter in that case study that it’s a bank or something. What’s it called?
Sarah:
It’s called Tidal Bank.
Larry:
Tidal Bank, thank you. Yeah.
Sarah:
It’s an actual bank because that’s the thing on Cape Cod, where I live, a tidal bank.
Larry:
Oh, it’s an actual bay. Oh, cool. Yeah.
Sarah:
Yeah. And the environment, high tide, low tide, Tidal Bank.
Larry:
Oh, okay. Oh, right, duh. Yeah. I live kind of near the ocean, but not as close as you.
Sarah:
Yeah. And Shannon Geis wrote that, and I think she did a great job. She has Figma files with examples, and we’re going to attach all that in a secret section on the website.
Larry:
Well, it’s not so secret in the book manuscript. I like that you call it out. But anyhow, I hope that reminds me. Oh yeah, we’re coming up close to time, Sarah, but before we wrap up, is there anything last that you want to revisit from the conversation or just make sure that we share before we go?
Sarah:
Yeah, so I’d like to share that we’re all about moving content forward, and I hope this book contributes to that conversation. And our blog on contentfirstdesign.com is called Moving Content Forward, and I’d love to hear ideas from people of how they would want to maybe write something short for that. Bobbie King from Sarah Winters’ organization is writing something, and to get people interested in thinking about what they’re doing to help the process of content design move forward. And take a look at the website. We’ve got some great workshops, we’ve got some great content services that we’re offering, and hopefully the blog you’ll get excited about and create community around this cool thing that we’re involved in called content design.
Larry:
Great. Well, thanks. Hey, one thing to that, I’ll put those links to the website and stuff in the show notes, but if folks want to follow you or connect online, what’s the best place to find you?
Sarah:
LinkedIn, definitely LinkedIn/in/sajwriter.
Larry:
Excellent. I’ll put that in the show notes as well.
Sarah:
Okay. Thank you, Larry.
Larry:
Well, thanks so much, Sarah. This was fun. It’s always good talking, but this was a particularly good one.
Sarah:
Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on the podcast.
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