Lunch n' Learn: Talking Tech - Giving and receiving critical feedback
Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry.
Susanna Carman
Speaker Bio 🎤
Susanna Carman is a Strategic Designer and research practitioner who helps people solve complex problems involving services, systems, and human interactions. Specializing in design, leadership, and learning, Susanna brings a high-value toolkit and herself as a Thinking Partner to design leadership and change practitioners who are tasked with delivering sustainable solutions amidst disruptive conditions.
Susanna holds a Master of Design Futures degree from RMIT University. She has over a decade of experience delivering business performance, cultural alignment, and leadership development outcomes to the education, health, community development, and financial services sectors. She is also the founder and host of Transition Leadership Lab, a nine-week learning lab for design, leadership, and change practitioners who already have a sophisticated set of tools and mindsets but still feel these are insufficient to meet the challenge of leading change in a rapidly transforming world.
Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥪
Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry.
Susanna Carman
Speaker Bio 🎤
Susanna Carman is a Strategic Designer and research practitioner who helps people solve complex problems involving services, systems, and human interactions. Specializing in design, leadership, and learning, Susanna brings a high-value toolkit and herself as a Thinking Partner to design leadership and change practitioners who are tasked with delivering sustainable solutions amidst disruptive conditions.
Susanna holds a Master of Design Futures degree from RMIT University. She has over a decade of experience delivering business performance, cultural alignment, and leadership development outcomes to the education, health, community development, and financial services sectors. She is also the founder and host of Transition Leadership Lab, a nine-week learning lab for design, leadership, and change practitioners who already have a sophisticated set of tools and mindsets but still feel these are insufficient to meet the challenge of leading change in a rapidly transforming world.
Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥪
When you have a small design team or none at all, how do you ensure that your content is consistent, has the right tone, and is captivating? It can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be! Julia Steffen, Principal Content Designer at Varis, spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, about how startups can achieve impactful content and delight users.
In her talk, Julia shares her most useful tips, tricks, and rules of thumb to ensure meaningful content design. She also shares some helpful tools to achieve maximum efficiency.
Julia Steffen bio 🎤
Julia has worked in content for 10+ years at St.Jude, Wunderman Thompson, MetaLab, and Grubhub. She is based in the United States and is the Principal Content Designer at Varis.
Content design for startups - How to work lean, have maximum impact, and get all the high-fives ✋🏽✋🏻✋🏿
Why should you care about content design? Julia argues that “content design is product success”. Because Julia specifically talks about content design in relation to startups, she focuses on how to achieve the best results possible with a small, lean team. To that end, Julia discusses four must-haves for content design:
Voice
Tools for efficiency
Words in the experience
Ways to check, test, and perfect your words
Voice 🎙️
Why is your company’s voice important? Voice tells your users who you are, creates meaningful connections, and provides valuable signals that convey whether or not your company is deserving of trust. Choosing the voice for your startup begins with a competitor audit. Documenting who you compete against, and how you might want to differentiate your startup is crucial to finding your corner of the market. For example, is your voice welcoming, gentle, and positive, or are you more formal and technical?
User research can also be really helpful when determining and monitoring your voice. Involve your research team and learn what does and doesn’t delight your audience when it comes to your messaging.
It’s also important to map your voice to your startup’s values. Be sure to connect to your mission and your brand. Julia sums up product voice as:
Product voice = your values + space to differentiate + what research tells you
So, when you find your voice, where can you lean into it? There are several key areas or moments that provide opportunities to share your unique voice, such as:
Notifications: Emails, SMS, and in-app messages are a great place to delight customers
Success states: Celebrate with your users in your voice (and remove any anxiety that may be there)
Empty states: They aren’t just a chance to educate, they’re a chance to add some interest or fun (or to mask a UX issue).
Placeholder text: If a field is well labeled, you can use this section to bring joy and reduce a user’s anxiety.
Onboarding: You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Make it count!
Tools for efficiency ⚒️
To remain lean and efficient as a startup, one of the best things you can do is create a style guide. This helps to keep your content and voice consistent. For example, what pronouns do you use in your interface, do you capitalize certain words, etc? There is actually a lot to consider here, so Julia points viewers to various resources that allow you to copy and paste, such as Quinn Keast’s Product Language Framework.
A glossary or language bank is also important. Record branded words, terms that you never use, and terms that you’ve heard your users say organically. This helps to ensure that you’re using language that resonates with your audience and language that reduces cognitive load as much as possible.
Pro tip: Use the Writer app with Figma. This integration helps to ensure that your style guide is actually used! It includes your style guide and glossary so that you’re being consistent as you work. You can also use the Hemingway app or Grammarly to look out for passive voice, hard-to-parse sentences, and overall readability.
Words in the experience – writing for content design 📝
The first thing Julia points out when approaching writing is the need to be user-focused. This might seem obvious to UX practitioners, but word selection can be nuanced, and subtle changes can be powerful. For example, instead of writing “[Your company] introduces a new feature”, think about how can you change the statement to be more about what the new feature means for the user, rather than your company. Here are a few rules of thumb to help refine your writing.
Clarity over cleverness. Unless you’re clear and the message is understood by your user, even the best jokes and wittiest phrases in the world will be wasted.
Write like you’re having a conversation with your Grandmother. Be clear and don’t use too much jargon.
Think like the best content designers. Writing is a process and there are several things to consider, such as the purpose of your copy, the context that it’s being read, and what emotion the reader might be feeling at that moment, etc. Julia offers the Microcopy Canvas as a useful tool for startups, which is a helpful writing template/worksheet created by Jane Ruffino.
Ways to check, test, and perfect your words 👀
Julia suggests that design reviews are the perfect place to sense-check your words and content. Review your designs intentionally and through a content lens. Again, the Microcopy Canvas can be a useful tool when conducting this step, helping to ensure you have considered the right tone and achieved your purpose with your words.
Following a design review process, it’s important to test for clarity and affinity. Conduct user tests frequently to ensure your words and content are clear, understood, and hitting the mark in the intended way.
Finally, make sure your content goals are recorded in your dashboards. Be accountable to your own success measures, KPIs, and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Some metrics that help track success are:
Onboarding flows
Notification metrics
Feature adoption
Conversion rates
If you’re falling short on some metrics, review your content and try to figure out where words can be sharpened to be clearer, more friendly, or less technical, for example. Then, feed this information into your prioritization and planning. What changes are going to have the most impact on your product’s success? What changes are quick wins?
Why it matters 🤯
Julia’s talk is important for UX and content designers, particularly those working in startup environments, as it highlights the critical role of content design in achieving product success. The content you share, the voice and tone you adopt, and the clarity of communication, all add to the user's overall experience with your product. Investing time into your content is critical and, as Julia explains, it doesn’t have to put too much stress on your team's workload. If time isn’t invested, however, you may find yourself with poor content, delivering poor experiences, resulting in high customer attrition.
Efficiency, therefore, should be a focus for startups wanting to achieve great content design without being weighed down. Julia offers pragmatic advice on maintaining consistency through tools like style guides and language banks and by leveraging apps like Hemingway and Grammarly. Tools like these are incredibly helpful when streamlining processes and ensuring a cohesive and polished user interface.
At the end of the day, Julia stresses the impact that content design has on user experiences and encourages startups to pay close attention to content in ways that are achievable for small teams.
Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break. These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry.
Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.
Ally Tutkaluk
A multi-faceted approach is key when creating digital products for users who may be in a vulnerable, sensitive, or distressed state. Adopting an approach to copy, design, and testing that considers the unique needs of your main user group not only enhances their experiences, but improves the product for everyone.
From user interviews, to copywriting, to IA decisions, to testing - Ally will cover tools and tips for how you can ensure vulnerable users needs’ are considered at every stage of the digital design process.
Speaker Bio
Ally has worked in digital experience in the higher education, FMCG, and not-for-profit industries for over 14 years, most recently at Australian healthcare charity Lives Lived Well. She’s passionate about working with users to create data-driven, meaningful and valuable digital content and navigation pathways. She lives in Brisbane and also teaches Design Thinking at the Queensland University of Technology.
Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn 🌮🍕🥪
