Jared Spool: UX Content Strategy – Episode 25

Jared Spool For nearly 40 years, Jared Spool has been helping publishers and software developers create better experiences for their users. Along the way, he has also helped companies apply UX design principles to the process of creating content for their customers. Jared is one of the best-known and most widely cited practitioners and educators in the UX field. We had a wide-ranging conversation on content strategy and how it manifests in user experience design. We talked about: his definition of content strategy (including Karen McGrane's content-as-gift analogy) the relationship between content and design how the evolution from static content to template-ized dynamic content at first messed things up but ultimately demonstrated the importance of content strategy the big push to sophisticated and highly customized content management systems at big media outfits like Vox, the New York Times, and ProPublica tools that support editorial workflow and examples of companies using them the importance of tracking editorial success and how to measure it the dearth of off-the-shelf third-party tools for tracking and improving editorial operations - "everything is bespoke" how the shortage of well-trained UX and content strategy talent led to the creation of the Center Centre his thoughts on the new "UX Writer" job role, and on the inadequacy of job roles in general who on a UX team can/should write the UX copy how to assess the skills set of your team the availability of his first cohort of Center Centre students for residencies (contact them if your company might have an opportunity) Jared's Bio Jared M. Spool is a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre/UIE. Center Centre is the school he started with Leslie Jensen-Inman to create industry-ready User Experience Designers. UIE is Center Centre’s professional development arm, dedicated to understanding what it takes for organizations to produce competitively great products and services. In the 39 years he's been in the tech field, he's worked with hundreds of organizations, written two books, published hundreds of articles and podcasts, and tours the world speaking to audiences everywhere. When he can, he does his laundry in Andover, Massachusetts. Video Here's the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/8ENJ0iKQ4-E Transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 25 of the content strategy interviews podcast. I'm really happy today to have on the show Jared Spool. Jared is a legend in the user experience world. He's been doing it since before it was a field. I think it's safe to say he was there at the start of it. He's best known as the found of the User Interface Engineering company. I'm not sure how long ago that was started, but it's been around for a little while. More recently, a couple years ago, he founded a school, a university, for user experience professionals called Center Centre down in Chattanooga. I'll let Jared tell you a little bit more about what he's up to these day, and a little bit more about his background. Jared: In 1988. That's when we started UIE. Center Centre was started in 2013 and we merged in 2016. Larry: Oh. Okay. Jared: So, we're now Center Centre UIE. Larry: Nice. Very cool. I guess maybe you could talk about it in the context of the Center Centre curriculum or just in general, how you think content strategy ... First of all, how would you define content strategy, and then how would you contextualize it within the field of user experience design? Jared: Well I would ask a content strategist, that's how I would define content strategy. It's easier when you let somebody else do it. To me, content strategy is all the work that has to do with the words. From a UX perspective, a user experience perspective, it's very easy for designers to just focus on the delivery of the stuff without thinking about what the stuff is. The trap that people fall into is that they're basically ... Karen McGrane has this great saying of it's like creating a beautiful gift box, but never putting a gift in it. A lot of design work can fall into that trap, where you're creating this beautiful gift box, but you're never figuring out what the gift is and who it's for and whether it's a meaningful gift and will it always have meaning and all those things. To me, content strategy is all those things. Thinking about how you figure out what content will make it best, what the different forms of that content needs to be, the different context that that content has to show up, when that content goes away, all those things. Larry: Right. You mentioned that Karen McGrane gift. I think it was ... I read a whole bunch of stuff preparing for this so, apologies if I'm conflating things here, but- Jared: That's okay. You should do all your homework. That's very good. Larry: One of the things I think it was ... Anyhow, there was an article you did about how content and design are inseparable. Jared: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Larry: That the two of them go together, and I think that's where I first saw you talk about the Karen McGrane story about the gift, which I love. You could take that metaphor all over the place, like how much thought went into that gift, how- Jared: Exactly. Larry: The content as a gift is a great thing. I think it hasn't always been that way. There are still designers who just think lorem ipsum place holders, stick it in there, get going. How have you seen content and design come together as disciplines like content strategy and content design and content structure and UX practice? Is that a relatively new thing, or is it something that's just been identified or how do you articulate that relationship? Jared: I don't think it's a new thing. Content has always had to think about its context. I mean, design has always had to think about its context. Right? Design is about ... If you wanna design a park, you could just take a bunch of trees and say "okay, now that's a park". There's a plot of land and say that's a park, but no, you start to think about well, wait a second. Some parts of the park should have easy to walk areas, and some parts should ... Maybe there are trails. There should be things to explore. Some of those should be well marked. Some of them maybe shouldn't be so well marked. There should be open areas. There should be wooded areas. There should be benches. There should be trash cans. Now you get into all this sort of infrastructure thing. If you're gonna have grassy areas, you have to have a way to cut the grass, which means you have to have an access road for the lawnmowers to get there, which means you have to have a place to put the lawnmowers. You don't want the places to put the lawnmowers as sort of ugly, so you don't want them to be in the middle of the park. There's all this sort of stuff that has to sorta emerge. You can't just say "Well, we're gonna make a beautiful park" and not think about all those things. I think that design is always thought of content. If you think that a lot of what we consider to be visual design today, came out of the graphic communications world. Graphic communications was producing everything from posters to annual reports. Those aren't designed without the content at all. I mean, you can't design a poster without the content. You can't design an annual report without the content. There's nothing to do. They've always had this relationship. Where things got problematic, was that that content was always static. In the world of the annual report, sure there's a new annual report every year, but you redesign the annual report every year and an art director created a new annual report. A magazine had an art director that created a new magazine with every issue. It's not the case that you open the physical magazine and the article changes out from one month to the next. Once that magazine goes out of the building and into someone's life, it stays exactly the same forever. Websites don't do that. Software doesn't do that. Software allows you to replace content into a template. Nothing else really has that property in real life. That messed us up for a while because we got so fixated on the templates, we forgot that there was content that was supposed to live inside them. I think that that was a giant step backwards for design for a while and content strategy sort of shook the cage and said "No, no. Yes, you can swap out content in the same thing, but there's actually a strategy to it. That strategy has to be intentional". It's part of the design. Larry: What comes to mind ... I think we all come at this from different directions, and I come out of the publishing world for example. You've been pretty ensconced ... Your original career you were in the computer world, right? You were doing user interface stuff for- Jared: Well, yeah, except I was doing publishing. I was writing software for publishers. I was doing publishing software and desktop software and I worked on the first email systems and the first spreadsheets and word processors and typesetting systems and things like that. Larry: Okay. So your background is more like mine than I might've imagined I guess then. I think the point I was trying to get there is that- Jared: I don't have that giant owl behind me that you seem to have. Larry: Oh, is that showing up in my ... Oh good. I'm in a coworking space in Seattle. There's a moose on the other wall, but the lighting's not good. I prefer the moose- Jared: Oh good. I was gonna be embarrassed 'cause your whiteboard is so empty I thought "My gosh, this guy has no ideas". Larry: No. It's a shared room. All the ideas are in my computer. Jared: Got it. Larry: Anyhow, but I wanted to get at that. I think everybody, we're all at varying places on that journey of understanding what you just talked about....