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An experienced content designer and strategist shares her top resources, case studies, and advice for clear and effective communication.
How often do you think about content design? The answer, most likely, is: “not enough”.
The work of a Content Designer involves fitting the right words in the right places, understanding the nuances of things log in vs. sign in, and knowing the right words to use to engage customers. Content Design is an important part of the user experience—and the ROI is high. Like, “millions of $s saved through content-testing” high.
Erica Jorgensen is a Staff Content Designer at Chewy.com and the author of Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX. She joined Erin and Carol on the podcast to discuss the ins and outs of content design, the importance of clarity for effective communication, and how to involve your audience in content design.
Erica Jorgensen is a staff content designer at Chewy.com and the author of Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX, published in April 2023 by Rosenfeld Media.
She's a content designer, content strategist, and team leader determined to bring greater respect to the content field. To that end, Erica speaks frequently at conferences including UXDX USA, UX Lisbon, Microsoft Design Week, the Web Directions Summit, and Button: The Content Design Conference, and on podcasts like The Content Strategy Podcast with Kristina Halvorson and Content Insights podcast with Larry Swanson. In addition to working in content roles for companies of all sizes, she has taught at the University of Washington and Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts.
Erica earned her B.A. from the University of Connecticut and M.A. from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. In her free time, you can find her exploring Washington State’s wineries or hiking with her husband and rescue dog, Rufus.
Find her on LinkedIn or X (Twitter) @JorgensenErica
Erica - 00:00:00: I think if teams were to hire more content designers, they would have-, the ROI is just huge. But I think people like to come across as smarter, they like to present their products as sophisticated, so there's a lot of jargon in websites and apps because, like, big words, people think, oh, that sounds smart, or if your product is expensive, you want to use big fancy words. But I'd say Sarah Richards from User Experience London, she wrote the book, Content Design, like the first book called Content Design. She is a big proponent of planned language, and it's so important to use simple words. It's harder to write simply than it is to use big long sentences, big long words. But if you can simplify things, that helps with customer engagement, that helps boost your customers' confidence, your audience's confidence, and their trust in you.
Erin - 00:00:44: This is Erin May.
JH - 00:00:46: I'm John Henry Forster, and this is Awkward Silences
Erin - 00:00:51: Silences. Hello everybody and welcome back to Awkward Silences. Today we're here with Erica Jorgensen, the Staff Content Designer at Chewy and author of a great new book that you can buy. It's called Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX. We'll say this again later, but if you wanna pick up the book, we've got a discount for you, which is AS15. You can get it at Rosenfeld Media. Erica, thanks for joining us today.
Erica - 00:01:23: Thanks for having me.
Erin - 00:01:24: We're going to be talking about content design, fittingly.
Erica - 00:01:27: Yes, content design, content strategy, content testing, all that jazz.
Erin - 00:01:31: Awesome. And we've got Carol here, too.
Carol - 00:01:34: Hi, everyone, Carol here. So excited to talk about content. I think many of us have been in the room where we had debates and confusion over what to put on the page, so can't wait to dig into it.
Erin - 00:01:44: Awesome. Well, let's start from the beginning. I know content design has gone through something of a rebirth or renaissance recently. It's gone by many names, as UX Writing, and seems to have landed on content design. But maybe you could tell us a little bit about what is content design and what is content research in the context of content design?
Erica - 00:02:03: I think you're right. I think I credit Andy Welfle and Michael Metts for, I don't know if they coined the term content design, but they definitely helped promote the use of the term content design. And I think what it means is when you're working on content for a website or app or digital experience of any sort, it's important to know what words to put where, not just what words to use. So if you're looking at architecture, information hierarchy, progressive disclosure, it's really important to work closely with product designers to carve out the experience, not just plug in lorem ipsum content. That, to me, is heartbreaking and a little soul crushing to be looped into a project when there's already lorem ipsum content. That's not cool. And then the customer experience inevitably isn't as good as it could be, isn't as smooth, isn't as helpful. You're introducing friction if you're not collaborating with content design and product design at the same time. And the words are important, I think, to answer your question about content. Research and content testing, which words are working is really hard to know. And I think people working content have really good instincts and experience and love writing, not everyone loves to write, but whether your audience is clear on the words is something that you need to find out. You need to ask them what words are appealing to them, clear to them, effective. You can find out what words people are likely to click on or not and why. And I think the why part is mostly what my book is about, like finding out what's going on in people's heads is really fascinating. And I think a quick example I can provide for that is former coworker at Microsoft, Dylan Romero, he teaches content strategy at Seattle Pacific University. He's a really great guy. He did a content test on sign in or login, which would an audience prefer? And he thought that sign in would be more clear, that login is kind of an antiquated term. You know, I think a login reminds me of, honestly, like basic programming from the olden days. But he found out that there's a generational difference that younger people preferred login because they thought sign in was a little bit too personal, like asking for too much personal information, asking about their names and such. So they preferred login, even though it's a little bit more technical. And maybe I thought login was sort of a passé term that we wouldn't use. Generally, most companies I've worked for in the last five to ten years have said don't use login, you sign it. But Dylan's research found that people preferred login over sign in when, you know, people under 40 or so were like, yeah, yeah, login, not sign in. And people over 40 were like, sign in's cool, login's old, I don't want to feel old, so forget login.
Erin - 00:04:32: Well, I have about a million questions about that already, which is like-
Erica - 00:04:36: I know, I was like, who knew? And then, it's the why, it's like, you know, older people did not want to feel old. They're like, oh, I don't want to seem out of it, or, you know, sign in is cool, that's more modern, that's more up to date.
Erin - 00:04:48: So is that, like, a universal, should I be changing my sign in to login?
Erica - 00:04:51: No, I wouldn't say that's universal. I think that was definitely-
Erin - 00:04:54: You're trying to speak to different age ranges too, right? So then you gotta do that.
Erica - 00:04:58: Right. And I think it depends if you are blessed with an amazing content management system, like Adobe Experience Manager or something, or close partnership with your engineering team, it depends on how you're publishing your content. And I was like, wow, what are you going to do with that? And he's like, well, we're going to look at where we can update it. Maybe it's just an email. Maybe it's, you know, I'm not sure if he's going to go and update it in every instance on the website or app, but that is fascinating. I'm sure there's more to unpack there and there's more terms that have generational specific appeal or lack of appeal.
Carol - 00:05:29: Yeah, sign in/login is such an interesting one because it's so common. I guess I'm curious if you know in this example why they did that specific research or maybe just more broadly, how do you know that you need to do content research?
Erica - 00:05:40: Well, that's a great question. I'm not sure if Dylan was working on the Office experience. At Microsoft, I worked on the Office 365 purchase experience. How do you buy Word? How do you buy the Office suite, you know, competing with Google? And I think every step of the way, every step that the customer takes as they go from point A to point B is an opportunity to dig in and figure out where the friction is coming from. Microsoft has extremely sophisticated, amazing metrics, they can measure from step one, two, three, three, four, five, six, seven. They can see which step there's friction because they've tagged it all up and they have funnel views of where fall off happens between the steps. So if someone's asked to sign in and they see there's a fall off on that first step, that's where you dig in with the content research. But if someone adds something to their shopping bag or shopping cart and then they don't check out or they get stuck on the credit card step, like the specific step where people are getting stuck, little flags, digital flags are being waved by their analytics.
Carol - 00:06:36: I wonder for teams that maybe are less sophisticated or have smaller teams than Microsoft, are there sort of telltale signs that some area of the product needs more focus on content, or how do you think about where you need it?
Erica - 00:06:48: I think if you don't have those tools, I'd say think about the words that you use all the time without thinking about it. Whether it's like when you start a job and you hear people use words or it's part of the customer experience, it's a product name or the way you describe a product. Or like when your spidey sense goes off and I think this is something that content designers, content strategists are really good at is “that word.” There's a word jumping out at you when you start working for a company or organization. That's something to listen to. There's an example in my book from Tracy Vandygam. She worked for a tech company that has drone apps, drone capabilities, and drone services, and there is a term that kept popping up when she was starting. She was like, what is this? And she looked in the style guide. She's like, what is this term? Like I've never heard of this. This is really weird to me. And everyone in the company was using this term and it turned out that the customers were really confused by it. So it's good to dig into content research to find out like, okay, what you're assuming, is that okay to assume or do you need to go back to the drawing board and figure out these words that are appearing everywhere? And I think another example in my book that I get into is seat versus license. If you're working for a SaaS company, if people are buying licenses to use your product, I was kind of rabble-browsy when I first started at Microsoft on the Content Design team. I'm like, is seat or license the right? I'm like, license sounds very heavy. And everywhere it was, how many licenses do you want to buy? It felt bureaucratic and heavy to me. So I dug in. It sounds like going to the Department of Motor Vehicles and getting your license renewed on a Saturday in the summer, and, like who wants a license? And to me, seat sounded like going to a concert, going to Taylor Swift, you have a seat for the Taylor Swift show, which I’m giving away my Taylor Swift tickets by the way, I'm traveling, I'm sad. But to me, seat is fun. Seat has a more positive connotation. So I did a content study and asked just a handful of folks, I think it was 10 or 20, which would you, what is the word that you use to describe the thing you need to buy software? And this is a geeky Microsoft example. I've got more less techie examples in the book, but I was like, which word, what do you use? And I asked in a multiple choice format, seat, license, or something else. And 17 out of 20 people said license, and maybe because it's like a self-fulfilling or other fulfilling promise it's like it's used all the time, so people use it. But then I asked people, tell me a little bit about what you know about these things. And that sounds like a really basic question. Like, tell me what you know about licenses. And normally you need one license per person, right? But no, au contraire. And this is like another generational thing where some people thought you needed one license for every device, for your phone, for your laptop. So people were buying, not everyone, not everyone who participated in the study shared this information, but enough people said, oh, yeah, you need one license per device. And I was like, whoa, because that means that people are buying too many and Office isn't cheap. If you go to install it and you're like, wow, that's an extra-, maybe you don't notice you have those extra licenses. In many cases, you don't. If someone from your company is buying licenses and giving them away to people on the team, you might not notice that you have twice as many as you need. So this was like, woo, woo, sirens going off in my head, oh my gosh, so license is cool, great. And my coworker, Trudy, is like, I told you, we don't want to change that. It's everywhere. It would be a big pain to change it. And I was like, I know, but what if it's the right thing to do? We should put in the effort to change words that don't make sense. But it was the qualitative, the open ended feedback where people fessed up or they didn't know they were confessing, but I was like, my eyes were bugging out of my head when they said you need one license per device. And I was like, uh oh. And then one person said you need one license per company. And that was another ,like they're going to pay whatever, how much it is per month, like say they're paying $19 a month and they're trying to give it to everyone in their company and they can't onboard their company to the software because they only bought one license and they have to go back to the website and sign in and buy more. And then the renewal dates are different and then they have to give it out to people. So we ended up putting one little tiny chunk of content on the purchase path that said you need one license per person. And the designer was like, you're mucking with my design. I'm like, I'm not mucking with your design, I'm saving the company from losing customers. I'm helping customers be successful, be happy customers, because they're going to buy just what they need to know more. They're going to be more likely to renew. They're going to be less likely to say, forget this. I'm going to Google or I'm going to find some other kind of, you know, Office suite for presentations, word, writing, spreadsheets, blah, blah, blah. So digging into license and seat was helpful for many reasons because it helped me feel confident like, okay, licenses and just people, our customers are not reacting to that word the way I am. And I'm a nerd. I grew up reading, you know, I'm me, I'm from Boston, I live in Seattle, I am a white woman. Like there's biases inherent in my existence. So, you know, I can use my best educated guess to think about the words that people are seeing, whether they're going to react positively or negatively, are they going to interact with a call to action button? Are they going to ignore it? All the verbs and call to action buttons are great things to test because you never know what people are, how they're going to react. And I think a lot of companies copy the competition, right? It's like, oh, what is so and so, our competitor, doing? And you go to their website and look at their CTA buttons or look at their content. A lot of companies, especially startups, will just copy the competition without thinking, is it working or not? They just assume that because another website has content on their site, they must have tested it or they must have analytics on it. They must have optimized it.
Erin - 00:11:52: So your spidey sense can be a good kind of instigating event to maybe you want to do some research, but it's not necessarily going to tell you what the conclusion is going to be. So in this example, license was kind of like, I don't know about this. And then the first cut is sort of actually people like this, and it's like, well, actually they're familiar with it, but they're confused by it. So it's peeling that onion back and getting to, what is the real insight here? If we're going to give this episode a kind of theme, it's that words matter, right? Words are part of the EOX.
Erica - 00:12:26: And assuming is dangerous. Yeah, so words matter and assuming is dangerous. And I think it's the humbling part of content testing I think is the most fascinating. It's like, oh my gosh, I never even thought about it. And I think it's like death by a thousand paper cuts. If you're assuming and assuming and assuming and you have all these words on your website, you're kind of compounding the frictions like sedimentary rock, like layer after layer, like word after word that either is unclear or people can't explain it in their own words, it’s 100% customer confidence that undermines engagement. So it's really good to dig in, especially in your most important customer experiences, whether it's purchase or onboarding or campaigns. It's interesting how people react to words, isn't it?
Carol - 00:13:03: You mentioned this spidey sense, and then you mentioned really important flows or verbs and calls to action as being really important, and then talked a little bit about internally how you might describe a product. I guess I'm just thinking, are there any other signs that this content clearly needs extra work, customer feedback, or internally we're confused about what it does, any of those other signs of people not being aware to focus?
Erica - 00:13:26: Well, it's so pathetic that I'll just get on my soapbox for a little bit. There are just so few content designers and content strategists working on teams. You know, there's a preponderance of engineers. That makes sense. There's a lot of product designers. Great. A lot of product managers. But it's like hiring for content seems to always come last, which is shooting yourself in the foot, honestly. I think if teams were to hire more content designers, they would have-, the ROI is just huge. But I think people like to come across as smart or they like to present their products as sophisticated. So there's a lot of jargon in websites and apps. Because like big words, people think, oh, that sounds smart, or if your product is expensive, you want to use big fancy words. But I'd say Sarah Richards from User Experience London, she wrote the book, Content Design, like the first book called Content Design. She is a big proponent of plain language and it's so important to use simple words. It's harder to write simply than it is to use big long sentences, big long words. But if you can simplify things, that helps with customer engagement. That helps boost your customer's confidence, your audience's confidence, and their trust in you. And I worked at an insurance company where we had words like, God, health insurance in America, could there be anything more confusing between copay, coinsurance, blah, blah, blah, adjudicate, these humongous words were peppered throughout the customer experience. And we did all we could to simplify, simplify, simplify. And the effect was customers would buy more. Customers would buy more insurance policies, they would be loyal, they would renew their plans because we had simple language throughout the customer experience in email, on the app, even in our surveys.
Erin - 00:14:56: It's a pretty cynical point of view that avoiding understanding is a good business philosophy, right? Generally, you want people to understand what you're selling them and what the experience is going to offer them. That seems like a good thing.
Erica - 00:15:09: Well, I think sometimes it's presumptuous that if you haven't had a content designer in your team who's dug in and said, do we know people are clear on this? You just assume it's working. You just assume it's fine. But that's, yeah. And I think I worked with the lawyers who were like, we are going to use big words, but yeah, you shouldn't.
Erin - 00:15:24: And not even a conscious assumption, right? Like maybe that goes with what you're saying, but I think a lot of what happens with content in products too, I mean, I've certainly seen this in my experience, I don't know about you, is content gets thrown in somewhere at some point, terms start being used internally and all of a sudden they're there, like forever.
Erica - 00:15:45: And they're persistent.
Erin - 00:15:46: And you don't notice them, it's just like furniture, right? So it's not even like, we assume this is good, it just is, it's just there. You don't notice it.
Erica - 00:15:55: And that's dangerous. I mean, English is so complicated. I think if you're working for a company and you translate your content into multiple languages or localize it into different languages, it's fascinating to think about how culturally words don't translate well either. And I think localization teams are really big on doing content testing too, because if you have your core, this is going to be very American-centric, or US-centric if you have your core website and that's being translated. If the core website is not working and you translate it into 10 or 20 or 40 languages, you have made 40 times more problems for yourself. It's just cost-effective to make sure that your key experiences are working. And knowing why, super cool, and I think also a benefit over AV experiments, I think that's something I am happy to get on another soapbox about is, AV experiments are great, but they don't tell you why one version of an experience is working over another.
Carol - 00:16:48: I'd love to get into what to do about it. I think we've all been in situations where you did figure out, okay, this actually seems like it's jargon, seems like a term we use internally. Maybe we're confused internally. Erin and I certainly have a part of our product, many parts of our product that we think this wording is clearly wrong. But then in my experience, it often ends up in a sort of debate among peers, throwing around different terms and it's difficult to land anywhere. How do we get out of this cycle? I'd love to hear about some of the methods.
Erica - 00:17:15: I think, well, I've used UserTesting a lot, or any online survey tool, or even just go out on the street and ask people, what do you think of this word? And I worked at rover.com when it was a startup and we were struggling, we were tranched, venture capital funding, so like we were scraping by, we didn't have a lot of resources to put toward a cool thing like an online testing platform like UserTesting, Dscout, what have you. But we took a clipboard, like literally pieces of paper and pens, and went downtown Seattle in front of a busy intersection and asked people, do you have a pet? Do you have a dog? Or if we saw people walking a dog, we'd be like, hey, over here, do you want a Starbucks gift card? We offered them $5 Starbucks gift cards and asked them what words do you like or what words would you use for X, Y, Z and why? And just scribbled notes and then ran back to the Office and put them in a spreadsheet. So it was kind of very start-upy, but really helpful to let the product managers or whoever, the CEO, whoever was like, I don't believe that, we got the customers, the voice of the customers came through. People get opinionated. People want to assert their authority or let people, let their coworkers know how smart they are. It's really all about the customers. And I think that's the great thing about content testing is it's humbling and helps teams work together better, I think, when people are like, oh, I was wrong. Not everyone has the wherewithal to admit that or to say that, but you will constantly say, oh, I'm surprised or oh, that's not what I thought would happen. You're being more human as you do content testing, I think, because you're listening to people and you're taking that information and you're sharing it with your teams and people get really excited when you learn these insights, these little golden nuggets. They’re like, oh, that's not, people didn't think, upper field, the example from Tracy that I mentioned before, I didn't explain, but she had upper field as this term throughout her website. And people thought it was actually like a UX direction, like in the upper right corner of your phone. People didn't realize it was a manager, like a regional manager. So the field manager is what they replaced upper field with. It was all over the place. And she's like, well, this has to be right. It's everywhere. No, no, no, no. And she had to change that everywhere. Like everyone in the company knew about that change because it was in sales manuals. It was in onboarding. It was everywhere. And even when your CEO learns that you're clarifying the content on your product website app, they get more respect for content. They realize early practice of content design, content strategy. They realize, oh my gosh, this is worth digging into because the clarity immediately means, if you recall, it's a customer service, which you can quantify and get like the dollar bill, like the dollar amount that you're saving your company or improve revenue, improve loyalty. Those are all, with the economy being a little bumpy, like it's really important to be able to show impact and the content testing leads directly to impact for your business.
Erin - 00:19:50: So let's spend some time on those two things you just mentioned, because I think this is going to be really useful for folks, which is impact and methods. I think very common, as you were saying, right now in the current economy, impact should always matter, in my opinion, to anyone in any business context, but especially right now, and especially for researchers who are kind of, let's say, in their adolescence, this is an established field going through some change and in a tough economy. So how do you show impact in the context of content design, of content research? And what are some methods you've seen that have been really helpful in doing that?
Erica - 00:20:28: I go back to my favorite example, which is kind of in retrospect, it's just mind boggling, was at the health insurance company, which is Premera Blue Cross. Our digital VP was Curtis Kopf, he's great, he's now with REI.com, a really wonderful leader who empowered us by getting us UserTesting, SurveyMonkey we had access to these tools. And what we noticed was we had a campaign that was very short in length. It was like eight weeks to sell the Affordable Care Act health insurance plans, also known as Obamacare. And we weren't selling the most important plan. We had gold, silver, and bronze plans. And very stressful, you know, execs coming into the digital experience section of our floor and kind of breathing down our necks like, what's going on? We're not selling the silver plans like we wanted to. We have a sales quota. What the heck is going on? And we're selling bronze, we are selling gold. Gold were really expensive, people couldn't renew them, they couldn't afford them. Bronze, you couldn't see the doctors you wanted. You could afford that plan, the monthly premium, but you couldn't necessarily see the doctors or go to the hospital you need to. So bronze were dangerous. People were mad about the bronze plans. People were mad about the gold plans when they bought them and started using them. The silver was the happy medium. And it looked like the call to action button on the homepage, gold, silver, bronze, it looked like the silver one was broken. Like we had three buttons on the homepage and I was like, well, the HTML must be broken, like we're not selling silver plans. So let's go into the code and look. And so I just, not all content designers are nerdy like me, but I know HTML. And I went in and I lifted the CTA button and I'm like, oh no, the HTML is working. We have a content problem. So we surveyed customers and asked them gold, silver, bronze, which plan would you buy? Which word, which is most appealing to you? And people told us just like we expected, well, I can afford the bronze when it's cheaper or I have diabetes or chronic health care health issues so I'm going to buy the gold plan. But when we asked them why we found out that people would not buy the silver plan because they thought it was a Medicare plan. They thought silver meant silver hair, centrum silver, older, you know, like they, even though there's nothing on the homepage to say anything about Medicare in this banner promotion on the buses, on the Radio, like we were promoting this like crazy. And it was in the news everywhere, like gold, silver, bronze. You couldn't be an American at that time and not know that there were gold, silver, and bronze plans for sale and you had to buy one or you're going to get taxed. There were going to be negative repercussions for not buying a plan. So people had to buy these plans against their will in many cases. But when we heard that people were like silver, silver's Medicare plan. I'm not going to buy a silver plan. The sirens started going off. And I swear, like when we used SurveyMonkey, we just asked like 20 people, what would you do? We got the results within like an hour and we were like, holy bleep. We need to clarify that the silver plan is an Affordable Care Act plan. They were swearing, there were people turning beet red. Like there was a lot of stress involved because if we didn't make these plans sell, if we didn't help these plans sell, we knew there were going to be layoffs. Like there was going to be hell to pay.
Erin - 00:23:18: And to be clear, you wanted to sell this plan because it was the right fit for a lot of people.
Erica - 00:23:23: Yeah, and we didn't want to explain everything on the homepage . Like we wanted to entice them to click through and learn more. This is like the mama bear health plan you know, it's medium cost, medium benefits and good for you, good for everyone, good for the company, good for the customer. We sold like, I don't know, like single digits of silver plans and the other plans had sold like thousands and we're like, what the heck is going on?
Erin - 00:23:41: So what'd you call it, teal?
Erica - 00:23:43: Oh, we couldn't change the name. So you know, like, you see in the Olympics, it gets gold, silver, bronze. So we could not change the name because it was a government mandate. These are what they're called. They have long, extra long, formal names. But on the homepage, it was gold, silver, bronze, pretty much. So we had to add a line of content, just like with license and seat. We had to add, or we knew the right thing to do was to add a line of content to the homepage saying, this is an Affordable Care Act plan. This silver plan is an Affordable Care Act plan. If you need a Medicare plan, you have to go to the navigation and look at the Medicare. There was Medicare for sale on the website the rest of the year. This is where the mental model came from, as customers knew we did sell Medicare plans. We weren't promoting that on the homepage at the time, or anywhere else, or on the app, or anything. But we were like, woo, woo, like sirens. We had to add a line of content. Again, the designer's like, you're mucking with my design. And I was like, step aside, buddy, we need to add this. Like, not that rudely, but seriously, we did need so many rounds of design review. It did seem disappointing and a little disruptive, to be honest, to add a line of content to say this silver plan is an Affordable Care Act plan. If you want Medicare, go here. But literally the second we added that and hit publish with this content management system, we started selling the plans. And Curtis was high five. Everyone was like, thank god. People were clapping. It was kind of ridiculous, honestly, all the stress involved, but we had this tiny window of just only so many weeks to sell these plans and then you can't buy them for another year.
Carol - 00:25:09: It's an easier solution, it sounds like too, then if it was a product problem, we all know that could be a large path to go down, big investment, right?
Erica - 00:25:18: Could have been much more complicated, yeah.
Erin - 00:25:20: Or even changing the name of the plan. I think that's probably a good takeaway for some folks. It's like, I really want to rename this product, whatever it might be. And that might just not be tenable for whatever reason.
Erica - 00:25:30: Well, I'd say if we could have tested, if we could have created the product names or tested them ahead of time, yes, definitely. I think if you're working with your marketing team or business development, whoever at your company helps create new ideas, like the innovation team, whoever, like if you have a new product or new feature coming out, you should test the name of it so it doesn't inadvertently cause confusion. If we could have renamed them, I don't know, one, two, three, something, something easy to understand, expensive, not expensive, wicked expensive? Or something, you know, I'm joking, but what a commitment to buy a healthcare plan, but to understand that people are mucking it up, their mental models were scrambled. And then of course, we had to change all the radio ads, we had to change the social media, like everyone in the company knew about this change. And it was really cool to have people go, oh, we need to be clear and sometimes to be clear, you need to add more content. I think, UX, everyone's like, you have to write short, you have to write short. Sometimes you have to explain stuff.
Carol - 00:26:29: So it sounds like in this case you found out that it was a problem through doing a survey digging deeper. I'd love to hear more about what are some other ways that you, getting into Erin's question about methods, what are some other common methods you might use?
Erica - 00:26:42: So I said about the gold, silver, bronze example. To get into methods, I'd say you can do Cloze Testing, C-L-O-Z-E. It's sort of like MadLibs where you take a chunk of content and you remove like every fifth or seventh word and then get some participants and ask them to fill in the blanks. And that's for just general clarity. I think Cloze Testing has been around for, I don't know, 40 years, longer than that. It's a super cheap, super fast way to find out if your overall content, longer form content is clear. I think five second tests are also one of my favorites where you show a landing or a homepage page or, often your homepage is not your most important content, which I also get into in the book, but some important chunk of content, show it to people, especially if it's a prototype or new design, and ask them what sticks in their mind about it. What did they notice? Sometimes they'll comment on design, but often what you want is them to comment on the words. It's like, which word did the CTA button stick out? Did they notice anything at all? Maybe not. Maybe that's good. Maybe it's not. I mean, it depends on your goals. I think heat mapping is another really interesting tool to use to see what people are noticing. Just asking people what they'd interact with or not is also eye opening. Like, would they click on the CTA button. Actionability testing, I think, is really important to understand what steps people would take or would they run for the hills? Are they being so turned off by your content or design that they're like, I'm going to close my laptop and take a nap? Like, I get into many different types of testing in the book. Clarity is so important, and I think that's where most team discussions happen, or, you know, disagreements happen. People are like, this is clear, this is fine. Ask your audience, is this clear to you? How would you explain this in your own words? Ask people to explain keywords in their own words, like spreadsheets, let me go back to a Microsoft example. Can people explain what a spreadsheet is? Maybe, maybe not. You know, think of high school when you were taking a test and you got half credit. If you had to fill in the blank or, you know, explain something in your own words and your teacher gives you 50% credit because you didn't explain it very clearly. If people can explain things in their own words and you know they're confident, you know that they're comfortable. But if they can't and they're like, I don't, like some people fudge that with license. They're like, well, you need it. You buy it. It's a thing. Like they couldn't articulate that you have to download it. Or, you know, once upon a time you would plug in the key, the 16 digit key, and then download it or get help to actually install software. I think if people are comfortable with the whole process and can explain it and they're like, this is what happens, then you know they're cool and the clarity has been achieved.
Erin - 00:29:10: No, I was just going to say you mentioned Clarity, which is, of course, a Microsoft product that we use all the time.
Erica - 00:29:15: Oh, I didn't even think about it.
Erin - 00:29:17: Yeah. Yeah. That's what I thought you were talking about at first, but that's been very helpful for us for doing some of the sorts of testing that you're talking about.
Erica - 00:29:26: No, no, that's funny. I think another really inexpensive or easy to use way to check on clarity is you can, you know, the Hemingway app or Flesch Kincaid is another, you can run stuff, if you're using Google Docs or Microsoft Word, just plug your content in there and run a clarity check with those tools. They're not perfect because they're meant for paragraphs. They're meant for, you know, long-form content. But if you have enough words that you can get, like, is this 80% clear, is this 90% clear, according to their algorithms, that can be helpful too. I like Merriam- Webster's dictionary. It's free online and it tells you how frequently words are used, which just gives you a gut check of like, is this word okay? And my super cheap test is, does it have more than three or more syllables? I run for the hills. When a word has three syllables or more, it's inherently more complicated. And I don't want to say dumb down your content and use only two syllables or one syllable words. That's not what I'm saying. But honestly, like for Call to Action buttons, if you see a three syllable word or longer, woo, like sirens go off in my head that you can often simplify just looking at the length of a word, the number of syllables in a word. And everyone can go online and use Merriam-Webster. I like Visual Thesaurus. That's 20 bucks a year. It's not an attractive looking website, but it is an amazing, more robust website than Merriam-Webster's online thesaurus. It shows you visually relationships of words, like cousins. It gets into word origin and it has this like visual display. When you plug in a word and it just kind of sprays like leaves of petals on a flower of like, oh, these are the related words, and it does, you know, verbs, nouns, adverbs. It's so fun. If you're looking for a replacement word, if you know something is unclear and you need to replace it with something, Visual Thesaurus is super fun.
Erin - 00:31:08: Carol, did I cut you off before? I thought you were going to say something.
Carol - 00:31:11: Oh yes, it sounds like some of the methods you described are in the context of a prototype or visual design. So you mentioned the five second test where you see the screen. And then I think you also said there are methods that you might just take the words out and leave the visual design behind. I'd love to hear when you choose to use one of those or how you choose which method.
Erica - 00:31:29: I think if you're like Tracy at Zipline and you're like, what's up with these terms that are popping out at me as a new employee? Just digging into the words that you use frequently by themselves can be really eye-opening. Without the design, without needing any help from designers or engineers or anything, you can just dig into the words. I really, really recommend that, to do the, what I call the one-two punches, ask people like, what word would you use for X, Y, Z, or look at this word, how do you feel when you see this word? Asking people how words make them react emotionally is really interesting too. And getting those open-ended questions like, tell me more, tell me more.
Carol - 00:32:05: Do you have an example of, I'm just thinking about some way to-, do you have an example of a time that you use that and what type of questions you ask?
Erica - 00:32:11: Just two questions. I ask, usually start with a multiple choice question or just like a fill in the blank, like what word would you use for blah? And then ask people, how does this word make you feel? Or tell me more about this word. You don't even have to tell them or ask them how does it make you feel? Because some people react very strongly to that. They're like, oh, I don't wanna talk about my feelings.
Erin - 00:32:28: Is this a case where it matters if you pose the question as what word would you use or what word do you use or what word have you used in the past? I don't know if that matters here or is it all kind of the same because it's just words, it's not behaviors.
Erica - 00:32:44: You know, thinking of onboarding experiences or landing pages, I'm trying to think of, I might need more coffee, I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but it's really intriguing when people tell you, oh, this reminds me of something, or often they will say it reminds you of a product I used before and I didn't like it, or it reminds me of something technically complicated that was unpleasant or expensive or whatever. I think it depends on your industry, it depends on what you're digging into. I think a lot of people who work at nonprofits and are like a team of one have used content testing to dig into, you know, we want people to donate, we want people, we're doing fundraising and analyzing that experience. Which words do you use a lot? Like give versus donate. I've done experiments with give versus donate and a lot of people feel like donate is a more altruistic feeling, it's longer. Give sounds like you're taking. There might be regionalisms with this too. You might want to do an A-B experiment to verify.
Carol - 00:33:35: And just to go deep on this one method, because it's nice to get tactical. When you said what word do you use for blah, I imagine I would be worried if I was writing that question that whatever I put in that blah space is going to influence their answer, right? So how do you even think about how to describe it in a way that doesn't influence their answer?
Erica - 00:33:52: I'm picturing Gumby, the green flexible character. Sometimes you have to bend over backwards to not reveal your motives or your underlying, like, what you're getting at. And I get into techniques for that in the book like how to raise the question so that you don't give away what you're getting at. Like the license versus seat, it's like you don't wanna use seat or license in the question itself. So it's like what term or word is used to describe what you need when you purchase software. Like that it's like a long kind of slightly awkward from a syntactic point of view. The sentence itself is a little wonky, but sometimes you have to do that in Gumby, like the bending to not give away.
Erin - 00:34:31: You know what it makes me think of is taboo. You're playing taboo. You can't say any of the words on the card. And you're just trying to kind of dance around these things you can't say.
Erica - 00:34:43: Funny side note, I worked at Cranium, the game company for a while. I worked on their first online game, which was a massive failure, a Pop Culture game with crowdsourced videos. Anyway, yeah, that could have benefited from some content testing, but I wasn't doing this at the time.
Erin - 00:34:59: Okay, so I think two more questions for you. I mean, it's a big one, but I'm curious how you think about this. I think the answer is probably it depends. But I'm curious how you think about it, which is that content doesn't exist in a vacuum, it exists in products which usually have a visual interface. I mean, you know, we could be talking about a voice AI or whatever, but let's assume there's a visual interface as well. How do you think about the syntax of sort of designing the visual with the words and testing those pieces separately or together?
Erica - 00:35:28: Well, it depends on your deadline, how much time you have. I mean, if you can dig into the words on their own, fantastic. I'm thinking of a project I'm working on right now where we’re sprinting to the finish line, we have to hand it off to engineering, like a big rush, and we have to wait till it actually launches to test it. And like, we're going to get some real feedback from real customers after it launches, which is fine. It's better than no feedback at all. Testing with the design, people are going to be influenced by the color. What's the usability phenomenon where if a design is aesthetically pleasing, people immediately assume it's easier to use. It's like the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but there's a term for it. If you want to test in tandem, design plus content, that's fantastic. I love System Usability Scale, system e-score, those comprehensive-, baseline your overall user experience and then go back in a quarter and see if the work that you've done has made a difference in making it less friction filled. Love those kinds of in-depth metrics, but those take a long time to achieve. And whenever I bring it up at work, like, let's do S-U-S or S-E-S, everyone's like, oh, God, we don't have time for that.
Erin - 00:36:30: So in an ideal world, you would do the words on their own, then maybe bring them together with the design and then test again?
Erica - 00:36:38: I mean, I just think about the typical UX team and how constrained we are. If you think of, like I said, the most frequently used words or the key, most crucial words, often in a CTA button, where you want people to take action, those, if you have to choose. I mean, you don't have to test every word in every experience. But if you get into it and you do content testing and you can inform your style guides or your design library, whatever system you're using, and you can flag, like, we tested this word in July, 2020, and link people off to your study reports, that's helpful. And then you build this wonderful compendium of helpful research for your whole team to use. That's what we did at Microsoft. It was pretty awesome how we dug into it, like, do people know what an app is? Do people know what the cloud is? When you mention cloud storage, do people get this blank stare? They do if they're an entrepreneur. If they're an admin with like 1,000 employees and they're really techie, they're cool with that. But it was really helpful to understand what was confusing to people and why. I'd say, like, don't worry about not being able to test everything or everything you want to, but start somewhere and share your results. And then more people in your organization will do testing or they'll want to or they'll jump on the bandwagon. And then you start building, you start validating the words you're using and have that foundation of like, yeah, we tested it on this day. Like things aren't going to stay true forever. Like in 2027, maybe license and seat will test differently. But when you build, when you start sharing, and sharing is caring,, and people get wind of what's going on, they get excited. They want to do it, not just content designers and product designers, but PMs, engineers. I worked with engineers on error messages and they're like, we should test this word. I'm like, damn right, we should. Yeah.
Carol - 00:38:21: Sounds like it's self fulfilling, you know.
Erica - 00:38:23: It's kind of contagious. Yeah, it's awesome because it's helpful to not assume. It's helpful to think about the customer like, is this really the best word or could this be clearer or could this be simpler? I think the simple language guidelines from Sarah Richards are amazing. If I could get a little political for a second, I think a lot of people have come up to me and said, I don't want to write simply because it reminds me of... Seriously, I got that feedback from some lawyers I worked with and some people, mostly at Premera Blue Cross, they're like, that was when the election was getting very hairy. His campaign, clearly his political, I don't even want to say, his attention was, he was getting more and more attention. Dumbing down and simplifying are different things. Yeah, and I think he uses political rhetoric, that is a technique, simple language, short sentences is a technique used in political speech writing.
Erin - 00:39:08: Rhetoric is helpful.
Erica - 00:39:10: Being simple, right, like that's a whole other thing. Yeah, I honestly like I get this a lot when I do Q&A's people are like, well aren't you talking like Donald Trump? Like no! Like okay maybe like there's similar techniques but with different inspirations, different motivations like we were trying to make customer experience awesome. It's not dumbing down, it's making things clear so people can successfully complete their jobs to be done whatever they're doing on their app or website or whatever.
Carol - 00:39:35: You mentioned a few resources. Erin was nodding. Erin's more of a writer than I am. You mentioned simple language guidelines and Hemingway. Maybe we can link to those. But can you describe a little bit more what those two tools are?
Erica - 00:39:46: Well, Hemingway, it measures how simple your language is. It tells you which words might need to be replaced. If your sentences are too long, you should chop them into pieces. Honestly, the Flesch–Kincaid Wikipedia page is super interesting. F-L-E-S-C-H hyphen K-I-N-C-A-I-D. Flesch–Kincaid is the language algorithm that people use to make sure that their language is simple. It's embedded in Word. And Google Docs has, I think, a slightly different algorithm. If you ask it to do a spelling check or a language check, grammar check, it'll give you a score. Yeah, and I'm trying to think. Visual Thesaurus is another thing I strongly recommend. It's so great. UserTesting.com has a whole bunch of resources, too, online. They're merging with UserZoom. So there are some-, I'm not sure what the URL is going to be down the road. But Dscout, UserZoom, UserTesting, they have a lot of online resources about how to simplify your language, how to dig into the language and make it easier to understand. I'd say Jeff Sauro's website, he's a user researcher. I think he invented SUS, System Usability Scale. No, he was one of the inventors. He wasn't the only one. But yeah, I think digging into more complex testing frameworks like SUS is really fun to do, too. But I'm a nerd, so. But yeah, Jeff Sauro.
Erin - 00:41:00: I don't think you're the only one, you keep saying. I think you're in good company on that one, I have to say.
Erica - 00:41:06: I think for nerdy language or just content design in general, I think I mentioned Michael Metts. He and Andy Welfle wrote Writing is Designing, also from Rosenfeld Media. And Scott Kubie, I think he's in Rhode Island, he was working with Kristina Halvorson, at BrainTraffic in Minneapolis, but he's now in Rhode Island, I believe, and he has some great newsletters about the content design world, content resources, and job hunting stuff too. He's really big on helping people find jobs.
Erin - 00:41:34: Excellent. We'll link that all in the notes. I just wanted to end with looking forward and talking about the future just briefly, which is as a relatively-, again, we started by talking about the renaissance and the change of this field of content design. So what do you expect it might look like in the near or distant term with everything happening both with economy, with, I don't know, with AI, pick your thing. Where is it going? .
Erica - 00:42:02: Oh, AI. I would recommend people follow Mike Caulfield from the University of Washington. He's a misinformation specialist. He's got a book coming out in the fall. I don't know the name of it, sorry, Michael. But he's a very smart guy. I mean, the use of AI has dipped in just the last two weeks. I'd say writing is a skill that everyone should have. They shouldn't lean on AI to do it for them. I think it will be used generatively for people doing content design for websites, sometimes. But I think you really need the human touch to make things awesome, to make things usable, to understand your audience's reaction to things, you still need people for that. So that's my mini rant about AI. I think any new communication tool, like if you look at the history of TV and radio, like TV didn't eradicate radio, you know, I think things evolve and change. And yeah, it's interesting.
Erin - 00:42:53: But the future is bright for content design?
Erica - 00:42:56: I'd say this, smart companies hire content designers because the ROI is huge. And I have examples in my book of, you save your company $75,000 by improving content in a specific customer experience. And my coworker Trudy at Microsoft saved Microsoft $2 million by doing a little content testing and figuring out what information, what gaps in the information, what gaps in the content were there. And she filled them and she's saving them millions of dollars. So I'd say smart companies have content designers on staff who don't do office hours. I'll rant for two seconds about office hours. Office hours are draining. Having so few people on your staff that you need them to pinch it on projects that they're not involved in and context switch is crazy making and draining and leads to burnout. Companies are successful when they have staff, content designers, content strategists who can dig in and understand what words are working for your audience and why, and which ones are not working and why, and share that information with your whole UX team.
Carol - 00:43:52: Thanks very much for joining us. We really appreciate it.
Erica - 00:43:55: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Have a great day.
Erin - 00:44:02: Thanks for listening to Awkward Silences, brought to you by User Interviews.
JH - 00:44:07: Theme music by Fragile Gang.
SVP, Marketing
Left brained, right brained. Customer and user advocate. Writer and editor. Lifelong learner. Strong opinions, weakly held.
