After my injury I started reading up on experiments in nerve regeneration and poured through texts that mapped the brain’s connection to pain, sensation, and movement—learning whenever I had a free moment.

Now, no matter what project I am part of, I always find myself wondering how my audience’s brain (intended end user or not) will process—and ultimately comprehend—the output of my work.

So, as first principles go, comprehension first tends to be my buoy. It may seem like a simple concept, but one that often escapes strategists and content creators alike.

The problem, unfortunately, comes from the processes we use. Content strategy and many of its allied fields are analytical, logical, and detail oriented. At times, what we do is downright clinical. We audit, we analyze, and we recommend. That sterility often rubs off on the content we create. This is when our work gets a serious case of the “whats.”

What should this copy be to achieve optimal SEO value? What features should we highlight to promote this product? What chart should we add to give users more data? What? What? What?

Don’t get me wrong, there is value in “whats,” but I find it more helpful to focus the bulk of my effort on the emotional side of content (the “whys” and “hows”) for the simple reason that doing so results in stronger comprehension and retention for the end user.

Instead of the cold, hard facts, tell me why you make your products the way that you do. What is the deeper story behind your manufacturing process? What drives you to show up at a community soup kitchen every morning? In short, why do you do what you do? If a user even remotely identifies with the “why,” there’s a far greater chance it will stick with them.

How do we know this? Neuroscience!

Content and your brain. Seriously.

When we think, speak, read, listen to music, or attempt to do anything remotely detail oriented, we use our brain’s neocortex. As the language center, the neocortex is most concerned with the analytical, rational, and logical. In other words the neocortex cares about the “whats,” but has less to do with making decisions, memories or connecting with concepts on a deeper level than one might believe. For that, we have to look elsewhere, into one of the oldest parts of our brain from an evolutionary standpoint (think reptilian!).

Buried inside our cerebral cortex are the elements that make up our limbic system—the center for emotion and human behavior.

Despite being home to the brain structures that make us uniquely human, the limbic system’s primary function is to partner with the endocrine system to regulate the body’s automated functions. Our limbic system ensures we don’t have to think to breathe. It raises and lowers our blood pressure. It makes these decisions for us without our knowledge through an innate network of memories. These early connections and memories are among the first things to be wired as we develop in utero.

And just because the human machine loves to be even more complex (albeit efficient), these structures serve a secondary function; operating as a memory factory of sorts. The same limbic system elements that help keep us breathing without thinking or tell us not to breathe when there’s something threatening, also process various sensory information and relay it to different parts of the brain to form both short and long-term memories.

While all this is fine and good, this memory formation is being done in our “emotional” brain and we’re attaching “feelings” to memories based on our personalities, beliefs, and preferences. All of this sits in the limbic system. What it means is that how we feel about something has a much stronger role in decision making and comprehension than we’d like to believe. No matter how analytical we believe we might be, our emotional brain still decides how we ultimately internalize and act on language and data.

This happens because our limbic system matures in our teen years while our prefrontal cortex doesn’t mature until our early-to-mid-20s. Cue up your favorite bad haircut, piercing, or near death experience from your memory bank. Now you know what to blame it on. Go tell your mom. I’ll wait.

What does it mean to me?

The brief neuroanatomy lesson supports my first principle. While the “whats” (detail oriented content, messages, etc.) are important to a user, content they can connect with on an emotional/behavioral level (“hows” and “whys”) is what drives deeper comprehension because it connects to the area of the brain that defines our behavioral context. When we have content that addresses these behavioral factors, we stimulate the parts of the brain that create memory and ultimately make us able to truly comprehend something. When we have that, we have the potential to influence things like favorability, consideration, satisfaction, and even loyalty.

What that should tell you, my fellow lovers of content, is that the most effective strategy leads to work that speaks bi-directionally—to both the rational and emotional parts of our brain. If we only believe that retention happens when we present our case for a product, service, organization, etc., we’re assuming that the spatial/language-based portion of our brain governs our decision making process. Fact is, it just doesn’t have the final say.

Content works hardest when it stimulates the behaviors and emotions in the deepest parts of our brain and is supported by details that tickle our neocortex. See? Brain science = awesome.

So, next time you’re working on a content strategy project, don’t get too mired in the details and remember to focus on user comprehension. We all say we think about our users and that we want to create content that’s useful for them, but how often are we thinking of their emotions, pain points, and what drives behaviors when we make our recommendations? The web is becoming a far more personal place and it has never been a more exciting or opportune time to have our work follow suit.

You’re stuck with me

I’ll be a regular contributor to Contents, and while my new partners tell me they don’t want me to limit my scope to talking about context, my research or a single topic, you can rest assured that my first principles will be the connective tissue bringing my thoughts to life with each issue. Please join the conversation. This will be so much more fun if it’s a dialogue.

Each participant gave us capsule descriptions of their own first principles (professional or personal, organizational or individual), and talked about how those principles have changed over time and about the place where they began. We invite you to carry on the conversation by posting the underlying principles of your own work in the discussion section below.

Karen McGrane

Karen is one of the quiet revolutionaries of the UX world. In her client projects and education work at SVA, she does a lot more than she talks about. When she does speak, we listen.

The basic principle that underlies everything I do is that writing and design share a foundation. For better or for worse, in my work, I don’t make a big distinction between, say, content strategy and interaction design. Because everything is about understanding the user.

My first exposure to the underlying principles of user-centered design wasn’t from design at all—it was from writing. The notion that you, as a writer, need to develop a clear mental picture of your reader really made a big difference in how I see the world. I learned to construct personas of my reader, conducted usability tests on documents—I did many of the activities we associate with UX design, but I did them all with written text.

Audience is everything. The tools we have to understand the user are what connect us, and what we should share, regardless of what field of practice we belong to.

How my principles have changed

The past ten years haven’t changed my principles, but they have grounded me in the politics of this belief system. When you get religion about writing for a reader, or designing for a user, it’s hard to see why everyone doesn’t grok that approach. But many businesses still struggle to make things that their users want, and they’re resistant to adapting their internal processes and structures—they’re still focused on what they want to say or make, as opposed to trying to understand what their users need.

Even within our field, there are politics around our ever-narrowing sub-specialties. I’ve certainly had debates with people who believe that, in practice, content strategy and interaction design are vastly different fields, and that we can’t expect people to understand both. But I prefer to ground myself in the principles that unite varying perspectives, because I think it makes everyone’s work stronger.

Where I come from

It would not be too much of a stretch to say that I studied content strategy in grad school. I have an M.S. in technical communication from RPI, and focused most of my coursework on human-computer interaction. My education prepared me well to work as an information architect at Razorfish after I graduated, and to play a variety of leadership roles in the UX department there. All of my professional history has sort of been leading up to content strategy.

Randall Snare

Randall is a New Orleans native living and working in Ireland as a content strategist. On stage, on the web, and in bars, she rarely says anything expected. We like that.

• Understand who you’re working with (both in an empathetic and Machiavellian way). I find that most of my work is convincing people that a design/plan will work and can be implemented. It’s really easy to say “delete 500 pages and here’s our research to prove it,” but it’s very hard to make that happen. I work with really big companies and sometimes they’re governmental bodies, which is like working with giant T-rexes (getting an ID card to get in the building takes 18 months). So I find that if you really understand a person’s role within the organization, what they’re interested in (Do they want a promotion? Do they want to move into a different department?) and how they relate to others in their company, helps you to know what to say to them to get things done. It also helps you make them look good, which is every consultant’s job. Or if you’re not a consultant, it’s the best way to get a raise.
• Make jokes even when it’s inappropriate. People get really emotional, myself included, when they’re working in web stuff. And it’s entirely understandable: often what we’re messing with are things that are mixed up in people’s jobs. Imagine if someone told you that what you do every day should be called something different because some guy called “the user” doesn’t know what it means. That’s emotional territory. Making jokes always works. Even if they’re bad ones. It puts people at ease and everyone can make rational decisions instead of emotional ones.
• Do things outside of work so that you’re an interesting person. I think people in the web industry work very hard, and that’s great, but if all you do is work, then you’re boring (although talking about CSS in bars is awesome). There are two good things about doing stuff outside of work: 1) Meeting different types of people helps you to become a better communicator—and everyone in the web industry is in the communications industry, and 2) Doing things outside of your comfort zone makes you humble, i.e., looking stupid for an hour or so per week is good for you. I take dance classes with young flexible people, and sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and it looks like I’ve had a stroke and half of my body is paralyzed. I say that’s good for the soul.

How my principles have changed

Ten years ago, writing to me meant writing fiction. When you write fiction, you have no idea about your audience; they don’t matter except to hand you awards and ask you to sign their copy of your book*. Now because I work as a UX consultant, the mechanisms of writing have changed. It’s more of an interaction, and it has much more to do with space. I’m also far more interested in writing non-fiction (plug: Mapped), which is like creativity with constraints. I think constraints facilitate the creative.

And I’m less of a snob, if I count snobbery as a principle. When you’re 22 and carrying around Rilke, you’re a total jerk. Web snobbery is far less offensive.

*I don’t have a book and no one’s ever asked me to sign a copy of anything. Cue violins.

Where I come from

My roots are deep in fiction (this doesn’t mean I’m not a real person). I studied fiction in New Orleans (New Orleans Centre for Creative Arts, about which I can’t say enough good things) and New York (Hunter College), almost as a trade, if fiction were recognized as such.

What’s good about studying fiction is that it makes text evaluatable. I can read something and give you reasons why it works or it doesn’t. Now, I may operate with different metrics than someone else, but standards exist, and therefore I learned to discuss fiction beyond the plot summary. I learned about things like imagery and tone and syntax and sound—all that good stuff. And this has helped me immensely in my career as a designer/strategist/information-person/writer (aren’t web industry labels fun?).

Henrik Berggren

All this editorial stuff we do relies on technologists and visual designers to turn it into sites, products, books, publications—to make it real. Henrik is one of the minds behind Readmill, a new-school reading tool from Berlin of which we’re extremely fond.

• Simplicity—Born out of frustration for things that do not work, I guess. Lots of interfaces try and do too many things at the same time. Lots of people seem to be afraid of simplicity, afraid that simple means less valuable. I now believe that it’s the complete opposite.
• Openness—With openness comes trust and that’s a key part for me these days. This is something I think a lot about when designing social software. It’s hard to create a space on the web where people feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and feelings. Trust, and distrust, stays in the joints of the network, just like memories stay in the walls of old houses. So it’s important to get it right from the beginning. For example, this has made us stay away from complicated privacy settings to focus on an open API, and to avoid any auto-following of friends.
• Design—Without great design, technology is only half of what it can be. I really appreciate both and when they both shine, you’ve built a great product. A technical solution that solves a hard problem, with a user interface that is simple to use. If you’re missing either, it’s not really a great product any more.
• Ideas are worth nothing, craft is everything—Something I truly believe. I think it was David Lynch who said that ideas are everywhere, free for anyone to use. And I think that everyone has ideas, lots of them, both good and bad. So I chose early on to focus on craft. Minding the little details that make a difference. And this is where I have a soul mate in David my co-founder. We share the passion for perfection of details.

How my principles have changed

Oh, they have definitely changed. I used to be much more focused on technology for the sake of technology. Today, tech is only one part of something great. Also, my sense of products has also vastly changed. And to be honest, I think it comes mostly from hanging out on the web for 15 years. I’m raised on hyper communication, surfing on modems, and building webpages. This has made me appreciate the construction of services and apps. And has made me realize that developers are the people of the future.

This also has to do with craft. The more time you spend using digital products and services the more you learn about what to appreciate. And as stated I was raised with using computers so I have it in my blood stream. All those long hours after school playing with Encarta 95 and my Commodore 64. Now it pays off.

Where I come from

I come from technology and interaction. Probably leaning toward technology. Essentially, products have always been important to me, I want to figure things out and learn how they work. If it takes too long or is too hard I get bored or frustrated. I have the attention span of a five-year-old. So when we design and build things at Readmill, dead simple is the benchmark. When I got my first computer ~1990, I think I broke it five times in one year, just because I wanted to try to improve it in different ways, and then when we picked it up from the repairman I always questioned him thoroughly about how he fixed it, went home, and tried the same thing. I was lucky to have such patient parents.

Elizabeth McGuane

Elizabeth is one of the early migrants from journalism to content strategy, and has a habit of sneaking forehead-smacking reasonableness into the most heated conversations.

• Ask questions, even when you’re up against a deadline and the answer could be complicated
• Be nice to people, because someday you might have to call them with bad news
• Don’t meet bullshit with more bullshit, for obvious reasons if you do the math

How my principles have changed

Sadly, I think the no-bullshit principle has become more crucial since I moved into design and advertising. Which is not to say bullshit didn’t exist in journalism—each world has its own special brand. So, the principles haven’t changed, but I keep rediscovering why they matter. And I’ve learned other things too. I think the key lesson I took forward from print into the web is that content is always a details game. Maybe people don’t think of strategy as being about the details—they start yelling “tactics! tactics!” when you talk nuts and bolts—but I think it is. Just like in the newsroom, the more you understand about what’s really happening now, the farther ahead you can see.

Where I come from

I started out in the newspaper game, y’see—I trained by talking fast and being an expert wearer of porkpie hats.

Really, I worked at a well-respected national weekly in Ireland, The Sunday Business Post. I was an editorial assistant and then a writer, and I learned about editorial processes and deadlines and the absolute power of subeditors. I fell in love with interviewing writers, and loved getting paid to go to the theatre, but eventually realized I did all of my reading online, and it felt like there was a wider world out there that I should explore. I don’t like there being stuff I don’t know. iQ Content, a UX consultancy, took me on as a content specialist, even though I had no technical or design experience, apparently on the strength of my cover letter, which basically said “I know nothing but I really want to learn.” I was at iQ for three years, and I had amazing mentors there in UX and project management and CMS-wrangling.

Those three years happened to coincide with the rise of content strategy as a special practice—and now I’m a content strategist. It all looks like it makes sense when I look backward, but it didn’t feel that way on the way up.

Ian Alexander

Some people engage in long online dialogues about their ideas. Others drop in and say blink-inducing things and then vanish in a puff of smoke and style. Ian’s one of the latter, and we lured him here by promising rare sneakers.

• Do you want to be right or do right? This principle keeps us honest and forces us to check our egos. It also trains us see things from different perspectives, and reminds us to always keep the customer’s point of view in mind.
• Every project requires a little crazy. At our agency, we aim to inspire change. Sometimes we can’t execute that change because of budget, scope, or timing, but we endeavor to push a few notches farther than we believe we will land. Being safe rarely works.
• Do the hard stuff first, then iterate. Everyone talks about iterating, being agile, and getting to a minimally viable product, but I think the most important part of those strategies is tackling the most difficult aspect of the project very early on. This does not mean that you have to provide the final solution but rather that you indicate the most significant hurdle (a process in itself) and begin to attack that problem. Too often we do what’s easy, but still time consuming, and then have to redo that work based a new paradigm.
• No “creative” (in the agency sense) without strategy. This is a hard one and it contains two lessons. First, almost without exception, strategy should inform creative decision making. Second, if you are rushing, you usually don’t care about the client or project—and if the client is rushing, they don’t care about the relationship with your agency.

How my principles have changed

Over ten years, the first three have been constant, and the last is new to the game. Ten years ago I was 34 and watching many worlds collide: publishing, programming, user experience, marketing, management, and many other fields were playing leapfrog. Those things seem to be settling now and this makes strategy more accessible.

Twenty years ago, I was 24. Being right and doing right were often confused, and so, in turn, were the results. Youth is often about rejection then creation in that order.

Where I come from

My background is 60% arts and 40% science. I originally went to school for writing then transferred to visual arts, and I worked on one of the first 3D printing technologies at MIT. I’ve done tours of duty as a general contractor, outsourcing specialist in China, technology writer, and e-learning technologist. The arts were and still are a major influence—I have always been interested how they affect things that people use (products).

Dorian Taylor

Dorian’s feeds are a constant source of provocative approaches and ideas that do more than merely provoke. His tangents are more interesting than most people’s straight paths to “productivity.”

Conceptual integrity: When I first read these words in The Mythical Man-Month, I was like YES. Brooks states that “conceptual integrity is the single most important consideration in system design,” and I agree with him completely. My understanding of this principle is so visceral that I have trouble articulating it, but I’ll try: you have gained comprehension of a problem. You grok it. You have a coherent form in your head and you can communicate it to others. You can see the whole. You can see its anatomy, the joints, where it comes apart. It is clear, it is beautiful, it is right. And if you don’t have conceptual integrity, you and your colleagues will fumble along indefinitely until you achieve it. Your results, if you have any, will be awkward and fragile. Try looking around your environment, and see if you can spot the artifacts that exhibit conceptual integrity and the ones that don’t.

Medium size: Archimedes said something like “give me a lever long enough and I will pry the world off its hinges.” We build microscopes and telescopes to see things that are small and far away; radio equipment to perceive bands of light we can’t otherwise perceive; trucks, ships, and airplanes to augment both our speed, endurance, and carrying capacity. In each of these cases, what we’re doing is bringing extremes to human scale—to medium size. We use statistics to make sense of seas of data, calculus to glean a concise understanding of the behavior of functions, algebras to understand the structures of sets. These systems collapse a different kind of extreme—unwieldy complexity—into coherent concepts that an individual person can contemplate. In some endeavors, you can’t expect to budge until you find the conceptual equivalent of Archimedes’ lever. And if you can’t find your lever, you will have to make one.

Isomorphism: This is probably my most important discovery in the past few years. An isomorphism is a fancy abstract mathematical concept which has enormous importance for how we learn and how we shape things. It goes by other names you might be more familiar with: metaphor, analogy, etc. But it’s stricter. It refers to a pair of functions which map between sets, the actual mechanics of connecting a metaphor to its referent and back again, with no significant loss of information. Using this principle it is possible to create cognitive tools for the express purpose of achieving conceptual integrity—you make that the task—and desired artifact (along with many other interesting and valuable artifacts) will simply drop out as a byproduct of the process. Make the goal to think more clearly, express more elegantly, and the widgets will become so stupidly obvious that you can bulldoze right through them.

How my principles have changed

Complete inversion. When people tell you you’re talented and smart, you start to believe it. I suspect a lot of people with the “rock-star” mentality believe that their produce exudes from some preternatural source inside them. I did. But as the problems got more complex, the magic started to become unreliable. It’s like this: no matter how hard you flap your arms, you’re never going to lift off the ground. It isn’t that you aren’t strong enough, it’s that you just aren’t the right shape. But what you can do is get some canvas and some bicycle parts and make an airplane. So I decided to ditch the narrative of hero-martyr and mint a new one that relies on representing and re-representing form, rather than magic.

Where I come from

I’m self-taught and I started out low-tech. As a tweenager I wanted to do special effects for movies—building scale models, etc. I’ve always gravitated toward making things. Then I got a computer and got really into 3D modeling and the underground BBS art scene. Then the web started to pick up steam. I got really inspired in the late 90s by John Maeda and his students at the MIT media lab, doing generative art, infoviz and other gorgeous stuff coming out of the aesthetics and computation group. My visual design from the late 90s to early oughts was always pretty heavily instrumented with code, which I had picked up for that purpose. Turns out knowing how to program is useful for other stuff too. So I followed the loot to a programming career from about 2001–2007.

At heart, I’m a designer. I don’t write apps. Virtually all of my programming experience is in infrastructure—system automation, content management, business intelligence, internal tools, etc. What’s interesting about these systems is that it really matters that you get them right, and surprisingly they don’t end up amounting to a lot of code.

The conventional “tech” scene is all about racing to market before your competitors beat you, or your VC cash runs out. I just don’t buy that narrative though, and for the past four years I’ve been working out an alternative. It’s been this massive haul through management theory, pedagogy, cybernetics, semiotics, economics, finance, cognitive science, sociology, and more math than I had ever expected I would need to learn. I also started writing. To offer a quasi-romantic summary, it’s like healing the dichotomy of talk and action, so that action becomes a language, albeit typically with more expensive words. I believe this idea is essential to form-giving activity going forward, because it is becoming increasingly important precisely what we create, instead of just that we create.

Kat Meyer

The publishing world houses a lot of lovely people, but Kat Meyer stands out a mile away. She’s a choreographer of giant events, an editor of words and gatherings, and a friend of stories.

I have one principle, it turns out. I had to think about this, because I never thought of it as a principle as much as a goal, but now I see that it’s both:

Make all of your decisions out of love, not out of fear.

If that sounds hokey, I assure you it isn’t. It’s pretty primal and it’s also really real. It comes up every day. Decisions you have to make about doing what you know you should be doing—doing what is close to your heart—or, going the easy route and doing what is not scary.

It’s so much easier to not do things you believe in. Things you really believe in are scary to act upon. And it’s so much easier to just avoid taking the scary route. Something as simple as picking up the phone and calling someone you really admire but are sure will never ever in a million years want to talk to you—that can be scary. Greenlighting—and being responsible—for a project that may not find an immediate audience but deserves one, that can be scary. But it’s the love that drives you to do it that you should listen to. That’s my principle. “Listen to the love, not the fear.”

There’s another guiding thought I carry around in my head that goads me to do stuff I would hesitate to do. It’s a quote from Diane Arbus: “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” That sums up why I try to get cool people on stage at conferences, or make sure that someone who has a really great idea meets someone who can help make that idea come to life, or even why I answer questions like this…we all have a lot to offer that is totally unique and totally matters.

How my principles have changed

In the past 10 years, these principles haven’t changed, but I do have much more evidence that they’re pretty good rules to live by.

And, I think I’m better at following them.

Some people, I guess, get less bold about things as they get older. Less willing to look like they don’t have it all figured out, or admit they need help, or maybe they do have it figured out…which is great for them, but I’m getting a lot bolder about admitting I have no clue and that the only things I do know are those defined by these sorta-kinda principles. If I listen to my heart and do my best to share those things I think are important—that’s a lot. It’s not easy, but it matters. It totally matters.

Where I come from

I’m from publishing. Editorial production for academic journals; marketing for a university press and a regional trade press; marketing and editorial for a children’s regional publisher and plush toy maker (not as fun as it sounds); marketing consultant for a “boutique” self publishing services company (that was enlightening); freelance social media consulting for all kinds of publishers; an honest go at trying to start a digital-first romance publishing company (not as easy as it sounds). And now a job (Chair for O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing Practice Area) that encompasses kind of all of the above and more—but is more focused on talking about publishing than actually publishing, though I get to do that too. Which means I get to talk to the people who are doing the stuff that makes the world a better place for creating and sharing content.

I like being from here. Publishing peeps are a tribe unlike any other. Word crafters, technologists, artists, storytellers, storysellers, curators, visionaries—all these people with a love for ideas and an inability to keep the ideas to ourselves. There are lots of good people in the world, but I feel at home here with these people. One could do worse.

Argo is a public experiment in developing technical and editorial frameworks for thoughtfully managed topical content projects that don’t require a huge team or a big budget. In the nearly two years since the project began, the team has been developing plans, testing them, and teaching each other, and they’ve been doing a lot of it live and in public via the Project Argo blog.

In the final stage of the project, the Argo team has also pulled off something almost as impressive as the network of sites themselves, which is a thirteenth site that collects and organizes everything they’ve learned and built. This extraordinary resource documents the open-source publishing tools they’ve made and the free-range editorial and technical knowledge they’ve developed. The site collects two main things: the team’s field-tested editorial practices, and their GPL-2.0 licensed code, built on WordPress and housed on GitHub.

Who’s responsible

Project Argo team is directed by Joel Sucherman and built by developer Marc Lavallee and designer/front-end dev Wes Lindamood. Snarkmarket’s Matt Thompson heads things up editorially. The project is funded by grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Knight Foundation, and executed by the Argo team plus staff from twelve NPR member stations.

Why it’s remarkable

If you care about editorial/content strategy, content management, blogging, or digital publishing, Project Argo is the kind of exemplar we’d be bone-stupid to ignore. The philosophy behind Argo will be familiar to content strategy and publishing people: Sucherman summed up the sites’ essential elements as “strong original content,” “community and conversation,” and “smart curation and aggregation.” Like other digital publishers, the Argo crew has faced the pressure to sacrifice genuinely strategic thought to the pace of the web:

When you work in digital media, you face a constant temptation to scorn strategy and ride the wave of chance instead. First of all, the Internet is always hungry, and any time spent planning is time you could have spent posting.
— “Wrap-up: Strategy and planning”

Instead of caving, the team insisted on real strategy and advance planning, and published their results. If you’ve ever done a project that remotely approaches Argo’s scale, you know how exhausting it can be to compose even basic documentation; it’s particularly impressive that the team has assembled such a substantial resource. By doing this kind of disciplined, practical content work—and doing it in public—the Argo team has provided the kind of case study material that people working on the corporate side have been yelling for for years. By documenting everything they’ve learned, making their code open source, and providing solid write-ups for every part of their project, they’ve set a new standard for all public content projects.

So why haven’t we heard more about it? The project has been covered extensively in the journalism world by outlets like the Nieman Journalism Lab, which is produced by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, and Guardian News and Media’s paidContent.org, which focuses on “the economics of digital content.” And of course, as a public media project, it’s received a lot of attention from other major news sources, mostly in the US—but mostly within journalism-about-journalism circles. Outside of that world, it deserves a lot more attention than it has received. Happily, the new resource site is likely to change that.

Where to begin

The content collected on argoproject.org ranges from the explicitly tactical (e.g. short, geeky Twitter tips) to meditative examinations of what it means to write online, and how that should affect our daily efforts:

Distillation, synthesis and hierarchy are all prized qualities in online writing. Where a newspaper story might demand a narrative transition, readers on the Web are perfectly all right with bullet points. Great long-form writers package mountains of information into an elegantly shaped, smooth and flowing story. Great bloggers, on the other hand, unpack complex information into discrete points and lay those out in concise and orderly fashion. If he weren’t busy being President, I imagine Barack Obama would have made a terrific blogger. Danah Boyd is an extraordinarily nuanced thinker, yet her writings and speeches are marvelously easy to parse.
— “What constitutes a ‘bloggy sensibility’?”

The team also magically avoids the attention-leeching dullness that plagues a lot of documentation. A video webinar, for example, breaks down content planning using game-world terms: long-term editorial strategy turns into the World Domination Plan, monthly planning becomes the Quest Narrative, and weekly/daily planning is (as we all know) Feeding The Beast. It’s practical, memorable, and exactly the kind of editorial choice that keeps you going further down the rabbit hole of Argo posts.

If you’re new to Argo, start with the wrap-ups, like the blogging post that covers all the classic questions about frequency, tone, and focus. If you’re more interested in the code (and rationale) of open-source content management, check out their custom-built plugins and themes.

Show your work

In the last year or so, as hacker/maker culture has begun to make inroads into newsrooms, journalism-tech teams have turned dozens of internal efforts into open source code and public documentation that serves the wider community. Project Argo’s Thompson is among those explaining why more open sharing of processes, code, and theory is good for everyone, for reasons both selfish and altruistic.

It’s one of our guiding principles at Contents that shared information—and especially information shared freely on the web, outside of closed conference talks, expensive books, and locked journals—makes us all smarter. So perhaps the next move from those of us working outside of media and journalism is to work against the closed-by-default assumptions of our own industries and niches. As Thompson writes:

…once this movement started to get a foothold, whatever cultural resistance might have prevented newsrooms from opening up their processes and toolkits to potential competitors started to wither away. Now that organizations from the New York Times to the Bay Citizen to ProPublica to the Guardian are showing their work, it’s easier for coders in every newsroom to say, “We should do this too.”

The gift of Project Argo’s resources and practices marks an opportunity to move more industries toward openness, but this sort of public learning and teaching doesn’t schedule or pay for itself. Genuinely helpful public resources appear when we recognize their value and set aside resources to make them happen. Whether we’re coding, editing, or running projects, that’s something each of us can work toward in the year to come.

“It’s very important to consider your content from your user’s perspective. Is it written so that your target audience will understand and relate to it?”

In Kristina Halvorson’s book, she reminds us to consider our target audience when writing content for them. Who that audience is will, of course, depend on your particular site and its goals. But if your target audience includes the general public, you may want to consider that nearly half of them may have low literacy skills.

That’s right. Half.

Don’t believe me? I don’t blame you, it’s a shocking number. But for proof, just check out the results of the National Adult Literacy Survey. It found that 21-23% of U.S. adults had highly deficient literacy skills while another 25-28% had very limited literacy skills.[1] Those two are the groups it defines as having low literacy. The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development found similar levels of low literacy in North America, Australia, and most of Europe.[2]

What is low literacy?

The National Literacy Act of 1991 defines literacy as “the ability to read, write and speak English; compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job and in society; to achieve one’s goals; and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.” The basic skills needed for literacy include things like recognizing words fluently, understanding the structure of sentences and how they relate to each other, drawing appropriate inferences, applying information, and solving quantitative problems.

A person with low literacy skills will have a harder time doing things like filling out a job application, interpreting a bus schedule, or understanding when to take medications.

Low literacy does not mean illiteracy. But it used to. As recently as 1979, the U.S. Census Bureau defined as illiterate anyone who hadn’t finished the fifth grade.[3] In the 1800s you only had to be able to sign your name to be considered literate. We now view literacy as something that exists in gradations, not as something you either have or don’t have.

Who are these people?

There are many misconceptions about low literacy, what it means, and whom it affects. While you might assume that only those who didn’t finish high school or speak English as a second language have low literacy skills, you’d be wrong. Although minority groups are disproportionately affected by low literacy, most of those with low literacy skills in the United States are white and native-born.[4] Completing high school doesn’t get you out of the woods either: a person’s literacy skills tend to be three to five grade levels lower than the last school year completed.[5] The elderly tend to have much worse rates of low literacy skills, with nearly 35% of US residents aged 60-65 considered not functionally literate.[6]

Its important to note that low literacy doesn’t indicate a lack of intelligence, but a lack of skills. Reading, writing, and comprehension skills are underdeveloped in people who have low literacy, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be developed.[7] Think of it this way: I may not be the best typist, what with my 20-word-per-minute rate, but just because I’m not good at typing doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything wrong with me or that I’m dumb—it simply means I haven’t developed that skill.

Think you can tell who has low literacy skills by simply looking at or talking to them? You might not be as successful as you’d expect. Practitioners in the medical profession frequently deal with patients who have low literacy skills. Yet when physicians at one women’s health clinic were asked to identify which of their patients were very low-literacy (defined in this study as reading below a third-grade level) they only did so successfully 20% of time.[8]

It’s so difficult to tell when someone has low literacy skills for two main reasons:

• They’ve developed coping mechanisms that hide their condition.
• They don’t think of themselves as being poor readers.

In one study, two-thirds of those who admitted having reading difficulties had never told their spouse; 19% had never told anyone.[9] Because of the stigma associated with poor reading skills, most people won’t. Instead they’ll come up with strategies to avoid reading, like saying they’ve left their glasses at home or that they usually leave the work of filling out forms to a family member.

Most poor readers also view their own reading skills as adequate. In the National Adult Literacy Survey, 66 to 75% of adults in the very lowest skill level described themselves as being able to read or write English “well” or “very well.” Of those in the next lowest skill level, 93-97% described themselves this way.[10]

We’re all low-literacy (at times)

Ever screw up a recipe because you were rushing to finish before the guests arrived and mistook “t” for “T”? Ever been confused while in a foreign country trying to figure out how to use public transportation to get to the Flughafen (airport)? Then you’ve experienced some of the same situations and exhibited some of the same behaviors as people with low literacy skills. When people are tired, under stress, or just plain busy, they may have fewer cognitive resources to bring to the task at hand. And that affects word recognition, inference, problem solving—all the skills you use for reading and understanding. Let me tell you a story from my own experience.

When my son was four years old, he had his tonsils removed. In about 1-2% of cases, patients experience post-surgical bleeding. And that is exactly what happened after my son woke from his nap about a week after the surgery, his mouth full of blood, stains on his sheets and clothes. I called the surgeon’s office, and they sent me to the emergency room at St. Christopher’s Hospital in Philadelphia, where his surgeon would stop the bleeding.

In my panic, I forgot to ask for the hospital’s address, so I looked it up on Google, wrote down the first result I saw, got in the car, and started driving. When I arrived at that address half an hour later, there was no hospital. The address I had written down was for the St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children Foundation, in west Philadelphia. The hospital, my intended destination, was nearly 45 minutes away in north Philadelphia.

The story has a happy ending—I turned out to be a short drive from a closer children’s hospital—but my frustration levels at myself, Google, and whoever wrote the foundation’s home page were through the roof. It was also, as evidenced by the hospital bill, a rather expensive mistake.

This is classic low-literacy behavior: picking the first plausible answer without confirming that it’s the correct or best answer. I don’t have low literacy skills, but for that afternoon, because of the high-stress situation, I behaved like I did.

It’s tempting to think that audiences are coming to our content with the basic skills needed to comprehend and interpret it. That may simply not be the case. Part of “consider[ing] your content from your user’s perspective” is understanding what reading skills the user brings to the equation and writing to accommodate them.

Strategies of low-lit readers

There’s a lot of stuff going on in your brain when you read. First you have to recognize the words in front of you by associating the printed word with the spoken word it represents, a process called decoding. Beginning readers start by recognizing letters. More proficient readers can move past letter-by-letter reading to recognizing individual words. The second part of the process is comprehension—interpreting the meaning of all those sentences and paragraphs.

People with low literacy skills have difficulty understanding what they read because they’re spending so much effort on decoding—word and letter recognition—that they have few cognitive resources left to interpret meaning. They may read every word put in front of them, but because they don’t have much left to attend to comprehension, they take little meaning from what they read.

When you observe someone who has low literacy skills reading, you’ll likely see some of the following behaviors:

• Reading one word at a time: Observe an eye tracking test and you’ll see that most people fixate on one word out of every three or four. But low-lit readers may fixate on every single word. By spending all their cognitive resources on word recognition, low-lit readers may have little left over to interpret what they’ve read.
• Taking things literally: Being able to apply what you’ve read to your situation is one of the literacy skill sets. Unskilled readers don’t do this very well, particularly with abstract concepts based on written text. They tend to think in concrete terms.[11] Because they take things so literally, they may not realize that stories or examples used in written text to illustrate a point actually apply to them.
• Avoiding reading altogether: Low-literacy readers will judge whether it’s even worth their time to attempt to read. They may skip difficult words or entire chunks of text and miss the information they were looking for in the first place.
• Satisficing: A combination of the words “satisfy” and “suffice,” this refers to the tendency of unskilled readers to stop reading as soon as they’ve found the first plausible answer to what they were looking for, even if it isn’t the best answer or even the correct answer.
• Retaining little: People with low literacy skills may not be able to store as much information in their short-term memory. Adults with adequate literacy skills can store around seven independent chunks of information at a time in short-term memory.[12] The number for poor readers may be closer to five or fewer.[13] That becomes a problem when you include lots of information (more than five to seven chunks) and expect readers to remember it. When working memory is full but more stuff is coming our way, our brains don’t just discard some of what’s in there, it all gets dumped. So it’s not a good idea to include lots of information in text and hope that some of it will stick; it probably won’t.

Accommodating low-literacy readers

You might be feeling like there is little you can do to accommodate unskilled readers. But take heart: there are plenty of ways to present information that make it easier (if not exactly easy) for low-literacy adults to understand and use it.

• Make it easy to read: Writing text at an appropriate level can help to ensure that the reader has a better chance of understanding and being able to use the information. Plain language guidelines like using common words and shorter sentences will help.
• Make it look easy to read: As important as making information easy to read is making it look easy to read. Designing a simple layout with lots of white space, type that is large enough to be easily read, and headings that provide visual cues about the content will make the interface less intimidating.
• Include only what’s important: Given that it takes so much effort required by low-lit readers to decode text, much less interpret and apply it, you should only cover information they need to know, not what’s nice to know. Focus first on actions the user should do, not the theory behind why it should be done.
• Be consistent: Using synonyms (for example, alternating between using “dairy” and “milk” at different points in text to describe dietary restrictions for a medication) requires additional cognitive resources. What is often obvious to skilled readers—like using two different words to mean the same thing—requires more work for poor readers to decipher.
• Provide feedback: Let users know there are a certain number of steps to achieve a desired result and where they are in the process; in other words, provide a light at the end of the tunnel. Provide validation whenever possible. Otherwise, low-lit users may opt out.

Why it matters

Crafting information so that it meets the needs of your audience is hard. Audiences can be inconvenient and unwieldy. They’re rarely homogenous. They probably don’t know what we know. If they did, they wouldn’t need us to fill in the gaps, would they? Writing to accommodate people with low literacy skills may feel like introducing a new set of requirements, but it isn’t really, because we’ve always had a large population with low literacy skills. Those results from the NALS? They don’t really change much from decade to decade.

People with low literacy skills have always been part of our audience. They’ve always needed their information presented clearly, plainly, and simply so they can succeed in understanding and using it. Most of us just didn’t know it. But now we do.

Another common question, “Won’t dumbing down the content make it unpleasant for everyone else?” First, let’s get one thing straight. You’re not “dumbing down” anything, you’re simplifying it. Second, accommodating low-literate adults does not come at the expense of more adept readers. In fact, crafting your content to accommodate this audience has the added benefit of making information easier for everyone to read, understand, and use. Everybody appreciates clarity. So I say the answer to this is a resounding “no.” (For a quantitative comparison of task success, time-on-task and satisfaction for low- vs. average-lit participants using a site designed for low-lit users, read about the study described in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox article on low literacy.[14])

And, of course, there’s the self-serving reason revealed by my experience driving to the hospital: one day, that “low-literacy” reader may be you.

For more information

There are dozens of excellent resources available on designing and writing for unskilled readers. Here are a few great places to start:

• Teaching Patients with Low Literacy Skills by Ceci and Len Doak. If you read nothing else about low literacy, you must read this. Seriously.
• Clear & Simple: Developing Effective Print Materials for Low-Literate Readers published by the National Cancer Institute
• Caroline Jarrett’s Design to Read site
• Kathryn Summers’ research on Reading and Navigational Strategies of Web Users with Lower Literacy Skills (PDF) and Designing Web-based Forms for Users with Low Literacy Skills
• My presentation on Recruiting Users with Low Literacy Skills

References

1. Kirsch I, Jungeblut A, Jenkins L, et al. Adult Literacy in America: A first look at the findings of the National Adult Literacy Survey, 3rd edition. Vol 201. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education; US Department of Education; 2002. ↩
2. Literacy in the Information Age: Final Report of the International Adult Literacy Survey. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2000. (Graphic retrieved from http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_lit_adu_at_low_lit_lev-education-literacy-adults-low-level) ↩
3. Werner, L. “Illiteracy rate for adults in U.S. is 13%, census study shows.” Houston Chronicle 21 April 1986, p.3. ↩
4. Kirsch I, Jungeblut A, Jenkins L, et al. Adult Literacy in America: A first look at the findings of the National Adult Literacy Survey. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education; US Department of Education; 1993. ↩
5. Doak CC, Doak LG, Root JH. Teaching Patients with Low Literacy Skills. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co; 1996. ↩
6. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Resources to promote older adult literacy. Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985. ↩
7. Zarcadoolas C, Blanco M, Boyer J. Unweaving the web: an exploratory study of low-literate adults’ navigation skills on the World Wide Web. Journal of Health Communication, 2002. 7: 309-324. ↩
8. Lindau S, et al. The association of health literacy with cervical cancer prevention knowledge and health behaviors in a multiethnic cohort of women. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. 2002. ↩
9. Parikh N, et al. Shame and health literacy: the unspoken connection. Patient Education and Counseling. 1996. ↩
10. Kirsch, 2002. ↩
11. Clear and Simple: Developing Effective Print Materials for Low-Literate Readers ↩
12. Miller G. (1956) The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97. ↩
13. Doak. ↩
14. Nielsen J. Lower-Literacy Users: Writing for a Broad Consumer Audience. 14 March 2005 ↩

I both cherished and despised this nightly ritual. While the books were marvelous—all fluttering bonnets and rugged adventures—I was perplexed by the ease with which my mom turned those strings of letters into beautiful words and sentences. How does she know what they say?

It was the most infuriating thing in my little life.

A quarter century later, this insatiable curiosity—the desire to be in on the joke, to see the answer, to have all the pieces to the puzzle—remains one of my guiding principles. It’s what turned me from a discontented writer into a content strategist, from a doer into a questioner.

It’s likely that you’re familiar with this as well. Whether you work as an editor, publisher, writer, strategist, or other content person, odds are that curiosity—the desire to know all the things—propelled you to where you are today.

Yet curiosity is tricky. It’s the first thing that pushes us forward, but it’s also one of the first to hold us back: to keep us from shipping good ideas because we’re too busy lusting after unachievable ones.

If we want curiosity to take us further, this first principle demands a second look.

Curiosity in content work

Back in 2010, Ahava Leibtag listed curiosity as the number one trait a content strategist should have—the trait that “allows us to see how all the different pieces fit together.”

It’s no surprise—after all, it’s difficult to make content work for our users and organizations without both asking questions and caring about the answers. Each day, whether editing or evaluating, writing or wrangling teams, we ask:

• Why is this here?
• What’s important?
• Who cares?
• What next?
• What if?

As Australian graphic designer Alex Charchar recently wrote in The Manual #2, creative work comes from “the impact of all that surrounds us,” and it is only when we “cast our intellectual and experiential nets wide—and wider still” that we can cull our varied influences into effective approaches:

We are not simply stylists or specialists but expert practitioners who can translate an organization’s abstract concept into a meaningful message that evokes the desired response. It’s curiosity, then, that makes for the magnificent creative.

Curiosity is the prerequisite—the force that exposes us, in Charchar’s words, to “new ways of solving problems, expressing answers, and thus speaking to the world.” Without it, we’d never slog through content audits or create workable publishing plans or research rich, meaningful stories or do anything else worthwhile in our field.

Left unchanneled, curiosity can also lead us into a variety of traps.

Shallowness

When we are curious about everything, we often wander through every topic that interests us without settling in to make any of them our own. This can turn us into dilettantes who take on too many clients and dabble in too many subjects, unable to give anything the attention it deserves.

Indecisiveness

When undirected curiosity takes over research and discovery processes, it can lead us further and further afield as we explore ever-widening circles and increasingly distant tangents. When we find ourselves constantly extending our inquiries, we become unable to move from researching or interviewing to decision making and problem solving—and we sacrifice the opportunity to apply what we’ve learned.

Dissatisfaction

When we are curious, we want more: more information, more knowledge, more success. That hunger can turn on us, leaving us feeling let down by every project we finish because it wasn’t, somehow, “more.” When we discount our successes because they don’t measure up to our constantly expanding ideals, we lose the chance to celebrate our work, to take stock of progress, and to share our ideas with others.

When we fall into these traps, we become victims of our own curiosity. Rather than using it to inform and strengthen our decisions, it becomes nothing more than a crutch that allows us to avoid the hard parts: making tough calls, fixing problems, getting on with things.

If curiosity is our first principle, then we now need to learn to make it principled—to foster curiosity that pushes our work forward, instead of holding us back.

Building better curiosity

In mathematics, first principles are called axioms—self-evident starting points from which further logic may be derived: through any two points there is exactly one line; if a = b and b = c, then a = c.

Axioms alone do little to solve problems. They are only the building blocks of mathematical inquiry: the foundations upon which centuries of theorems and proofs rest. The same is true for our curiosity. It’s simply a starting point—a beginning to work from.

By concentrating our curiosity where it matters, we can build on it more effectively, exchanging the infinite world of wandering and wondering for a more useful one where we get things done.

Let’s stop doing everything our curiosity asks, and instead start asking some things of it.

Make space for depth

Recently, I did a bit of editorial work for a client in the radiology field, admittedly, a topic about which I know little. While looking up what, precisely, the difference between a CT scan and an MRI was, I clicked on a link to information about barium, often used in these procedures. That led to revisiting the entire periodic table, which led to visits to a half-dozen Wikipedia pages about basic chemical structures. Fifteen minutes later, I realized I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.

As my curiosity took me further and further from the task at hand, what did I gain? Nothing but tiny morsels.

Sound all too familiar? Then you may be a dabbler, too.

Tidbits about a thousand topics are great for cocktail parties and business lunches, but this digressive approach yields only the shallowest knowledge. Instead, we must carve out time to go deep into the topics that interest us most—and not necessarily because we will become specialists in them. Rather, channeling our curiosity toward depth allows us to seek connections between ideas, to sort through complex data, and to draw our own conclusions—skills we’ll need for every project we touch.

This requires us to sometimes restrain ourselves from the lure of endless links, yes. But much more importantly, we need to make space in our lives for this sort of curiosity to flourish: time to take a class, read a book, or study a language. When we do, we’ll be more capable of tapping into topics quickly and understanding them more fully, our minds trained to prefer depth to breadth.

Focus the questions

Any strategy work requires that we ask questions: of colleagues, clients, users, and the content itself. But questions alone don’t move us closer to decisions—and in fact, sometimes they keep us from them.

Take the content audit, for example, a staple of content strategy research and discovery work. At their core, our audits document answers to a series of questions about each piece of content associated with a project: Where’s it from? Who made it? Who manages it? When was it created? Has it been updated? Are people using it? Is it working?

The more questions it attempts to answer, the longer the audit takes—and the more time we put between recognizing there’s a problem and actually solving it. To stay on track, we must learn to frame our questions in ways that cut to the core of the problem—that begin by casting our nets “wide—and wider still,” but narrow quickly, pinpointing answers along the way.

Yet once we’re in audit mode, it’s easy to start over-documenting, adding new analysis points for every interesting piece of information you find—until we have an Excel file so far-reaching it’s overwhelming to complete and unwieldy to work with.

Margot Bloomstein’s call to build a message architecture before we audit can help prevent this. By clarifying the messages we want to send, we can more easily select audit criteria to match, such as voice and tone, topic depth, and calls to action. It’s also often helpful to split discovery work into two phases: the open period, where we gain a broad view to identify the shape and scope of the problem—where we allow ourselves to go broad—and the closed period, where we dig into the specifics.

Get uncomfortable

Curiosity is inherently unsafe, always forcing us out of known lands and into unexplored regions. What drives us forward is a desire to push past this discomfort: to get to know our unknowns, and to become comfortable within them.

But it’s precisely this desire to get rid of the discomfort that leads to our dissatisfaction—because the fact is, you can’t eliminate unknowns. The moment we reach a plateau, a new peak will always emerge in the distance: another user test to run, another source to interview, another approach to try. If I could just figure this out, I’d be sure.

Rather than staring forlornly at all those paths not yet taken, we need to learn to thrive within this discomfort—to accept that we don’t have all the information, and to take action anyway.

Mastering our curiosity

I don’t remember learning to read. It just happened one day: I ran up to my father waving a copy of Bugs Bunny and the Blue-Ribbon Carrot and proudly recited the entire tale.

The triumph was short lived. Out of my small victory unfolded a million new challenges: unfamiliar words to master, strange dialects to understand, complex concepts with which to grapple. I had devoured one book, but it wasn’t the one I craved.

Curiosity keeps us hungry. It leads us to tackle new challenges when the easy questions have all been answered. It makes us wonder how things could be better—even when they are, if we’d just pause to admit it, pretty damn good already.

Yet we also need to get things done: to assemble the story, document the plan, and fix the workflows. We need to master the Blue-Ribbon Carrot, not spend all our time wishing it were the Little House on the Prairie.

When we channel our curiosity, we can joyfully inhabit the space between what we know and what we do not—the space where pragmatism and idealism meet.

Our second issue is a call to take a breath and remember what it is that we’re doing, and why. You won’t find any New Year’s resolutions, but you will encounter many different angles on the idea of first principles: the ideas and positions on which everything else is built. We don’t often have time to consider all the underlying stuff that gives our work shape, character, and meaning, and that time won’t ever appear on its own. But we can choose it. Even in the crazy spells—and maybe especially then, when we’re making so many important decisions.

We come from many different fields and traditions, and this issue’s contents reflect that fact. First, Sara Wachter-Boettcher kicks us off with an essay about the care and handling of professional curiosity. Later in the issue, we’ll have thoughts ranging from snack-sized to feast-worthy by writers who lead content strategy projects, write interfaces, develop reading applications, build information systems, and help shape the publishing world. We’ll also be launching the first official Contents project—a collaborative effort with some of our favorite thinkers that will, we hope, change industry practices in useful, principled ways.

Let’s talk

In our first issue, we introduced the Annotations that will end each issue we publish. For this, our second issue, we’d especially like to invite you to consider—and document—your own first principles: as blog posts, comments on our articles, tweets, or something else entirely. Send your links to @Contents throughout the issue, and we’ll collect a batch of them in this issue’s Annotations, come February. Please do join us.

— Erin

…bacteria increased their mutation rates dramatically when confronted with the “stress” of low energy supplies. When the living is good, Rosenberg’s research suggests, bacteria have less of a need for high mutation rates, because their current strategies are well adapted to their environment. But when the environment grows more hostile, the pressure to innovate—to stumble across some new way of eking out a living in a resource-poor setting—shifts the balance of risk versus reward involved in mutation. The risk of your offspring dying from some deadly mutation doesn’t look quite as bad if they’re going to die of starvation anyway.”

Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven B. Johnson

“Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.”

Language, Thought, and Reality, Benjamin Lee Whorf

“My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.”

Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan

“When treasures are recipes they are less clearly, less distinctly remembered than when they are tangible objects. They evoke however quite as vivid a feeling—that is, to some of us who, considering cooking an art, feel that a way of cooking can produce something that approaches an aesthetic emotion. What more can one say? If one had the choice of again hearing Pachmann play the two Chopin sonatas or dining once more at the Cafe Anglais, which would one choose?”

The Cookbook of Alice B. Toklas, Alice B. Toklas

No one really owns a recipe. They get shared and disseminated through a love all humans share, of good food. Substitutions get made, volumes altered and flavors tweaked as the cook makes and remakes a dish. It becomes theirs to make for others and share anew: Katie’s lasagna verde or Stu’s white chocolate tiramisu.

I once found a small notebook tucked in the back of an old Diary of Household Management with an array of peculiar sounding dishes written in a loopy cursive, all with Anglicized names like “cream chicken a la orange” and “dinner party trifle.” I like to imagine that, in some Abigail’s Party sort of world, these were the tried and tested recipes shared among the wives of middle management businessmen, for those times when The Boss came round for dinner and they laid the nice china out.

At the start of 2011, I became a bit obsessed with tracking down, or creating, a version of classic dishes that I would be happy enough to write down in my personal book of recipes. March: Relly’s sausage casserole. June: Relly’s Wimbledon pie. That kind of thing. I like to think that one day I will publish this self-credited culinary genius in some form, with the margin notes, floury creases, buttery fingerprints, and all. It might take me some time as I’ve only got twelve recipes in it at the moment, but—as with my imaginary hostess and her dinner party trifle—these are my tried and tested dishes: the ones I would serve if you came over for dinner. The recipes my children will learn from being with me in the kitchen.

As an example, November found me obsessively making gingerbread men. I poured over recipes in my books and online and looked through that modern equivalent of margin scribbling—the reviews of people who had followed the original poster’s suggestions. Through this, I learned that one of the recipes came up better using a finer flour than the suggested brand. Another commenter had suggested a substitute for an ingredient that isn’t as common in the UK as it is in the US.

Combining these two suggestions with a third recipe I found elsewhere, I came up with the Holy Grail of Gingerbread Men. Caramelly but spicy, soft but chewy. It’s in the book now. When my boys come to read it in years hence they will know I made eight batches of cookies in four weeks, that I think a blend of light and dark muscovado makes for good color and not being too heavy-handed with the sugar pays off in the baking. They will find a photo of them aged five and two, with sticky brown sugar round their broadly grinning faces and know that it was worth the four hours to prove the dough.

The ephemeral web

I worry, though, that we might be losing a lot of this hand-me-down social history to the transience of social networks. I worry that baby albums uploaded to some currently popular site, with no backup, might be lost. I worry that videos of family reunions might be rendered inaccessible when one service provider acquires another.

I don’t want to be the killjoy. I love the sharing. But I also want to educate people in the importance of owning their own stuff, even if simply offline. If we don’t, there is a good chance that children will grow up and find that much of their personal history is either lost or impossible to find in a sea of “graduation” photo albums, or “baby’s first steps” videos.

Back it up

So here’s a request, from me to you. These coming holidays, forget the troubles of CMS systems in the wild or the responsibilities of heading up an editorial team of 50. Go home and teach a parent, a friend, a someone somewhere, how to keep a backup and why it’s important. Because what is “shared content” today will become family history tomorrow, if only we can treasure it.

In exchange, I’ll give you my Ultimate Gingerbread Men recipe. Pay attention to the notes:

Using a five inch cutter, this will give you around 16-20 gingerbread men. Gingerbread improves from standing in the tin, so don’t worry that you need to eat them all at once, but I usually split the dough and make one batch of 8-10 and use the other batch up a few days later.

The secret to this recipe is letting the dough get cold for as long as possible. This is, of course, very difficult to do when you have small people clamoring to help out, but it is what makes the dough strong enough to withstand the efforts of any two-year-old amateur pastry chef. Maybe throw this together in the morning while supervising breakfast and leave in it the fridge until that 3 p.m. lull.

Relly’s Ultimate Gingerbread Men

• 350g / 12oz plain flour (ideally Italian 00 flour), sifted
• 1 level tsp of bicarbonate of soda
• 2 level tsp of ground ginger
• 100g / 4oz butter, unsalted, room temperature
• 100g / 4oz light muscovado sugar
• 75g / 2oz dark muscovado sugar
• 4 tablespoons of golden syrup (corn syrup would be closest equivalent in North America but you can buy it in international stores)
• 1 large egg, room temperature, beaten
• Currants to decorate (or colored icing pens if you’re feeling particularly exuberant and/or have small children to entertain)

1. Measure the flour, bicarb, and ginger into a bowl. Rub in the butter with your fingertips until you get something a bit like breadcrumbs. If you’re using a free-standing mixer, dump the mix into the bowl. At this point, fix the paddle and stir in the sugar on low, working out the lumps. By hand, add the sugar and stir with a wooden spoon until well blended.
2. Add the syrup and the egg, and mix to form a dough (you don’t need the dough hook for this as it isn’t anywhere near as heavy as bread dough). It will be smooth and slightly shiny when it’s ready. At this point knead lightly with your hands to check for lumps and for the sheer pleasure of knowing you are making something with your very own hands.
3. Divide the dough into two. Wrap in cling film and leave for at least four hours but preferably overnight.
4. When ready to bake, pre-heat your oven 190c /375f or 170c /325f with a fan oven. (Gas mark five if that’s your style.) Lightly grease three trays if you’re baking the whole lot, two if you’re splitting.
5. Lightly flour the surface and roll out one batch of the dough to a thickness of about half a centimeter / quarter of an inch. Dip your cutter into flour to cut out as many shapes as you can, pull away excess dough (resist the temptation to squeeze it too much. You want it cold, remember!) and lift your men on to the trays. Repeat until you run out of dough or it starts to stick (where you can return it for another 15 minutes in the fridge, while baking the current batch). Use currants for eyes and buttons if desired.
6. Bake in the pre-heated oven for about 10 minutes, until they get a nice tan. Cool on the tray a little (while cutting the next batch) and then lift to a wire rack and allow to cool completely. Oh, okay, until the currants cool enough for you to jam one in with a lovely cup of tea. Aaaah!

That’s a daunting task. Content wants to be messy. It wants to roll around in the mud. It wants to be gross. Our job is to pull it together—to take the guesswork out of creating and curating it—and to treat content work as something closer to a science.

There’s always been a need for methodology in content. From the invention of written language to the printing press, our communication processes have been codified. Sometimes, that codification takes a long time: the march from Gutenberg’s original printing press to Richard March Hoe’s rotary press took 400 years. Now, we need to create new methodologies in days.

But we can’t slap a rigid structure on our processes and expect them to work. In our field, there’s no single set of rules, and there’s no progress without a little bit of guessing and testing. There’s room for wiggling. But before we can wiggle, we need to know how much space we’ve got to wiggle in.

Methodology: A Definition

In strictly academic terms, a methodology is the formal documentation—whether on paper or in your head—of a set of processes for a given field. The classic example of a methodology is the scientific method:

1. Ask a question
2. Research the question
3. Form a hypothesis
4. Test the hypothesis
5. Communicate the findings or change the hypothesis

We often mistake processes for methodologies. Think of it this way: processes—the steps you take—are like the directions in a recipe. They give you structure and lead you toward a result. They tell you to let the dough rise now, form a boule, and bake for 45 minutes. The methodology combines those steps with a deeper purpose, providing you—and your clients, and your partners, and anyone who comes in contact with you—the why to your recipe’s how.

This combination of processes and reason gives us a working blueprint with which to dive into any project. The exact format your methodology takes is yours and yours alone, but the essential form is consistent: a chronological map of what it means to do your work. It could be a list of tasks and their justifications. It could be a checklist. It could be a book.

Regardless of the format, your methodology should lead you through any point in the progress by answering two constant questions: what comes next and why are we doing it?

Why Methodologies Matter

First off, a methodology gives you a cheat sheet to explain how you work. Knowing what steps you’ll need to take—and having them written out in a formal document—provides you with a packaged, easily adapted explanation of what exactly it is that you do. For contractors or consultants, this is crucial for writing proposals: content work is largely abstract and clients want to know where their money is going. But even if you’re not pitching clients, the people you work for and with will appreciate knowing why you do what you do.

Once the project has begun, methodologies promote consistency with clients and team members. There is no more guesswork: step one, we meet; step two, we brainstorm; step three, we prototype. A methodology gives your client (or employers) confidence that you know what you’re doing and helps partners understand their role throughout the process.

Finally, your methodology keeps you honest. We’re humans, and humans like to skip things. With each step explicitly outlined, you can better decide which steps to skip. You can refer back to the methodology when you’re questioning your process, too. It’s a custom-designed lifeboat when you’re in over your head, that’s more valuable than any book or blog.

Ultimately, a methodology provides structure and legitimacy. It provides an argument for why That Thing You Do is worth attention and respect, which in turn allows you to present your skills in a way that instills trust. Otherwise, as Stephen Lamble mentions in his article “Documenting the Methodology of Journalism,” a deficient or apparently deficient methodology leaves your work vulnerable to attack. On the subject of the contents of a journalism methodology, Lamble writes:

That list of elements should relate to the specialist language and culture of journalism. It would include (but not be limited to) essential joumalistic words and concepts such as: balanced, fair and accurate accounts of events; adherence to ethical standards; news values; research and investigation; seeking truth and providing a contextual interpretive framework by attempting to answer who, what, when, where, why and how; reporting and storytelling through text, narrative and images; good writing; legal awareness; historic perspective; political awareness; information, education and entertainment; objectivity; public interest; and public benefit.

At the design agency where I work, our content strategy methodology has become a full member of the team, keeping us in check and giving us easy access to answers for our clients and developers. When I need to remind a client—or myself—what we’re doing next and why, I simply pull out the content strategy methodology document, adapt and excerpt it as needed, and send it off in an email.

Methodologies Are Personal

There’s just one problem with all of this: a methodology can’t simply be plucked out of thin air. You can’t just find your methodology. You can find someone else’s methodology, but it probably won’t work for you. And especially if you’re doing something relatively new, it shouldn’t work for you—at least, not in the form in which it has been presented elsewhere.

The example I like to use is how I’ve adapted Margot Bloomstein’s Message Matters presentation. At its core, Margot uses an adapted card sort to help determine a client’s message architecture—the hierarchy of their communication goals and how they should be communicated. Instead of sorting concepts, Margot sorts characteristics and tones.

The first time I performed Margot’s card sort, it went swimmingly. Until I presented my findings. Where I provided a list of message characteristics and tone suggestions, the client expected a literal message hierarchy, with full communications goals. In my context—with this client—there was confusion on the name of the process itself. I used Margot’s card sort without regard to my situation and position in the client relationship. I screwed up.

Next time I tried the card sort, I told the client we were helping develop a “tone hierarchy.” It made sense to them. And thus I had stolen and adapted Margot’s card sort for my personal methodology.

Great. So How Do I Do It?

There are three main steps.

One: Make a List

Write down all the things that you’re expected to do. If you’re having trouble thinking of everything, that’s okay. This process takes time, and you’ll have a chance to fill in the holes later.

Two: Organize It

With all your tasks laid out in front of you, you’ll begin seeing natural breaks that represent phases of the project. For help organizing your tasks and processes into an appropriate order, look at other methodologies from your field, and from other content-related fields, like the ones listed here.

Content strategy:

• Jeffrey MacIntyre’s presentation “Audit, Plan, Build, Grow: A Methodology for Content Strategy”
• The Google Knol for Content Strategy
• Erin Kissane’s The Elements of Content Strategy

Copywriting/marketing:

• Ginny Redish’s Letting Go of the Words
• Luke Sullivan’s Hey Whipple, Squeeze This
• Ogilvy on Advertising

Editorial:

• The Editor’s Companion
• Bay Area Editors’ Forum’s “What do Editors Do?” portal (Note: this is an old resource, but it’s full of information on the editorial process.)

Information architecture:

• Donna Spencer’s A Practical Guide to Information Architecture
• Information Architecture Institute’s IA Library
• User Interface Engineering’s interview with Indi Young: “Information Architecture the Adaptive Path Way”

Don’t see your favorite methodology here? Add it to the comments. We’d all love some help stealing from each other. The best discoveries often come from learning from other practices.

Three: Flesh It Out

As mentioned before, the goal of a methodology is to provide reason and consistency to the things we do. So expand on your list by answering these questions:

• What is the goal of this phase (or deliverable or event)?
• Why have we placed this phase/deliverable/event at this part of the methodology?
• What is the expected outcome for this phase/deliverable/event?
• What resources have we borrowed from for this phase/deliverable/event?

“Wait,” you may ask. “Do I really need to write it down?”

Yeah. You should. You don’t need to, I guess, but writing it down makes your methodology more concrete. Content strategist Clinton Forry started his blog, Content-ment, as a way to write down his processes and discoveries. The blog gradually became an exercise in brainstorming. “The very act of writing these things down in a coherent fashion sparks even more ideas,” Clinton says.

With your processes and justifications written out, you’ll get a good snapshot of just what it is you’re supposed to be doing. But it’s not complete. Not yet.

You’re Never Not Changing

Jeffrey MacIntyre says, “The first time I put together a content strategy methodology, it was akin to a galactic gap analysis.” He explained that creating a methodology from nearly five years spent collecting ideas from former employers, conferences, and the internet allowed him to visualize not only what he did, but also to see which areas needed work—whether that meant expanding his own practice or finding partners and consultants who could help him.

The initial creation of a methodology may only take a piece of paper and a good chunk of time, but it’s the adaptation and enrichment of the methodology that provides the biggest benefit. And that takes equal parts attention, prediction, and experience.

Adaptation via Attention

Stealing from others means more than just saving a blog post for later. It means taking entire concepts and dropping them into the holes in your methodology. This is especially helpful for those moving into a new practice, or shifting from an agency setting to an individual consultancy—or anyone who’s bringing already-developed opinions and processes to a different area of the content map.

Throughout this article, there are links to people I’ve borrowed, pilfered and stolen from. In addition to those two, the first phases of our CS methodology includes snippets from and links to:

• Fiona Cullinan’s “How to Look for Content Clues in Your Analytics”
• Clare O’Brien at Confab—“What is Data-Informed Content Strategy?”
• Daniel Eizans—The entire Content Strategy Gut Checks series and his work on context
• Whitney Hess—“My Best Advice for Conducting User Interviews”
• Nokia N9′s UX Guidelines
• Stephanie Hay—“Designing for Content: Creating a Message Hierarchy”
• Chris Detzi—“How a Content Strategist and Information Architect Co-Conquered a Rapid Redesign”
• Jakob Nielsen—“Mini-IA: Structuring the Information About a Concept” and “Corporate Blogs: Front Page Structure”
• Dan Brown—“Letter to a Content Strategist”

Also:

• Erik Peterson’s The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators
• James Robertson’s Designing Intranets
• Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
• Heather Hedden’s The Accidental Taxonomist
• Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin

There are too many great resources to list in one article—and that’s the point I’m trying to make here. We’ve found that it’s best to gather a lot of information and use a little bit of everything. You may also notice that this list isn’t just a bunch of content-strategy-specific resources, either. We’ve tried to cast a net over the entire user experience field, and beyond.

And that’s just the stuff I’ve saved and integrated. There are even more from which I’ve snuck bits and pieces. For example, Tiffani Jones Brown’s “Making Things Hard” shaped a large part of our discovery session, though few of her questions still exist in their original form. The same goes for our process of determining client audiences and outcomes, which began from a small paragraph in C. David Gammel‘s book Online and On Mission. We expanded it by working with David on two projects, and the methodology has since evolved to the point that David might no longer recognize it.

Find the book about your field—probably the one named “An Introduction to [Your Field]“—and steal from it. Go to conferences and steal from the presenters. Follow industry leaders on Twitter and steal from them. Then, follow the links they give and steal from those. Read things from different content areas. Read things from different industries altogether. Steal widely and well, cite your sources when it’s appropriate, and adapt the ideas you’ve found to suit your own work.

While you’re at it, let your sources know you’re stealing from them. Want to see more great ideas? Tell that person how much those great ideas mean to you.

Adaptation via Prediction

Adapting a methodology requires an eye to the future and a bit of clairvoyance.

Before each project, look at your methodology and determine if you’ll need something more than what you’re already offering. For example, maybe you’ve never worked on a project that depends on mobile technology. If you make the rather safe prediction that mobile is going to be a thing in the future, you may want to begin adding mobile-friendly processes to your methodology.

Adaptation via Experience

According to University of Exeter professor Andy Wills’s study on predictive learning, we learn more rapidly from incorrect predictions than from correct ones. Our mistakes are lessons, without which we could never determine the benefits of tweaking our processes. In other words: mistakes are good. Make them, and make them often.

At our agency, we determined early on that content analysis—which we were doing as a part of our initial content inventory/audit process—was impossible to do well without knowing who our audiences were and what they were expecting from the sites we designed. We didn’t change any of the processes—we simply pulled the content analysis out and moved it to the end of the discovery phase, when we were better able to get a grip on site users and their needs.

This example highlights the need to constantly evaluate your methodology and be willing to change when things don’t go the way they should. Nothing kills a useful methodology like a stubborn, inflexible creator.

Go Forth and Methodolog-ize

We no longer have the luxury of fine-tuning our processes by making 400 years’ worth of mistakes. One person cannot make enough mistakes to shift the collective process. We must make mistakes together.

We are not the first to do what we’re doing, and we won’t be the last. It’s up to us to make things better, for ourselves and others.

If you’re on the internet and attending to content, you probably know that earlier this fall, Facebook launched several major changes in the way it collects, organizes, and displays user-generated content. Facebook’s content strategists work on the large scale: 800 million users; more than 900 million pages, groups, events, and community pages; 250 million new photos uploaded every day. Earlier this month, Tiffani Jones Brown gave us a behind-the-scenes look at the growing Facebook CS team, how they work, and how the company thinks about content.

Can you give us a quick sketch of content strategy at Facebook?

Right now we’re five strong: our manager Alicia Dougherty-Wold, Sarah Marx Cancilla, Evany Thomas, Amy Thibodeau, and me. We’re part of the design/UEX org, along with product design, communication design, research, and user interface engineers.

As far as how we work, we split our energy between site-wide content strategy initiatives that we work on together, and being embedded within individual product teams. We each work in a couple of different areas, which break down into a handful of features (like timeline, photos or music), and we’re very in-the-trenches with our teams as things develop toward launch.

At Facebook teams operate a bit like startups—they’re scrappy and have lots of autonomy over what they’re making—so a big part of our job is to bring a cohesive voice, tone, and content standards to our respective teams. We help keep things consistent and on-brand.

And within the team, what’s your role?

I’ve worked on a handful of features: news feed, music, subscribe, events, the iPad app, and a few others. I also help with our outreach, on getting out into the community to learn from lovely folks like the Contents team.

The way we’re assigned to projects really depends on our interests and talents, but we all do a bit of everything: writing UI copy, editorial, content planning, clarifying content goals, generating themes and messaging, naming and positioning features, etc. We’re always on the lookout for generalists who are great at both strategy and execution. As we grow, we may look to hire more specialists.

As for my role, I really like the “ethnographic” piece of the work—working with researchers and figuring out who we’re building for, why, and how to do it right. Beyond that, I’m pretty focused on editorial strategy, on getting the words and tone right.

How did you come to join the Facebook content strategy team?

I come from a design agency background. Before Facebook I ran Things That Are Brown with my husband Matt Brown and freelanced at Second and Park. Before that I worked at Blue Flavor.

We’d been busy at Things That Are Brown, working on projects for Microsoft, the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, and Dave Eggers’ non-profit 826 Seattle, when Facebook approached us about coming on full-time, and relocating from Seattle down to Palo Alto.

We knew great things were happening at Facebook, so we flew out to meet the design and content strategy teams. We’d talked before about wanting to work on a product, and I felt like I’d stumbled onto dream team island, where everyone was kind and bright and talented. By the time we headed back to Seattle, the idea of working at Facebook felt like an adventure.

Making the move was a tough choice since we felt we were just getting going with Things That Are Brown. After some soul searching, though, we decided this was exactly the kind of adventure and challenge we wanted. I’m eight months in, and it was absolutely the right choice—we’re still feeling the glow.

When I mention content strategy in the context of Facebook, a lot of people (outside the CS world) look at me like I’ve grown an extra head, because they’re not thinking of Facebook’s social sharing and user-generated content as a content strategy problem. Is there a sense, within Facebook, that the whole product is essentially concerned with content/publishing?

Yes. The things people share and the information our system produces to describe those things (both called stories) are central to Facebook’s social design, and have become even more so as the content strategy team has grown. Planning, creating, and maintaining these stories is a big part of our job.

For example, whenever we create a new feature like music, we spend a lot of time perfecting the stories that are produced when you use it. We have to ask ourselves things like this: When someone opts into our music product and listens to a song, do we publish a story about it? If so, what kind? And how is the story written? Is it “Tiffani Jones Brown listened to an album?” “Tiffani Jones Brown listened to Bjork on Rdio?” “Tiffani Jones Brown listened to Vespertine by Bjork on Rdio?” Which of those pieces of data are linked? Where do those links go? Where does this story appear? What happens when someone likes the story? Can they comment on it? Can they share it? Do I get notified about that? If I’m listening on Rdio and my friend doesn’t have Rdio, how can they listen, too?

We also have to make sure the stories for a particular feature knit together with stories from all the other features and apps on Facebook. Does this story make sense next to others in the news feed? Is it consistent with others across the site?  Does it “feel” like Facebook when you get this story?  

These are all content strategy questions about framing and dealing with user-generated content. The range of these questions is immense, and at the heart of what Facebook does.

What were (or are) the major content strategy or content-related challenges of the new Facebook timeline?

Evany was the content strategist on switching from profile to timeline, so I talked to her about some of the content challenges around this.

With the switch to timeline, we wanted to give people an easy way to capture the big events in their lives. While the standard status update is a handy way to capture stuff you’re doing and thinking about today, it isn’t a great tool for filling out stuff you did before you joined Facebook. This is where life events for timeline came in.

We needed to work closely with research to identify what types of events people think of as major life events, and to figure out the best way to refer to them. The challenge was to find names for each event that were broad enough to apply to a wide variety of situations, but not so broad that they didn’t resonate. For example, “Had a Baby” excluded people who adopt, whereas the more inclusive “New Family Member” didn’t match how people think about the arrival of a child. (In testing, people would breeze past “New Family Member” and instead select “Other” and enter “Had a Baby” by hand.)

With timeline there was also the problem of changing 5000 instances of the word “profile” to “timeline” across Facebook. My team sat down with a giant content audit over cupcakes to take care of this. We individually reviewed instances of “profile” for context, then made recommendations about what needed to change.

Where did the “cover” image decision on the new timeline come from? Was that a design decision, a content recommendation, or both? Or neither?

Timeline was definitely a collaboration across teams—Product Design, Research, Communication Design, and Evany from our team were all deeply involved.

As far as the strategy behind the cover image, we know that before timeline, many people were using the five thumbnail images at the top of their profile as a sort of stand-in cover photo. There was already customization and curation going on there, and we were seeing signs that people wanted more control over how their profile looked and what images showed up there.

The new wide, open space where your cover photo goes was a way to address this desire.

There’s been a lot of discussion of the shift from nouns to verbs in the new Facebook. It looks like a beast, from a content strategy perspective—a lot of potential complexity to deal with. Do you have, like, a verb working group?

One of the big goals of the past months has been to give people the option of telling more personal stories about their lives. Publishing more complex stories—with verbs besides “like”—is part of this.

For example, now you might see more stories published by apps your friends are using. Things like, “Ben is listening to the White Stripes on Spotify” or “Jenny is running in Golden Gate park on Nike +.”

If you think of all the apps out there, and all the potential actions you might be taking on those apps, you have a lot of verbs—and a huge content strategy problem. What verbs do we allow? Do we use a simple subject-verb-object construction, or something more complicated? Can developers decide what verbs are associated with their apps, or do we decide this? What kinds of tools do developers need to be able to input this information?

When this project first got started, I worked with a team of engineers to think through the new verbs we might expect from a project like this. We wrote them all down, then mapped out possible configurations of the sentences that might evolve from those verbs. It was a huge spreadsheet. We have people from across the company working on this. It’s an ongoing project.

Does the increasing integration of Facebook into the rest of the web (Facebook comments on other websites, Facebook login functionality on a growing number of services) affect your work or decisions?

Yes. With the Facebook platform, we need to think about content not just in the context of Facebook, but throughout the web as a whole. We think about how apps publish to Facebook, how Facebook content behaves as it is shared across websites and how a plugin will be worded and behave, for example.

Facebook has become the guardian of very large quantities of information shared by people with widely varying degrees of technical sophistication. How does that fact shape your work—and how does the weight of those issues affects your own subjective experience as a content strategist at Facebook?

The effects of what my team does—whether it’s changing the name of a security setting or working on a privacy-related interaction—are massive and far-reaching, and we’re mindful of the responsibility that comes with that. These things lend extra complexity to our work.

I think of this extra complexity as a design challenge. So now, in addition to my user experience and content strategy checklists, I need to work through legal and security checklists too. I try to build this extra work into my process, making sure I talk to the right experts, vet my choices with research, and that I have the context I need before making a recommendation.

I like that my work can have direct impact on people’s lives and make Facebook easier to use and understand.

Do you worry about Facebook’s more vulnerable users? Those who may lack the web savvy or basic assumptions about interfaces and social sharing that allow more technically proficient users to make fine-grained choices about things like sharing information with apps, or with other users?

Our job is to be the voice for all our users, so we have to take the differences that 800 million people bring to our site into account in our work. These differences include accessibility and capabilities, as well as technical divides across cultures, varying levels of literacy and vastly different expectations about what Facebook is and should be.

Our content standards have to democratically address these differences, to make sure we’re solving not just for a few people, but for vulnerable users, people across continents, and everyone in between.

How do you get feedback on things that are or aren’t working? I’m imagining a retrofuturistic, white-plastic 1960s-NASA-style control room full of people crunching analytics and extrapolating user behaviors. That’s totally what it’s like, right?

Facebook is a feedback platform—one of the largest in the world—so we have a huge opportunity to see how people respond to the things we make. We get a ton of feedback from all sorts of channels: in comments people make on the site, in the data, in usability studies, qualitative research, from people we know, etc. All this feedback informs the work we do. We’re constantly testing and iterating based on it.

And yes, I’ve seen UEX’s control room. It’s bright and bustly.

What’s it like to wrangle the more traditionally editorial voice/tone stuff for the interface and instructional copy on a site of this size? How does your team handle that?

Right now Sarah is leading our team in building out our Content Standards, a sort of style guide on steroids. It outlines standards for all the content on Facebook: principles that inform what we write, our approach to voice and tone, as well as specific guidelines for error messages, UI copy, grammar conventions, user education, ads, forms, marketing pages, the works.

Even though Facebook is big, following solid content strategy principles and relying on our standards helps us wrangle the voice and tone. In addition to the standards, we do a lot of evangelizing, collaborative tinkering, and just working closely with our product teams to get the voice and tone right.

What are some of the tough calls you’ve made on the voice/tone side?

One of our core content principles is to “put people’s voices first.”  That means we need to be neutral with our tone, and to avoid value-laden, charged, or overly cute language. Our content shouldn’t get in the way of what people are trying to do on Facebook.

At the same time, we have to balance “getting out of the way” with other content principles like being friendly and clear. We have to be sure that neutrality doesn’t trend toward a robotic voice of the machine.

Here’s an example of this tension: if you like a page or add a friend but then change your mind, you need a way to undo that action. This interaction can be potentially awkward and somewhat charged, though, so we need to find a process and words that meet our principles for being clear and direct, but which don’t sound scary (“Delete Friend”), severe (“Remove Friend”), or robotic (“Remove Page From Liked Pages”). That’s how we landed on Unfriend and Unlike.

Does your team work on voice/tone things outside of interface copy?

We’re the voice for all the content within and without the interface. We create positioning and narratives around features, for example. And we lead the content strategy for launch pages, product tours, and other brand-centric initiatives like the Safety Center. We also consult widely with other teams that write—guiding the voice and tone for support content, giving input on press releases, editing blog posts, etc. We’re a kind of hub for everything content-related at Facebook.

 

What keeps you awake at night?

When it comes to work, I fuss a lot over making Facebook easy to use and understand, and keeping us all sounding like humans. I care a lot about that.

I also stay awake thinking of other things I want to do. Like live in Morocco for a while, or own a Tennessee Walker.

What are you most excited about?

I like people. I’m pretty excited about people. I also get jazzed about writing. I recently took a personal essay course at the SF Writer’s Grotto, and I’ve got an article coming up in The Manual this spring. The reading and writing scene in San Francisco is really lively, so I spend a lot of my weekend time on that.