Weeknotes — 1 November 2024
Can you talk to it?
This week I’m pure buzzing
I’ve had a positive call with some subject matter experts this week, to review their feedback on 2 new multipage guides.
10 small comments. No tracked changes. No rewritten content. Result.
I think this is because we:
- took the time to understand the subject matter
- met with them weekly to walk through content drafts
- got their feedback in calls, went away and shared what we’d updated
- shared a document at the point we thought it was done, and they had minimal changes
We’ve done lots of work with a few different policy teams over the last few months. Some of those calls have admittedly gone better than others!
This team has been our main point of contact, and are responsible for most of the content we’ve been working on. All the hard work and energy that we’ve put into connecting with them, understanding their thing, then writing about it with them, is so far paying off. It was such a boost to come out of that call and know that we’d made really good progress.
This week we’re connecting the dots
We had an interesting chat with another policy lead this week. We reached out to check in about some content we need him to fact check on our service, which got us talking about his work, and we started spotting some of the gaps on the digital services they provide.
It went beyond our roles as content designers. Alone, we couldn’t help him address the gap that might need to be filled.
It was something like this: Our problem is users are coming to this piece of content that doesn’t help them, and that causes frustration. The content has high traffic, low engagement rate, and lots of negative feedback. But if this gap was addressed, and we created content and a tool to help people, then that might be what some of them are looking for. It won’t solve the issue for many, but it could help some users.
Andy wrote up a good summary and we passed it up the chain. It needs someone else to make the call and explore what can be done with capacity and budget. But we opened an avenue to discuss it, and hopefully we can keep the conversation going over the coming months while we collaborate on the existing content.
We’ve found policy colleagues telling us about correspondence, queries and complaints they get which they then spend time dealing with. We’ve discussed how we can address those with the content on the service. We won’t stop all the correspondence and complaints, but we might be able to reduce it by meeting some users’ needs, and that’s a step forward.
It showed the value of the time we’re taking to meet with policy colleagues and speak with them. We’re asking them to work on the content we already have, but we’re also giving them space to bring things up with us.
These wouldn’t have happened if we’d sent them an email asking them to check some content and send it back with comments.
This week I’m following the style guide
If it’s in the style guide, that works for me.
There’s been a bit of discussion in my team this week about Term A versus Term B. It’s a conversation we’ve had before.
To me the answer is very clear. The GOV.UK style guide that we follow says Term A. So we should use Term A.
I’ve been thinking a bit about why the style guide is necessary. To me, it’s important because:
- it saves us time — we don’t have to discuss whether it’s Term A or Term B in a peer review or 2i check
- it helps us be consistent — this helps users know what to expect from our service and helps us reuse content
- it helps us follow best practice — if someone’s researched why users recognise Term A over Term B, that’s more research than I can do right now, and again, it saves me time and effort
We’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re not the first people to write about Term A. Let’s agree to follow the style guide and move on.
