Weeknotes — 25 October 2024
A pair of young hipster types.
This week I’ve been critting content
I’m pleased to say I’ve been a two content crits for colleagues work this week, and I’m going to another next week.
I think there’s so much value in critting content, and it’s something I’ve not done regularly joining Scottish Government.
When I worked at Shelter Scotland, every new piece of content we published would be critted at least once. This meant we learned together, had ownership of our content, spotted patterns we could reuse and wrote with a consistent voice, all of which benefitted our users.
It’s easier in a smaller team to do that work and make those decisions together. It can be harder in a big team, working on lots of different policy areas.
But I still think there’s so much to be gained by getting together, talking about content, discussing what could be better and what we could live without. When I’m looking at my own work in a crit, I often find I’ve got a fresh perspective it, like I’m reading it with someone else’s eyes, and I think, “why did I include that? That’s such unnecessary fluff!”
It takes a bit of bravery and it can feel like your content is being torn apart. But if the content is improved, that shouldn’t matter. Getting to a point where you don’t feel like you need to defend or explain every single decision you made is a good one. Take the ego out and get people to crit your content, it’s always the better for it.
This week I’ve been thinking about 2i checks
2i or second pair of eyes is another step we had in our Shelter Scotland workflow.
It meant that nothing could be published with some efficient pre-publishing checks. Typos, negative contractions, linking errors or link text problems would be whipped out because someone else gave the content a thorough read through.
And when you’re creating lots of new content, or you’ve been working on the same page for weeks, those things are easily missed when you do it alone. Content design is a team sport. We always benefit from input from our colleagues.
Having a 2i checklist is all well and good. It must be used consistently. When it’s not built into a workflow, and it’s not an essential part of publishing new or updated content, then all those errors go live, and that’s unprofessional.
This week I’ve been “managing stakeholders”
We had a rollercoaster of a call with a policy colleague this week.
While delivering new content, we’ve taken the approach of:
- subject matter experts are partners, not pain points
- work in the open — we’re doing everything on calls as far as possible
- avoid track changes as far as possible
- just be sound
We set up regular calls with this team, and it’s been a bit inconsistent who turns up. It showed that even when we share our working and evidence for decisions one week, there was no guarantee we could build on that the following week. If you’re met by a disinterested person who wasn’t on the call the week before, sometimes there’s not a lot of progress you can make.
This week I’ve been listening to
I’ve been revisiting this classic from 2014, and their EP Earrings Off! after seeing them in Glasgow on Monday. What a band.
