At tonight’s Sydney Content Strategy meetup, Liz Leigh, from Service NSW, shared her insights and practices on building the Content Strategy discipline, and how and why to incorporate content critique sessions.

Crafting a Vision for Content Design

Liz Leigh has defined a vision for content design at Service NSW. Informed by internal research, this vision seeks to create a community of practice, connection, collaboration and career development. A significant initiative from this vision that was the focus of this talk was how Service NSW have implemented ‘Content Critiques.’

What is a Content Critique?

A content writ is an opportunity for people to receive feedback on a piece of content they have created

Liz Leigh

Implementing Effective Content Critiques

The format of the ‘Content Critique’ sessions have been refined over two years at Service NSW. These sessions set the right environment by:

• Conducting critiques earlier in the process before usability testing.
• Running critiques regularly (they have ~2 per week)
• Assigning a moderator – to avoid bystander syndrome who looks after the agenda and schedule
• Keeping to 1 hr maximum to avoid fatigue
• Limiting the number of participants to ~10 including the core content team members and guests from other disciplines or teams
• Sticking to a single topic per session to avoid context switching.
• Limiting feedback to 1-4 screens
• Setting the scene with the research, user story, how might we’s, persona, JTBD or similar as well as project details such as the delivery timeline
• Allowing everyone to talk through their feedback and diving into a group discussion only when necessary.
• Sticking to the well honed format that includes guidelines on what to provide feedback on.
• And encouraging feedback from everyone – be they content writers, SMEs, designers or devs.

Other tips included

• Considering carefully when to run critiques versus a peer review session.
• Use public GELs/Design Systems for guidance on plain language and effective writing (examples cited by Leigh and the audience included the Australian Style Manual, Westpac’s Design System, Spotify and Atlassian’s)
• And treating each piece of feedback on its own merits – without voting or grouping in the session.

Benefits of Content Critiques

Just like design critiques, the benefits of content critiques range from team cohesion to product quality. At Service NSW the outcomes of regular content critiques have been:

• Sparking new ideas.
• Connecting team members and giving them an opportunity to work together
• Providing direction for usability testing.
• Speeding up delivery through iterative improvement.
• Identifying inconsistencies and misalignment and improving the overall quality of the customer experience – with the input from colleagues working across other initiatives.
• Applying existing and establishing new content and product guidelines.

The Importance of Radical Candor in Content Critique Sessions

The biggest tip of the night, and what generated the most discussion was following principles of Radical Candor in critique sessions. This approach, inspired by Kim Scott’s book and framework, emphasises caring personally while challenging directly. It acknowledges why feedback is vital and also personal. By incorporating this framework, Service NSW ensure meaningful critique sessions rather than criticism.

My takeaways

While content always comes up in design critiques I’d never thought of having critiques dedicated to content. Which makes me think what other work in the product space could I apply critiques to?

See past and upcoming events from Sydney Content Strategy at: https://www.sydneycontentstrategy.com/.