The audience doesn’t care who is doing the fracking, only that it is happening. So now you have a clash. Your organisation only wants to talk about its own fracking sites. The audience wants to know about any fracking that affects them. What are you going to do?
Start by narrowing it down:
When I find out Nice Green Energy’s fracking might happen near me
I want to find out exactly where and when So I can decide what I am going to do next This one is similar to the one above but the first one assumes you want to complain. Some people might be pro-fracking and some might just want to move quickly.
Without research, we can’t work out what their next task is, so we need to keep it quite wide.
Stories often evolve. The first one you write may not be the one you end up with.
When I want to find out about fracking I want to find out the facts from the fiction So I can make an informed judgement about it You’ll note there is a theme here. Most of these stories are about taking some action or other. Content usually
User stories and job stories 105
results in some sort of action, even if it is just peace of mind or curiosity is sated.
The best content knows it has a purpose and fulfils that purpose. If it doesn’t, that content is a waste of space.
This one could lead to action or inaction. For example, if the law is watertight, you can’t do anything about it so you might want to move home or vote differently. If the government is saying conflicting things, you could take advantage of that and be very vocal in the discussion. Maybe you can sway things. As a content person, you need to take a view and stand by it.
When I want to find out what the government is saying about fracking
I want to see all the latest, relevant information easily and quickly
So I know what the legal and political position is
Acceptance
criteria
Some teams find having acceptance criteria useful.
They are short lists of points that indicate that the work on a particular user story or job story is done.
They can be really useful when you have many stakeholders watching your progress, or when you need to
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keep your team on track through a big and complicated content project.
Meeting acceptance criteria gives your team a chance to tick things off the to-do list.
For:
When I find out fracking might happen near me I want to find out exactly where So I can decide what I am going to do your acceptance criterion might be: This story is done when I can find where the nearest fracking site is to the location I am interested in.
Note that the criterion isn’t: This story is done when I can put in my postcode and see the nearest fracking site.
That puts a solution up front. That’s a bad idea. Your audience will tell you what the solution is. Don’t assume from the outset that a particular tool (like a postcode look-up) will do the job. If there were only 5 fracking sites in the UK, it would be easier to just publish a list of affected towns and postcodes.
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So far, you’ve done
your research and
discovery work, and
written some stories.
In many organisa-
tions, you’ll need
to get sign-off from
above before you
can go much further.
So let’s look at
how to get that.
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Bringing
your organisation
with you
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I’ve found the best
way to get the rest
of an organisation
to agree with my
work and approach
is to run a workshop
where all the right
people are together.
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My advice is to
invite anyone and
everyone who might
influence, stop or
change your content.
Get the fact-checkers,
the lawyers, the
bosses – anyone
who might feel the
need to interfere.
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The Nice Green Energy invitation list would include:
● the science and environment experts
● the lawyer who has control of final sign-off
● the boss who wants this done quickly
● the head of marketing and brand Note: I am deliberately making this difficult because I want to show different techniques.
It’s also important to acknowledge that a significant part of a content designer’s job can be negotiation and persuasion.
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You invite all these people because:
● they have to sign off your content
● you’ll spend loads of time working with all of them to get anything published
● if you get them all together in one room now, you won’t have to have the same conversation multiple times
Sometimes it can be hard to get all those people together, especially if they’re senior people. I have some ideas to deal with that.
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Make it sound
important
(because it is)
Don’t call it a meeting. Sometimes, a word like
‘workshop’ does the job, but it is overused and can mean different things to different people.
At Nice Green Energy, you call it a
‘decision-making session’.
This will stand out in people’s email inboxes. It sounds final and it has an action attached. People in places of authority or responsibility either love, or are scared of decisions. Either way, you probably have their attention.
It also sends a clear message to those people. They:
● are expected to make a decision
● may feel they’ll miss something important if they are not there
● are much more likely to open that email Get people used
to the concept
You may need to take time to explain to colleagues how
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content decisions are made. Take potentially difficult people out for coffee and go over it with them. Make sure that when the time comes, the idea of a content decision-making session isn’t completely new and alien to everyone. You don’t want to waste half of the session explaining what it’s for and how it works.
Make the
purpose clear
Let’s meet some of your colleagues at Nice Green Energy:
● Sandra, the lawyer and a senior decision-maker
● Alan, an expert in environmental matters
● Sam, an expert in fracking In your invitation, make it clear that the session will result in a decision. That’s what the session is for.
Suggest to senior people that if they can’t attend, they should delegate someone else to attend on their behalf – someone who has been given the same decision-making power.
When writing your invitation emails, make them powerful. Open with show-stopping facts, if you can.
Some examples might be:
Dear Sandra,
There have been 1,032 articles about fracking in the
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press in the past month. We have appeared negatively in over 90% of them.
or
Dear Sandra,
82% of our audience rate us highly for satisfaction and we have a 12% increase in sales in the past month. We think we can do better.
or
Dear Sandra,
In recent research, our audience said we are:
● dry and dusty
; ● boring
● out of date
● inaccurate
● lazy
We need to change this.
Most of the time, leading with a fact can get you positive attention quickly. If it’s an insight that has led to the change, include it to give some context – but use it in an action-orientated way.
Make the
plan clear
Tell your invitees what the plan is: Subject: Decision-making session on fracking
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Dear Sandra,
There have been 1,032 articles about fracking in the press in the past month. We have appeared negatively in over 90% of them. We need to change this.
The approach
We would like to meet with you, Alan and Sam on: Monday 24 Feb, 10–10.45am, Boardroom A. During this session, we will sign off the content structure for the new fracking content.
Meetings don’t always have to be an hour. Make them an odd time – it can focus the mind. I’ve found people are far more time-conscious if a meeting is 45 minutes long.
Your decision
In this session we, as a group, will decide:
● the content we will cover
● main messages
● channels
If you can’t attend, can you send someone else who has decision-making capability?
You are saying, quite clearly and politely, that a decision will be made during this session, with or without their presence.
Preparation
We’ll bring:
● details of the content our customers are looking for from us and on this topic in general
● customer journeys (which pages our customers are visiting and where they go)
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● a list of vocabulary our customers use to find us Could you please bring:
● your thoughts on any legal challenges we may encounter
● any changes to fracking law we need to cover What to do in
the decision-
making session
Welcome everyone to the session.
Tell them its purpose – the goal is to get all of them to agree on:
● a set of job stories, and the order they should be tackled in
● a skeleton structure of headings and subheadings for the content
Point out to everyone that by running this session now, you are saving yourself and all of them a lot of time and pain later on.
If you had everyone in the discovery phase with you, you can just give a summary. If you didn’t, you will have to go into some detail. Start by showing them your research, including:
● analytics
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● public perception (if applicable)
● the visuals of your conversations with the experts Then explain what a user story or job story is and briefly explain why you use them. Then show those too.
The more visual you can make it, the better. Make it all about the content and not about you, your thoughts or your opinions. It is far harder to argue with an inanimate product (like a website) or people who are not there (the website audience).
Try not to position so it looks like you are pushing the decision-makers towards a decision you want. Share your knowledge openly and ask them to contribute; not in a them-and-us way, but in a way that invites them to be equal with you.
This session is for everyone to stop thinking about what team they are in. They need to focus on being a team and aiming for a common goal.
Keep it short. You don’t want people to get bored. They need to validate what they say or when they disagree with each other.
When you speak, say things like:
‘Research shows…’
‘Our clients are saying…’
‘When we spoke to you, you said…’
This might sound daft, but remember to smile. Unless
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you are very good at it, I wouldn’t recommend going into full comedian mode, but if you have a tricky history with the participants of this session, you might come across as too authoritarian, and therefore positioning.
Watch your body language – be open, stay calm, smile.
If the reception is frosty and the decision-makers give you a hard time, and if you believe the issue is important enough to risk a possible confrontation, show evidence of the website audience failing at specific tasks, or criticising the product or service.
Video of user research is particularly powerful for this if you have it. Nothing gets to the heart of the problem faster than a real user saying what they really think while trying to use a website.
Remember, each person in the room will have a different view on the same thing and some people may be quieter than others. As a facilitator, you need to make sure you have all the information you need.
Your job is to:
● be the voice of the audience you’ve researched
● keep everyone focused on the job stories (let your participants show gaps, but if it is not a job story backed by evidence, it doesn’t get in)
● make sure all voices in the room are heard, not just the loudest ones
Sometimes, these events are tense. People take a position, try to appear superior, maybe even switch
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off completely. To get the best out of it, try to detach a bit. See yourself as a facilitator, not a content person.
Every time you want to make a statement, phrase it as a question and you might get further.
By the end of this session, you should have on the wall:
● a list of job stories that everyone agrees are important
● ideally, some skeleton content (headings and subheadings)
Top tips for
decision-making
sessions
● as with discovery, make sure there are plenty of whiteboards, walls, pens and sticky notes
● be a good facilitator: don’t allow people to go off on tangents
● book a big room with natural light
● if there’s a lot of content to discuss, plan some breaks to keep people’s minds fresh
● as each decision gets made, write it on a sticky note and put it on a section of wall marked DONE – this helps people remember what’s already been decided, and motivates them to keep going
● at the end, wrap up very briefly with: ‘OK, we have decided to do this, this and this.’
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Designing
content
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You’ve done a lot of
preparatory work to
get this far, but all
of it was essential
for the next step:
Designing content 125
actually
designing
content.
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Start by thinking
about formats
Your user stories have told you that your audience wants to know if fracking is happening near them.
You could do that with flat content (just words on a page, perhaps a map; nothing that moves or needs any sort of interaction beyond reading or listening). But wouldn’t it be better if you let your audience see a more tailored result?
As we mentioned before, the content design choice you make here depends on how many sites in the UK are affected. If there were only 3 proposed fracking sites in the UK, you could take care of that in a sentence. If there are 3,000, that’s a long page of listings.
With your user stories and job stories backing you up, you’re now in a position to start proposing solutions.
You can say, ‘No one will read a list of 3,000 addresses, so let’s build a postcode look-up tool.’ That’s content design, right there. You are designing the content for your audience.
You are not editing anyt
hing. You are barely writing anything. But you are designing content.
Formats are different ways of presenting information on a page. Text is one format. A postcode look-up tool is another format. Other formats include calculators,
Designing content 127
or calendars, or maps, and so on. Anything that presents information in some way.
Prioritising
Prioritise the most complicated tasks: anything that needs extra skills will take longer, so get those things started first.
When you are looking at what content to produce first, I would recommend prioritising these things, in this order:
1. anything your research
shows users want from you
2. information that limits reputational damage to your organisation
3. things that will need more developer time to build
You’ll also need to decide how much you are going to publish. You don’t need to publish everything.
What you don’t publish is as important as what you do publish.
The more you publish, the more you expect your audience to read, and the more you’ll have to update and maintain. You’re creating more work for everyone.
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Turning stories
into content
Let’s take each of the stories we have.
When I am concerned about the effect fracking will have on the planet
I want to find out if Nice Green Energy is one of them
So I can complain (if appropriate) This story assumes the user already has a negative view of fracking. Finding out about fracking, and Nice Green Energy’s policy on safe fracking are other needs.
The acceptance criterion is: This story is done when I know if Nice Green Energy has fracking sites.
Nice Green Energy has just 12 fracking sites in the UK.
You can put addresses and maps to those and add contact details. You can then do some research about what tasks this might lead to, like the safety of fracking or the benefits of fracking.
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