SERVICE DESIGN: A BLUEPRINT FOR CONTENT OPERATIONS SUCCESS
As a designer, I love looking across the aisle at other disciplines and frameworks and bringing them into my process and approach. In May 2024, I presented a lightning talk on just such a topic at the Code For America Summit in Oakland, CA:
Adopting a service design mindset for content success
The hardest part about designing content for digital experiences isn’t the strategy or even the words—it’s aligning people on how to efficiently move content through an organization. Neglecting content operations results in delays, errors, and a frustrating experience for both your internal teams and external users. This is where service design can help. Service design is a human-centered approach to making holistic changes that benefit the people delivering and receiving an experience. Find out how a service design mindset can inspire collaborative, impactful changes to your content operations and improve everyone’s content experience.
Where did this topic come from?
This topic took shape for me over the course of a year as I reflected on recent UX content consulting projects and how difficult it was to stand up new content processes and workflows in large organizations. I realized that doing this “content operations work” was really all about collaboration, change management, and breaking down silos. As I helped teams set up tooling and workflows to unblock content production and delivery, I kept returning to service design frameworks and principles for inspiration. This intersection between service design and content operations felt like something I wanted to dig into and share more with other folks. So, I talked to my network to see what they thought and did some googling to see if anyone had written about service design and content ops before. It felt like a new thread or juxtaposition ripe for exploration.
Pitching and preparing the talk
When Code for America Summit announced its call for speakers, I decided to try submitting this topic for a five-minute lightning talk. The submission process forced me to quickly organize my thoughts and scribbled notes into a simple title and description. Then, when my talk was selected, I had to face the challenge of distilling this topic (an exploration across two complex disciplines) into a five-minute talk.
I wanted to tailor the talk to the conference audience of designers, researchers, product managers, and engineers. While this audience may have worked with “content” in the websites, forms, and apps they help design, they may not have dedicated content folks on their teams or know the value of a content designer or content operations. So I decided to set the stage by defining and unpacking what content designers do and why content ops matters. Since the summit had an entire track dedicated to service design and delivery, I assumed the audience would be more familiar with service design basics, so I spent less time defining that discipline.
The toughest part of preparing the talk was the short format. I’m used to presenting for 30 to 60 minutes, so the limit of five minutes and ten slides was hard to execute. I am grateful for the support of my Coforma content colleagues, who provided excellent feedback on early drafts. After going through this ruthless editing and simplification process, I also feel that I leveled-up my deck design and presentation skills.
Presenting at Code for America Summit
At the Code for America Summit, I was humbled to share the stage with so many talented and dedicated civic technologists. As one of the only content-focused presenters, it was rewarding to champion the importance of content design and operations to this group. I hope there are even more content-led panels and presentations at future summits. If you’re interested in civic tech, I highly recommend this event. It’s a welcoming environment and the other talks were all so inspiring. I came away feeling like I was part of a community and energized to keep working to improve government digital services.
Below are a few photos from the summit along with my slides and talking points. I hope this topic sparks some inspiration or new questions for you in your own work.
Slide 1
Slide 1: Good afternoon. I’m Britt Brouse, a Senior Content Designer with Coforma. We work with government and private sector organizations to craft solutions that improve people’s lives.
Slide 2
Slide 2: Today we’ll start with: why you should care about content. Then, we’ll talk about the challenges of working in content and we’ll end with how service design can help.
Slide 3
Slide 3: Working in content design is bigger than just copywriting, or deciding which words go on which screens. It’s about structuring and designing information in digital spaces, so that people can find what they need, when they need it, and accomplish what they came to do.
Without well-designed content flows, our government websites and apps would feel broken and confusing, and people would be unable to access the critical benefits and services they need. This is why we should all care about content success.
Slide 4
Slide 4: To describe content’s biggest challenge, I’ll share a story from a few years ago, when I worked at a user experience design consultancy before Coforma.
In this role, I led content efforts for private sector projects in healthcare and financial services. Much like government work, this was enterprise, highly regulated, and often involved taking offline content and processes and digitizing them.
I’d start each project by researching the audience’s needs, identifying the most relevant content for that audience, and planning strategy and governance for getting content created and approved. But moving from the strategy to delivery phase of each project was always the hardest part. I’d work with all the teams involved to map out their content workflows, tools, and guidelines, and I’d end up with something like this . . . .
Slide 5
Slide 5: This is the biggest challenge in content: the messy enterprise content ecosystem. I’m sure many people in this room have experienced something similar on their own government projects.
You’ve got siloed teams, content housed in various tools and formats, and tons of disconnected ways of working. As a content lead: How do you get all these siloed teams working together for the first time to deliver content on a new platform?
There’s a name for what’s missing or needed here. It’s called content operations.
Slide 6
Slide 6: Content operations means finding clear, tactical steps for moving content through your organization. The goal is to cut through that siloed chaos and align the right people, tools, and processes to deliver at scale.
If I didn’t get this right, my team could waste hours and even days copying and pasting content between siloed tools (which isn’t scalable and introduces a lot of risk). I understood that content ops was my north star for navigating out of the chaos on my projects, but there were so many moving parts and stakeholders. I just didn’t know where to start.
I was feeling overwhelmed and stuck when I attended a company workshare . . .
Slide 7
Slide 7: The workshare featured a service design project re-imagining human resources (HR) at a Fortune 100 company. The service designers walked through a slew of hands-on frameworks and activities they had used. I was impressed by how they got so many different teams involved in the work! They didn’t just talk to HR folks, but also department heads, IT, and even job candidates and employees.
They ended by sharing a service design blueprint. If you’ve never seen one of these, definitely do some googling and take a look. They are powerful artefacts.
Their blueprint showed, not only the front stage journey of a job candidate going through the HR process, but it also showed all of the connected backstage steps, tools, and teams needed to make that HR journey possible.
Looking at this service design blueprint was a light bulb moment for me and I realized something . . .
Slide 8
Slide 8: I realized that service design and content ops shared a mission. We were all trying to align the right people, processes, and tools to deliver seamless experiences.
If service designers already had frameworks for solving tricky process problems, then why not adopt a service design mindset to help untangle my content mess?
So I read up on service design, met with practitioners, and started experimenting:
I’ve tried a lot of things, but I’ll give you two examples:
First, I used job shadowing to observe different teams working with content. In doing this job shadowing, we discovered a way to tag content in one system so the content could move seamlessly and automatically to a second system via an API.
Second, for a product launch, I used low code software to prototype a content source of truth (almost a content management system or CMS). We tested and adapted the prototype as we used it with different teams to manage content for launch. This prototype helped us to stay organized, aligned, and on schedule for launch. We also learned what different teams needed to support their content workflows and gathered valuable requirements should the organization want to invest in a more robust or permanent content management solution in the future.
But my biggest learning in applying service design to content operations is this: it’s all about people and co-creation.
Service Design has given me human-centered frameworks to help get the right people in the room, and get those people involved and invested in the work, so that we can start solving messy content problems together.
Slide 9
Before I say goodbye, I want to leave you with a call-to-action: Let’s keep exploring this magical intersection between ops and service design. I have a feeling that these fameworks are not only useful for content ops, but can also unlock success for design and research ops as well.
Thank you for reading! Here are a few recommended books to check out:
Content Operations From Start to Scale - edited by Carlos Evia
Good Services: How to Design Services that Work - Lou Downe
This is Service Design Thinking - Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider