Sweat the small stuff

Whether at conferences, as leaders, or when buried in projects, we content people often ponder big questions. What defines our roles and our worth? How do we embed good content practices in our organisations? How do we scope the content needed for a particular project?

But a big part of our day is spent thinking about small things. In my recent talk at Web Directions Summit, I argued that sweating the small stuff helps us achieve the big stuff.

The small stuff matters

In my talk, I argued that it’s worth spending time thinking deeply about what could be thought of as small stuff. And more than that, sometimes thinking about the small stuff is what helps us to achieve the big stuff.

Two things prompted me to think about this.

First, the questions people often ask us when we’re teaching content design. Things like:

• Should I use accordions?
• When should I use job stories rather than user needs?
• Should this be one screen or two?
• How many people should I interview?
• How many words should a web page be?

This tells me that people want to know how to do content design at a micro level. But there is never a one-size-fits-all answer to these questions, so the only way to figure them out is to think deeply about them – to sweat the small stuff.

The second prompt was seeing some examples of what can go wrong for our users when we don’t sweat the small stuff. For example:

• I skipped over most of the introduction on a web page because it was dense, disjointed and its tone jumped around. The apparent lack of thought about the purpose and composition of this component meant I missed some important information.
• On a page about healthcare during pregnancy, I reckon some people would have stopped reading important content because the author made an assumption about their readers’ emotional state. Writing that everyone is excited about being pregnant would have alienated some users.
• I couldn’t find important information I was looking for because of misleading words on a navigation label.

Word choice is an obvious example of the ‘small stuff’ content designers need to sweat. But it’s never just about the words. We also need to think deeply about things like the purpose of components, or the variety of people who will be using our content and the range of experiences and emotions they may have.

Getting to the big through the small

I’m interested in all the big questions, and spend time thinking about them. But I reckon sweating the small stuff can be a good way to get to the big stuff.

For example, sweating the introduction in the example I gave earlier, would have meant thinking about:

• the purpose of the introduction
• the most important user needs and which were highest priority
• whether we needed to do more user research
• tone
• word choices.

And there would have been another introduction to sweat, and another one after that, with the same things to think about.

Doing this thinking helps us to scale. By thinking deeply about several different introductions, we would have begun to see, for example, patterns that could be documented. Then the next introductions can follow an established pattern.

Depending on the organisation, we may or may not have  a bank of user needs, user research, user archetypes, and tone and voice guidelines to work from. If we don’t have these things, doing the small-scale work helps us create them. If we do have these things, the small-scale work helps us to make sure they remain up-to-date and relevant.

What small stuff to sweat

Most content teams we’ve encountered through our consultancy work have been stretched thin. So I know that it’s impossible to sweat all the small stuff. Unfortunately, again, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. It’s our job as content strategists and content designers to figure this out for our organisations, and most of all for our users.