Well, interviews have started. I’ve had a couple of screening calls with recruiters this week and last, but now the full-on “what have you created” discussions with hiring managers and potential teammates is getting underway. So, if you’ll indulge me tonight, I’m going to draft one of my case studies here in front of you.
As I’ve mentioned when I started creating these posts, writing has been a constant through-line in my career. One of the aspects about being a content designer and UX writer that’s so attractive to me is the ability to use systems thinking to make writing easier and better for both individuals and teams. Essentially, I want to help make crafting content quicker, and more scalable, for global organizations. Whether that means creating and maintaining style guides so that standards are understood and adhered to, or mentoring designers — for instance — who are looking to document their decision-making process so they can better defend them in presentations or submit them as a talk at conferences, I really love giving people the tools to become better communicators. With these systems in place, we can streamline the ways we implement the improvements we want to make in our apps and online experiences. I think of it as setting up a kitchen so that you can create exactly what you are craving. That means ensuring recipes have all the steps you need, you have easy access to the right ingredients, and you’ve made sure the cookware and utensils are clean and in expected and convenient places so that you can start creating rather than casting about for one thing or another. With that explanation of how I think about content strategy in general out of the way, let’s look at an example of how I put it into practice during one project at Twitter.
Specifically, I want to talk about why and how we expanded Twitter’s Tweet limits from 140 to 280 characters. We noticed that people were abandoning Tweets as they got close to that 140-character limit. So the Design Team worked with our data partners to figure out how much of a problem that limit was for people creating Tweets. Turns out, 9% of all English-language Tweets were bumping up against the 140-character limit, but less than a half of a percent for Tweets in Japanese. We also learned that a good portion of those people who were bumping into the upper limit were abandoning their drafts rather than revising them. So this was a problem not only for our users — because they couldn’t say what they wanted to — but also for Twitter, since Tweets were the fundamental building blocks of essentially everything else the business was built on. To put it more starkly, without Tweets, Twitter doesn’t exist.
As we explored ways to test whether giving people more characters would keep people from abandoning Tweets which were too long, we needed to make sure making this change — specifically longer Tweets — didn’t have negative effects on other aspects of the timeline, such as Tweet density, especially in double-byte character sets. In addition to how Tweets would show up in the timeline, we needed to look at the Tweet creation flow, and test different ways to make it clear what the new limits were and when people were getting close to exhausting it. Working with my Design partner, Josh, we created some visual explorations for how we could simply and clearly communicate the new limit to anyone, anywhere in the world.
As we tested this extended character count, we saw the number of those 9% of English-language Tweets which were previously hitting the 140-character limit plummet. With the expanded character count, that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. We were definitely addressing both the user and business problem. With the solution in hand, we still needed to figure out how to implement it, though.
What I love about the explorations and collaborations we worked on for the final implementation was the fact that the “content” I was strategizing was more than just words. Our needs were global, and that meant that almost any error indicator or hint about the limits were best indicated without words so that they were universal and accessible, no matter how people were interacting with the apps and website. So rather than iterating on different versions of a “Your Tweet is too long” written error message, we settled on an indicator which closed and changed color as you got closer to the new, 280-character limit. We also built the status indicator into the VoiceOver flow so that people using screen readers would know if they had exceeded 280 characters, and by how many of them they had gone over.
Once we had the product design approved and the product implementation coded, we need a communications plan to coordinate with the launch. Working with the Brand, Marketing, and Comms teams, we did a series of Tweets and blog posts, which I helped edit and ghost-write, to talk about the entire process — from the design and the rationale, to UI indicators and error messages. But we can talk about that part of the story another time. Wish me luck.
Rowing
16 February 2023
UX and you.
Well, interviews have started. I’ve had a couple of screening calls with recruiters this week and last, but now the full-on “what have you created” discussions with hiring managers and potential teammates is getting underway. So, if you’ll indulge me tonight, I’m going to draft one of my case studies here in front of you.
As I’ve mentioned when I started creating these posts, writing has been a constant through-line in my career. One of the aspects about being a content designer and UX writer that’s so attractive to me is the ability to use systems thinking to make writing easier and better for both individuals and teams. Essentially, I want to help make crafting content quicker, and more scalable, for global organizations. Whether that means creating and maintaining style guides so that standards are understood and adhered to, or mentoring designers — for instance — who are looking to document their decision-making process so they can better defend them in presentations or submit them as a talk at conferences, I really love giving people the tools to become better communicators. With these systems in place, we can streamline the ways we implement the improvements we want to make in our apps and online experiences. I think of it as setting up a kitchen so that you can create exactly what you are craving. That means ensuring recipes have all the steps you need, you have easy access to the right ingredients, and you’ve made sure the cookware and utensils are clean and in expected and convenient places so that you can start creating rather than casting about for one thing or another. With that explanation of how I think about content strategy in general out of the way, let’s look at an example of how I put it into practice during one project at Twitter.
Specifically, I want to talk about why and how we expanded Twitter’s Tweet limits from 140 to 280 characters. We noticed that people were abandoning Tweets as they got close to that 140-character limit. So the Design Team worked with our data partners to figure out how much of a problem that limit was for people creating Tweets. Turns out, 9% of all English-language Tweets were bumping up against the 140-character limit, but less than a half of a percent for Tweets in Japanese. We also learned that a good portion of those people who were bumping into the upper limit were abandoning their drafts rather than revising them. So this was a problem not only for our users — because they couldn’t say what they wanted to — but also for Twitter, since Tweets were the fundamental building blocks of essentially everything else the business was built on. To put it more starkly, without Tweets, Twitter doesn’t exist.
As we explored ways to test whether giving people more characters would keep people from abandoning Tweets which were too long, we needed to make sure making this change — specifically longer Tweets — didn’t have negative effects on other aspects of the timeline, such as Tweet density, especially in double-byte character sets. In addition to how Tweets would show up in the timeline, we needed to look at the Tweet creation flow, and test different ways to make it clear what the new limits were and when people were getting close to exhausting it. Working with my Design partner, Josh, we created some visual explorations for how we could simply and clearly communicate the new limit to anyone, anywhere in the world.
As we tested this extended character count, we saw the number of those 9% of English-language Tweets which were previously hitting the 140-character limit plummet. With the expanded character count, that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. We were definitely addressing both the user and business problem. With the solution in hand, we still needed to figure out how to implement it, though.
What I love about the explorations and collaborations we worked on for the final implementation was the fact that the “content” I was strategizing was more than just words. Our needs were global, and that meant that almost any error indicator or hint about the limits were best indicated without words so that they were universal and accessible, no matter how people were interacting with the apps and website. So rather than iterating on different versions of a “Your Tweet is too long” written error message, we settled on an indicator which closed and changed color as you got closer to the new, 280-character limit. We also built the status indicator into the VoiceOver flow so that people using screen readers would know if they had exceeded 280 characters, and by how many of them they had gone over.
Once we had the product design approved and the product implementation coded, we need a communications plan to coordinate with the launch. Working with the Brand, Marketing, and Comms teams, we did a series of Tweets and blog posts, which I helped edit and ghost-write, to talk about the entire process — from the design and the rationale, to UI indicators and error messages. But we can talk about that part of the story another time. Wish me luck.
See you tomorrow?