How are getting on with all the AI excitement and nonsense? Seems to me it largely depends on what kind of content work you do and who you do it for. Either way, this AI glossary from Nielsen Norman is actually pretty good route into it and a helpful guide to what things actually mean.
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Long Story Short
This is neat. Long Story Short is a daily online game (think Wordle) where you select 5 words from a sentence that still conveys the same message or tells the same story. It's like being at work, but for fun.
Headers, headings, and titles
Love this clear explanation from Martin Underhill of what headers, headings and titles are, and why they are very much not the same.
This resonates:
Three particular terms I often hear being used interchangeably are ‘header’, ‘heading’, and ‘title’; I even catch myself doing it sometimes! Let’s have a look how they can be confused.
And this seems pretty sensible:
What a designer calls something should not differ from what a developer calls it, and the easiest way to ensure this consistency is to use the terminology defined by the super smart people who wrote HTML and ARIA.
If you work in content that lives on the internet, I think you should know the differences and be able to explain them.
Basically:
- header – usually a banner area where a logo, strapline and navigation lives
- title – search-friendly metadata that describes the page and appears in the browser, not the page itself
- headings – the h1, h2, h3 content that helps structure a page and provides an outline of your content
If you're reading this and thinking, "Hmm, still not sure," then I highly recommend you go check out Underhill's post. It includes much more detailed definitions and useful examples to help you out.
Writing NHS messages
I'm almost 6 months into my first contract with NHS England. It's been great to see the constant activity to try and improve content guidance for people working across various digital services.
I want to point you at these new guidelines on writing NHS messages, which are useful for anyone who writes healthcare content. It covers emails, text messages and paper letters, and includes examples of each.
Fancy some further reading? Here's some GOV.UK advice on sending emails and text messages. And if you work in an area where paper letters are essential, you can learn more about how to write effective letters on GOV.UK too.
Co-designing with people around difficult subject areas
I have just started working with the brill Charley Pothecary who is bringing some excellent user research and service design nous to the project. In this post, she shares some good, practical suggestions for running inclusive research sessions. These are especially useful if you often work with people who are vulnerable or who have experienced trauma.
Your documentation is still in your Mum’s filing cabinet
This post by Geri Reid questions the traditional folder-based approach to documentation:
For years we’ve treated documentation like a filing cabinet. Put the thing in the right folder and give it a label. But much as it pains me, people rarely wander through my carefully crafted hierarchy, admiring the taxonomy. They search, skim, follow links. And the second finding information feels like work, they’ve checked out and just asked someone.
I have to say, this was exactly my experience on a recent guidance project. Users would often find the document they wanted and make a direct copy to keep locally. Of course, when guidance was updated, that local copy was soon out of date.
For these users, knowing where to quickly find guidance was important. To heck with the shared folder structure! And for those times where they couldn't find the right guidance document at all, they would simply ask a colleague for the answer.
Needless to say, I learnt a lot from this experience. It's important to organise documents in a clear, sensible way that people can easily navigate. But don't think for a second that users will or want to carefully wander through your folder structure to find what they want.
