Intercom's Senior Manager says they destroyed content design
Word of the day
Sesquipedalian
Having many syllables.
Given to or characterized by the use of long words.
It comes from Latin and means "a foot and a half long". 🦶 + 🦶/2
Says who
“Writing isn’t normal. The normal thing is to read and the pleasant thing is to read; even the elegant thing is to read. Writing is an exercise in masochism.”
Roberto Bolaño - Chilean writer
Intercom's Senior Manager says they destroyed content design
More than a couple of tweets from people who attended to Jonathon Colman's presentation at SofaConf last Thursday said he brought them to tears. "There are strong opinions here", he said right off, while the first slides showed big alert signs. And who doesn't like strong opinions about writing in for the tech industry? (I sure do.)
Jonathon is a Senior Design Manager working at Dublin for Intercom, an online customer messaging company that recently changed its CEO, eyeing an IPO shortly. He moved to Dublin at the end of 2018 to lead the company's global content design team, with the challenge of maximizing its impact.
It's not always easy to define the role of content designers. Intercom's team itself has already tried, through the voice of Kelly O'Brien, who attempted to "demystify this mysterious discipline" in a talk at Write the Docs Prague in October 2019.
Indeed, each company seems to make its content people (whether they are called designers, strategists, or whatever) throw their attention towards different parts of the product. Or most often, says Jonathon, to a bunch of these parts at the same time. While product designers usually focus on one product, a content designer's work tends to spread throughout the company. And as they grow in the career—instead of going deeper—they see this scope growing horizontally, which brings more work and not much of an exciting career path.
He also says that in big tech companies, a content design team often ends up being made up of people whose hands are tied since they're primarily limited to doing UX writing—but they do so with a tremendous lack of focus. They are the wordsmiths, so wherever there are words, there they should be, as firefighters coming to put out the fire. The problem, in Jonathon's opinion, is that this limits their opportunity for impact.
He lists eight harming consequences that this scenario yields for content designers:
Their work lacks focus.
They lack context about their work and the company as a whole.
No one in the company knows what they do.
Their work never stops being shallow.
There are fewer opportunities for them to impact the product.
There is less opportunity for career growth.
They get paid less than other people in the company, such as designers.
Their spread scope leads them to burn out.
So, upon arriving at Intercom, Jonathon decided he should try a different approach. He started an attempt to blur the lines between product designers and content designers, making it hard to distinguish their job descriptions.
“The sole limiter is that product designers tend to do more interaction and visual design whereas content designers tend to what we call concept design, as well as information architecture or UX writing.”
Both roles can do all that, he says. The difference is accountability, which pends a little more towards visual and interaction for product designers and to concept design, IA, and UW writing for content people. This also means that management holds content designers almost to the same expectations as they do the rest of the team.
For me, the most exciting outcome that I feel might come from that approach is that content designers have more chances of really driving the roadmap alongside the engineers, product designers, and product managers, instead of just being in the room. And I use the word "really" because—although this has been the pitch for some years now—let's be honest: writers are still seen as the folks who can help to polish the words before launch (or often after it), so we don't ship anything too ugly.
According to Jonathon, his internal crusade to destroy barriers has already brought results. Content designers have gained context, accountability, and knowledge depth.
I believe each company's culture is unique. Therefore we should never look at this kind of change as a recipe to be blindly followed. But it's an effort to applaud. I'd be curious to see other tech companies trying to organize their content teams in a similar direction.
💻 Techy Nugget
Why people still use self-closing HTML tags like <br/>
HTML has two types of tags:
Container tags: the ones that need information inside. Because of that, you need to inform where the element starts and where it ends. For example, if you'd write a paragraph, you would type something like <p>Hello World</p>, where <p> is the opening paragraph tag and </p> is the closing paragraph tag.
Empty tags: these are the ones that don't need any information inside. For example, in case you want to break a line, you just type <br>. There is nothing to be contained there, so you don't need a </br> (there is no such thing in HTML).
And then we see all over the web things like <br/>. What the heck is that?
Note that the forward slash, in this case, comes after the "br", not before. This means <br></br>, which we've just learned that makes no sense.
Self-closing tags like this come from the long-forgotten XHTML, which was an attempt raised by W3C to extend HTML using the syntax of XML rather than SGML—the original standard in which HTML was based. Until HTML5, there was still an attempt to define HTML as an SGML application, but HTML5 left that attempt behind. (W3C described even HTML4 as "an SGML application conforming to International Standard ISO 8879".)
The thing is XML is much more strict than HTML. For instance, if there is an error in an XML document, the entire document will simply not be rendered. Although there are advantages there, I can only imagine that an XML-based web would always be half broken.
In its strictness, XML requires that every opening tag must have a corresponding closing tag, no matter if it's a container or not. So you would write <br></br>, which can be abbreviated by using <br/>. Both mean the same.
HTML5 doesn't complain if it sees a self-closing tag like that, but only to keep compatibility. What happens under the hood is that the forward slash is ignored—poor thing.