I’m Etain. I started working as a content designer at Olive Jar in April and am working on a project with the Department for Business and Trade as part of a multi-disciplinary team.
What you do as a content designer is pretty varied, depending on what stage of a project you’re delivering and what your current focus is. But whatever I’m working on, I usually start around 8:30, after I’ve got my daughter sorted for the day ahead.
The first thing I’ll do is look at my calendar and our project board.I’ll check what meetings I’ve got in and carve up the rest of my day into chunks, based on what tickets I’m working on.
Then I’ll have a quick nosey through Teams, Slack and emails for updates or chatter.
I have an early check in with the OJ team most mornings. We have stand-up 3 days a week and on Fridays our professional services team have a regular community catch-up. Project work can be a bit like living in a bubble – you can easily lose track of the workhappening in other teams. This community time is a great way to hear about progress in other Olive Jar projects, to share the things we’re working on and to chat about what’s going on in our lives outside of work.
Team meetings
The people on my project team are scattered across the UK. I'm not a lone ranger so I like to check in with the folks I’m working withregularly. Not just so we can make sure we’re aligned and delivering the right things at the right time, but also so we get to know each other and build a safe, respectful and positive working environment. And I’m lucky to be in a great team full of lovely people who are always up for a chat.
We’ve a project stand-up at 10:00 every morning. We use this to run through our priorities for the day, share what we’re working on and ask for input from other team members if we’re dealing with any knotty issues.
Most days will have at least one other team meeting, either as a full team planning or reviewing work, or as a smaller, specialised group tackling a specific problem.
Work that’s not meetings
I’m one of 2 content designers on this project. If you’re not familiar with content design you might think that means I spend most of the day writing, but that’s far from the truth.
Content designers often say that writing only takes up about 10% of their time. That’s certainly my experience on this project. I’m much more likely to be:
reviewing documents, trying to figure out how different pieces of guidance relate to each other and cross referencing these
planning and delivering workshops to explore what we know and need to find out about our content operations and users
diving into analytics and feedback to understand more about how users are interacting with content and what they have to say about these interactions
reviewing and auditing the client’s existing content to understand the content infrastructure, taxonomies and information architecture
finding out more about the problem space we’re working in and the language that users and subject matter experts use to describe it
mapping out user journeys and process flows
talking to lots and lots of people about lots and lots of things
Eventually, I’ll get to writing, but that can only happen once all the other work’s been done, and I feel like I properly understand the problem space, what users need and how content can help give them this.
Wrapping up the day
The end of the day is much like the start of the day.
I’ll take a last look at the project board to update any tickets I’vebeen working on and think about what the next day’s work might be. Next, I’ll check what meetings are booked in for tomorrow, (even though I know I’m going to check this first thing in the morning). I’ll have another snoop at Slack and Teams to make sure I haven’t missed anything.
And then I’ll send a few messages to team mates to see how everyone’s day went before logging off for the evening.
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