21 years in digital content: revolution, not evolution
Image from Unsplash
By Beck Thompson
Beck has worked in content for over 20 years. She has been in content design since the start - she was on the GOV.UK launch team - and has worked as content lead at both Government Digital Service and Citizens Advice.
After many happy years consulting on content for Scroll, she’s now at the Ministry of Justice, where she’s continuing to creating user-focused content and solve problems for users.
A content designer’s journey
Recently, I was talking to my Gen Alpha daughter (12) about what she might do when she grows up. She remarked that her future job might be one that doesn’t exist yet, and this got me thinking.
As a Gen X-er (age unspecified), I had a non-digital childhood. My daughter has 2 email addresses already, but I didn’t get my first until I was at university, and I was 27 before I had a mobile phone. And yet now, my profession - which definitely didn’t exist when I was 12 - is very much a digital one.
As Scroll - first set up in 2004 - turns 21 this year, I thought it might be interesting to reflect on this coming-of-age moment and consider how the world of digital content has changed over the past couple of decades.
From UKOnline to Directgov
Directgov, the government website that was GOV.UK’s predecessor, was also born in 2004. It had noble ambitions: to be a single point of information for UK citizens to find government information online. It was an attempt to go further than the UKOnline portal, which aimed to make it easier for people to find information across thousands of government websites. It tried to make sense of public sector digital chaos and help people find the things they needed.
When UKOnline launched in 2001, I was working on the reed.co.uk jobs website. It was the UK’s first recruitment website, and I remember the excitement when we hit 100,000 registered users in 2002. This was a cause for huge celebration: we were invited to a dinner at the Ritz to mark the achievement. Of course, 100,000 seems like a small figure now: reed.co.uk has more than 100 million people using it each year to look for work, and over 80,000 job applications a day. I think this goes to show how much digital has evolved over the past couple of decades.
I loved being part of the reed.co.uk team - I spent 4 years there and learnt a lot, but I wanted to work in the public sector. So I became a ‘web content manager’ for the Government Office for the South East in 2003.
Web content managers, editors and ‘dumbing down’
There were lots of web content managers back then. We worked to some of the principles that content designers use today, but we were not content designers. Website content would come from policy leads, and it was my job to edit it a bit to make it easier to read.
I also tried to educate policy folk about writing for the web, with varying degrees of success. I developed training, a style guide and principles that were sometimes followed, and sometimes not. Back in 2003, I remember someone telling me that my edits were “dumbing down” the content he wanted to publish.
When I joined Directgov as a senior editor in 2009, things had changed a bit. Directgov had a team of senior editors who knew how to write for the web. We were looking at analytics and learning more. We had content quality leads, too, who had a 2i (second pair of eyes review) role, making sure that content met Directgov standards. But we were still working primarily to departments, who could - and did - sometimes ignore our suggested edits to publish what they wanted, how they wanted. Departments were the ones funding Directgov, so they had the final say.
Martha Lane Fox review
In 2010, Martha Lane Fox - then the UK’s Digital Champion - published a report called ‘Directgov 2010 and beyond: revolution not evolution’ (opens new tab).
She had been invited to review the website and explore how government could use the internet better to communicate with people. At the same time, a Directgov team led by Sarah Winters - who would go on to establish the content design profession and become Head of Content Design at GOV.UK - was working on a huge project to close down 551 government websites.
In her report, Martha Lane Fox said that the government’s digital estate should be radically improved. She proposed a ‘digital by default’ model for public services, and the simplification and improvement of existing digital channels. This included exploring how Directgov and Business Link, its sister site for a business audience, could be combined into a single website.
I remember being torn about the report. I felt that Martha Lane Fox was right: this was an opportunity to improve government digital services for the better and change the way things were done. But I also worried that it would put people’s jobs under threat.
Fast forward to 2011, and both of those things were true. We were told that Directgov would be disbanded as an organisation and replaced by the Government Digital Service (GDS). We were invited to apply for jobs at GDS as part of the reorganisation.
The first content design team
I remember seeing the job title ‘content designer’ and wondering what on earth that was. I applied for the job and got it. And almost immediately, I could see that this was going to be different. We were encouraged to think creatively, and remember that content didn’t just mean words on a page. Importantly, because it was a beta and GOV.UK would initially run alongside Directgov, we were given the freedom to start again from scratch and approach things from a fresh perspective.
The team adopted an agile, ‘learn by doing’ approach. I remember a senior person telling me that it was okay if an idea failed: we were encouraged to think about user needs and experiment. Publishing models changed: ‘sign off’ became ‘fact checking’, and we were given the autonomy to challenge or disregard policy comments that were not about factual correctness. We were finally allowed to do what many of us had been trying to do for years and create simple, clear content that was easy to understand.
With that small team in Hercules House, a drab concrete government building near Waterloo, the content design profession was born. We learnt and improved our content design skills together, eventually moving to an office in Holborn and launching GOV.UK in February 2012.
My introduction to Scroll
As we worked our way towards launch, the team expanded. Contractors came on board, and that was my first encounter with Scroll. The Scroll people I collaborated with were great; they were able to work in a user-centred way and quickly became an important part of the launch team. We all learnt from each other, and I enjoyed working with Scrollies so much that I would regularly hire them after I became a content lead at GDS.
After 4 years at GDS, I joined the brilliant content design team at Citizens Advice, working as content lead there. The content designers there were fantastic to work with, but part of me wanted to return to being a practitioner. So I joined Scroll as a freelancer in 2016 and have been there ever since. I’m about to leave to join the Ministry of Justice, but I have loved my time at Scroll. The projects I’ve been involved with show how much content design has grown over the past few years. With Scroll, I’ve worked on user-centred content for websites, intranets, digital services and even a printed booklet.
Content design is an established profession
Much has changed since 2011. There are so many more content designers in both the public and private sectors. They work on websites, apps, transactional services and many other things besides. They might spend an entire sprint iterating, testing and refining what amounts to a very small number of words on a digital service somewhere.
Perhaps the words are a result of multiple conversations with users, developers, subject matter experts and stakeholders. Perhaps they’ve involved negotiation, interrogating data, analysing user feedback and behaviour. Maybe there has been pair writing and advocating for user-centred content with difficult stakeholders. Maybe, sometimes, there has been compromise, and the content designer is not entirely happy with the result - but they’ve accepted that done is better than perfect (opens new tab).
Content design is now an established profession in government and elsewhere. In the civil service, there are 6 levels within the discipline and a structured career path. Find out more about what content designers do at each level (opens new tab).
It’s a hugely rewarding, challenging job. And it’s still changing with the world and with technology - content designers now work on AI projects, on the new GDS GOV.UK app, on content structured for voice and chat design. I wonder what the next 21 years will bring?
Interested in joining the profession? Read how one content designer got started or get in touch with Scroll.