Content design in paper-first organisations

In this episode Sarah Winters chats to Persis Howe, a content lead who has worked on large scale projects across both the US and UK government.

Using their wide range of knowledge and experience, Persis shares the differences and similarities between working in UK and US government digital teams. They discuss how people’s mental models differ between the 2 countries when it comes to interacting with government services, and the challenges that can cause content designers.

Persis also looks back to their time at the Government Digital Service (GDS). They talk us through building and running the GDS content community, and how important it is to have a team of designers who just want to do a good job.

Episode transcript:
https://contentdesign.london/assets/transcripts/global-content-design-episode-02-transcript.txt


Persis Howe

Persis builds and leads teams of content and accessible language specialists solving problems at scale in government. In San Francisco, her team focused on accessibility for people in the city and launched business permitting for cannabis businesses, COVID vaccine availability notifications and SF.gov. 


At the Government Digital Service (GDS) in the UK, Persis built and managed the community of practice for over 2,000 content designers publishing on GOV.UK. Before that, she worked with web teams as they moved to GOV.UK, writing content strategies, training editors and running workshops so that websites and services could meet the needs of users and departments.

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Transcript

# Episode 2: Content design in paper-first organisations

https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/2285568.rss

Sarah Winters: Hello everybody, welcome to the Global Content Design podcast. Today we're talking to Persis Howe. She's the Content Lead at Digital Services for the City and County of San Francisco. She's worked for both the UK and the USA government and we're going to talk about all things content design. 

[Intro music]

Sarah: Hi, Persis. Thank you for being on the podcast today.

Persis Howe: It's so good to see you again, Sarah.

Sarah: Let's start with, where are you in the world?

Persis: So, I am in sunny California. But I'm in Northern California, not far from San Francisco, where it is always cold. 

Sarah: Always cold. Is that right? 

Persis: Oh, yes. [Laughs]

Sarah: I thought California was all hot. You know, the shorts and roller skates? 

Persis: No, there's a really good quote from Mark Twain, that "I've never spent a colder winter than July in San Francisco".

Sarah: Okay, well, there we are. I've learned something new already. And we're about a minute in. So that's amazing. Thank you very much. 

Okay, why don't you tell everybody a little about your role, and how you got from wherever it is that you started to where you are now in content.

Persis: So I am the Content Lead for Digital Services for the City and County of San Francisco. I'm an American, and was born and raised here. And then spent a long time living in the UK. I bounced around after college, I had a number of jobs, worked in Japan, met my husband, who's British and moved to London, and got into content in investment banks. And then moved over to working in government, which was a much better fit.

Sarah: I don't remember you saying that on some of the very late nights and tricky projects that we were on. Can I just say that?

[Both laughing]

Persis: Yeah, yeah. But those were therapy sessions. Lots of bitching going on!

Sarah: Okay, sorry to interrupt, carry on.

Persis: So I started at GDS, not long before GOV.UK launched. And I worked on the website for a couple of years and then managed and ran the content community, which was a group of 2000 editors across the UK who were publishing on GOV.UK. 

And after doing that for a couple of years, I was looking around for a next step. And found one in California, which fit with kind of wanting to be closer to my family and wanting my kids to have American accents.

Sarah: [Exaggerating accent] You don't want them to have British accents? Persis, really?

Persis: Well, I've got one of each now. [Laughs] I'm not sure how that happened. But that's where we are.

Sarah: Amazing. Okay, so this is the really interesting thing you have worked with both the British government and the American government.

Persis: Yes.

Sarah: And I appreciate, we all appreciate, that you probably can't say some things. But what would you say? [Both laugh] We're gonna be diplomatic here, right? So…we don't want an international incident. So what can you tell us about the differences, actually, between the 2 countries and their digital view, I suppose?

Persis: The one caveat here is that in the UK, I worked at a federal level. And in the US, I work for the City of San Francisco. But to me, the biggest difference is Americans really don't like government. And we say we hate it. And we tend to want smaller taxes and smaller government and just as a general thing. 

But then we have 4 layers of government, and the UK has 2. 

So there is so much more government here…

Sarah: Right.

Persis: …frequently at odds with each other. So, like, in California, it is legal to grow, buy, sell marijuana. In many states, that is not legal. And that's a huge tension between the states and the federal government. But then there's also a county level, and then there is a city level. 

Sarah: Okay.

Persis: Yes. So, San Francisco is one of the few places in the states where their city and county are combined. So, at least for that we only have 3 levels. And then they do weird things like schools are their own kind of private or separate thing, where they don't actually report to a national Department of Education. They report to the local and the state and the national but in different ways that I have never figured out entirely.

Sarah: Okay. So because this is a podcast, I feel like I should describe the fact that I have a furrowed brow! What is happening here?

[Laughter]

We were just looking today, as a team, at some stuff from local government and central government and it was kind of, like, ‘what is going on here?' There were various things going on. 

Persis: Yeah. 

Sarah: You're saying you have 4 levels of that when it comes to users doing, I don't know, go find a school or… I'm not even gonna touch your healthcare system. But…do you know what I mean? How difficult is it? Or is it really easy?

Persis: Well, no, it's really difficult. And you get a lot of workarounds. And some of those workarounds are really well intentioned, like charities that will help you do things. A lot of them are like, we get ads for schools on the radio here. 

Sarah: Okay. 

Persis: Mostly private schools, but not always. Which I find mystifying, but it's that yet so... So the American system is based on choice. And it's based on keeping things separated, so that you have more choice, I think.

Sarah: That must make the user journeys way more mucky?

Persis: Well, it makes the user journeys incredibly complicated and complex. And they also, I think it puts the US at a disadvantage. 

In the UK, when I was working for GDS, there was this really strong kind of top down, ‘we will save money by de-siloing out at least our websites, and really focusing on services'.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Persis: And you're seeing that in the US, but it's… the Veterans Administration is doing that for veterans within the Veterans Administration. And then they have to link out to somewhere else if those veterans are going back to school and another place if the veterans are, I don't know, for health care.

So when we were first starting GOV.UK, the relationships between departments were frequently tenuous. And you'd be linking off to a site that you weren't completely sure had really been optimised for that user journey.

Sarah: Yeah.

Persis: But because the UK has 2 levels of government, they've been able to sort that out much quicker than the US. 

Sarah: Yeah.

Persis: And they have more resources, because you're only applying it to 2 levels of government.

Sarah: Okay. Okay. And so, for your average American then, when they go into this kind of digital sphere, do they all know where they're going to be going? Or do they just go to Google search and then get lost? Or is it one of those innate things that you just kind of know where you're going?

Persis: No. In San Francisco, one of my first big projects was building SF gaps, which is like a single website for all of the different departments. And we did a lot of, like, user intercepts before we started building and talked to people about what they thought about government and how they looked at getting services.

Sarah: Okay, sorry, I need a second. User intercepts? Is that what you call that?

Persis: Oh, yeah. We just stopped people walking around in parks or at the library and said, ‘what do you think about government?' 

Sarah: Amazing!

Persis: No, we didn't have a researcher at that point. We needed to do it. So we just kind of dove in and got started. 

Sarah: So is this content people, walking around, doing research?

Persis: It was a product manager, an engineer, a designer, and me. Yes, a content person.

Sarah: I love it. And you also like that you called it an intercept? 

Persis: Yes. 

Sarah: It sounds very American. Very, I don't know Jason Bourne – fabulous, anyway carry on…

Persis: So what we found out was, as you would expect, the people that we were talking to, for the most part, saw government as one entity. So they had absolutely no differentiation between where you go to vote, and where you pay your taxes, and where you pay a parking permit, even though those are actually 3 different levels and 3 different entities. 

That model wasn't there when they talked about government.

If you ask them about how to get services, particularly people who are older and more confident at doing that, where they'd had experience. They knew they had to go to a particular government agency. And they kind of had a slight idea of the model of that. But the like 5 people that we actually talked to in depth about this, every single one of them got it wrong.

Sarah: As in the department, they thought they had to go to, or the place they had to go to, it was the wrong place?

Persis: Yes, the mental model over here is much more about actually connecting with the person.

And it frustrated me so much when I first moved over that, like, I had to go into a bank and talk to them to open an account. I just want to do something online, don't make me come and talk to you. [Laughs]

Sarah: Okay. 

Persis: But everything was ‘you have to call, you have to talk to somebody.' And so these people that we were talking to would go to one department and then very frequently get sent across the road to another department. And they kind of expected that and planned it into dealing with government.

Sarah: My mind is just blown. Can you imagine like, if you're in a rural area, and America is massive!

Persis: Yes, yes.

Sarah: If you're in a rural area, and then you want to, I don't know, update your driving licence, whatever it is, you have to travel to a place to do it.

Persis: Yes.

Sarah: There's also this kind of, I don't know if this is probably just a silly perception. But I have a view of America of you know, AI and Silicon Valley, and everything is glittery, and stuff like that. But it's clear that it's not a digital first digital culture.

Persis: No, it's not. And it's very particularly not a digital-first government at this point. 

There are…there are glimmers of it. And there are some really great things being done. For example, you can now do a lot of your driver's licence for California, and it's a state thing, online. And my first project with San Francisco was to build a very complicated way of getting a business permit for cannabis businesses online.

Sarah: Okay. Tell us about that. 

Persis: Oh, there are 17 forms. And it involves, I think, at that point, it was 4 departments, and some of them weren't solely digital first, and you had to fax them things.

Sarah: Sorry, when was this?

Persis: 2017. So the legalisation of cannabis had just happened in California. Okay, so we were like, this is a greenfield process. We're gonna make it digital, it'll be fabulous. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Persis: And I've never worked in permitting before. And man, is it complicated!

Sarah: Err, yeah…so just to set up a business?

Persis: Yes. And I think it was taking about 2 years to do that, to get through that process.

Sarah: Okay. That, yep. I thought our processes were bad. 2 years, you would like that's not something that you could sit there and, ‘I'm going to start a business and then I go and create a bank account and…'. 2 years you have to work and do your day job while you're going through this process. Presumably.

Persis: And a lot of those day jobs were in a very grey area of cannabis businesses that were operating kind of within the law, but the law was changing. And yeah, so it was really complex.

Sarah: That's a very nice, lovely word to use. I would use… it sounds very tricky.

Persis: Yeah, it is. But you know, when I first got here, you had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get your licence. 

Sarah: Yeah.

Persis: And now for many things, if they don't have to take a picture, or really verify your identity, you can do it online. 

Sarah: Okay, so what would you say the state of digital is now compared with like 5 years ago, in America?

Persis: I think it's getting better. I think there are some really brilliant cases of best practice. There was the most wonderful service built during COVID, built really quickly, where you can sign up to get COVID tests mailed to you. And they were from the government. So they were free.

It wasn't perfect. But it was a quick, small service that worked really well. And then texted you about when your tests were gonna get delivered. And I think that was one of those things... I think COVID in general, really highlighted in America and I think kind of everywhere, the need for digital.

Sarah: Okay.

Persis: It really gave a lot of government entities a really clear display of how important it was to have digital.

Sarah: Yeah, okay. And is… is content important? Or is it seen like over here – I'm gonna be very honest – it's sometimes the poor cousin, right? ‘Everybody can write', you know, whatever. Is that the same in America? 

Persis: Very much so. What I see is very similar to what I saw in the UK. That we're still not valuing websites in the way that we should, in that, like, frequently, the departments that I work with will place a lot of their resources into social media, because it's very immediate, and it gives them direct contact with their users.

But we know from analytics that 10 to 100 times more people actually look at the website, but the distribution of where they're putting their resources isn't based on that usage. It's kind of based on whoever is shouting the loudest.

Sarah: Ah, okay. So on social media, you were saying like it's immediate. So you can see immediately whether people are engaging with it and sharing it and having negative opinions about it. But because it's harder on a site, it's less important, is that right? 

Persis: Yes, that's what I'm seeing, in many cases. The San Francisco Department of Elections is absolutely brilliant at really keeping up with their analytics, and they know exactly how many people are on their site and what they're going to and what they're complaining about on the website. And so there are places where they do that, but I don't… yeah, I'm not seeing it be that widespread over here yet. In the same way that it wasn't in the UK, I don't think? I mean, it may be now but it certainly wasn't when I was there.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Also in America, they have a very clear demarcation actually, between product and website. And it seems to be that, I don't know if, again, it's a perception, but there seems to be a little bit of snobbery in places that if you work on a service or product, that's slightly more important than a website. Have you seen any of that? Or is that not correct?

Persis: I haven't, but I don't work in industry. 

Sarah: Yeah.

Persis: My background is government. 

Sarah: Okay.

Persis: So I think that's not really happening, where we are.

Sarah: Okay. 

Persis: However, there is, I think, a lot of snobbery. Every website I've worked on, between the people who build the website, and the people who support either front end users or backend users. And that, like, you know, who's doing the support, and who's doing the actual building – that I do see. People want to work on the products, and they don't always want to work in support.

Sarah: So, just tell me a bit more about that. You mean, like content maintenance?

Persis: Um, well, so gov US uses the same model as GOV.UK where you have a very high number of distributed editors editing a single site. And so those editors need support. And then there's also people on the front end using the website who need support.

Sarah: Ah, okay.

Persis: And I think it's one of those things that digital teams tend to focus on making the thing. And we don't…yeah, I mean, it happened with GOV.UK?

Sarah: Yeah. 

Persis: We don't think about supporting the thing in the detail that we should, because you make it over, you know, 6 months, a year, 5 years, whatever. Yeah. And then you support it for the rest of its life. 

Sarah: Yeah.

Persis: So again, it's that like, you know, we're putting all of our resources on one side. And actually the other side is what has the impact?

Sarah: Yeah, so we build it, you come, we move away because it's built right. And then it's just occasional word tweaking? Is that what you mean? 

Persis: That one. Yes, yes. Or we built it, you're using it. And now we don't really have enough people to help you use it correctly. 

Sarah: Sure. And then there's a turnover in staff and then knowledge gets lost… and…

Persis: Yep, exactly. So you know, that was a lot of the reason that we poured resources into the content community in the UK, because that community was a way to help support those editors.

Sarah: Yeah, so, tell everybody about that. Because I'm not sure how many people outside of government actually knew about the content clinics and the content community. 

Persis: So we launched GOV.UK as a services-first site. And then shortly after brought over the 24 ministerial departments onto the website. And at that point, we realised that the basis for bringing those editors over was that they were going to have, kind of, professional editors, like we had at GDS. And that wasn't really happening. There were small departments who didn't have a named person doing it. 

And it was a lot harder to use them than we thought, particularly for people who didn't have a strong background of publishing on lots of different sites.

So we started by going around and talking to people in running these things called Content Clinics. We thought it was going to be ‘we're here to help you with your words'. And actually, it was a lot of editors going, ‘We need this feature! You built the damn thing, and it's not right!'

Sarah: I remember!

Persis: Yes, exactly. There was a lot of that. Me coming back to the GDS office, and saying ‘they're really angry with us, we really need to listen to them, they're really angry with us'.

Sarah: Yeah.

Persis: And so we had a content conference. And it was an explosion of editors really wanting to meet each other and get support and be part of this community and actually have a say in what was going on, like the website. So I convinced GDS to let me do that as my full time job. And I ran more conferences to try and upskill editors, but also kind of give them more of a voice.

We brought in the GOV.UK product managers to talk to them and listen to them. And then we also, like, tried to really help those people think about user journeys across their content and making sure that they were really optimised for that.

Sarah: I really just want to spend a minute actually and just reflect….  actually what a massive achievement that was. It is a huge achievement, Persis. I remember you saying we should be doing this. And I said, ‘I don't know, should we? Really? I don't know!'

And you took it, and you flew and you pulled everybody together. Because at that point, it was very much bulldozing. 

Persis: Yes!

Sarah: Right?! ‘Sarah makes the mess, Persis cleans it up'.

Sarah: And then… but you know you pulled the people together, because it is exactly as you were just saying, right? You can work on the product. And that can be shiny, and you can build it. But actually there are people who have to maintain this. And there are people who need to continue with it, to make sure that it doesn't drop, but also to make it better than it was at the beginning. And then, you know, you turn that into like a conference and like I was outside by then. But I saw one of them. And you had the most incredible line-up from people all over. 

Persis: Yeah, I was constantly amazed. I would go to these people that were my kind of content heroes, like you and Jerry McGovern. And be like, ‘we can't pay you because it's a government conference, but would you like to come and speak? We'll be really appreciative'. And they'd say yes.

And I was always flabbergasted. But it was like people really wanted to help. And the idea of there being a roomful of people who wanted to be better content designers was a really powerful draw. Because, you know, the one thing I could promise beside, which wasn't money, was a really engaged audience. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I think that really speaks to actually the government, content community and wider, right? Everybody wants to do a good job.

Persis: I mean I think that's why we're in government. We really want to serve people. And if we didn't, we wouldn't be here for long.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah. And you wouldn't take the massive pay cut and all the other things and the hard work and everything. Just for everybody listening to this podcast, Persis is so foundational, so instrumental in getting the departments to calm down and to engage. [Laughs] But it was brutal right? At the beginning it was brutal.

Persis: It was bad. It was really bad. Yeah. My favourite story on that was you realised that we needed to have some sort of template for ministers biographies. And for some reason you asked me to do it, I don't think you'd realise how much I didn't know about UK Government at that point. 

[Both laughing]

So I had to like, go home and get my husband to teach me.

Sarah: The capability curse Persis, when you find somebody capable, you give them everything!

Persis: And I was like getting a crash course in the structure and the make up of the UK Government over like, 24 hours so I could write these templates.

Sarah: I didn't know anything about this. So thank you for hiding it. 

Persis: Well, they were very simple. [Laughs]

Sarah: But I think that, that that also speaks to like, from the outside things can look really simple, right? But when you add humans and you add ego and hierarchy and power, it becomes a lot harder, actually. 

Persis: Well, yes, and, I see very frequently, people who are really good at their job, and really enmeshed in the details of that job. And they know so much that it's really hard for them to focus on the 80% who need none of that specialist knowledge and only need the very clear defined simple primary path.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Persis: And trying to build up an understanding of not overloading users, I think, is a really difficult place to get to.

Sarah: Yeah.

Persis: Particularly for those people who are so expert in their field. So I think there's also something that I see more clearly in America, and I'm not sure if it's a local federal thing, or an American British thing. But over here, there's this huge push to be transparent. And so people really want to give all the things… so I was working with a department a couple of years back that had meeting minutes from the 1930s. And they really felt that they needed to put those online because there were researchers who needed them, occasionally.

Sarah: See, it's interesting, though, because I… way back National Archives, all the rest of that over here. But then if you look at Jerry McGovern's work that is still costing us something. So, how do you balance transparency, and people will want to know some things that government is doing? They will. So how do we balance that between ‘it's got to go somewhere' to ‘but don't put it in the middle of the user's way, because they just don't care what happened in the 30s'. 

Persis: Exactly, yeah. So when we moved departments over to SF gov from their old site, we've built an archives on the Wayback Machine for them, that they can link back to, that has their old site in its entirety, so that they haven't lost that transparency.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah, we need a lot more bold archiving. That's what we need.

Persis: Yes, for us that archiving is the solution for that is to like, we've created a link to a snapshot of your website on this day. Down to, like, you can still find the PDFs that are attached.

Sarah: And that can be good and bad.

Persis: You know, government being transparent is a good thing. But you do need to be really clear on your user journeys.

Sarah: I have 2 more questions for you. What do you see as the opportunities and the challenges for the content design industry?

Persis: Oh, so I feel like from the summer, there's been a lot going on, on the things that I get, about how hard it is to work in content right now. And it feels like I'm hearing a lot of the conversations that I was hearing 10 years ago, about ‘no one's taking content seriously', ‘everyone can write', ‘we have to prove our value'… All of that, like, foundational stuff, ‘we aren't getting a seat at the table'. And I find that really disheartening because I feel, like, kind of before this last recession, we were doing better! And there was more of an understanding.

So I think that's a big challenge is not to get disheartened by that.

Sarah: Yeah, okay.

Persis: And then, for me the way that I connected with my community used to be through Twitter.

Sarah: Yep.

Persis: And I'm still not sure how to do that without Twitter being Twitter any more.

So that to me is actually a huge challenge. Like, I want that support and that community where you can just say, "I'm having a problem. Talk to me".

Sarah: Yeah. 

Persis: And I don't have to look through 17 different slack groups and search the archives and all that nonsense.

Sarah: Yeah, it is quite hard. It is dropping. The numbers are dropping. I'm hoping we'll just all move over to Bluesky. It seems a bit nicer. But that will take time.

Persis: People over here seem to be moving to Mastodon. I'm waiting until there's consensus before I deeply invest!

Sarah: But there is that thing like, you need a community. Particularly, I mean you're not, but if you were in an organisation that has one content design, it is so hard...

Persis: Yeah. 

Sarah: …actually, when you're sitting there on your own. Because often people will think that like, organisational maturity, in terms of content is down to the one content designer in there. And it's like, no organisational maturity is the organisation's responsibility, not one person. 

Persis: Completely. But even like, I've built up a team of 5 here. And I still need that community, like I still go back to blogs that I know of from years ago, because I know that somebody published a really great blog on content design in discovery…

Sarah: Yes.

Persis: …and what that actually entails, or, you know, there'll be a great post from GDS on what they're doing in terms of mapping user journeys, like that cross-pollinisation is really important. And then for people who work in government who don't have huge budgets, to go to conferences. I think it's even more important. 

Sarah: Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. And opportunities?

Persis: Oh, so many.

For me, I see there being this massive opportunity in American government to hide the complexity of the government structure and make it easy for users. And I think there are little glimmers of that happening. I'm really looking forward to a better understanding of that happening everywhere. 

I applied for my UK passport a couple of years back, and it was my first one. And I was able to do it completely online. 

Sarah: Yeah.

Persis: And from my phone. Yeah, to take the picture and everything. And I remember posting about that in my work Slack. And just saying, "this is awesome", and nobody believed me.

Sarah: Nobody in America believed you that you could do it all from your phone. 

Persis: Yes. And getting a passport in the US as a renewal takes at least 3 months. 5 if they're backed up.

Sarah: Oh, okay. Oh, wow. Okay. 

Persis: So they're all these hacks of like, you know, you buy an aeroplane ticket and you go in and you get your passport because it looks like you're travelling the next day. And then you cancel the ticket. 

Sarah: Yeah. So glimmers. That's what we're hoping for?

Persis: We're hoping that government will make it easier for people to do the right thing. And it's happening. But I want more.

Sarah: Always the more, always the more! Okay, my last question. And can we just see that cup? ‘No more content, smarter content'. A Content Design London black cup, I believe?

Persis: Yes. Although I have to remember not to use this one or the FAQ one in meeting with stakeholders. [Both laugh]

I've tried that. And over here, it doesn't work!

Sarah: I would like, I would like that tested. Okay, so the last question that I have for you is, are there any phrases or expressions that are used in America that would not translate elsewhere? 

Persis: Loads. Loads. But actually, the worst that I've had was what I thought was an American expression. And I just got it completely and totally wrong. 

So, I was working on a permit, an online permitting for people who wanted to sell on like a blanket on a sidewalk.

Sarah: Okay.

Persis: And I thought, I've moved back to America. And over here, we talked about things being in blocks, like a city block. You know, that's the way we talked about that. So I was trying to figure out a really clear way that we could get… that we could explain to the people applying for permits that they needed to, to really clearly identify where they wanted to put their blanket to sell things.

Sarah: Okay.

Persis: And so I phrased that in terms of blocks, because that's how I think about cities.

And most of the vendors who were applying, were not native English speakers, and had absolutely no idea what a block was, because that term didn't translate into any of the languages they were using. And it's an American idiom, but it's also one that was in American idiom when I left America, and not so much when I came back!

I don't know, people don't use it here. It really didn't work with non-native speakers.

And they're like, ‘We have no idea what you're talking about! Can you like... we want to put it in metres, we want to tell you how many metres we are away from this intersection.'

Sarah: Blocks can be Lego blocks right?

Persis: Exactly. And then it totally didn't translate. And it was one of those services that we had to get out the door before we tested with users.

Sarah: That is perfect. And that is a perfect example of that. That is a perfect example of, like, knowing who your users are.

Persis: Yes. And I know I should have done better.

Sarah: But no judgement Persis!

Persis: I was so proud of myself for being able to use an American idiom!

[Both laugh]

Sarah: All right, well, I really could talk to you for hours, but we're gonna have to wrap up. So thank you so much for coming on.

Persis: No, thank you. It's been really lovely to talk to you. It is always fabulous to talk about content.