By Janus Boye
“Content Design is where User Experience was 5 years ago”
Content design and how it helps deliver successful digital products at Mastercard was the topic of our recent member conference call. Heading up the Content Design practice at Mastercard's Tech Hub in New York City Melinda Belcher shared her perspectives and made the fitting comparison to the UX space as a part of the conversation.
Specifically, Melinda said that in her view content design is haunted by:
Fewer rules, frameworks and methodology
Lack of common understanding. Content design is not the same as copy writing, just like UI is not UX
The challenge is delivering content at scale and content design is clearly an emerging term that’s resonating with many. Let’s look at how they do it at Mastercard and what you might learn from it.
What is content design really?
Melinda’s 5-person team is focused on helping people around the world exchange information quickly and securely.
On her 2nd slide, she shared their high-level take on content design. As you can see on the slide below, it focuses on the objective to drive preferences for their products and services.
Combining her curiosity and experience, she elaborated by asking good questions:
Why do we say it
How do we say it
How do we best bring the customer into the experience and make them feel supported?
Are we telling a story people want to hear?
Where are we not meeting the needs?
A screenshot from the member call where Melinda talked about how to create experiences people love
As in most large, complex and global organisations, Melinda has many internal stakeholders. She fittingly calls them partners and shared her lessons learned on getting the essential buy-in from leadership.
Melinda also shared that the three key initiatives around which her content design structures their OKRs for the year. The key objectives are on:
Thought leadership
Strategy & systems
Content creation (or the “day-to-day hamster wheel” as she called it)
In terms of tools, Melinda shared that they are largely working in a combination of Sketch and Excel to capture decisions taken. They have also created tools to help them extract content from that process for delivery to their development and translation partners in the “develop” phase so that it can be easily delivered into code and scaled.
Content Ops in practice
Interestingly, and confirming Melinda’s point on the emerging terms, she sees Content Ops and uses the term Content Ops a bit differently than we have done for the past years on these pages.
It caught my attention when she covered how content design is an integral part of the product lifecycle. To clarify, the slide below is not a hierarchy of workstreams, but a map of where their work slots into the product design lifecycle at Mastercard.
Going deeper on how they see Content Ops at Mastercard, she shared this slide with deliverables. Notice the bullet under Content Ops including UI strings management, translation content matrices and more:
I asked Melinda to elaborate a bit in our follow up Q&A while fleshing out this post and she sent this helpful explanation (key terms in bold):
Perhaps this is the difference between the approach to content development for product vs marketing. At Mastercard, we are not usually creating content for marketing websites – we are creating content for an entire product ecosystem that includes websites, SMS, email, sales narratives, implementation guides, etc. So a lot of our work in the beginning is what we would define as content design (creating the product experience with our design and product partners based on an iterative understanding of user needs in a dynamic test-and-learn environment) & content strategy (defining and documenting key messages and terminology around features and benefits). Content ops, for us, is less about how we make and document those content decisions – it’s about how we efficiently deliver the content itself at scale within a global organization.
If you’ve read some of the previous posts on Content Ops on this blog, like these two:
Content Operations? How To Collaborate On Content (Effectively) by Angus Edwardson from Gathercontent (February 2019)
Thinking Beyond The Words: The Complexities Of Content Strategy by Rob Mills from Gathercontent (February 2020)
You’ll notice that Gathercontent and others see Content Ops a bit differently. In brief, Angus has described it as the gap between strategy and execution. Rob shared these three pillars of content operations:
People
Process
Technology
Norwegian Enonic used this similar definition of content operations:
“Content operations is a content production principle between strategy and delivery that integrates people, process, and technology.”
Words matter, but clearly both content design and content ops are setting out address the growing and real problem of trying to do content at scale. As Melinda wrote in an email afterwards:
We all agree it’s necessary to have these mechanisms in place, no matter what we call them or where we place them in the product (or marketing) lifecycle.
My closing advice on content operations, would be alongside Melinda’s take: No matter what you call it, just make sure you are speaking the same language internally and with your partners.
Learn more about content design and customer experience
For more about Melinda’s team and her work, check out this interview on Writer. Every Experience is a Content Experience: Interview with Melinda Belcher.
On the value of content and how to measure the impact of our work on improving the customer experience, you might like the recent post by Mark Demeny from Contentful titled: Accounting For Customer Experience.
At the Boye 19 Brooklyn conference last, year, Melinda Belcher discussed how to better assess and understand user needs at each step of the decision-making process, and how to map content to those needs in order to create meaningful connections with prospects. On the slide from the talk below, you can find more about targeting content.
Melinda on stage at the Boye 19 Brooklyn conference - her session was titled: “Content is for Closers: Improving Lead Generation and Conversion through Content Strategy”
Finally, you can also browse the slides from the call (PDF) or even view the entire recording from the call below