Michael Andrews
The emergence of design systems has created new content strategy and content management needs and opportunities, especially with the advent of headless CMSs.
As a long-time UX practitioner, content strategy evangelist, and content systems expert, Michael Andrews is uniquely qualified to talk about how to manage content in these new systems.
So far, the most important lesson he has learned from working with content in design systems: Don't forget to apply the basic content strategy lessons we've learned over the past 20 years.
"You really are not going to be as good a content designer as you can be if you don't tap into the incredible body of knowledge that's been developed over the past 20 years in content strategy."
We talked about:
his work at Kontent.ai and his history as a UX and content practitioner
the emergence of content practice in design systems, currently "more guidelines than executable processes"
the problems with tightly tying content to specific uses in a design
the main benefit of headless content management - "decouple the visual layout of the UI design from the content itself" - so the same message can be conveyed in multiple channels
how content strategy practice manifests in design-system work
the current state of tooling for working with content in design systems
the benefits of working with content from a single source of truth
governance issues that can arise when working with content in design systems
the benefits of bringing well-established content strategy and content modeling craft to design-system content
how a content model can help manage content variants and variations in a design systems
the importance of having the right content structured and ready for uses like personalization experiences
Michael's bio
Michael Andrews is content strategy evangelist at Kontent.ai, a headless CMS. In this role, he champions better practices for managing all kinds of digital content. Over the past two decades, he has worked as a consultant in the fields of user experience and content strategy in the United States, Europe, and Asia, advising clients in a diverse range of industries. He’s spoken at various content-related conferences, blogs extensively, and has written two books about content metadata. He has an MSc in human-centered computing systems from the University of Sussex.
Connect with Michael online:
LinkedIn
Twitter
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFPeiDA2RJ8
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 147. As design systems have emerged over the past several years, content designers and content strategists have begun to work with their design and engineering colleagues in new ways. As a content strategy evangelist working for a headless-CMS company, Michael Andrews has a unique perspective on this growing segment of the design and content worlds. His biggest take-home lesson so far? Don't forget the basic content strategy lessons we've learned over the past 20 years.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 147 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really delighted today to welcome back to the show, Michael Andrews. Michael was on about three years ago talking about metadata strategy, but we have a much more topical thing to talk about today. We're going to talk about the role of content and design systems. So Michael, welcome. Michael's an evangelist, a content strategy evangelist at Kontent.ai, and welcome Michael. Tell the folks a little bit more about your work there at Kontent.ai?
Michael:
Well, thanks again for having me on again, Larry, delighted to be here. Yeah, I work at Kontent.ai, which is a headless content management system and really trying to bring the new and best practices of content strategy to our customers and folks who might be interested in moving to a headless approach to content management. And I've been working in UX and content strategy for over a couple of decades now. I started out in UX, which is not really a common background to get involved with content. So I've been very interested in the intersection of content and user experience, how we can make that process more effective and ideally more sustainable.
Larry:
One of the things that's emerged the last four or five years, I guess, is the role of design systems in UX practice, and that is a way to articulate patterns and foundational design decisions and organize content or organize design components in a design system. And just the last maybe year or two, I want to say that it seemed like there's been attention to the role of content and design systems. So can you talk a little bit about where are we at? How are we doing with getting content into design systems?
Michael:
Yeah. It is interesting to see the emergence of content and design systems, and I think we have some companies that are really looking to build that out. Other companies are maybe curious about it, but they haven't done so much yet on it. But I would say generally speaking, it's a case of the design systems, as you pointed out, have been underdevelopment now for the past half decade or so, and the content piece of that has been a much more recent arrival.
Michael:
So we don't see the level of detail, I think, in the content aspect of the design system that we see in the UI definition part of it. With the UI piece of it, we have a lot of detail there where you're defining these components in really production-ready detail. So you can create tokens that you can really push into production, reuse these particular pieces of the design system, modify them quite easily through code, things like that.
Michael:
We don't have anything really production-ready when it comes to the content that's in design system. It tends to be much more advisory notes about this is the kind of things you should do, this is a tone you should use here. These are the good words that you should use or shouldn't use. But even then, there may be some exceptions to it. It's much more guidelines rather than executable processes that you can implement straight away. And I think this is pointing to maybe the different intents behind the design systems as they were conceived originally by front end developers and the expectations that content folks have for design systems. I think they're coming from slightly different perspectives there and maybe that is going to resolve itself, but maybe it's also just creating some divergences in terms of what people want these things to evolve into over time.
Larry:
As you talk about that, I think we could probably all agree on the top-level benefits of a design system or that notion of consistency and efficiency, doing things better and quicker and making it consistent across the board. But very quickly after that, we seem to diverge the design people and the content people. Do you have any success stories about... And designers are all about diverging and converging. Have you had any good convergence success stories?
Michael:
Conversions between...?
Larry:
Well, in terms of getting... Well, actually, let me contextualize that a little bit differently too, because when I think about content in design systems, I think about... I think most of the content that's in design systems now is around documentation of... The stuff that we think of as the content and design systems is like the guidance, the style and voice and tone and brand guidance and all that stuff. But I also think a lot about those UX strings that are in there that most of which are buried and ensconced in Figma at this stage of the game.
Larry:
And then I also think about the instance data, the substantive attribute-based data that populates instances of the designs and each of those three kind of has... I don't know, can you manage all three of those in a fancy headless CMS like yours?
Michael:
Well, yes, I think you can, but this is really the interesting thing is that often, when we see content designers working alongside their colleagues who are designing the UI itself, we find that they are defining very specific text strings to accompany specific widgets in a UI design. And this is causing a tight coupling between the UI widget and the text that is being placed in that widget, and I don't think this is actually a healthy thing to do. So one of the things I've observed in my career is that the UI design tends to get revised at a fairly fast pace. It is common to revise your UI design, refresh it or maybe even radically change it on a fairly quick frequency because there are new front ends that come out that give better performance. People decide they want to update the look of it, all kinds of reasons driving that.
Michael:
The content itself, what you need to communicate, that has a much greater permanence to it. You need to decide what it is you want people to do, how you need to convey that. So you don't revise that as often. So when you are coupling those words, essentially trapping them inside a button and that button keeps changing, you're potentially having to rewrite that button text just because you're visually redesigning the layout of your UI. I think organizations across the globe are finding that is a pain point they would like to do away with.
Michael:
So as you mentioned headless, that is really the benefit of headless is that you are able to decouple the visual layout of the UI design from the content itself. So the content itself is structured where it has an independent existence from the UI design and people can revise that UI design without breaking the content as a result of that. But people need to start understanding the value of planning their content outside of the context of a very specific widget in order to take advantage of that.
Larry:
Right,
