Michael Haggerty-Villa
Michael Haggerty-Villa's work with content and designs systems spans the history of these practices. From his work at eBay on one of the earliest design systems up until today, he has been at the forefront of both content strategy leadership and design system innovation.
This conversation focuses on design systems, but it was inevitable that Michael's content strategy wisdom would shine through, too.
We talked about:
his work as the Director of Content Strategy at Teradata
the scope of the design system documentation at Teradata
how he triangulates on the truthiness of the complex content ecosystem
the structured-content infrastructure that he works with
his preference to bridges silos, not bust them
the style council he convenes to help align stakeholders on language and other topics
the differences in content needs in design systems for B2C companies vs. B2B
the tooling he uses to manage, and the scope of, the Teradata design system
how they establish standards as documentation for new media formats like video are incorporated into the design system
the importance of standards in communication and design guidance
the requirements they're developing for their design system management tooling
his preference for a "reliable starting point" over a "single source of truth"
Michael's bio
Michael Haggerty-Villa is the director of content strategy at Teradata and has also worked on the content design team at Blue Shield of California. He was one of the leaders who launched the Intuit Content Design System, and he has worked on design and systems for brands such as Compass, Disney, eBay, Mint, QuickBooks, and TurboTax. His articles about content in design systems have appeared in Content Science Review, UX Collective, and other sites. His content strategy clients include HPE Software, Kaiser Permanente, Yellowpages.com, and others. Just to make sure he has no free time, he’s also a father to three children and three cats.
Connect with Michael online
LinkedIn
ADPList
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/Q0T4e0ofJVY
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 184. Many people trace the origin of design systems to the release of Google's Material Design in 2014. Almost a decade before that, Michael Haggerty-Villa was a lead content strategist in the Design Systems Group at eBay. He has since led content strategy and design systems initiatives at enterprises like Disney and Intuit. To this day, he remains at the forefront of practice where content strategy, information architecture, and design systems intersect.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 184 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Michael Haggerty-Villa. Michael is a legend, I think it's safe to say, in the content in design systems world. He is in my mind anyway, but he's currently the director of content strategy at Teradata, so welcome Michael. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to at Teradata and in the design system world.
Michael:
Hey Larry, thank you for having me and again, you're the legend and thank you for all you do about continuing to put out this information about content strategy and content design into the world because we need people like you and Paula Land and other advocates for our craft to be helping us. So thank you, first of all addressing the legend where the legend needs it.
Michael:
What I'm doing right now, in January, I just started as the director of content strategy at Teradata, a massive data analytics and data storage company, and we're in the process of doing a digital transformation, actually migrating a lot of our business to the cloud. And as we do that, we realize that we need to create better experiences for a slightly different market than we have usually gone for, and the bar for those experiences is higher, the bar for what good content is is higher, and so we're sort of transforming the content practice as we speak, really looking at content design, content operations, content systems, and a lot of the technical documentation that supports a lot of what we do, for a lot of our audience. So right now I have my fingers in all the pies of the content themes and that's what I'm working on, including our young design system.
Larry:
What's it called again? The name of the design system?
Michael:
The design system is Covalent.
Larry:
Covalent, okay. Yeah. Is it publicly, because I know not all of them are out in the world. Is yours publicly available or?
Michael:
We just started doing documentation on it, so we're in very early stages. Of course we have bunches of Figma files that we can show, but we don't have the documentation on usage purpose, the critical things as well as really we have a legacy number of content systems and style guides that we need to start to pull together into one unified resource. I feel like I've been here before, similar to some of the work that I did at Intuit, pulling together one style guide for them, and so we're starting off on that journey at Teradata. It's actually terrifying and exciting.
Larry:
Yeah, no, I love the way you set out this first, the way you just described your current role, it sounds great. You've got your fingers in every little bit of that pie at Teradata, which is really important, but then you're ensconcing that knowledge, lore, wisdom, practice stuff in the design system as well, which seems really important. I also love that you kind of alluded to, I don't know if you were thinking about it, but I love the way John Collins a couple of years ago set out the scope of content practices, strategy, design, engineering, operations, and you're all over that, but tell me which, how much of that shows up in the design system documentation and elsewhere in the design system?
Michael:
It all will to a certain extent because we are a lightweight to the house for technical documentation and we need lots of guidelines to do that correctly and that's very, very challenging. We have a pile of documentation that helps us do that. Some of that documentation is not as useful as others because some of it has not been maintained, governed. So we have an opportunity for some of that tools usage documentation as well as some of the basic style guide information. We encountered yesterday three different terminology, indexes, indices, and we only need one. We have to have one, I hate to say one source of truth, but one reliable place where we can find the answers that guide us to do this content thing that we're doing.
Larry:
Well, as you say that, I'm really curious about that because you kind of need in any initiative, a single source of truth to refer to, but the reality of a complex organization like you just described is that that's really hard to do, but you still need to source your truthiness from someplace. How do you handle that in a complex org?
Michael:
I love that you used truthiness because I just used that in a Slack message yesterday because we have various sources of truthiness and so as a result, nothing is reliable right now. I'm relying on a lot of relationships right now, I'm reaching out to all people who do content design in the organization and we have contributors to the design organization on the developer side, software engineering, and they're all valid contributions. Also reaching out to marketing because the end-to-end experience of content matters from the first door of Teradata is a thing, through when they finally sign up for the product.
Michael:
Most of my purview is the product experience, but I definitely need to know what our marketing partners, what our social media partners, what our bloggers are doing as well. So right now I'm in onboarding mode, drinking from the fire hose as they say, just learning all the content things about Teradata and figuring out where we lean in. It's actually an exciting place to be and a lot of the discoveries that I'm making, I'm working collaboratively with a team and we're going to document these discoveries and start to standardize our ways of moving forward.
Larry:
Yeah, as you said that too, you reminded, you set out the whole, I think of it as, I call it omnichannel. I work with Noz Urbina a lot, so I have to, but I think it's a reasonable way to look at it. But when you describe accounting for marketing and the needs of the software engineers and all these other stakeholders that are involved, that sort of speaks to, and then you also mentioned lightweight DITA and sourcing your truth of the system. Is lightweight data, and actually we should probably describe that for people who don't know because I'm a structured content nerd, so I love DITA and the DITA standard lightweight DITA is a more recent innovation that makes it a little more accessible to people who don't want to go all the way into the XML world. Can you talk a little bit about lightweight DITA and how it came to be the system of choice there?
Michael:
This system choice was actually made probably a decade before my time, so we're right now, full disclosure, evaluating if it is the right way to go. I am consulting with structured content experts like Michael Andrews, who I believe you talked to in the past, and I have a meeting on Monday with Carrie Hayne who wrote the book on structured content because we need to look at our current systems and say, are they serving us well for the things that we need to do as we modernize our approach to delivering content? We have an existing system using IXIASOFT, a handful of and Fluid Topics and oXygen and a handful of other tools. Is it as nimble as we need it to be? Is it as agile as we need it to be? These are all open questions that we're exploring right now.
