This year’s NHS Content Away Day brought content designers together to share what they had learned, catch up with colleagues and make connections across the NHS.
Several Hippos working on NHS projects joined the event. For those of us working in large, multidisciplinary teams, collaboration felt like a particularly relevant theme. Most content decisions involve people from several professions, each bringing their own knowledge, priorities and constraints.
Hippo invited content designer and strategist Candi Williams to explore what helps those relationships work. Her talk covered everything from confidence and stakeholder relationships to perfectionism and sharing our successes.
These are the ideas that stayed with me.
Content design starts before the words
When content designers join a piece of work near the end, there is often little room left to shape it.
The service structure may already be fixed. Assumptions have become requirements. Someone has designed a journey and now needs a content designer to make the words fit.
Our role needs to start much earlier.
Content designers help teams understand what people need to know, decide when they need to know it and remove information that gets in the way. We shape journeys, reduce cognitive load and make important health information easier to understand.
An interaction designer once introduced me to a room by saying: “It’s not just about the words, but she does have the best words.”
The line has stayed with me because it captures the role rather neatly. Of course the words matter. In health services, they can affect whether someone understands a diagnosis, completes an application or gets the support they need. The thinking behind those words matters just as much.
Confidence grows through practice
Candi talked about confidence as a skill we can develop over time.
Content designers need confidence to ask questions, challenge an assumption or explain why a team should take a different approach. That confidence does not always arrive before the conversation. Sometimes it develops because we spoke up, learned from the experience and found it a little easier the next time.
One of Candi’s suggestions was to keep a record of micro-wins. These could be moments when research changed a decision, a colleague gave useful feedback or a small content improvement made a journey clearer.
I liked this idea because content work can disappear into the finished service. Once something reads naturally or works as expected, it is easy to forget the decisions that got it there.
Keeping track gives us evidence of our progress and a useful reminder of the value we bring to a team.
Work with the reality in front of you
There is rarely a perfect answer in a large healthcare system.
Content designers work within policy, technology, time and governance constraints. Some of those things can be changed. Others can be influenced over time. A few will remain firmly outside the team’s control.
Candi shared a simple way to think about a difficult situation:
- What can I control?
- What can I influence?
- What sits outside my control?
The framework helps when a problem feels too big to tackle. It gives us somewhere to begin and stops us spending all our energy on the parts we cannot move.
Progress may be a clearer page, one less step in a journey or a better conversation between two teams. Those improvements still count. They can make a real difference to somebody trying to use a health service.
Get to know your stakeholders
One of the most useful parts of the session focused on stakeholders.
“Stakeholder” can become a catch-all term for the people who review, question or occasionally slow down a decision. Behind the label is someone with their own expertise, responsibilities and pressures.
Candi encouraged us to approach those relationships with the same curiosity we bring to user research. What does this person need? What are they responsible for? Which risks are they trying to manage?
She showed a Venn diagram exploring the overlap between design and areas such as legal or compliance. The groups may approach a problem from different directions, while still wanting people to understand what they are agreeing to, feel informed and trust the service.
Finding that overlap gives the conversation somewhere productive to go. It also helps us see a challenge from outside our own discipline.
Explain why the work matters
It is easy to make a recommendation and assume its value is obvious.
A content designer might say that a page needs to use plain English. Explaining that plain English can reduce anxiety for someone navigating a diagnosis gives the recommendation meaning.
The same applies to activities such as content audits. Asking for time to complete an audit may sound like asking for more process. Explaining that it will reveal duplication, gaps and areas for improvement gives the team a reason to invest in it.
Reasons are easier to discuss than instructions. They help colleagues understand the outcome we are working towards and bring their own expertise to the decision.
Keep the receipts
“Stop being so modest” was one of Candi’s clearest messages.
Content designers often do brilliant work quietly. We untangle complicated journeys, make dense information understandable and spot problems before they reach users. Then the work moves on and much of that contribution is forgotten.
Candi suggested keeping screenshots of positive feedback, capturing before-and-after examples and writing short case studies about what changed.
There are plenty of good reasons to do this. It gives us material to share with colleagues, helps other content designers learn and makes the value of the work easier to see. It can also show why bringing content design into a project early is worth the investment.
The credit will often belong to a wider team. Recording the contribution of content design gives a fuller account of how that team reached the outcome.
Taking these ideas back to our teams
I left the session thinking about collaboration as a collection of everyday habits.
Ask questions early. Learn what matters to the people around you. Explain the reasoning behind a recommendation. Put your energy into the areas where it can make a difference. Keep evidence of what the team achieved.
These habits give content designers more influence over the services we help create. They also give our colleagues more opportunities to shape the work with us.
In the NHS, that shared understanding can lead to clearer information, better decisions and services that are easier for people to use. That feels like something worth talking about.
