A great podcast by Sarah Winters from @ContentDesignLN and @GerryMcGovern on panic publishing during coronavirus made me think about what we got right, got right eventually and what we’d do differently in the @scope #ContentDesign team, a thread https://www.thisishcd.com/episode/sarah-winters-how-covid-19-drove-panic-publishing

The scale and pace of change was big. We knew we had to change how we worked. We could not use data to design in the same way. But we still wanted to make useful content, based on evidenced need.

At the start we called it the ‘flurry’, I think as a nod to this being a different time, but one that would end or, at least, change.

We used calls from our helpline as evidence of user need, because we didn’t have time to do interviews. At the start, it was so new there wasn’t search data either.

We mapped evidence of need to existing content so we could check if we needed to update something we already had or make something new.

Content that related to money, benefits or food was given the highest priority. To start with, we had a more complex way of working out what was medium or low-priority, but it was too complicated and we stopped doing that.

We had a landing page for coronavirus, in past lives I might have called it a ‘hub’, but we didn’t move the content. For example, you could find a link to social care assessment stuff on our ‘coronavirus’ page but it had never moved out of our adult social care section.

We didn’t have time to do crits, so we paused them, but still asked subject experts to fact-check content and gave people like our policy team the chance to feed back by email.

We still tested content, but usually after we published it instead.

We added a fact-change backlog column on our Kanban board to help us visualise maintenance tasks. I forget how many times we updated the page on how to get food. It was at least 60 times.

Updating existing content was a good model, but we did a lot of warning boxes near the top of pages. This year, we’ve started re-factoring them. This isn’t urgent information, it isn’t even new now. It’s just information.

We started monitoring changing patterns of use for the content we were working on, but later than we should have. We could have cut stuff that wasn’t being used earlier.

Monitoring use earlier would have helped us to check our qualitative data. A call from helpline shows us that someone needs help, it doesn’t tell us that they’re looking for that help online. It was good data for the time, but it wasn’t perfect.

Looking back, our early coronavirus content was not as consistent or concise as our other stuff. I think this was because we paused crits and our slower-paced review workshops with content designers and our editor.

The need to review has never stopped. We’ve changed a few pages recently that were weighted towards describing what was ‘normal’ with a section on how things are different now.

We’ve started to lead with how things are now. Short-term gov schemes that may or may not be renewed don’t help with this though!

Looking back, I have a lot of feels. It wasn’t easy always straightforward, but it was one of the most rewarding pieces of work I’ve ever had a hand in.

Yes, this should have been a blog post