The highs and lows each week from senior content designer and general goofball, Nia Campbell. Find me on Bluesky, LinkedIn and check out a newsletter I co-write with the brilliant Adrián Ortega.

Friday 15 March

  • This week has flown. I started the week at the Welsh Language Commissioner and CDPS' Language Matters Roadshow in Cardiff. I'm still processing and mulling over the day. I'm sure there's a blog post coming soon.

  • My main thought is about the Commissioner's new project for promoting Welsh services. 'How can you promote your Welsh services better?' they asked, and gave some tips for promotion. There was no mention of 2 important factors:
  1. Testing these services to make sure that just translating from English works for Welsh language users. When we design only in English, we don't address their needs. Assuming that direct translations are sufficient (sometimes even without a quality or sense check by someone who understands the language) means that we could be promoting bad Welsh language experiences. And this leads on neatly to the elephant in the room…
  2. Capacity and Welsh language provisions. We hear time and again that translation teams are working at capacity. Organisations often rely on their few Welsh speakers to translate. If we're promoting Welsh services that have barely been proofread, let alone tested, we could end up with all sorts of problems. A lack of trust in our organisation, an increase in requests for support and complaints from Welsh language users, bad press.

  • If we do not address the capacity and provisions problem, we cannot give Welsh products and services the time and attention they deserve.

  • In other news, I got to chat with the wonderful Laura Parker who's joined the MOJ design system team. We discussed how we could build on the Welsh language work our team has done over the last 1.5 years. Some of Laura's ideas are to make patterns and components available in Welsh, and to develop my scrappy 'things to consider for your Welsh products and services checklist' as a guide.
  • This checklist includes all sorts of things like Welsh grammar and dynamic content (a huge headache for our developers), free text boxes, language toggles and preferences, address lookups and calendar tools, and lots of other equally exciting things. :D  

  • I've also been involved in some knotty English design work, specifically looking at the language. A colleague asked how we could make things "clear at a glance", a phrase I realised is relevant to so much of our work. Clear at a glance. I'm saving this question for future conversations about tricky content work.

  • This weekend is a rugby weekend. Frantic house cleaning, 4 friends staying, and hopefully we'll get to see Wales win their only game of the Six Nations. Pray for us!  

Friday 8 March

  • Writing this week’s notes on the train home from our team awayday in London. These days remind me just how awesome the people behind CDL are, and how lucky I am to work with them.

  • One of today's activities was describing the benefits of clear language to a senior leader without using terms like content design, accessibility, human-centered design, etc. It's not easy, but there were interesting takes. We all agreed that examples help (show don't tell, of course), and had similar themes around saving time, avoiding confusion, managing risk and building trust.

  • In other news this week, Abbie Foxton and the team published a fantastic post about how they're designing a bilingual service for Wales, from the start. I love that the team had a lesson on the history of the Welsh language from the translation unit. And the idea of leaving your own comfort zone to meet users where they are is one that will stay with me.

  • Another highlight was reviewing an English prototype of a prison visit booking service, giving the team things to consider for their Welsh language users. We talked about things like entering and displaying addresses in Welsh, setting expectations if any links point to English content, and what happens if a user enters information in Welsh about the support they need (reasonable adjustments) to visit someone in prison. It's good to be able to take what we've learnt and help other teams.

  • I've been missing my colleague, SD. (If you're reading this, please know that your friendship, expertise and book chats are very much missed.)

  • I'm starting to think about handover as my contract at Justice Digital is coming to an end. I have a real mix of feelings: proud that we've got teams thinking about their Welsh language users at central government, anxious that I'm leaving a bit of a gap in the team, sad that I won't be there for public beta to see how the Welsh side of the service is used. But also excited for the next thing.

  • Next Monday is the Language Matters roadshow in Cardiff, where the Welsh Language Commissioner will be talking about their "2024-25 project on designing and promoting Welsh language services”. I'm hoping that it considers the needs of teams at central government too. From recent conversations, I've realised that some people in the Welsh public sector are unaware that there are teams at central government working hard to design Welsh language products and services. (um, devolution, yes?)

Friday 1 March 2024

  • Here we go again. Another attempt at weeknotes. Hello, welcome to my world, etc, etc.
  • At the ‘designing Welsh products and services’ meetup on Monday, we chatted about the accessibility of bilingual design layouts (LinkedIn post). This seems to be something that’s mostly ignored, possibly because it’s a tricky thing to address.
  • Accessibility expert, Martin Glancy pointed me in the direction of some great resources about this, which I’ve added to our shared document (Google doc).
  • One of the week’s highlights was chatting to Heidi, Elisaa and Eliane from the Canadian Government. We chatted about our experiences of education and living in bilingual places, and the challenges of designing in English and simply translating into another language (Welsh and French in this case). I enjoyed hearing about their work at the digital academy, and it’s nice to hear that they’ve found our Welsh language work at MLPA (Google site) useful! (Here’s Heidi’s take!)
  • We also discussed why trio writing probably won’t work for most teams. Unless you’re fortunate to have a translator or native-speaking designer embedded in your team, pace of work and continuous iteration makes it difficult to design in two languages simultaneously.
  • I’ve been mulling over (and feeling frustrated by) performative actions over the last few weeks. As someone who is very much value-driven, I really struggle with this and tend to just disengage. So this brilliant piece from Public Digital’s Dave Rogers on truth and narrative gaps was timely. I feel this!

“A very common narrative gap in organisations is when the stories told by leaders feel empty of purpose. For instance, when the end of the story is achieving an arbitrary change to efficiency, productivity, quality, or uptake of ‘best practice’. Or simply, to ‘be the best’ in the market, domain or industry. These are desirable things, but they don’t tell a story. For real impact, leaders need to tell a story defined by clear intentionality and purpose.”

  • This month’s pep talk at Content Club was from user researcher, Kris McGill. I learnt the term ‘interrogative suggestibility’. It was heartening to hear Kris’ experiences of working with content designers, and why this was so important to progress the work. The recording will be on our Youtube channel soon.
  • I backed a content book on Kickstarter about designing content authoring experiences from Greg Dunlap. Such a great idea and the book sounds excellent. More of this, please!