Design
Nicole Michaelis
Oct 13, 2023
Introducing Content Design at Wolt - Making the unknown known ✨
We recently introduced a new team at Wolt: content design! We’re excited to set the foundation for this vital contribution to our UX. In this post, we talk about what content design looks like at Wolt.
“What is content design?”- Is probably the question I heard the most during my first few months at Wolt. Thank god I love few things more than explaining what content design is to people so I pulled together a few decks covering the basics and with LOADS of examples, and started showing them at meetings, all-hands, and in 1:1s.
Things that really stuck with folks were A/B-tests that clearly showed performance differences even with seemingly minor tweaks. Talking about information architecture and how people discover Wolt also led to quick aha-moments and lastly, anything that had to do with trying to simplify our terms was quickly appreciated.
“Content design is a way of thinking. It’s about using data and evidence to give the audience what they need, at the time they need it and in a way they expect.” – (Said best by Sarah Winters of Content Design London)
After 2-3 months of persistent communication about what we were up to, content design made it on most people’s radar. We were getting many more pings alla “hey, is this something you can help with?” or “what should this message be?”. Success! Now people knew who we were and what we did(ish) and they were eager to reach out.
Before joining Wolt, I had defined what success would look like for content design. The list looked something like this.
Success is:
everyone knowing we have a Content Design team
everyone knowing how to get in touch with content design
everyone understanding when and how content design can help
Content design having demonstrated impact
Content design being a constant and valued stakeholder to all design project
And while it was great that people were now aware of content design and how it could impact projects, we still had to figure out the process and how to best work with us.
We were on a mission to empower anyone using Wolt with our words after all!
Making the work, work
Establishing ways of working in a scaling company is challenging. Things move fast, projects are urgent, old and new people mix with their different working styles and processes, and it generally can feel quite chaotic.
It was important to me to make working with content design feel accessible and easy. At the same time, nobody wants to receive random pings on Slack, in documents or Figma x times a day. So we had to introduce some structure.
I decided to create a request board with a simple brief. People can describe what they want help with, add links, give a rough prioritization and timeline and we can quickly kick things off OR (yes, this happens!) say we can’t support as we’re fully booked. The board helps us keep track of what we’re working on and manage workload. It also makes it easy to prioritize and for stakeholders to see when and if we can get involved in a project.
Besides this, we initiated bi-weekly office hours. People can sign up for a 15 min slot to get quick content design support. The feedback for office hours has been overwhelmingly positive. We’re still a small team of just four people and getting our eyes on something quickly has been a great way to unblock collaborators.
There are some other minor tweaks we made to processes. For example, as most content designers will know, we wanted to make sure we get involved earlier in projects to provide greater value.
And then there was another tricky thing…
Localization!
Did you know that Wolt is actually mostly used in various languages that aren’t English? Wolt operates in 25 countries (that’s 20+ languages!) around the world.
This poses a unique challenge to content design as we need to take localizability into account much sooner – and to a greater degree – than most companies.
Localization at Wolt is also a rather new team. It was my top priority to loop up with the team closely and make sure we figure out efficient ways of working together–like maintaining short feedback loops to make adjustments and staying on top of quality. We’re still figuring out ways to improve here, but making sure localization is top of mind when diving into any kind of content design work is definitely different from how I used to work with previous companies.
It’s also affected central content design projects such as our style guide for product writing and our glossary. We’ve focused on guidance that is easier to translate into other languages and our ambition with the glossary is for it to be a term sheet that covers all languages.
And then there’s AI
One thing I love about Wolt is how frank people are. So naturally, when I started talking about content design, many asked about AI and how we could use it to scale consistency across product copy. I believe AI is a key to making content design even better and especially more accessible for all teams, so I said “Sure! Let’s make AI work for us”.
Already now, we’re looking into training AI to follow our tone and voice, replicate UX content patterns and other style guidance, and maybe we’ll teach it our term sheet next. Lots of people were eager to help with this and it’s been a great way to make connections and have a little fun with our guides in a mixed group of engineers, designers and content people.
And we’ll surely share our setup with the world once we’re happy with it – keep an eye on the blog. Pinky promise!
Lot’s left to do
Wow, looking at this now I’m quite proud of what we have achieved in such a short amount of time. We’ve gotten some major shoutouts and have been involved in some of the biggest things we’re currently building here at Wolt. That is quite impressive for such a small team.
Yet, my to-do list is long. For example, right now I’m looking into how to set up clearer success metrics to help us demonstrate our impact. I’m looking for a sweet spot between data and things like feedback from our support team.
Plus, we also want content design to be a core component of our (new!) design system. Busy times!
