Episode 33: Jordan Craig, Twitter - Scaling content design at Twitter

Kristina Halvorson:

Hello again for another episode of The Content Strategy Podcast. I'm so happy to be back and doing this. I have a lot of different jobs and this is one of my very favorite things that I get to do. Where this podcast came from is that many years ago I was having incredible conversations with super smart people, across content strategy, content design, technologies, etcetera and I thought, "Oh, I wish that people could be listening in on this”, and behold, the podcast was born. So, here I am today getting to talk to yet another smart, amazing person and I'm so glad that I was able to invite you all along for the ride. And that person, friends and neighbors is Jordan Craig.

Jordan Craig leads the product content design team at Twitter. She specializes in managing well-planned holistic campaigns. She's skilled in content design, traditional and digital marketing, commercial production and sales. Jordan, that's a lot of stuff. She brings special expertise in crafting voice and tone style guides and brand guidelines. She has provided strategic direction to numerous nonprofits and associations such as Pan American Health Organization, Public Broadcasting Service, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, AKA the most beautiful museum in the entire country. Jordan, welcome to The Content Strategy Podcast.‍

Jordan Craig:‍

Yay, thank you for having me. And I agree, NMAAHC is one of the most beautiful museums I have ever stepped foot in and it's just absolutely gorgeous.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

Even seeing it from the outside the first time. I had the kids in DC while it was being built and we came around the corner and saw it. It just took my breath away.‍

‍Jordan Craig:‍

The outside is actually a crown. That's why it is so stunning. It's literally meant to be a nod to crowns from the kings and queens in Africa. Very beautiful for sure.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

Now that I didn't know. See? We've been doing this for 90 seconds and you're already teaching me things.‍

Jordan Craig:‍

(laughs).

Kristina Halvorson

‍Again, my favorite job. Jordan, at the top of every episode I ask my very special guest to please tell me a little bit about your journey to content strategy and content design.‍

Jordan Craig:‍

I went to LSU for undergraduate. I started off as a broadcast journalism major and I decided that I absolutely hated the way I sounded on the news and hated my voice on television. So I quickly pivoted to public relations. And from there, I jumped into working once I graduated. I started working at a couple of different advertising agencies that really focused on nonprofits. I get a lot of joy and inspiration in helping others, so nonprofits felt like the best place for me to start and I really started to figure out what I wanted to do within the advertising and agency world. I wrote scripts and radio spots and things like that. And I thought, "Oh, I like this, but this is not exactly what I wanna do."

So, I started to pivot into digital and from there, I started working on web content strategies. Did that for a few years, and I saw a really awesome opportunity open up at Twitter. I actually sent a good friend of mine who was at Twitter a DM, and was like, "Do you think I could do this job?" and she basically said, "I think you could pretty much do anything you put your mind to." And I'm so glad I did, because I ended up meeting with my future boss, Dantley. Actually, he was in DC. We sat at a coffee shop and talked for two hours. I'm pretty sure I only had 30 minutes of his time, but he really sat there and took his time with me to kind of walk me through what he saw for the content strategy team at Twitter. And the rest is kind of history.

I've been at Twitter for about 18 months, working on a lot of really fun and interesting work. We've gone through so much in the last year. It's unfathomable how much work we've actually shipped and launched. So, that's how I got to Twitter.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

Jordan, tell me a little bit about the content design team at Twitter. Where do you all sit? How many are you? How do you collaborate with folks across the organization? ‍

Jordan Craig:‍

When I first started there were actually only five content designers at Twitter, and they at the time reported into design directors. Once I came on board everyone came up under me. We grew pretty rapidly from five to 13 and then before the end of the summer 2021, we should net out at about 17. We all currently sit within design and research. We sit horizontally across both the consumer side of our app and then also the advertising side of our app. We work on product across pretty much everything.

Because there's so few of us, almost every project that we work on ships in some way, which is really unusual when you think about it. So, we're spread a little thin, but we do get to work on really cool work.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

An exciting thing about our audience is that they come from all walks of content life. So when you talk about it being unusual that everything that you work on ships, can you say a little bit more about that?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

Within Twitter and within the product itself we have the luxury of working on things that mean a lot to our audience. So, the content that you read when you're in the onboarding experience has primarily been touched by my team or when you're going through something and you wanna report spam or abuse or things like that, right? Someone on my team has thought deeply about what those words look like, the level of empathy needed, the voice and tone necessary.

And then on the advertising side as well we're thinking about how advertisers can use our platform to make money. Because there's so few of us and there's so many designers and researchers, that's one thing that's really top of mind for me is to make sure our ratio is more proportionate in the future. But because there are so many designers and researchers on our team, I try to make sure that my team only works on priority work that we know is gonna have the most eyeballs on the app.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

When you say there's so many more designers and researchers, how many more?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

I did the ratio this morning just to confirm. We're sitting at about like 11 to one, right? So, there's a little under 200 designers. There's about 40 or 50 researchers. We're really working on evening ourselves out this year. I have the luxury of having a boss who really believes in content and knows that we have to have more in order for our team to be successful and in order for Twitter to be successful. Because I think there's this misconception that people do not read, and I think that's absolutely false.

We see it every day in our testing and our experimentation with our research team, that when people don't understand the words, they churn and leave the app immediately. Or, conversely, they will Google how to solve problems on Twitter, which is great but at the same time, if we can't figure out how to help people resolve their issues within the app, I have not done my job well at all.‍

‍Kristina Halvorson:‍

What I've actually seen over the last several years, because I've been in the UX field for about 20 years, people were saying, "Oh yeah, content. Content is really important." That was in the early 2000, teens. And there was more of an awareness being built and content was showing up at UX conferences. It was a little bit behind like, "Oh, research. Yeah. Research is important," which started to happen a few years before.

And what happened then is that content as a thing designers and technologists and product leadership care about a little bit fell to the side, but research has continued its rise. It's really interesting to me that the ratios at Twitter sort of bear that out. The research team has continued to grow. Is it partially that research is telling Twitter over and over, "Oh, people bail if they don't understand the words. We might wanna focus a little bit more on the words?" Is that a thing that is serving your growth?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

Oh, most certainly. I thank God for our research team every day, honestly, because they literally help us write from such an informed space, and we can see it, right? We can see when we're, we're watching people on the app live and they're struggling to get through a specific page. I try to tell my team too that they should be thinking about the way the words represent. Not only just the words themselves, but the readability of the words. Great content can not fix design that's just bad.

Not to say that all of the design or anything like that is the primary problem, but good content can not fix bad design. There's too few of us to be focused on trying to fix something that's not working. We almost need to start over from scratch and rethink through the problem. I think our research team has done an excellent job of saying, "This is the problem." Some of the easier solutions that we can provide definitely starts at the content level.

We should be bringing our content peers in earlier, so that we can all be thinking through these problems holistically versus having us come in later in the problem or process. I would actually say though that Twitter and our design and research team has done an excellent job of bringing us in the room at the right time. Like we sometimes get left out. That happens, no question, but the teams that have embedded content designers have done a great job of bringing us in at the beginning, 'cause we also bring in our localization partners and they bring in their partners.

We also make sure that our accessibility content designer is in the room. All these things trickle into each other through our working norms and our ReadMes.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

I wanna get back to the working norms and ReadMes, because those are two phrases that I would like our audience to understand more, and frankly, I would like to understand more, but let me back up just a little bit though. One of the number one questions that gets asked at any content strategy or content design conference is, "The speakers are working in these environments where they do get called and people do want them at the table. How do I get my company to do that?" I guarantee that when Twitter launched, that was not necessarily the way it was What changes that? How does that shift happen within an organization? What needs to exist culturally?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

For us, we really just proved impact kind of quickly. We were dealt an interesting card with COVID last year. Some of the COVID misinformation labels really required a specific tone that we knew we had to get right. So we're working through this and we're iterating and we're working with our research team to split test and, and figure out if all of that is correct.

Once we got that right, once we started to slow down misinformation, I think people started to see like, "Oh, this is what happens when a person that knows content design, understands the strategy of content, understands content hierarchy, this is what happens.” We get it right. People understand. And it's not that we expect sentiment to be high or low, but we can tell when people are happy or are very unhappy on the app with our work, because people are kind of mean, actually. They will let us know immediately.‍

You think you're doing everything right, and people still have things to say. So, it kinda is what it is at this point. But impact has been our, our number one strategy, but we've also been able to scale through our tools, which I'm sure we'll touch on in a little bit. Scaling helps our peers really understand and realize our value for sure.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

How did you scale? Were you sending out emails to people? Were you showing it in meetings? Do you have town halls? Like how do you get that message out?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

A lot of education. I feel like my first six months or so at Twitter was me going around and being like, "Hi, I'm Jordan. I work on words. What do you do?" And then people were literally floored that there was a team that did that. And so, it kind of made me laugh, because I thought, "Well, how did you think the words got in there? How did you think it made (laughing) it into the app?" Like, "Oh."‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

How hard is it? How hard could it be? It's just words.‍ Somebody writes it, it goes out, it's fine.‍

Jordan Craig:‍

It just pops into the app and there you have it. There were a lot of meetings. There was a lot of getting in the room where it happens, (laughs). I knew I was gonna be able to slip in a Hamilton reference. I love that.‍

We use Writer, our artificial intelligence tool for strings management. Strings is basically how our content is housed within our coding. And because we were able to put our terminology management, our voice and tone documentation, all of that into Writer, we were able to give access to people that wouldn't normally be writing, but sometimes they needed to write in case, you know, we were unavailable.

So, we gave access to our PM partners, our design partners, our engineer partners and said, "Go for it. This has our style guide in it. Once you get done, send it back to us. We'll review. It's not the best process, but this is what we can do for now to make it work." And people just thought it was the coolest thing ever that they were able to write with something that kind of auto-corrected a bit like Grammarly and was in our voice and tone.

People got really excited when they saw that they have this capability. That allowed us to scale, right? Because they saw that they could write on our behalf. They quickly realized they didn't want to, and then they started to find headcount allocation for us, so that we could get bigger, which is really strange to do in a pandemic. Like having people onboard fully remotely is such a wild ride, and kudos to all the people that had to do it this past year.

‍Kristina Halvorson:‍

No kidding. All of us together. You just threw out the software or service called Writer.‍ You threw out strings management. You threw out AI. What are you talking about? What is that?

‍Jordan Craig:‍

We use a tool at Twitter called Writer and like I said, it's our artificial intelligence system that houses the way our words work within the product team. So, it houses our style guide. It's basically like our own version of Grammarly, but with our, our product writing guidelines built into it. And essentially, it provides inlined recommendations. And it also scores based on the words that are on the page. So, it will tell us how close or how not close it is to our voice and tone.

It gives us kind of like a number and we’ll use that also to audit in the future, but that's, that's such a whole other conversation.

Writer is helpful in the sense that it essentially is attached to our Google Docs. And so, when you're writing and let's say you use a word like "blacklist," it will pop up and say, "We don't use this word at Twitter. Here's a suggestion for another word," or, you know, any of the, the words that we deprecated last year. It also currently houses our terminology management.

So, all of the words that you think of that make Twitter, Twitter, right? Like Tweet, Fleet, Spaces. It provides definitions, and we have it meta-tagged in with all of our metadata, just so that we are keeping it in one place. 'Cause I don't think people realize just how large managing terminology for a company is. Like, it is such a cross-functional team effort. We have everyone from legal and policy and marketing to obviously my team. We have people from the design team or design systems and we all sit in this big room and essentially go through word by word and say, "Yep, we agree on this definition. Nope. This word is no longer allowed. Yes, we're gonna use this new word that we made up."

So that's the terminology management piece of Writer. And then lastly, we have our strings management. So the AI basically scores strings. And we worked with an engineering partner to basically integrate Writer into Twitter's string center. So, that means that if our strings, our content is in strings center, we can essentially edit them and then put them into production without needing help from anyone on the engineering team.

Which really excited our engineering peers, because that meant if we saw a misspelled word, we could just go into Writer, correct it, push into our string center and the word is corrected within the app. Versus us having to stop, get an engineer, you know, open a ticket to work with them. It really just helped us speed up how quickly we can move and how few resources we need when it comes to the words at Twitter.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

If I were editing a word that appeared anywhere on the Twitter app, hitting, "Okay. Send," or "Change," or whatever, I would have a nervous breakdown every time ‍

Jordan Craig:‍

It definitely makes me like a little sweaty. I'm not gonna lie.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

Yeah, exactly. Do you have aworkflow that's like, "Can you check this? Because I don't even know where I would be able to stop editing and hit send.‍

Jordan Craig:‍

In our working norms we definitely have a built-in buffering system for that. Because in theory, anyone with administrative privileges within Writer could go push whatever they wanted into Writer, which is obviously a huge deal. It opens us up for different security risks and stuff. So, currently at the moment, the only people with admin rights to be able to push live are myself and two other managers on my team, but everyone else can push it towards us

It does allow us, however, on the bright side, to have a level of QA, quality assurance that we didn't have before. I get DMS or people will screen-grab things on the regular of like a comma splice or a word that's super awkward. And so this allows us to kind of fix it and then push into the app, so that I don't have to get that same, you know, piece of feedback or ... and then when I do get that piece of feedback, I don't have to go bother an engineer to help me fix it. I can just fix it immediately. But it's definitely like one of those moments where you're like, "Ooh, am I gonna break the app right now and to be in ‍trouble with everyone?"‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

So, you threw out that term again, working norms. Tell me what thatmeans at Twitter.‍

Jordan Craig:‍

Working norms means, for my team, a few different things. This was really important to me when I came on as the manager of the team to establish working norms. So essentially, it's the way we work, working hours. 'Cause I am of the mindset that I don't really have a thought around when my team works. But I do like to know when they are going to work, so that if I need to get a hold of them, I'm respecting the time boundaries they have on their day.

So, it's everything from the way we like to communicate. Right? So, if you're sending me an email and it is important, we just make sure to flag it, so that they know I can respond or vice versa. Or like we won't make any major decisions in Slack, which is like our communication tool. Just things like that, but then we also have a working norm that has our process for how to work with us that we have sent out and gotten a lot of feedback from too, for, with our design team, our research team, with our PM partners. And essentially, it just walks through the way to work with this team if you do not have a content designer currently embedded within the project you're working on.

In a typical process a PM or a designer would kick off a project. They would open up a ticket with my team. It would get assigned. That person would then go to all the kickoff meetings and then you'd start your typical iterate and like ideate process. And then from there, you become a team with your designer and your research partner, and you're just really working through the designs until it gets to a place that it can be, given to eng to be built.

And then if there are other feature edits or things like that, then the process starts back over. But essentially, our working norms, we spent several weeks just getting feedback to make sure that it was gonna work. 'Cause we didn't want it to be overly complicated, 'cause then no one would follow it or conversely, projects don't always look the same. So it's been definitely a labor of love. I think it's an evergreen document that will always be updated as needed, but we have working norms within our team. And then we have working norms within how to work with us as well.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

How is it documented? Does it live on an internal site, is it a PDF?‍ Where is it available?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

It lives in a few different places. We have Google Docs. That's our primary documentation method. So, we have a Google doc that we have sent out, 'cause that's easy to get to, but we have a confluence page that people, that we send people to often. And then it also lives on our Go Get Words. So, that's how you would essentially fill out a ticket. You'd go to the site called Go Get Words, but that's internal to Twitter.

So, it lives in a few places, 'cause I, I'm a firm believer in showing people more than once, so that they like truly get it. I'll just keep hitting you over the head with it until it sticks.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

Do you have to update it in all those places?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

Yes and no. When we do decide as a team to make an update, because it's such a big deal to get to an updated place, it's fine. Like we don't make updates to it every week or anything like that.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

Jordan, I wanna take several steps back now. Am I right in understanding you just came into content design as a field of practice 18 months ago?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

You are correct.‍ I was in digital strategy before, but definitely had some transferable skills.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

Right. So you had a handful of people at Twitter that were like, "Yes, content strategy," although I guess you were called content strategists and have recently transitioned, like every other organization to content design for product. What was your initial impression of content design as a field of practice or where were you getting your information about best practices?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

I’m a words person. Like words people are my people. So, I was immediately in love with just spending several days, weeks, hours thinking about sentence syntax or when we use this word, it evokes this emotion. Just those types of things. Just seeing how one casual shift in a word or one casual shift in the way we used a particular verb in a sentence, that made my heart sing a little bit. So, I was really excited to get to Twitter and do some cool work.

'Cause I, I joined Twitter, because I wanted to do some good in the world. I wanted to make a safe space for women and especially, especially women of color. I wanted to make sure that we had a place on the internet that we could be comfortable and feel safe and free. So, that was like the reason I was like, "I gotta get to Twitter. This is so cool." And then to be able to work on a piece of the product that really helps people be themselves and, and, and show up as who they wanna be was just phenomenal. But yes, just, just really got into the world of content strategy.

I feel like as a digital strategist, I was doing similar things, right? Like I wrote plenty of voice and tone documentation and I worked on style guides. When I was working with NMAAHC, I did lots of content work for them. So, I just knew that it needed to be hyper-focused to the way the product felt. And as a user of the, of the product, I could immediately see the places that needed to be updated. So, I think that that was actually kind of like my lucky charm or my superpower.

I knew what we needed to work on first, because I had problems with them as a consumer. And I think that was something that my boss, Dantley appreciated. I saw immediately where I wanted to start, 'cause he really kind of said, "Okay, you're here. We need to fix these things, but I'm really leaving it up to you to tell me what you're gonna do and how you're gonna invest in this team. Now you're gonna grow this team." And he gave me the tools and the resources that I needed and kind of got out of the way.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

Where have you found community with content design? Is that a thing that you have sought out? Are you confident and comfortable sticking to what you are building at Twitter?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

Last year at the beginning of COVID I decided to do something kind of nuts. I said, "Okay, you got to Twitter. It's your turn to open the door and help other people get in." So, I put on my LinkedIn, I did a free mentorship office hours thinking that like 15 people, at most, would sign up to talk with me. I was so wrong. I think I got over 450 sign-ups. I almost passed out.I didn't set up any parameters around it. It was like free rein to my calendar. As long as there wasn't like a meeting at that time, I wouldmeet with you. So, I met content strategists, content designers, conversational designers, um, UX writers, writers, copywriters. Like anyone that basically felt like they wanted to write in their career in some way signed up.

That taught me a very valuable lesson about, one, having boundaries, but two, I got to hear so many stories about how people came up into content design. I got to listen to what they were working on and what got them excited and what they liked about Twitter versus what they hated about Twitter. Or just, they needed help in the interview process. You know, things like that. So, that is how I found my sense of community. I still offer free mentorship. I just do it a lot less. 'cause I, I logged actually. This was the ultimate science experiment for me. I have a socio-linguistics minor.

I logged what we talked about and everyone can be boiled down into three different categories. They needed a pick-me-up, someone to just pat them on the back and be like, "You're doing amazing sweetie." Or they legitimately needed good advice when it came to the words in their portfolio or they needed a swift kick in the butt to tell them like, "You're going down the wrong path. You need to pivot. That might not be the best interest for, in the best interest for you," but they almost all fell into those categories.

And I found it really fascinating, 'cause I didn't know what I was getting myself into. So, that's how I found my, my sense of community. And then Twitter itself has just been monumental. You know, there's so many people that are just so warm and lovely that have taken me in and, and shown me the ropes or just been so kind and, and offered such great advice or given us feedback when we've asked for it, for words on the app. So, that has been, it's been the highlight of my career. I've never felt more accepted in a role than like I do now.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

At Brain Traffic we have hosted a conference since 2011 called Confab about content strategy. And then last year, we launched an event specifically for content design and UX writing as a specialty within the larger content strategy field. One of the big things that came up was people need mentorship. They need conversations. They need direction on their portfolios.

They want to transition or break into this field. And what's more, companies are like, "Yes, we need you. Please, hurry up, get here." But there is this real experience gap, because a lot of these job positions want five to seven years of content design work. And there are a lot of people who are doing it may not even know that that's what it's called. That is certainly been the experience of a lot of content strategists coming to the practice.

Beyond an individual, like you, offering mentorship services, do you have other ideas about what an organization can do to draw people into the field, help welcome them in and train them up? What are some ideas that you have, continually expanding or creating new paths into content design?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

Yeah, that's such a lovely question. I'm so excited to answer this, because this is something that's so top of mind to me. 'Cause I go back to where I was in college, and no one told me what to do. You know, my mom basically said, "Well, if you're gonna be in journalism, you better figure it out." Right? Because journalism at the time seemed like such a dying industry, which now actually really makes me laugh, because obviously it is not going anywhere and nor will it ever.

But essentially, I'm working on something right now. This isn't the true name for it, but I'm gonna call it Career Day for the sake of this conversation where we're gonna meet with different universities in the United States and talk about what it looks like to work in tech, what it looks like to work on product, what product content writing is. And we're gonna host two to three-day all day workshops where people can come and get feedback regarding content design, regular design, research.

I've gotten a few folks from the marketing team that are willing to come and chat, because I really feel like it starts either in high school or college. And I'm super specifically interested in going to non-Ivy League schools. Right? I wanna go to like state public, you know, community colleges, those types of universities. So, I feel like that is one way that I am currently working on. That's like an initiative for me that's important to me.

I can't even imagine what my life would have been like if I had had someone when I was 18 or 19, trying to figure out what I wanted to do in life, show me, "Oh, look, here's a way that you can like affect change in the world, by doing these things." So, we're working on that right now. And then the other thing, it's really important at Twitter, our CSR is called Twitter for Good. And we do so much mentorship, but specifically within design and research.

For the last few months we've been doing mentorships for different groups. So, this month I think we're working on Latinx in UX. Last month was, I wanna say women in UX. The month before that was Black in UX. So, we've been offering these free mentorship weekly cadence meetings with people, just because we know that we sit in a place of privilege and it's our duty to open the doors for others. So, there's so many cool things that we're working on at Twitter that I'm, I'm excited to see.

Career Day is gonna come up at the end of 2021. I cannot wait to see the results, 'cause we're, I'm always recruiting. I'm always looking for talent. I'm also always looking for talent that's not necessarily in the tech industry. Like I'm a firm believer in transferable skills and finding people that may have been, I don't know, working in a magazine or they wrote for their, their local news syndicate. 'Cause I feel like there are skillsets there for sure that you would easily do well in the UX field.

‍Kristina Halvorson:‍

Jordan, where can people go to find out more about Career Day?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

Ooh, it hasn't launched yet, but when it does, I will be tweeting about it,  @TwitterDesign will be tweeting about it for sure. It's still in the works, trying to get a few different universities on board, but I'm really excited, because there's just some really good names in here. And it's not just, you know, the major cities that people think of when you think about the, the tech hubs like San Francisco and LA and New York. I'm talking, when you're in middle America, we're looking at Chicago, we're looking at Ohio, Florida. So, I'm excited for sure.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

Minnesota.‍

Jordan Craig:‍

Minnesota. Absolutely.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

(laughs). Jordan, where can people find you on Twitter?‍

Jordan Craig:‍

My handle is @JordanEllyse. But I have to warn everyone, only follow me if you look, if you really like geriatric millennial tweeting and hilarious stories about my animals and my children, because that is what you're gonna get from me, basically.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

Thank you so much for joining me today. It was just a real delight.‍

Jordan Craig:‍

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to, to be here and, and to have chatted with you today. I really love this.‍

Kristina Halvorson:‍

Me too. All right. Take care.