Content-First Design: Transforming User Experience with Sarah Johnson

Speaker A: Welcome to Future Proof, the podcast for founders, marketers and sales leaders who want to scale with clarity. This show looks at how AI systems and smart strategy work together to support sustainable growth. Everything here is practical, actionable and grounded in real work. Today I'm joined by Sarah Johnson. Sarah is the founder of Content First Design and a leading voice in content strategy and UX writing. With more than 20 years of experience at organizations like Fidelity Investments, bank of America, tiaa, CVS and Bentley University, she's helped teams bring content and design together around what users actually need. She's also the author of six books including Content First Design and a trusted advisor to teams building more effective data driven digital experiences. Sarah's work focuses on creating strong content systems, integrating AI in thoughtful ways, and driving real ROI through clarity and structure.

Speaker B: All right, Sarah, welcome to the show.

Speaker C: Thank you Solomon. It's a thrill to be here. I really appreciate you having me.

Speaker B: I. We're going to have a great time because I learned so much about content and design and your framework. We're going to get all into that. But I do want to ask a little bit background about Sarah before she had discovered the Content First Design. What was, what was that like? Where did you work? How did you even come across content?

Speaker C: Sure, I've been in the field for a while, for a minute. And I started out at some financial services company and then started doing content strategy at Fidelity, bank of America, tia, cref, and then I moved over to retail to CVS and ran the E commerce team. And when I was asked to teach a course at Bentley University User Experience Design center in content strategy, I had to create something that I wanted to be meaningful to students. I had two days, you know, of a course and I didn't want to have bullet pointed slides with clip art. I wanted to do something that would keep people awake. So I wanted to do a hands on experiment where I chose this website that was a content disaster. And I created exercises, user research exercises for the class to do studying content specifically. And then I had them design a website using content only. And the results, Solomon, were amazing. And after a couple of years, years I realized, oh, I'm doing content first design. I should write a book about this because it was starting to be like in the content community, those words. And so I wrote, I came up with a framework and that worked for me and wrote the book hoping to create conversation about the topic. And I didn't want it to be Sarah Johnson the World According to I wanted to include quotes from experts. So I have a, uh, from the experts section and really make it a community conversation. Like, agree with me. Disagree with me. Go to my blog and write something, you know, about how wrong I am. You know, I want to hear. Get people talking.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, I think that is the approach that we want to take. We want to hear, uh, both sides. So you describe content first as starting with meaning before layout or visuals. Maybe you can explain that to all of us who have no idea.

Speaker C: Okay, sure. So one of the biggest things we do first is team alignment to get everybody on the same page about the problem we're trying to solve and to, you know, line up our tasks, our deadlines, our meeting cadence, and get everybody aligned. And then before we create solutions or the actual meeting, we do a tremendous amount of user research that's content based, not visual based. So we're studying how people talk, how they think, how they feel about what they're doing. And one of the interesting things we did at TIAA CREF was we listened in on the call center. We could hear actual customers talk about their pain points and what their reservations were and how they spoke about their money and how they felt about their money. And one of the biggest things we discovered was that they were afraid, uh, of dealing with money online and needed a lot of reassurance. And this was so helpful in restructuring and redoing the content for the pages because we knew what they needed. We knew what was going to help them get through a complex process. We were studying the metrics, and the pages were mostly content, but very simple. And for everything we asked, we said why we were asking that and how it would be used. So people didn't feel, like, afraid to tell us about their spouse or their Social Security number or their income or personal information because they understood the meaning behind it. And we were able to raise transaction submissions to some from somewhere in the 30% up to the 70 and 80%.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker C: Which was tremendous.

Speaker B: It's amazing.

Speaker C: That's a pressure off the call center. They save millions in call centers.

Speaker B: Yeah, love that. And I'm pretty sure that was a competitive advantage amongst other financial institutions. Yeah, right. Just. Just the fact that you've done that much research while others just ignore the call center. Is that funny how the real meat and potatoes of business happens in a call center in the Philippines, but everybody in the US is making the decisions in a boardroom with no context of real muscles.

Speaker C: Well, that brings us meaning misalignment.

Speaker B: Right, Right.

Speaker C: Meaning drift. So you have the CMO calling something one thing product, calling it another marketing Calling it another. By the time it gets to ux, completely convoluted. And then you have the support team using their language. So users in the end of the day are left up in arms. So they keep calling the call center and having a user experience that doesn't align.

Speaker B: Absolutely. No, I do agree with you on that. That is absolutely true. The bigger, the efficient, the more inefficient it is. But I do want to ask you, why do content decisions usually get pushed to the end of a design cycle rather than, hey, go get the content ready and then you go to design. Which, by the way, this is how I used to operate before ChatGPT. It has helped me create my content. Obviously I take sales calls, so I understand a lot of it. And we have A.I. uh, transcript. So user research is kind of going into that as Sarah for a small organization. But beyond that, we can now output the entire page, all the content that we need, read it, reread it, edit it. So it's been smoothening out our own, own, you know, design projects.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: But I want you to. Yeah, I want you to tell me why do these projects get pushed to the end? And is it because the copywriter's too busy?

Speaker C: No, no, no, no. We want content, like, involved from the kickoff. But what happens, I think is, I think it's a leftover residual pattern from advertising where they were always doing mockups and storyboards first and then adding the words and the language. And I think that played over to Internet design, you know, web design, um, and it's now ingrained. Like people do the UI first when, if. If the text on a page in a website or digital experience is a conversation with the user? How can you have the conversation if you don't know what the words are? So how can you create a meaningful UI if you don't know what the meaning is?

Speaker B: And you also explained that the meaning breaks down as the organization grows. I think that's an important topic. Tell us more about that. And how did that happen in any of your previous organizations?

Speaker C: The way that it happens in previous organizations is like message failure by the time it comes to ux, like I've noticed, we're calling one financial term one thing over in the custom portfolio page and another thing in the take your retirement distribution page. And I started to notice that 15 years ago. And I became really interested in the idea of meaning at scale. Like what? How can users understand something if we're calling it three different things? And how can we preserve that meaning from the top all the way through the process till we reach the end user and how, how can we diagnose those issues?

Speaker B: Love that. I agree. And I do want to get to the framework in a minute, but I do want to ask, what are the biggest mis misunderstanding leaders have? You know, about content and clarity and meaning? Because if they don't see it and everybody else is going to follow that

Speaker C: order, I think that people assume once they give the edict that it's going to be translated accordingly. And I think everybody has their own interpretation. Like, you could tell me something about your business and then I could turn around and tell my friend something and completely misconstrue what you said, because I have a different meaning behind that language that you're using. So I think there are a lot of assumptions made that the message is going to carry throughout, and I think there need to be systems in place to ensure that that really happens. I think it costs companies millions, that kind of meaning drift. It costs UX tons of rework work, marketing. Everybody's impacted.

Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely agreed. I think it shows up in ways that you don't even see. For instance, lower conversion rates, less leads. If you'd get less leads, then you're making less sales. So you don't see that because that's a lagging indicator because you don't see sales right away. You see, you know, you see anything else. But if we see lower and lower conversions after a website redesign or after a, uh, new product released, and it probably is a big red, you know, red alert, that's like, okay, maybe we should revisit the content. And I.

Speaker C: Who should call Sarah.

Speaker B: Agreed. Absolutely. I would say you need to hand these books out to every CMO of Fortune 1000 because I don't think they're. I don't think they're seeing that. I do want to ask you to kind of break down the framework just for our audience. They're all going to get your copy of your book, I'm sure. But if you would just give us the, I don't know, the cheat sheet version of it, I'm sure the yes. This episode is brought to you by ims.

Speaker A: IMS helps companies use AI, modern marketing and proven sales systems to create predictable growth. If you want better leads, stronger positioning, and systems that can scale without complexity, visit IMS m.net meaning@scale book.

Speaker C: There's a content first design book which I wrote for UX and then I've expanded upon it to create a book called Meaning at Scale and that deals with this meaning misalignment that happens throughout the trenches. And the biggest problem with that right now is that we're feeding AI misinformation. So it's hallucinating and giving us gobbledygook that doesn't really support our message. So the book has, uh, the Content first framework, I call it, which first diagnoses where the disconnect is. It aligns teams, gets them speaking the same language, identifies where breakdowns are happening and where gaps are in the process. Then we operationalize the framework, we put it into action, we get things going and systems and processes in place. And the third thing we do is we rewrite and revise for conversions for customer satisfaction so that everything through the organization is using the same messaging.

Speaker B: I love that.

Speaker C: And then the cool thing is we test the heck out of it and tweak it accordingly and iterate and iterate and iterate until we're completely satisfied, which is so important for AI.

Speaker B: Yeah. So how do you test that? Uh, do you just replace the copy? Do you do AB testing? Tell me more.

Speaker C: Everything. AB testing, usability studies, user interviews. What else have we done? Just content testing? Like simple highlight tests? Yeah, I think all of the above.

Speaker B: Gotcha. Yeah. I mean, and where do you think in that process, maybe there's some friction. Is it just smooth going from step 1, 2, 3, 4, or where do you. Where do you think the team doesn't buy in? Or they're like, oh, that's not how we do things.

Speaker C: The first step, you have to get everybody aligned because there's a lot of. A lot of chaos, honestly, around what the message is. They get the message and don't like the message. So tweak it according to what they think it should be. Meeting dead, you know, having too many meetings around a chaotic messaging system, having too much discord in the company, having meetings run over, you know, it's a time suck. And I think that friction really starts to happen at the very beginning. And it really takes good facilitation to create that alignment and teaching people to really listen to each other and try and understand what each person brings to the table and what makes each person successful so that we can collaborate instead of, you know, argue about what's right and what's wrong.

Speaker B: I 100% agree. I feel like this gives. Takes a lot of pressure off of the design team because typically the design team is just getting hammered. Oh, no, we got rid of that section, so redo it. Oh. After we started writing, this section became longer. So go back and make it fit. Oh, the left side and the right side isn't sound. Even so. So the designers are like probably spending two or three more times time trying to make it work. Now they're like, hey, at least they're in agreement on the content. We're not having to get or less in the middle of the project. I think that's really, really, I think that's an amazing experience for design team

Speaker C: and I think that's where a lot of the cost savings comes in, is that you don't have to rework. The speed to market is so much faster. It's because the user experience is working from the beginning and not, uh, way down here. After we content and tweak everything.

Speaker B: I agree. Yeah, we are half assing it in the current world because of the fact that we're go. Here's a mock up of our new homepage, but no content has been thought through. Nothing. In fact, they would probably do it with existing content, knowing that the content is going to change. But hey, this is like a layout refresh. So I can see this, right? It's like, yeah, we just, we didn't have anything else to do, so we, we are, we're uh, redesigning it because it's outdated. Yeah, exactly. So tell me more about the AI amplifying the problems. You know, uh, as you said earlier, because people use AI to speed up the process, but sure. How is, yeah, how is that, in your opinion, creating more issues?

Speaker C: Well, it comes down to the content designers who are dealing with the AI and generative AI and if they don't have the real message, the actual language that the company's using, the real brand as it is expressed from the top down, the AI won't work. It will spit out incorrect information as you've provided it with. When you make your own GPT, you have to train it. You have to train it in a really sophisticated fashion. You have to go over everything it spits out and rewrite the prompts and hone your prompts and talk to the GPT and teach it who you are. Use a company.

Speaker B: Right. I do agree with you. And if not, then you're going to get something completely different. And most people aren't even using custom GPT, Sarah. They do not even know custom GPTs are a thing. And also they're probably not even on a paid version of ChatGPT, which is even more problem. Yeah, So I think you're right about that. So let me ask you this. What red flag do you see when, when you see a project, you're like, oh yeah, this is not going to end well. This thing is going to struggle. Yeah. How do you, how does. Yeah. Knowing what you know now you've written two books. Right. We're waiting for the second one to be published. So how do you predict the end of a project?

Speaker C: I think at every stage there needs to be reconciliation of have we completed this phase successfully? And if there's any breakdown, you cannot move on to the next phase in the process. So each phase needs to be evaluated and if something's going to break down at the end, it will be the, you know, by the time you get to AI, it'll be screaming. But you know, we try and prevent that by really evaluating and being complete with each section of the framework.

Speaker B: I do agree. Yeah. If not, then you're going to have some misalignment. So I want to ask you a couple last questions here. If our listeners can only remember one principle from Content First Design because it's the first time they've ever heard of this concept, they probably agree with us. But what is one takeaway? You want them to have Meaning Drift

Speaker C: starts at the top and that it costs companies millions and they many people don't even know what it is. And to learn more and more about meaning drift and how meaning changes throughout an organization and how that's costing money millions.

Speaker B: Gotcha. And Sarah, how can they get a hold of you?

Speaker C: Sure, through my website@content first design.com or through my LinkedIn profile, which is LinkedIn.com. And.

Speaker B: Yeah, and getting a copy of this book at Amazon or anywhere books are sold. Right?

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: And you also do speaking and training, corporate events. Tell us more about that.

Speaker C: Sure. I do keynotes at corporations. I ah, have one coming up where I'm doing a keynote for a huge part of the organization to get people excited about Content First Design and understand it and understand how it's going to solve their pain points and then implement it in a workshop on two live projects so that we can really refine the process for the specifics of this company's needs. Well, I think that the uh, having the keynote first and getting people excited and having them really understand the depths of how this process improves the overall build can have tremendous impact and keep people wanting to proceed with the workshops and the next steps after that, which could be refining process or looking at meaning.

Speaker B: Right. 100%. What if the CEO or the leadership is as disconnected from, oh, I don't want to deal with marketing. That's marketing's job. Oh, I don't want to tell them, uh, they're doing fine job. I mean, isn't that how it all happens? Like delegation and delegation. And delegation.

Speaker C: And delegation. Yeah.

Speaker B: Right. They're just. Yeah. Marketing is now like, we got to figure this thing out. And I do feel that there is that disconnect between, like the CEO is too busy with inundated with meetings and what's going on and somebody else is dictating the headline and the subhead and you know, what to even call the navigation.

Speaker C: Right. I think the nav is up to the users. I mean the, um, excuse me, the UX designers and content designers. I think all the headlines and subheads, I think that's all content design, but I think the messaging, the purpose and the problem we're trying to solve has to come, um, from marketing or product.

Speaker B: Yeah. CEO, whoever.

Speaker C: I think CMOs have to get on the ball.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. I appreciate it. Well. Well, thank you, Sarah, for showing up and sharing this wisdom with us. I appreciate it. Yeah, I'm. We're gonna be in chat. I probably have more questions coming in email format for you, uh, than ever before, but. But thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker C: Thank you for having me, Solomon.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening to Future Proof. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe and

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Speaker A: IMS helps companies grow smarter with AI and sales systems, visit ims.net. as always, thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time.