Coming up soon with Catbird Content:

• September 26-27: Button Conference, online everywhere

• October 3-4: Converge Conference in Brighton, UK

• Fall term starts today! Undergrads at the University of Washington, Seattle can join my class, INFO 433, Content Strategy for Information Architecture.

Finds

I don’t think most folks know about Catbird Content’s list of tools and resources. I created this list of tools, courses, articles, videos, etc., to align with individual skills. If you have a resource that should be added, please let me know.

I also offer open office hours, for which you can sign up (for free!) up to 3 months in advance. These are meetings for you to talk about your career, current content challenges you’re having, and just to connect. I’ve had about 300 of these meetings over the past 4 years, and really treasure the connections I make there.

Flexes and fumbles

I’m happy that I was able to turn in the first draft of Chapter 5: Building AI Features for the second edition of Strategic Writing for UX. That chapter is in my development editor’s hands now.

So a flex, but hoo-boy. I expect feedback. So much feedback.

It’s super hard to write anything practical when it comes to how to do a thing with AI. The field is not just advancing, it’s changing quickly. The business models surrounding it—and therefore, the constraints and requirements for it—are rushing to change at the same time.

Content folks work with people who use language all the time, but we use language to meet specific purposes for specific people and business use cases. Our language expertise can help define and refine the inputs and outputs to LLMs so that organizations can build experiences that meet those specific purposes for people and other entities—while advocating for ethical methods and constraints.

So. We content designers need to know how to contribute to building LLM-based features, and the topic definitely belongs in the book.

Right now, I don’t know that I’ve done it right, yet.

I’ve released the dart and it hasn’t yet hit the board. I’ve done my best and I don’t know yet whether it was good. And frankly, it won’t be any good until after I get feedback from technical reviewers and fix it again. 😭

That’s the mystery of writing well: Being willing to admit that it’s not good enough yet, and then working to make it better.

The cycles are difficult, and I have to accept that fumbles I don’t even know about are written there in black and white, ready for me to be embarrassed about.

Even after this many years of writing, it’s strenuous to think so hard, putting words in a sequence that means exactly what I mean, how I mean it, in such a way that most other people will also understand it that way.

(And then, those people might agree or disagree–but at least all parties will understand what meaning was intended in the first place.)

So here I am, anticipating finding out about a whole pile of fumbles, and maybe a few successes, in this newest chapter. In the meantime, there’s a whole ‘nother book to be working on.

Philosophy

Since my last newsletter, I got to spend a couple of days with my co-authors Kim and Maya for the UX Skills book. We gathered together outside of Seattle, working on the book and getting to know each other in person.

Getting together in person wasn’t required, strictly speaking. But as we look forward to this next year of writing deadlines (first big deadline Nov 1!), we understood that we needed to prioritize having some fun together, as people. We needed to actively create the group of us, forming a set that works well together.

So we ate together. Walked together. Kayaked and paddleboarded together. Drew pictures and told stories. And we did a lot of writing.

We have found a few places where our perspectives as UXers diverge, and many, many more places where they align completely. We aren’t so different, even though we come from research, design, and content, with diverse backgrounds to boot. We’ve been conducting interviews to further diversify our inputs, too.

Just like the feelings I described above with the 2nd edition book, writing this book will also have its ups and downs. Of course it will.

But because we’ve spent the time to ground our group, we’re going to have an easier, more joyful time of writing it. And we get to do it together.

I write these newsletters myself, and I stand by what’s in them. If you have kudos, concerns, or questions, please tell me. —Torrey