Relly Annett-Baker: Stalwart Advocate for UX Content – Episode 173

Content Strategy Insights

Relly Annett-Baker Relly Annett-Baker recently said in a LinkedIn post, "The words are an expression of the solution, the last 20%, but we also need to do the 80% that comes before to know wtf to write. " UX writers and content designers spend a lot of their time, arguably too much of it, explaining this core aspect of their work to their colleagues and collaborators. While she sometimes bristles at the need to constantly defend and describe her team's work, Relly also realizes that that is, in fact, the most important part of her job. We talked about: her roles as the head of UX content strategy for Google's corporate engineering group her take on how requests for "wordsmithing" can diminish or ignore the many other design and stakeholder-wrangling skills that content practitioners bring to the table her identification of the unconscious bias that underlies this dynamic, a concept she calls "soft sizing" how she deals with the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously resenting the need for constant explanation of her work and realizing that that is in fact the core of the job the importance of tailoring your messaging about your work for the audience you're addressing her observation that prompt engineering is really just UX writing, that is, structured writing designed to result in a good outcome how prompt engineering and LLM fine tuning can benefit from insights from the practice of conversation design how the "uncanny valley" phenomenon manifests in content design for AI a quick overview of content crafts at Google what UX writers and content designers can learn from conversation designers the importance always tying your content-design work to business outcomes and goals Relly's bio A content strategist for too many years, Relly is the Head of UX Content Strategy for Google Corporate Engineering. She spends her days leading her fantastic content team, writing content strategy docs, overseeing content delivery, and petting the office Dooglers. She’s very good at saying “it depends” to stakeholders. Outside of work, Relly lives in Brighton, England with her husband and a collection of animals and teenagers. Relly recently finished a Masters in Crime Writing at Cambridge University, and she writes murder mysteries for children. She’s never yet turned a content-doubter into a fictional corpse, but there’s still time. Connect with Relly online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/7AowpqkCZ9I Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 173. Pretty much anyone in any kind of content role has had to deal with colleagues who misunderstand, diminish, and sometimes even disparage, our work. In her role as the head of UX content strategy for Google's corporate engineering group, Relly Annett-Baker has had many opportunities to help her collaborators understand that the words that we use to express complex concepts are just a small part of the work that we do as content designers and UX writers. Interview transcript Larry: Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 173 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Relly Annett-Baker. Relly is the head of UX content strategy for Google corporate engineering. Relly, that sounds like a really amazing job. Tell us a little bit about, well, first of all, welcome. And tell us what you do as a head of UX content strategy. Relly: Yeah. So Corporate Engineering is an organization within Google that really builds the internal tools. It's kind of like engineering the things that Google needs to be Google. So everything from performance management, procurement tools, legal stuff, kind of everything in between. And so the portfolio is pretty big. My team is smaller, but I manage a team of around 20 writers, user experience writers and user docs writers. So we work on those products and tools.