Nicole Michaelis: Creating and Managing Design-System Content – Episode 113

Content Strategy Insights

Nicole Michaelis Design systems are quickly being adopted across companies of all sizes and types, from big enterprises to burgeoning startups. As in all digital practices, content is a crucial element in these systems. Nicole Michaelis has worked with content in design systems for many years and has learned a lot about how to create and manage the content that powers design systems. We talked about: her journey into UX writing how her brief stint as a material engineering student helped to prepare her for a UX career her transition from her first job into a career as an independent content professional her description of a design system: a set of standards that helps companies scale their design efforts how she sees content fitting into design systems the importance of keeping design systems up to date, and how content strategy can help with this the role of string management in design systems and related tooling systems how basic writing guidance can help both writers and non-writers create good UI strings the ideal situation where the relationship between content designers and engineers is equal the benefits of having staff dedicated to tooling for string management how reaching out to folks who are working with the technical side of the design system can help content designers the importance of aligning content strings across multiple platforms and in localization programs how to work with engineers to help them improve their documentation-writing skills her advice to content professionals: "don't be afraid of the design system" Nicole's bio Nicole Michaelis is a Senior UX Writer at Spotify with 10+ years of Content Design and Content Marketing experience under her belt. Among other things, she hosts the Content Rookie podcast on all things copy and content and teaches at Berghs School of Communication. Connect with Nicole online Twitter LinkedIn Portfolio Content Rookie podcast Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/t6lEtUGeiJI Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 113. Over the past several years, design systems have been adopted by companies of all shapes and sizes. Content plays a number of important roles in these systems. Nicole Michaelis has done content work both with and for several design systems in many roles. She has helped everyone from engineers and localization specialists to designers and content strategists create and manage the user-interface strings and other content that drive modern design systems. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 113 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to have with us Nicole Michaelis. Nicole does a lot of stuff. She's a Senior UX Writer at Spotify. She's done a lot of work with startups and other businesses, helping them with content strategy, UX, and marketing communication. She teaches a course on content marketing at the Berghs School of Communication in Austria. Anyhow, she's a very highly accomplished person. Also, does a podcast called the Content Rookie podcast. Welcome to the show, Nicole. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Nicole: Yay, thanks for having me, Larry. I know that was a tough introduction with all the different things I do, so I appreciate you taking the time to talk the listeners through it. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Larry: Cool. Well, you have, like everybody in this field has an interesting journey in. Nobody just went to UX writing school or content design school and started doing this. Tell us a little bit about how you ended up as a UX writer. Nicole: Yeah. It was a long journey that I never anticipated really happening. I graduated back in 2009 from high school. My dad is a professor in physics, so he was very eager,