(00:00) and the next talk is going to be primarily about well the art of communication design and how to get better that so our speaker has been speaking at devrelcon a few times already this is the fourth installment now she's a senior engineering engineering manager sorry at container Solutions uh maybe you've known her before as the manager of developer advocacy team for Wikimedia Foundation or the engineering manager at futurelearn a warm welcome to Melinda sackington okay hi everyone so quick show of hands who here has ever
(00:49) communicated something so don't be shy yeah I know it's not a quick question um but yeah everyone here has communicated something to someone at some point now who here is communicate is something that they think they could have communicated better so communication is something that we all do on a daily basis and most of us know that there there are times where we could have communicated better so as developers as developer evangelists we communicate in so many different ways and in so many different way it channels we do talks we do
(01:30) presentations we do workshops demos we send emails and slack messages we have face-to-face meetings and one-on-ones and we attend conferences like this there's so many different ways that we communicate but beyond that we also have so many different people that we want to communicate with there's lots of different languages different cultures different backgrounds there are different ways of perceiving and interpreting messages so you need to take the time to understand what it is you want to communicate so that you can design
(02:04) whether it will have the right impact so yeah hi everyone as mentioned at the start of this I'm Melinda seckington and I'm a senior engineering manager at container Solutions and previously I was an engineering manager at futilearn and the developer advocacy manager at the Wikimedia foundation in all of these roles though it time it's been really important to coordinate effective comms and yeah I've spoken here at Deborah Cole in previous years and this is the fourth year um fourth time in the series of
(02:39) basically becoming better communicators so the first time I spoke about how do you create effective slides so how do you apply design Theory to your slides the second time I looked at how do you create effective talks so how do you apply design thinking to your talks then the third time I spoke about how to tell effective stories and then this year the focus is well how can you in general just become a more effective communicator so it's all about how to design effective comps so let's take a step back and look at
(03:14) what communication actually is in most cases we Define communication as a way to impart or exchange information through some medium so how do we enable a more effective exchange of that information so we need to be able to be more deliberate more intentional with what we're communicating to allow that Exchange and there are lots of things that require more designed communication so the way I've applied this to my own work has often been when we know that we have something tricky or complex to communicate where we know we need to
(03:51) basically take a step back and consider well how do we actually want to do this things that require more than you know just an off-the-cuff email and the scope and size of these columns can vary a lot though so on one side of the spectrum you might have things like events like hackathons or conferences where the complexity and communication comes from coordinating the different types of messages that you need to send in the lead up to an event using like different channels or speaking to different communities
(04:22) and you know the coordination here might need to happen over weeks or months on the other side you might have things like internal team changes that you need to communicate really rapidly where you might only have a week to do the actual columns but the complexity comes in planning who needs to know maybe staggering information tweaking the messaging depending on who you're talking to in other cases the complexity may come from dealing with sensitive information where it's keyed at your only informing
(04:56) certain people or you really need to figure out how it will land with someone and what effects it might have on them so in all these cases though it's this idea that because you have complexity it's worth taking the time to take a step back and be deliberate in how you design what you'll be communicating it's all the intent to increase understanding you want to take the time to be deliberate and design your home so that what you're communicating will have a better effect now you might be thinking I don't really
(05:30) have to deal with these type of complex Communications I'm not really been in a position where I've had to do that and I think that's okay you know not every world will require this type of kind of thinking about comms but I think especially in devrel there may be more situations where you can apply a bit more deliberate thinking about columns to what you do even if it might not be as complex as some of the situations that I just described and also learning how to do this being prepared to apply this
(06:00) process will help ready you for when you ever do need to communicate something more complex so when I want to talk today it's a lot of what I want to talk about today are a couple of steps that you can take when thinking through something that you want to communicate so to design effective comps that can be as big as planning outcomes over several months like for an event or as small as writing a tricky email to your manager to tell them something that you've been dreading to tell them so the four steps that we'll be looking
(06:31) at are Define your goals identify your audience design your comms plan and design each message so first Define your goals so before doing anything else the first step is to ask yourself so what is your main goal what is the purpose of your columns so this may seem like a given but if you don't take time to Define this that's often when your homes can become messy unclear or just unfocused or what I've also seen is mixing up too many messages that aren't really about the same thing so the first exercise is write down in a
(07:11) one-liner your main goal of what you want to do why are you planning on communicating something in the first place in order to think about whether there are secondary objectives this will also help clarify whether it's something that actually belongs and fits in with the main homes or whether it is actually something different so here are a couple of examples it's made up once the show that's and they're all just simple one-liners about the goal of the comms the next step is asking well what I do
(07:44) is com's trying to achieve and this may seem like the same question as the previous one but what we want to do here is to determine what the effects of the columns will be so one way I like looking at this is to start with this concept from Stephen McGarvey from the book igniter shift so at the start of your columns your audience will be in a certain current states and by the end of it you want them in a specific desired state so what effects will your columns have had so this is about defining the desired
(08:15) outcomes what is the angle of the message that you're trying to get across so next exercise is about defining the desired outcomes in the goal statement so what effects will your Columns of hand and what angle should your message be focusing on so again here are a couple of contrived examples but it really will depend on your columns on what you want to focus on here and this is also where you can align your outcomes with your team goals or objectives or anything like that you that you might already have set up
(08:48) so you can have several outcomes for a specific comms piece but you do need to be careful with trying to do too much with one thing you might also be really tempted to just immediately go into detail here and Define specifics of specific pieces of communication but right now in this exercise we want to remain high level there will be more exercises coming up where we really dive into the detail of specific messaging and that brings us to the next section identify your audience so the question most times gets asked is
(09:21) who is your target audience but I think it's more useful to ask who are your target audiences so unless you're planning your homes for one specific person which I mentioned earlier May well be the case you're more likely to be aimier comes to multiple people so I'm not saying that you need to consider every person individually but be wary of making two large buckets for your audiences it's very easy to generalize and not realize that by doing so you're missing nuances needed in your columns
(09:52) so think about the subset sort of slices of groups that you're trying to Target what makes them distinct and then think about what do they each need to know how does that change with each group what variations are there next to that I also think of the attributes and constraints of these groups what is important to keep into account when designing comes for them so next exercise is create an audience breakdown so consider all the different groups that you want to Target with your columns think of individuals teams
(10:26) communities volunteers stakeholders success I can continue listing title groups but this will be super dependent on your context again depending on your company or your team and the type of comms that you're looking at this might be something that you've already have defined you might already have user research available that can inform this or you may already have some form of segmented data if that's the case that's great and use that this is not about Reinventing the wheel completely this is about just
(10:54) considering who your audiences are so here's a very simple example you know rather than just considering all potential attendees of hackathon you can break it down to more tangible groups so in this case we're looking at the potential origins of where the attendees might come from how they might have come across the events another way of looking at it is at the different types of programming languages maybe it's more relevant to you to communicate in different ways to these specific subsets there's no one way of making subsets of
(11:28) your audience and sometimes it helps just simply being aware of the various lenses that you can apply here think about the target audiences that make sense for what you want to communicate where are the differences and which differences do you need to be aware of and lead into and this is going to be really important later on when you start trying to figure out well do I send a single message to all of these groups or do I send dedicated messages to each group so then write out for each of these groups what the goal of the columns is
(12:01) for each of them what do they specifically need to know and then write out the attributes and constraints for each target audience so what do you need to take into account when designing your columns so this could be things like well this specific Community only interacts with us on RC while this other community has a mailing list or Discord but there's a thing about what I mentioned in nature there's lots of different languages different cultures different backgrounds of audiences that we may interact with so how will these
(12:31) things affect the way that you can communicate with people what are the things that you need to be aware of here so the next step is looking at what type of impact do you want on your audience what is it that you're trying to actually do with them so I would like to look at this as what Journey do you need to take them on so this is going back to that to Stephen mcgarvey's concept of that current state so a person's current state consists of several things their faults their feelings and their behaviors
(13:03) and most of the time these are all related to each other a person will think something that will lead them to feel something which will make them behave in a certain way so what are they currently thinking feeling and doing now this one also applies to the desired State you want them to get them to think a certain way so that they feel a certain way so that they'll behave a certain way so you need to be thinking about how do you lead them there what Journey do you want to take your audience on to get someone to that
(13:34) desired state so in this exercise you want to create an audience Journey overview so I've mentioned this in previous presentations as a think feel do overview so how does your target audience currently think you want to do and then how do you want your target audience to think feel and do after your columns so first looking at current state so think this is about how does your audience currently think what beliefs values criteria do they have feel how do they currently feel and do what actions are they currently taking
(14:11) what is driven what is driven by those thoughts and feelings and then think about your desired States so again what do you want your audience thinking about what mindset are you trying to change then how do you want them to feel and then what actions do you want them to take what new Behavior do you want to see from them again it really depends on the columns and you just how you feel this in for some you might only have one element in in one column for others you might have a row that really lines up nicely with think feel and do it doesn't
(14:43) really necessarily apply to every situation the third area that we want to look about around target audience is what are their core needs so for this we'll be looking at the biceps model so the biceps model is a model that Paloma Medina came up with but I know it mainly through Lara Hogan's blog posts about how to organize desk moves across engineering teams and it basically looks at the six core needs that are important to humans in both their work and personal lives so each of us will have our own individual
(15:19) order of these needs and we might just have different orders for these needs depending on the situation so the six biceps core needs are belowing so this is about feeling connected feeling part of a community improvements just about growth and progress choice is about having control autonomy and flexibility over things equality just making sure that things are fair and equitable predictability which is having certainty about when and how things are going to happen and significance and this is knowing how you fit in and what your
(15:59) purpose is so there are nuances to all of these and I've spent quite quickly through them but this is worth taking a closer look at so take the time to think about your target audiences and understand how their core needs might be affected by what you're communicating because understanding their core needs will help shape how and what to communicate thinking about these will help frame and like give a different perspective on what you need to take into account and what information you might need to include
(16:33) now not everything that you can indicate will have these core effects affects it but it's useful to think about how what you're communicating might affect someone's needs so next exercise is around audience needs so write out your target audience's needs so which of these might be affected by what you want to communicate and then how could you help how could your comps help address these needs as well so here's a simple example so let's think about a situation where we're sunsetting a surface and we need to
(17:04) communicate that to users people will likely be upset about it in different ways the core needs will be affected in different ways you know for some people it will be about belonging they might not be able to connect with their friends anymore because they're suddenly losing access to the service for other people it might be more about Choice the fact that they weren't able to input into that decision for others it might be about predictability not knowing not not liking the fact that it might happen really soon but it might be about
(17:35) significance the fact that they weren't important enough to be informed earlier so it's a little bit of a contrived example here but it's to show that a certain action can have very different effects on the needs from different people and York homes should be taking that into account when communicating something so putting that all together you'll have a good overview of your audience you understand who they are and what they need to know you understand what they currently think feel and do In Their audience journey
(18:08) and you understand their core needs so now don't you we've defined the goal of our columns and we've got a lot of information about our target audience the next step is designing an actual comes plan so first I want to revisit that concept that it's about coordinating complexity your comms plan is all about making it easier for you to coordinate what you'll be communicating and this needs to be optimized for your context you need to design your accounts plan in a way that will help reduce the
(18:40) complexity of your specific context so this is going back to what I said at the start of the talk so it might mean that the complexity comes from having multiple audiences and having to or coordinate the different messages that you're sending to each of these audiences maybe these messages need to be staggered delivered in a specific order where it makes sense for a certain group to be formed to be informed before others it might mean that you have multiple audiences but you want to send the same message to them and that message needs
(19:12) to work for those different audiences maybe it's the same target audience but you need to reach them in different ways on different channels so where the message needs to be tailored for each Channel where there's only a sort of lengthful message that you can use for each Channel or maybe it's about multiple messages planned out over a set piece of time delivering different time sensitive information or maybe it's about all of these different things combined making it a lot more complex and messy to follow
(19:43) so think about what type of complexity do you have how does it apply to your specific context and then within that complexity it's all about providing the right information at the right time to the right people so understand how you want to design the flow of information so this means planning what messages you need to send so the next exercise is first designing a framework of a Combs plan for your specific context so I could share I'll be sharing a couple of examples of how I've done it in the past but the main thing to think
(20:21) about is what works for you there are multiple templates out there have a look if those work for you but also be prepared to change them for what works for you and your team so what is the trickiest thing to a coordinate is it the timing of the messages is it the audience or the messages the channels that you're using the person who needs to do descending are certain parts dependent on each other so I think a lot of examples that I've used so far have been informing people about something but going back to the
(20:51) beginning of the talk remember that comes is also about the exchange of information often it's not just only the broadcasting of information it can be bi-directional so that exchange can also make the coordination complex are you actually waiting for the other parties the other the audiences to respond with something so take that also into account when you're building up your home's plans and then look at the consign framework and plan out all the specific messages that you need to send so what needs to
(21:22) happen when and who is doing what so here's a made-up example but based on the format that I've used um previously so it's a simple comms plan for an event where messaging needs to go out over multiple channels over a span of several weeks so the focus on the columns plan here is on the timing the channels the progress of the different messages whether or not someone has approved it or not whether or not has been scheduled and who's owning that piece so it's about visualizing the coordination of
(21:54) those specific event elements here's another example based on a format that I've also used in a different team where we had to communicate to two teams that they were being merged and making sure that we staggered the conversations there in the right way so here to focus was really on the timing so the who and how to have coordinated messaging by different people making sure that each owner of that piece of information is covering the same pieces of data to get across so keep in mind that it really doesn't
(22:28) matter what format this is in whether it's a spreadsheet Google Doc jira board it's about visualizing what makes sense for your team so the final section is about designing each individual message so as we touched on earlier messages can come in all different formats you can have messages in text so email slack or RC messages stuff like that you can have messages in person through talks or workshops or meetings and each of these are quite different and they need different approaches and I'm not going to be able to talk about
(23:05) every single one here because each of those could be its own talk in fact that's what my slide design talk was actually about about how to do that within your slides but I want to try to touch on some general tips and advice to keep in mind when designing messaging so again let's start with specifying what the goal is of this specific message so in this exercise you write down for that specific message the things that are most important who's the target audience or audiences what is the channel or the format and what are the
(23:38) goals and outcomes so these are all things that you've thought of before previously for the overarching rooms now we want to do it specifically for this message so what do you need to get done with this specific message the key thing about all of this is ensuring that your columns have the right impact so to me this is about reducing cognitive load does any amount of mental activity required to accomplish a goal so this definition comes from this book Universal principles of design great resource book I'd recommend
(24:12) checking it out and in the book we find this quote about cognitive load so design should minimize cognitive load to the greatest degree possible so how do you make it easier to consume your message how do you reduce that cognitive load so one good principle to keep in mind here is maximize signal minimize noise so this principle comes from the theory of signal to noise ratio so this is the concept that in every type of communication there's a certain amount of relevant information to us the signal and certain
(24:45) amount of irrelevant information to us the noise and good design we want to maximize the signal and minimize the noise so how do we maximize signal by focusing on the key points so keep it short easy to understand help your audience understand what the key messages are and this will be different from medium per channel the way you focus on something within talks and within your slides it's going to be different from when you're writing a slack message but you need to consider are you doing your best to get across what is most
(25:18) important so one thing you need to consider here is remember what you pulled together in the previous sections around the audience breakdown journey and needs so does your message take each of these into account these need to be a part of your key points for instance the core needs remember the example of sun setting a service consider whether your specific message could address any of the core needs that would have been affected so how do we minimize Noise by reducing distractions so to me this is about removing ambiguity making your messages
(25:51) clear and simple think about what words or sentences you're using that could be interpreted in different ways if you ask 10 people to describe what a dog looks like they're all going to use different words consider whether what you're saying could be interpreted in another way and one way if we're focusing on key points as well as reducing distractions is by chunking information so group together the information that belongs together and that can be digested together and this is again going to be applied
(26:22) differently depending on the format you know for slides it's about having one key message per slide keeping information that belongs together in different sections of your talk in text or in email or web pages you can use headings and boiling points to provide Clarity and structure to your to your message in conversations you can plan out different parts of topics to discuss so it's all about designing the flow of information in your message and finally it's keep it simple so use common words keep sentences shorts avoid
(26:55) jargon as you use the vocabulary that your audience is already using and use consistent wording so final exercise is message prep so identify your key information what does this specific message need to get across to your audience then Define your chunks of information what belongs together and then designed to flow how do you want your information to be consumed so here's an example of a not well thought out email it's not bad but it's also not designed So reading through it just consider what is the key
(27:30) information what are the audience journey and needs so to me what is important is in this example that the hackathon takes place on this date at this location you also want people to remember to bring along a printout and an ID and you don't want to surprise people thinking about the needs of about their being Security checks and back checks so here's a cleaner version just with simplified language and it uses headers and sections to make it really clear what information you need to convey again just as simple made up example but
(28:04) consider all these things when designing your messaging so those are four steps to designing more intentional homes Define your goals identify your audience design your columns plan and design each message so I'm hoping that with d steps you all are more prepared to look at your columns and be more deliberate with what you're communicating so I want to leave you with one final food for thought the steps I described are mostly applied in situations where I knew something complex was coming up and I had the time
(28:38) to plan out and design how to do this where it's been most useful though is where something last minute has happened and I've had to put a closed plan together like this very rapidly for something so that we could coordinate it within the team very very quickly and it helps having had the time earlier to try out these steps and figure out what types of homes plans work for your contacts so the next time that you need to communicate something even if it's something small or less complex remember these steps take the time to
(29:13) reflect on what it is you want to say who to say it to and how to say it thanks for listening so we again have time for one or two questions if there are some from the audience so thank you for the document in that um what do you do when a complexity is about stuff being adaptive and like things happening that you did not predict so how do you how do you prepare for unpredictable stuff and and how do you is there a way to to build for that yeah so the question was how do you plan for unpredictable stuff um in my I think it depends on what type
(30:02) of predictable unpredictability you're thinking of I think um what how I've seen how I've used these comp stands in the past is using it primarily as a single point of Truth for a lot of what we do so if things come up during that process that we realize you know the other person needs to take into account when we're trying to coordinate a certain message going out we can write notes on it or we'll use um a slack to coordinate to keep people up to date as to what the most relevant up-to-date information is
(30:37) um the other thing what I've also used is kind of as a as a as a side dock to the course plan is things like frequently asked questions you know what are the questions that people might have coming out of the comms that we do so that we have something to fall back on and build up over time with um with information that might only that we might only discover later on um so I think it depends on the type of unpredictability but I definitely think the more that you think about it the better it works um there's a really good book I can't
(31:15) remember the author's name but it's about crisis communication so that's actually all about how to communicate in in kind of like big crisis so think you know when things really go wrong how do you communicate um in in in in in that environment and that book really goes into detail about um planning out your columns but also planning out doing like test drives of um um of things going wrong basically and trying it out so yeah I think there are certain different ways to to do of it okay this speaks for the talk you
(31:50) answered all of the questions that might have been thank you very much foreign [Music]
