Elizabeth McGuane: Design by Definition – Episode 158

Content Strategy Insights

Elizabeth McGuane Content designers are word nerds by nature. Like many other craftspeople who are passionately immersed in their work, they can forget to step back and fully articulate what we are doing. Elizabeth McGuane has addressed this issue for the craft of content design. Her new book, Design by Definition, sets out the linguistic, rhetorical, and grammatical elements of content design and shows how they work together in design projects. We talked about: her work as a UX director at Shopify the origins of her book in a talk she delivered at a design leadership conference her writing process and how it relates to conversational design an overview of the structure of the book her transition from content design to design leadership the enduring strength of the relationships between visual and words people a great story about the utility and importance of metaphor in design work the importance of being thoughtful about naming things - and the idea that "words mean things" the importance of remaining "unfettered by truisms and by hard and fast rules for yourself that ignore the context of what you're actually looking at" the challenges she faced in writing the chapter on narrative her hope that her book both adds to the content-design conversation and expands it beyond our field Elizabeth's bio Elizabeth McGuane is a designer and writer who recently published her first book, Design by Definition (A Book Apart, 2023). She has worked as a content designer for 15 years and now directs large, multidisciplinary design teams that include product designers, developers, researchers and content designers. Elizabeth divides her time between Ontario and Nova Scotia, Canada. Connect with Elizabeth online LinkedIn Twitter Medium Threads Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/v-lRA6T_RAE Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 158. Content designers are, by nature, meticulous story crafters and notorious word nerds. For all of our word nerdery, though, we haven't yet had a book to refer to that sets out the linguistic, rhetorical, and grammatical elements of our craft. In her new book, Design by Definition, Elizabeth McGuane fixes this omission, diving deeply into the intricacies of how to bring clarity and meaning to the textual material that we use to design customer experiences. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 158 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Elizabeth McGuane. Elizabeth is a UX Director at Shopify, and she just wrote this brilliant book called Design by Definition, which is mostly what we'll talk about today. But welcome, Elizabeth, tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Elizabeth: Hi, Larry. Really happy to be here. I've been at Shopify now for about five years. I'm a UX director there on the mobile app, and we call it the operate team, the admin team. I look after the whole experience of the backend navigation search, things like that, which I kind of love. If you ask me any questions about the deep inner workings of commerce, I will not be able to answer it. If you want to complain to me about how Shopify admin search works, then yes, I am your person. I come from a background in content design. I originally started out writing, working for a newspaper in Dublin, Ireland, which is where ... I was born in Ireland and raised in Canada, went back to Ireland for university. Elizabeth: Not to give you my whole life story, but I've then moved into content design in about 2007. It wasn't called "content design" then, of course, but I was heavily involved in the origins of content strategy and content design around 2009. Probably not its origins. No, they go back to probably before I was born, but those first conversations that were happening at that time ...