Kylie Hansen

Kylie Hansen is a tireless evangelist for the field of content design and for her team at Microsoft's Cloud + AI Studios.

She shows the managers she works with how content design can improve their products. By demonstrating the ROI of content design, she also earns the budget that lets her continue to build her team.

The end result of Kylie's work is happier customers – and a growing team that is well-positioned to design the conversational and data-driven content of the not-too-distant future.

Kylie and I talked about:

the scope of her role as Director of UX Content Design, Microsoft Cloud (Azure) + AI Studios

the growth of the content designer role at Microsoft - she was the first one in 2013 and there are now more than 30, each embedded in a product team

how content designers are just one of many flavors of designers in their stack of UX talent

the shift at Microsoft from asking content folks to "please fix this without changing it" to fully embedding content designers throughout the design process

her work with other design leaders to articulate the ROI of content design - they have demonstrated that including a content designer on a product-design team:

increases NPS (Net Promoter Score) by 8 points

solves 44% of task failures

boosts usability by 92%

lifts both active users and customer retention

how the ensuing "happier customers and more successful products" show that "$1 invested in design is worth $100 to fix something in development"

their use of "experience analytics," which links OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) with actual data from customer use of their products, to optimize products over time

how her diverse background as a copy editor, copywriter, brand strategist, creative director, and experience-strategy director prepared her for her current role

her take on job titles in the content design and content strategy fields

how approaching content design strategically makes it much easier to do tactical creative work in a more consistent, aligned, and effective way

how they distinguish the different layers of their UX design work at Microsoft:

strategy (user journey, customer research, terminology, etc.)

structure (information architecture, navigation, messaging, hierarchy, wireframe copy, etc.)

surface (producing purposeful, conversational UI text that aligns to voice and style)

the challenges of staffing a UX content design team now that everyone is seeing the ROI and other benefits of including content designers on product teams

how UX design is not so much a deliverable as it is a mission, to take a product from idea to market leadership

how in their recruiting they try to "filter people in rather than filtering them out" - looking for folks who can master the challenges of short-form writing and who embody resilience

how positioning and messaging are embedded in their product experiences, always aiming for "five seconds to sign up and five minutes to wow"

their success in getting out of silos and collaborating - e.g., her close relationship with her counterpart in the cloud and AI brand content studio

the three "circles of impact" that they operate in at Microsoft

the evolution of her approach to selling content design and UX design to engineers

the emerging opportunity for content designers to lead the way as trends like conversational design, mixed reality, and chatbots shift experience design from screens and toward systems, processes, and data and how they interact with each other

Kylie's Bio

Kylie Hansen is Director of UX Content Design, Microsoft Cloud + AI Studios.