This is an interesting blog by Christine Cawthorne at the Government Digital Service, on training their writers to focus on user needs:

“We’ve provided training, support and access to more than 1,000 writers across government, who have published more than 120,000 pieces of content to the site. The word about user needs and transforming content has spread from the people we’ve trained to their colleagues and wider teams. The training is now so popular even people who aren’t in digital teams want to understand user needs and how to write for the web.”

It’s good that the training has been so popular, but I’m interested as to what impact it has had. Have the GDS noticed a difference in the way their authors are writing?

I have been involved with similar training sessions that encouraged writers (and others) to focus on user needs. Unfortunately, my experience has been that most participants take what they hear only as validation for the way they’ve always done things. They heard only what they wanted to hear. Everyone thinks they know their users, and writers are already tailoring their content and style to meet their (imagined) users’ needs. For me the more common problem is not that people don’t want to focus on user needs but that they don’t even know who their users are.