A week in the life of a UX Content Strategist at PDMS

I work in PDMS’ growing UX Team as a UX Content Strategist. In this piece, I try to explain more about my role, some of my responsibilities and who I work with.   

Firstly, what is a UX Content Strategist?

As a UX Content Strategist, I am responsible for ensuring useable and consistent design/content for our clients. I am often the first point of contact for our clients, understanding their project briefs, providing training and helping to create engaging, and more importantly, highly functional websites.

What does a typical week look like?

Each week can vary drastically depending on my client projects. The variety of tasks is one of the things I really like about my role - I get the opportunity to work with new and existing clients and support our marketing team too.

Monday – Planning and meetings

Powered by: An apple (to start the week off well)

The first task for my Monday morning is planning for the week ahead. This means checking any meetings that are in my diary, blocking out time for preparing for the client meetings and scheduling time to complete my priority tasks.  

Every Monday, I also join the PDMS weekly marketing catch-up. We discuss what we each have on all week, any ideas we have had, and provide updates on projects. These meetings are useful as I work so closely with the marketing team, it is very helpful to know what everyone is working on and I can provide updates to the marketing team about what is happening in the UX team.

Tuesday – Onboarding new clients

Powered by: A cake, getting in the spirit for Great British Bake Off!

Firstly, I get to meet and onboard a new client. The information I collect in our onboarding session will be used as part of a discovery workshop – one of the things we will work on is a user journey map. When we work with clients, we use online tools, such as Miro - an online whiteboard platform - which means that we can all collaborate remotely and does not rely on us being together in the same room.

When we work with clients, it involves lots of different PDMS teams, including:

• Business Analysts
• Marketing and Design teams
• Account Managers

Next up is another weekly meeting – this time, it’s with the Design team. This gives us all a chance to check-in with one another on the progress of our various projects and to help each other out if needed.

Wednesday – Content creation and meeting free afternoons

Powered by: A cream cheese bagel (substantial food to keep away the afternoon munchies)

On Wednesdays, PDMS has implemented a company-wide ‘meeting free afternoon’, which is great to allow uninterrupted focus time. I usually take the opportunity to work from home on this day. After the pandemic, we were given the choice to work flexibly either from home or in the office. I quite like working from home as it means I get to look after Luna (my dog) and make a healthy lunch to fuel the rest of my day! I do try and come into the office a day or two each week however to spend time with the team.

I have a two-hour meeting with a client scheduled in my diary on Thursday, so I spend the rest of my Wednesday creating content for their website. This includes designing visual content, shaping written content and analysing website performance. We have a range of tools that I use for monitoring the performance of websites including Google Analytics and Hotjar which help to ensure that client sites are running effectively, and help to identify where users are successfully fulfilling their user journey.

Thursday – CMS training call

Powered by: Grapes, strawberries and nuts (handy snacks for in between calls)

Ahead of my big training call with our client, I spent the morning finishing off the content I was working on yesterday and preparing their website for training.

The training with our client took two hours, it’s really important to me that people feel at ease and confident to add their own content to their website via their Content Management System (CMS). All training now happens online via Teams, which is useful as the session can also be recorded for anyone who is not able to make the training session.

Friday – Weekly review

Powered by: A homemade brownie (Friday treat well and truly earned!)

It’s the end of the week already! I like to spend my Friday reflecting on the week, finishing any outstanding tasks and planning ahead for next week. I’ll spend my time:  

• Thinking about any successes and how they can be replicated
• Reviewing any outstanding work that needs to be prioritised for the next week
• Scheduling meetings for the next week

Over lunch, we have our Monthly Briefing. It’s held over Teams once a month and Chris Gledhill, our CEO, provides updates on new and ongoing projects, company performance as well as personnel updates.

The final task of the week is the monthly user group meeting with SignedUp clients. The user group brings together all of our SignedUp clients where we as a group discuss:

• How the clients are getting on
• Share any industry developments that may be of use
• Knowledge share with each other and share their progress on projects

Looking back

So that’s what a typical week can look like for a UX Content Strategist at PDMS! Each week can vary depending on what work I have on but you can hopefully see how varied and interesting the job can be.

If you like the sound of my job and how varied it is, we're currently recruiting for a Website & Content Support Executive, if you'd like to apply visit our careers page.