Robert Mills
Welcome to the Fourth Wall Content Podcast. I'm your host, Robert Mills.
Actors address the audience directly by breaking the fourth wall in theatre and film. This podcast explores the fourth wall in a different sense.
We’ll share techniques, strategies, and tactics to forge meaningful connections with audiences, users, and stakeholders.
Our conversations with experienced and innovative content, UX and research practitioners will uncover the details of real projects with lessons learned along the way and outcomes of the work too.
Each episode will provide you with practical insights and actionable takeaways to help you meet user needs, connect with customers in a genuine way, or engage stakeholders meaningfully. Let’s get to it.
Hello, here we are again, but this time I have not one but two expert guests. Double the excitement, let me introduce them.
Emily Ray is a senior content designer at Citizens Advice. She leads a small but mighty team of content designers and legal experts on the creation of cost of living advice content. Previously, Emily worked at the British Heart Foundation and Taste Made UK before falling in love with user-centered, data-driven nature of content design. In her spare time, Emily is learning the basics of DIY while renovating a family home and she also loves traveling and spending time with her two orange cats.
My second guest is Mia Harris, who is a user researcher at Citizens Advice, currently working on website advice content. Previously, Mia worked as a researcher at Prison Reform Trust, having completed a PhD in criminology, exploring the experiences of LGBT people in British prisons. In their spare time, Mia volunteers for the charity Woodcraft Folk. They enjoy learning French, eating tasty vegan food and spending time with friends and family. Emily and Mia, welcome to the podcast.
Emily Ray
Thank you for having us. Wonderful to be here.
Robert Mills
I'm so excited about this conversation. There's lots that I think we're going to cover. So I'm going to dive straight in by asking the first question, which is the same on all episodes of the podcast, and that is who is the audience or the user that is going to be the focus of the conversation or the project that we're talking about today?
Emily Ray
It's a very broad audience to be honest. It's members of the public who are affected by the cost of living and who are in need of financial support, whether that be through increasing their income or reducing their outgoings.
We also have a bit of a secondary group of users as well, and that is our advisors in local offices. They will use our website content when clients come into the local offices and we have advisor content that's only visible to our advisors that gives them further information around sort of case law or websites they might want to look at. So yeah, the page is doing a lot and it's for everyone basically.
Robert Mills
As you said, at the start there's a broad audience and I suppose people who are affected by the cost of living crisis will be affected in different ways and maybe for different periods of time, maybe constantly or affected and then things improve and then they're affected again. Lots of different potential scenarios as to how they're affected and the impact it’s having on their life. So with that in mind, how do you take that broad audience and bring it down to something more specific I suppose to understand who those users are within that broad audience that you just outlined?
Emily Ray
At the very beginning when we were set up at the beginning of 2022, we were quite a small team with content designers and a couple of experts advisors. We didn't have the use of a researcher. So a lot of it was not necessarily guesswork but we had to go out and find a lot of these answers ourselves.
We would start off by doing some horizon scanning and sort of what people are talking about within the media. What search terms people are using to find the content and it was quite difficult. A lot of the time we kind of had to use a lot of assumptions when building out the content and things can change quite rapidly and seasonally. So we're constantly having to take a look at the landscape and see what's going on.
A lot of work has gone into establishing what exactly our scope is and what things we should be covering. We have a lot of ideation sessions for instance with our experts in benefits, debt and money and consumer areas to determine the core issues but we had a lot of conversations. We still to this day to be honest have a lot of conversations around is this a cost of living issue or is this to do with something else? So lots of conversations around kind of what the audience is and what the needs are there. Like I say, a lot of this can change seasonally and we have to constantly think around the impact versus effort in terms of what content we actually want to include on the page and what's going to be most impactful to our audience.
Robert Mills
So is it a constant iterative process? As that page on the website currently stands it's based on as you say the information you've got the moment, the data, the evidence, the user research which we'll come on to as well and then that process of reviewing that ,that you kind of outlined there, is that at set intervals are you reviewing it every two weeks, every month? Is there a different trigger that's causing you to review that?
Emily Ray
Our main page is get help with the cost of living and we are constantly iterating on that and maintaining it, making sure it's as accurate as possible for our users and making sure that it's relevant, it's meeting all those user needs. So we do routinely have mini discoveries to make sure we look across the whole site basically to see where people are looking at which sections. If you have visited the Citizens Advice website you'll see that we have different sections on debt and money, benefits, consumer. We'll do in our bigger discoveries at least we'll sort of look across the whole site to see which topics are trending and what people are responding to. Sometimes we might decide to develop that as a side project and work on that particular content and sometimes we might say right people aren't finding this content we really want to make sure that it's found and so we will have something on our get help with the cost of living page to sign post people there.
We also have our wonderful expert advisors who are constantly doing that horizon scanning, flagging with us if there is something new that government has announced, new initiative or maybe a deadline is coming up that we need to emphasise. And yeah it is kind of constant. It's a lot of work that goes into it from our amazing team.
Robert Mills
And with that page needing to serve lots of different users with lots of different needs it could be that somebody is like right I need advice on how to pay my ever increasing energy bill and somebody else might be thinking oh actually my priority is just I need to understand what benefits I may be able to get because I just need some sort of help and I'm not really sure what the help might look like specifically. If there's one page kind of talking to those needs, and other needs, how is that information prioritised and is that also part of an ongoing you know is that the right order is that the right is that the right information?
Emily Ray
So this is something we really thought about at the very beginning and we were seeing a lot of searches that were quite general around getting help with the cost of living. Sometimes people don't necessarily know what they're looking for. It's more of that general search and we need to provide them with the information that potentially is going to give them the most support moving forward. We did initially have a page called if you're struggling with living costs which we did redesign and turn into the page we currently have live. And what we did is we did a lot of research, just a lot of desk study around what people were searching for and did a lot of theming around that and we tried to use that in order to help structure the new page.
One of the first things we did was speak to our debt and money expert who explained that when clients go into a local office the first thing a local advisor will do is check what benefits they’re entitled to. And also make sure they are getting everything that they are entitled to because this can be a longer term solution or approach, rather than say a one off grant. Especially if someone is struggling with the cost of living. So that is something that we really wanted to emphasise right at the very top of the page and also highlight why it’s important for people to check.
Also benefits can be a gateway to other help and support in different areas. For instance, if people claim certain benefits they can be eligible for cost of living payments. They could also be eligible for help with medical costs. So that’s why it’s important information for us to have upfront and quite prominent on the page itself. I think we’re still sort of trying to revisit that conversation now and again just to make sure that it’s the best thing for our users. I think one of the conversations is, do we want to try and move that further down the page, just so we have at the top the more general stuff that’s going to be applicable to everyone. I think the fact that the benefits advice is going to be the cornerstone for a lot of other advice and support, it’s one of the reasons why we are still so keen to have it right at the very top of the page.
Mia Harris
Yeah if I could jump in there, I thought that was one of the interesting things that came out of the user research was that quite a lot of people commented on having that check what benefits you can get a section at the very top of the page and most participants said that they weren't going to use that section. Participants tended to believe that they were already getting the benefits they were entitled to even if they hadn't actually checked that through like an official assessment for example and yeah we were quite keen to find ways to encourage more people to check if they're on the right benefits because people were tending to skip over that section.
People were saying that they were expecting to see for example information about cost of living payments at the very top of the page because it's called get help from the cost of living. Or putting maybe we've got a big section on essential costs and people some people were suggesting putting that near the top of the page and more food bank information some people were saying food banks is really important I'm expecting to see that at the top of the page and I think that was an interesting finding is that sometimes the information that people want to see first isn't necessarily the information that they should be seeing first because as Emily was saying to you, if you're coming to the page just looking for information about food banks and you find that first thing great you've got your help with food banks really quickly brilliant, but actually if you're not getting prompted to see if you're missing out on certain benefits then you're not going to get that longer term more substantial help that we could be offering. So yeah I think there's it's interesting to see what users say they want and what how that differs sometimes what they actually need
Robert Mills
I'm glad you came in there Mia because I definitely want to talk more about research and some of the specifics of those sessions that you alluded to there. To kind of start that part the conversation off with can you share how content and research work together as citizens advice?
Mia Harris
From my perspective it’s going very well to start off with yeah we do have quite a lot of collaboration between content design and user research. So I'm working on content projects at the moment and we have another couple of user researchers based within different content teams.
I was based within the cost of living team who work on the website content around the cost of living for around five months I think. I'm now working with the housing team looking at our housing content, so we'll tend to have user researchers move into a particular team to look at that particular project on that content and then to be a resource for another team in the future.
Emily Ray
Yeah I was just gonna say, so it can depend on the project and also the capacity of the user research team this was the first time I'd ever worked with a user researcher at citizens advice in public content which was a fantastic experience. Sometimes you will have a user researcher attached to a team, but in a lot of cases like with the cost of living team, we work with a user researcher when we have something specific in mind to test and because we knew we had Mia for about five months give or take we decided that this was probably going to be the best use of their time in terms of this is a high traffic page it's it's high impact it's a lot of good information on there and we really wanted to test our assumptions that we built up over the last year or so.
Mia Harris
It was Emily's first time working with user researcher it was my first time working as a user researcher and my first time working on content and with a content designer so yeah I think we we learned a lot through the process of working together and it was really great great to work with Emily and to get a little alongside her.
Robert Mills
That was great thank you for sharing that and just how that collaboration works I mean that's quite a project to get started in user research in for sure Mia, straight in there with with that type of challenge. So as a content designer myself I recently worked with the user research on a project and it was so helpful and insightful and I just hope that I can have more projects where that relationship is available you know. We were pair writing on discussion guides together and we worked on bilingual content and the user researcher spoke the second language which was Welsh and it was just so helpful.
Still along the lines of research, is it hard to find participants for your research given the topic. You know people might be experiencing some real personal challenges does that make it harder to get people to do research and testing or are they more willing to share because they're glad to be asked because they can see that there's going to be help and improvements or they want to try and help others through their experiences
Mia Harris
Yeah in terms of recruiting for this project it was quite difficult because we wanted to speak to people who'd had personal experience of using this specific page for their real life problems so we put a survey on the page and again we didn't want to disrupt the user journey too much being conscious that people are struggling with the cost of living, it's a stressful time for them, we don't want to be having a big pop up with flashing lights trying to get their attention. So we had a static banner at the top of the page, we had it up there for about a month and over that month we got 18 complete survey responses and we went on to do content testing sessions with six people. Yeah we found people were really keen to get involved.
Robert Mills
I would love to know more about the structure and the content testing sessions. Can you talk me through what they looked like and what the participants were actually being asked to do?
Mia Harris
Yeah so we had six sessions as I say. Four of the sessions took place over video call and two sessions took place slightly differently we had one of the phone call and Emily and I actually went up to Bridlington in the northeast to do one of the sessions in person at a local Citizens Advice office because that person didn't have access to video call technology.
We started with a short semi-structured interview where we asked people about how they usually visit advice websites like Citizens Advices in terms of what kind of device they use like a mobile or a computer for example and we asked them about their experience of using Citizens Advice whether they'd use the website in the past or spoken to an advisor and we talked about the problem that took them to the Citizens Advice get help with the cost of living page and we wanted to find out more information about what they were looking for and why and if they tried to get help in any other ways.
Then we moved on to looking at the website so for those people who were doing video calls with they shared their screens with us and we asked them to just look for advice on our web page to help them meet the needs that they'd been that they'd been struggling with. So while they were completing that task while they were looking at the website for people who are comfortable with being interrupted as they went to my ask them about how they were navigating the page so for example why they were clicking on certain links or skipping particular sections or choosing to expand a revealable box or not and then afterwards we asked them a series of questions about their thoughts on the web page whether they felt they'd found the information that they needed, some questions about specific sections of the page that we were interested in whether they found it easy to understand the content and to find it and whether they'd take any further steps to get help with the cost of living
Robert Mills
And that content that was being tested was content that had been content designed and was already published on the citizens advice site or was it something that was more of a prototype or like a draft
Mia Harris
No no that's right yeah it was all existing content that had been designed and put there already.
Robert Mills
Did the insights on that testing then inform that kind of next round of you know that ongoing amends to the page?
Mia Harris
Exactly yeah. That's something that Emily and the team have been working on alongside all of the other things they've got to work on so yeah they've been, they've made a few updates to the page already and I know that they've got some further updates in the pipeline.
Robert Mills
As I understand it this wasn't the only thing that you were working on and I also understand that there's recently been a firebreak week as part of this project so I'm just curious as to what a firebreak week is in this context how it worked what were the outcomes did that have an impact on all of that other work that was still needed to happen it'd be great to find out more about what that looked like for you.
Emily Ray
Yeah of course I love the idea of a firebreak week. I feel like it feels a bit mythical and a bit like a magical adventure, but in reality it's still quite exciting, but the firebreak week it was something the whole content team actually took part in it wasn't just the cost of living team.
We all basically paused all our project work for one week and we all looked at very specific issues on the site so these are things that have come up maybe over the last few months that we would love to maybe look into a little bit more but we just haven't had the capacity to think about it a bit more broadly. I think we had some small teams looking at how we can humanise our content, how we can help people fill in forms, some people also looking at how we can introduce video content to our pages, and my particular team we were looking at how we can help people find the content on the get help with the cost of living page more easily because as we've said there are a lot of audiences, a lot of user needs, just a lot of information on this page. So we really wanted to explore other ways we could meet those needs perhaps outside of just flat content.
My team we were just a bunch of content designers working on this particular project and it was quite good because we had the wonderful Callum with us who works on the cost of living team, but we also had two other content designers who work on different projects, so it was really refreshing to sort of get their thoughts on our content and how we could explore other opportunities for our users. And because the page is so long things can be easily missed. A lot isn't relevant to everyone. We kind of explored what other places were doing and how they were going about sort of giving advice to the public.
One of the ideas we decided to explore a little bit more was the idea of like a filtering tool so how people can filter the content on the page so it's most relevant to them one of the things we explored a little bit more sort of doing sort of like a decision tree so people can maybe give a little bit more information about their situation and and then we sort of give them a results page that's tailored to them so it's personalised content that tells them this is going to be what you need to know and what you need to do.
Robert Mills
Do you have them often fire break weeks?
Emily Ray
I think this was my very first one. I feel like I have been part of more of them because I think before covid there were quite a few fire break weeks and they have been so excellent for a lot of content designers who are on the team because certain tools have come out of it or certain ways that we sort of create content or maintain our content has come out of that.
So yeah, like I said, it's just a great opportunity to clear your mind almost of the day-to-day things and just focus on something completely new. But it is very intense. I think all of us by the end of the week needed a good, a good rest.
Mia Harris
And so I guess there's also, obviously there's the day job to be getting on with, so you can't have five break weeks monthly unfortunately. But also they bring in different people from different teams as well right, so even though it was a content design fire break week for example I helped as a user researcher on one of the content design projects just giving them some tips about user research and the kind of research questions they could be asking for example.
Robert Mills
That leads nicely into the next question, which you didn't realise but it does so thank you for that, and it's this - we've talked about how content and research work together at Citizens Advice and I'm always interested in how teams work together within an organisation because often there are silos and you know working remotely people on in a physical space as much as they used to be a few years ago etc. You've mentioned that you know service design and some product designers and you'd also shared before we started chatting the cost of living data dashboard which you'd mentioned was put together by the Citizens Advice policy team and that dashboard outlines some of the core themes that you're looking at as an organisation. Is there anything you can share about how the different departments work together across Citizens Advice in alignment around those core themes?
Emily Ray
We aim to be as collaborative as possible I think there's always room for improvement especially it's like you say we're not in a physical office altogether we're working remotely. The network puts together sort of a report around emerging issues that have come through from local offices. So these are topics that a lot of clients are seeking advice on, which can be really useful for us, especially in terms of determining or identifying the themes and things that we want to focus on for the next three to six months.
We also have separate housing and energy content teams and we do meet up with them quite frequently just to make sure obviously we're not duplicating work but also that we are sharing knowledge around things that are coming up and making sure that it's included somewhere on the website. We also have several other teams, self-service team and we've got the lab that does a lot of fun experiments and sort of looks at other ways that we can meet user needs and they're experimenting things around checklists for our users and how we can reach marginalised communities a little bit more and there were often well someone from the cost of living team will often be at some of these meetings to sort of share raw knowledge and share ideas and so yeah really trying to hone in on that collaboration side of things.
We also try to link up from time to time with our comms department. Just because they’re on the frontline. They’re seeing things come up on social media on a daily basis and they might want to flag something that would be good to tackle from a content perspective. Then sometimes there are content redesigns that we are working on that would be good to push on social media just to get more eyes on it and then just to see if the content is working from a user perspective.
Mia Harris
Yeah I'd say there's a few other ways as well that people find out about what's going on within the organisation because it is a very big organisation. So for example this cost of living project that Emily and I worked on together, we did a show and tell which people from across the organisation came to just to try and disseminate our findings throughout the organisation because people always find something that they're interested in.
For example one of our findings in the research that we did was about one of the web design elements, so the accordions revealables expandables, people call them different things, but these sections on a website where you can click and expand and see more information. We found that some of the people we did content testing sessions with didn't realise that those boxes could be expanded and one person thought it was a link for example because the text is in blue they thought oh that's going to be a link to another page I didn't realise that it would show information within that page. Service design have been doing some experiments using different symbols at the moment we have a plus sign on these expandable boxes and for example using sideways arrows and downwards arrows to do some AB testing to see whether more people open them based on what symbol there is and they might be doing some further testing based on color because, for example as I said, one person thought oh it's blue text it's going to be a link.
So we try and feedback from all the projects that we're doing into other teams to kind of gain those insights from particular projects and amalgamate them and see if we've got themes that we can identify that need some further work on. Obviously other ways that we stay up to date is things like we've got an internal newsletter we've got slack channels we have a workplace group and that kind of thing so yeah we're all trying to keep rest of what's going on in a very big organisation where people are working on very different things.
Emily Ray
Sometimes it can be difficult because obviously we have the national Citizens Advice and then we have local offices, and so it can, you can feel very separate from them at times. That's something we're constantly trying to improve because we want to know what our users are looking for, what content they need and how they're feeling, how we can meet those needs. I think that's one of the reasons why it's just so crucial that we we do try and sort of increase that collaboration.
Robert Mills
Thank you that was really insightful to see how people how the departments work together it's always interesting especially in big organisations and more so I think now that people are spread far and wide due to remote or hybrid working. You also mentioned a bit about some of the findings through that content testing, love the specifics of that answer by the way and and the sort of things that people were bringing to your attention. How else are you understanding how the content is performing and what are the sort of data sets or measurement goals against the content?
Emily Ray
So the content designers on the team will often take monthly stats of our page. Obviously we're working across lots of different content but we we focus on this particular page, it's a good litmus test for what else is going on around the network and what people are generally searching for. We'll take obviously the basics like page views bounce rate feedback scores. Feedback scores actually really good it's it's a little form at the bottom of the page where people can say whether they they find the advice helped them or not and if they say no it didn't they can leave some comments about why they didn't find it was useful. And sometimes it's not necessarily a reflection of our content itself it's more the the limitation of advice that we can give, so we kind of yeah we have to take that sometimes with a pinch of salt we have to sort of look at it a bit objectively.
Obviously we're taking all these stats we're trying to establish a new baseline with Google Analytics 4 kicking in at the moment. We kind of had a good idea of what was, what was kind of average before before that kicked in but we're getting there, but also look at other things each month like the number of revealables that are being opened - that's the expandable content that people can interact with on the page. We'll also look at the top external and internal links that people are clicking on and also the search terms, just so we're keeping on top of changes and seeing what we can work on. Then we try and create sort of a monthly narrative that we can share with our experts because sometimes some months we might see oh everyone's clicking on this particular link, but then we try and think about what's happening this month has it been in the news, is it summer holidays is that why people are clicking on this, just so we don't try and jump in too quickly to sort of change the content before it it actually needs to be changed.
It's a really useful way of looking at things and it's a good way for us to test new content as well because sometimes people don't know what they're looking for, like I say, so we need to sort of give them information that's going to help them so we can test content around get help with looking after your pet for instance and vet bills.
We can see how people respond to that we also were able to experiment with a really good piece of content at the bottom of the page around if you're finding things difficult, we recognise that there is a limitation to the advice we can give and actually sometimes the best thing we can do or sometimes with some people is to encourage them to seek help if they need to speak about their mental health and sort of through looking at those measurements it's encouraging obviously to see people clicking on those links and they are some of the most popular links on the page, especially because they're right at the very bottom, but at the same time I don't want to see anyone clicking on these links because obviously I'd much prefer it that people didn't need that help, but it's nice to know we're sort of meeting that user need and it's an area for us to focus on.
Robert Mills
As you're talking through the content there like the topic can be quite heavy at times, some of the content you're needing to create given the circumstances that people are experiencing. And I know we've only scratched the surface of of the work that you've done and we've not even talked about all the other content and work outside of this particular page as well. So that's a lot, it's a lot of work and it's quite heavy going content at times. Is there anything that you're doing yourselves as a team and as an organisation to prioritise your own well-being in all of this?
Emily Ray
As an organisation we take well-being very seriously and I think a lot of the the content teams do try and emphasise that, especially given the kind of content that we're working with and often we'll need to look at what users are coming to us for or look at sort of cases that people come into local offices. I know sometimes I've you know read a case story and I’ve had to just take myself away from the situation after half an hour because it's just, it's so heavy, and it's just sometimes it's too much. Like I say it's that bringing people, bringing content designers together with what what's happening on the ground in the front line. It can be quite destroying sometimes and I think especially now we're all remote, like you say, we're spread across the country so it's more important than ever that we try and look after each other.
I think I'm a little bit biased, I think we do do this quite well in our particular team, we have some wonderful people that are all great some of them have been working on the project since the very beginning, some people have just joined us the last six months but we try and encourage people to speak openly about their feelings. We have daily check-ins on Slack with our Slackbot sort of asking people how they're feeling so we can bring ourselves, our whole selves to work and if we want to get something off our chest we can.
We have coffee chats every week where it's an opportunity for everyone in the cost of living team including experts that we can all come together and talk for 30 minutes about anything other than work. So we can, but it could be playing a game it could be just chatting about a goat video or something that someone's seen, it could be something, anything. But it's also just acknowledging that it's okay to step away from your computer if you need to. You know it is really heavy stuff that we're dealing with and stepping away from your computer having a walk having a cup of tea, doing something that's you know not as heavy it's it is just so so important.
We also just like to share a lot of positive news and that can be from around the network. Sort of successes at local offices but also if we have any nice feedback. I think it's so important that we we do share that with each other because we know from that whether we're making a difference, we are helping people and I think it can be hard to remember that when you're sitting in your home office and staring at your at your computer all day but it's it is really important.
Mia Harris
We're very conscious in the user research team that the people, the members of the public we're speaking to who use our services, often do have high levels of distress and we take that into account when we're designing our research. But yeah we do also take account of how that's going to impact us as user researchers so we always, for example after each session, I always set aside 15 minutes to debrief with the note taker. We always have two people doing research so it's never just the researcher on their own. There'll be someone taking notes as well as usually recording the session for accuracy purposes afterwards. There's definitely a culture at Citizens Advice where if you're feeling rubbish after a session you can take the rest of the day off, you can you can speak to somebody, your manager's available. There's definitely a culture of prioritising people's mental well-being when needed. Not saying we get days off willy-nilly, but yeah we we do look after ourselves and each other I think the best we can.
Emily Ray
Everyone's going to want to work for us after this.
Robert Mills
Yeah get ready, get ready for lots of enquiries and I guess keeping keeping the spotlight on yourselves for the last question. Can you think of a time recently when you've been the audience or you've been the user um what have you watched or what have you read or what have you listened to that might have provoked a reaction or stirred an emotion in you and it can be work related or otherwise?
Mia Harris
I saw a play last week that I really enjoyed. I found it really thought provoking, around accessibility issues. I hope I’m allowed to swear because the play's title was actually It's a Motherfucking Pleasure. It was by a disabled led theater company called Floorboard and yeah it was a satirical play about exploiting people's able anxiety about doing the right thing and being the perfect ally to disabled people.
The whole play was really interesting but I'll just mention the opening scene which was really funny but also really impactful. So the theater company had made some real genuine efforts to make the play accessible to the audience. So for example there was a British Sign Language interpreter, there was a screen with captions - which I've never seen in a play before - but the play opens with this really over-the-top satirical effort to make it even more inclusive in ways that end up making it really inaccessible to everybody. So they start by dimming the lights because one of the cast members, who is in fact blind, he needs low light levels because of his vision impairment but then they present that somebody in the audience had disclosed needing additional light so they shine this massive spotlight on this poor unsuspecting person in the second row. Then they pretend that one audience member disclosed that they have to lip read so they joke that the actors are going to stand in front of them for the entire play. They say that one person in the front rows hard of hearing so the actors start shouting and screaming at them but then they realise that that might upset people who react badly to loud noises. Then they chuck out all these earplugs to the rest of the audience. So yeah it was just a kind of funny way of getting people thinking about accessibility really.
Robert Mills
It sounds incredible. Do you know if it's touring?
Mia Harris
I think it is touring, yeah. I think it was it the Edinburgh Fringe this year. I'd really recommend it.
Robert Mills
I've never heard of anything like that before. Emily what about yourself a time when you've been the audience or user recently?
Emily Ray
I don’t have anything to top that to be honest, that's a great answer. Well I was thinking about something that's, most of your listeners are probably quite familiar with, but it's it was recently shared with me by a colleague at Citizens Advice and it's a TED talk by Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith who is a physician, researcher, speaker and in it she talks about the the seven different types of rest.
The takeaway is that sleep and rest aren't the same thing, you can't always expect to feel refreshed after a good night's sleep or after you've had a holiday away. And there are seven specific types of rest and of course it's like physical and mental but also sensory creative, emotional, spiritual, all different types of rest and it's all about identifying where you're spending the most energy in your day where that rest deficit is and how you can introduce more rest into your day to try and and then you sort yeah help yourself feel more restful. I think it particularly, it was eye opening to me purely because I think as content design as content designers I think we are quite susceptible sometimes to burnout, especially because we want to help as many people as we can, we want to you know make sure we're producing the best content we can for people and actually identifying the different types of rest it's just important to look after yourself, especially when you're you know you're doing so much on a daily basis for people. So yeah, my takeaway was just be kinder to yourself and give yourself permission to take those breaks you need.
Robert Mills
Also an outstanding answer. I love asking that question at the end and since I've been doing the podcast my things so watch, read and listen to has just become longer and longer and longer.
That does bring us to the end of the time that we've got today, so all it leaves me to say is thank you so much for the time that you've given. It was just the most incredible insight into some of the work that you're doing as Citizens Advice, very grateful that you're willing to share that. I really think it'll help other people even if the content they're working on is you know different topics and things. I think there's a lot of transferable knowledge and examples there and I'm just very grateful that you were happy to chat with me today and share that experience so thank you very much.
Mia Harris
Thanks for having us, we really enjoyed it.
Emily Ray
Yeah thank you. Had a great time.
Robert Mills
Thank you for listening to the Fourth Wall Content podcast. All episodes, transcripts and show notes can be found ay fourthwallcontent.com. Good luck with your content challenges and I hope you can join us next time. Bye for now.
