Michael Haggerty-Villa: Design Systems and Content Strategy

Content Strategy Insights

Michael Haggerty-Villa Michael Haggerty-Villa's work with content and designs systems spans the history of these practices. From his work at eBay on one of the earliest design systems up until today, he has been at the forefront of both content strategy leadership and design system innovation. This conversation focuses on design systems, but it was inevitable that Michael's content strategy wisdom would shine through, too. We talked about: his work as the Director of Content Strategy at Teradata the scope of the design system documentation at Teradata how he triangulates on the truthiness of the complex content ecosystem the structured-content infrastructure that he works with his preference to bridges silos, not bust them the style council he convenes to help align stakeholders on language and other topics the differences in content needs in design systems for B2C companies vs. B2B the tooling he uses to manage, and the scope of, the Teradata design system how they establish standards as documentation for new media formats like video are incorporated into the design system the importance of standards in communication and design guidance the requirements they're developing for their design system management tooling his preference for a "reliable starting point" over a "single source of truth" Michael's bio Michael Haggerty-Villa is the director of content strategy at Teradata and has also worked on the content design team at Blue Shield of California. He was one of the leaders who launched the Intuit Content Design System, and he has worked on design and systems for brands such as Compass, Disney, eBay, Mint, QuickBooks, and TurboTax. His articles about content in design systems have appeared in Content Science Review, UX Collective, and other sites. His content strategy clients include HPE Software, Kaiser Permanente, Yellowpages.com, and others. Just to make sure he has no free time, he’s also a father to three children and three cats. Connect with Michael online LinkedIn ADPList Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/Q0T4e0ofJVY Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 184. Many people trace the origin of design systems to the release of Google's Material Design in 2014. Almost a decade before that, Michael Haggerty-Villa was a lead content strategist in the Design Systems Group at eBay. He has since led content strategy and design systems initiatives at enterprises like Disney and Intuit. To this day, he remains at the forefront of practice where content strategy, information architecture, and design systems intersect. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 184 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Michael Haggerty-Villa. Michael is a legend, I think it's safe to say, in the content in design systems world. He is in my mind anyway, but he's currently the director of content strategy at Teradata, so welcome Michael. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to at Teradata and in the design system world. Michael: Hey Larry, thank you for having me and again, you're the legend and thank you for all you do about continuing to put out this information about content strategy and content design into the world because we need people like you and Paula Land and other advocates for our craft to be helping us. So thank you, first of all addressing the legend where the legend needs it. Michael: What I'm doing right now, in January, I just started as the director of content strategy at Teradata, a massive data analytics and data storage company, and we're in the process of doing a digital transformation, actually migrating a lot of our business to the cloud. And as we do that, we realize that we need to create better experiences for a slightly different market than we have usual...