đź‘‹ Ryan Cordell, Staff Content Designer
Hi I’m Ryan, content designer and doer
I use words to make sure experiences solve user needs. I’m into complex problems, design systems and teaching folks how to design better content.
Work
Rimble
Content strategy, product design
Rimble is an open-source library of components, guides and templates for designers and FE developers in the Ethereum space.
Responsible for content and UX on the team, I:
- improved documentation through testing and creating a repeatable content structure
- prototyped and tested solutions to blockchain UX problems
- documented components and templates
- wrote long-form guides
Codefi
Design systems, service design
ConsenSys Codefi is a suite of decentralized finance products with varying origin stories and identities. We started the design system team to help consolidate the look and feel of these products and make design and development more efficient to help products get to market sooner.
Working closely with other designers in the organisation, I designed and documented design tokens, components and patterns for Codefi products to use. I also worked closely with stakeholders to:
- get buy-in for the design system
- design our team’s processes and workflows
Deliveroo
Content design, UX
Deliveroo is a food delivery product that lets you deliver your favourite restaurant’s food to your door. I led content design on the restaurants team, the folks responsible for building products for the restaurant managers.
We were tasked with creating a tool that allowed restaurants to manage their own menu content. After countless iterations, some intense design collaboration and some vital research in our European markets, we built a highly flexible product that saved restaurants time and Deliveroo millions of pounds in outsourced menu creation/editing.
BOXT
Content design, UX
BOXT is a boiler delivery and installation startup that has seriously shaken up the heating industry in the UK. After the agency I worked for at the time had built their MVP, I joined the team to supercharge their sales funnel with some UX and content design improvements.
Working closely with UI designers and developers, I identified, tested and built several improvements to key parts of the buying flow. This increased their sales even with summer fast approaching, a usually quiet time in this particular market.
Interests
Content-first design
Designing for the content your user needs rather than fitting content into a pre-determined design.
Design systems
Systemising content design decisions but also the entire notion of making designers think less about stuff that’s already been solved and more about what’s new to solve
Blockchain UX problems
Continuing to push blockchain product usability as far as the tech will allow us.
Design education
Fighting the good fight and making sure folks understand the value in content design and design in general – especially interesting in the engineer-dominated blockchain space.
Open source
Sharing learnings and giving each other a helping hand.
Speaking and writing
I speak and write as part of my commitment to educating the industry on content design and blockchain UX
Speaking
Design and Defi panel
Decentralized Design, London, 2019
Conversational design
Content Deli, London, 2018
Writing
Blockchain
Content design
Tools
I’ve found in my work as a content designer that I’ve had to get comfortable or even proficient in software that my design and engineering teammates use.
Pen and paper
For sketching designs. However in remote roles, I’ve tended to quickly mock things up in Figma or Whimsical.
Figma
For collaborating with designers, prototyping and getting engineering feedback on early-stage designs.
GitHub
I use Github when on projects where I need to collaborate very closely with engineers. I prefer to create my own PRs to iterate on content directly in the product.
Whimsical
For mapping out high level user flows.
Mural
For remote workshops and collaboration between non-designers.
Get in touch
If you have a role in mind, reach out and we can chat content design until we’re blue in the face*.
*Other topics I’d be willing to talk about until we’re blue in the face: Waynes World, Philadelphia Eagles, Weezer’s Blue album, Tottenham Hotspur...