About
No one reads my work for pleasure. They read it because they are claiming Universal Credit, looking up a cancer prognosis or reporting a crime. More than 10 million people a month, most of them frightened, exhausted or reading in a second language.
At Ofsted, staff were proud of their 70-page registration manual. They were certain it helped people complete the forms. I checked the reading level. The manual had been written for people registering to look after children, and it required a postgraduate reading ability to get through it. Young women were breaking down in tears on the helpline, defeated by a document that stood between them and their livelihood.
No one had lied. No one had been careless. The organisation had measured the wrong thing and then stopped looking.
That gap, between what an organisation believes its content does and what it does to someone frightened, exhausted or out of options, is where I've worked for nearly four decades.
What I do
I write content for services people use on the worst day of their year. Reporting a spiking. Claiming benefits with a child on their hip. Reading about a prognosis they'd rather not know.
I started on my first government digital project in 1987. I spent years as a business editor, quoted by the Wall Street Journal on international accounting standards three months into the job with no accounting background. In 2012 I became the first content designer on Universal Credit, and helped establish the earliest content standards for GOV.UK while GDS was still finding its feet.
The method hasn't changed since the newsroom: find the signal, ask the question everyone is avoiding, and never assume the reader is at their best.
Micro-trauma
Most trauma-informed practice begins with a category, such as bereavement, PTSD or abuse, and treats trauma as something a minority of users bring with them.
My work starts somewhere less comfortable. The baseline has shifted. People arrive at services already depleted, more distracted and more sceptical of institutions than they were before the pandemic, with less cognitive room to spare. That isn't a user segment. That's everyone, on a bad day.
Which is why I don't write separate content for vulnerable users. Content that holds up when someone is frightened works better for everyone else too. Content that only works when the reader is calm, unhurried, literate and well is content that fails at exactly the moment it's needed.
There's a second gap that gets less attention. User research captures <i>lived</i> experience: a tidy retrospective account, given weeks later by someone sitting down with a cup of tea. What services have to survive is <i>living</i> experience, the real-time cognitive state of someone halfway through a form at 3am. The two are not the same. Designing for the first is how thoroughly researched services still fail real people.
It may be best practice. It is certainly not common practice.
Selected work
Metropolitan Police Service I wrote the national spiking advice and information service for police forces in England and Wales, now used by 87% of forces on the Police.uk app. It assumes a user who may be disoriented, frightened or still affected by a substance, and gives them a choice at every step rather than a process to comply with. Reviewed and praised by victim support organisations without a single change.
Universal Credit As one of the first content designers on the programme, I spent days challenging policy specialists on every question on the form. 'Do we need this? What happens if we don't ask?' Seventy per cent of the housing benefit questions came out.
Cancer Research UK I redesigned more than 5,000 pages of cancer advice on the website's <i>About cancer</i> section, accessed by more than 4 million unique visitors a month. User research showed that patients didn't want more information; they wanted control over which information reached them. Some needed every detail of the side effects. Others couldn't yet read a word about prognosis. The answer wasn't clearer writing. It was pathways that respected where someone was that day.
Cabinet Office Counter-fraud verification for Covid-19 business funding: collecting the data needed for background checks without making legitimate applicants feel accused. Described by Downing Street as a star performer in the government's Covid-19 response.
Environment Agency Applications for flood defence funding ran on a 350-column spreadsheet that almost everyone completed incorrectly. I replaced it with a guided online journey built around the fact that these applications take years, not afternoons.
Rural Payments Agency This one failed. For a year I said the service was defeating its users, often elderly farmers with limited digital skills, handed complex software and strict accuracy requirements. I was not persuasive enough. The programme went on to cost hundreds of millions and end in a public inquiry. I include it because a portfolio of only successes tells you nothing about what someone does when they're losing the argument.
What clients say
On the work
Kate Mew, Head of Content, Metropolitan Police Service: "Adrie's experience and expertise has been invaluable to the team. He did an amazing job."
Neil Henderson, CEO, Safeline — reviewing content written for police forces in England and Wales: "Adrie's language was appropriate and victim-focused. All the way through he was giving the victim the choice of what to do next, which is the right thing to do. We had no changes to make. It was excellent."
On the thinking
Dr Christopher Fitch, Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health and Vulnerability Lead, Money Advice Trust: "Everyone really enjoyed your talk today – notes were taken aplenty, people were still talking about (micro) trauma later that day, and you clearly made everyone think."
Kristina Halvorson, CEO and Founder, Button Events and Brain Traffic: "Thank you for your outstanding article on trauma-informed content and AI. Just excellent work."
Speaking and writing
I am an international keynote speaker and trainer on trauma-informed content and compliance, including for senior executives in financial services for the Vulnerability and Consumer Duty Academy, a six-month intensive programme for senior leaders in banking, energy, water and telecoms, focused on regulatory requirements around vulnerability. My articles are published on the Button blog, ProCopywriters and other UX writing thought-leadership platforms.
Working with me
As an EU national with Settled Status in the UK, I take on contract and consulting work in the UK, the EU and remotely. The projects that go well are the ones where somebody internally already suspects the content is failing people and needs an outside voice to say it out loud.
