Making allies in every room

An insightful conversation with Flipkart’s Nuvena Rajendran on how she established a successful Content Design program for 12 languages using mostly curiosity and determination

Imagine you had to get from Point A to Point B with limited access to maps, trying to follow roadsigns that were confusing and ill-placed, and nobody to ask for directions. Such is the experience of a user trying to navigate a digital experience built without good content design.

Our team is also center of Conversation Design at Flipkart, so it only felt right that we uncover it together in a conversation rather than a long thinking out loud piece. I’ve made some minor edits in the interest of clarity, but it is otherwise unchanged.

When our teams converged Nuvena was the only English writer and she had been thrust into a leadership role, tasked with hiring and training four regional language writers in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. The team later grew to accommodate a rapid launch in Marathi and eventually all the rest of the currently supported languages — Punjabi, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Odia, and Assamese.

I hope this conversation helps shine a light on her unique journey.

Intrigued by this world Nuvena faced in those early days, I was saddened by the uphill battle she faced but knowing she clearly doesn’t see it that way entirely gave me pause to think differently about it myself. I pivoted the conversation away from the what to more on the how she built her way out of the trenches. We both agreed that her experience starting out surely wasn’t isolated among UX writers or Content Designers. Side note — these terms are often used interchangeably in the industry, and that’s ok. We prefer Content Designer because it’s more than writing that we do. We approach design problem statements like all UX designers but use words instead of pixels to craft a way through for the user.

At that point we (I) got a little distracted looking at some of her photos, and we started picking out a few that hold aha moments during her evolving thesis on how you can’t consider content without considering language first.

Nuvena has done the good work getting to where we are now at Flipkart, with a vision that spans far past the content she was originally hired for. We’ve started formulating this into a more comprehensive content strategy that involves full narrative building and strategic content design. It’s deliberate, but also something we’re nurturing carefully and that can’t happen overnight without having a much larger team. Some days we just put on our pragmatist hats and deliver the copies. Then the day runs out and we find our inner fuel the next day. It’s a slow game only which I thought was only because of time and resource constraints.

Later, however, once we together formed our current team, Nuvena gave me the lay of the land on how we have to go beyond just any formula for content strategy. It has to be deliberately focused on India, and not just on users. In addition to writing and designing for them, we also have to think about potential future content designers or companies that don’t have the same idealist hat that we wear.

Of course Nuvena has this at her fingertips, pulling it up on her phone and proudly showing me like it’s a shiny new honor roll certificate.

I’m simultaneously amused and proud of this problem child.

To set some context here, one of the stellar parts of working in Flipkart’s design organization is the fantastic UX research team that partners with everyone across the organization to shine a light on the struggles of our users. It is through these sessions that we fine tune our solutions and get to know that we are truly doing something important for India.

It’s at this point in our interview that Nuvena looks like a lightbulb went off over her head and pauses to look up something in our Slack history. Without words, she shows me a real gem from two years ago. It’s then that it hits both of us. We have truly come full circle.

Besides our stories, we have an initiative to move our disciplines forward — Nuvena with content design and my focus on conversation design. Even as I asked her if we could document her journey, I did some reflection of my own. Though most of our dynamic has been clearly vibing from the start, we didn’t just grow as a team organically. We applied our collective purpose to the team as a whole — especially in how we represent ourselves as partners.

And here we are, living it still, finding value and joy more than ever in our work.

Sometime soon I’ll welcome you to join me in another conversation with another word warrior on our purposeful team.

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