Actionable information for UK exporters in a no-deal Brexit

After Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in July 2019 the UK Government ramped up its planning for a no-deal Brexit. The Department for International Trade (DIT) was tasked with providing guidance for UK exporters if we left the EU without a deal. My components approach proved an efficient way to tackle this, for 127 countries.

Inventory - a good foundation

Earlier on in the project I put together an inventory of all the existing export country guides to record things like publication date and who created them. I didn’t really know where we were headed at that time, but an inventory can be a great starting point to get familiar with content and build things out.

Working with the DIT content lead I added in each country’s trading status to the spreadsheet. We had a few broad buckets like ‘part of EU’, ‘trading arrangement via EU with signed continuity deal’, ‘trade on WTO terms not seeking a deal’. We ended up with 11 groupings.

It occurred to us that trading status should be the main pivot for which country showed what content.

Boilerplate copy and the matrix

Other content designers in the team were working with policy in DIT and other departments to prep guidance on various aspects of no-deal Brexit. Things like export of controlled goods, testing and certification and selling services abroad.

The country guides could be a path in to all this content. A signposting page with clear calls to action to help exporters get a head start.

I worked with each content designer to design a content component to house their signposting content. They worked with their policy people to pour in the words. We placed [COUNTRY] name slots in copy for us to fill in later as we assembled pages.

I content designed with the Trade Policy Group, pair writing the trade and tariffs components for our 11 trading status buckets.

In all we had 28 boilerplate content components and variants, with those [COUNTRY] slots.

I turned that spreadsheet into a matrix showing which county got which components - our blueprint for building each page.

Components sign off

My aim was to draft and sign off each component before we built any pages. Better to tweak one thing than when it had proliferated 127 times. I walked the Department for Exiting the EU and Strategic Communications through the approach.

Handcrafted but still sane

Rahel Anne-Bailie suggested using Adobe RoboHelp to automate content production, but we agreed it didn’t offer much of an advantage over putting pages together manually using the matrix.

A couple of other ace content designers and I rattled through creating each page, barely holding on to our sanity, getting them all ready to publish in time for the 29 March 2019 deadline.

See a screen shot of the France no-deal country guide (this link opens in a new window).