Anna Potapova & Arnaud Frattini: Content Design in China – Episode 178

Content Strategy Insights

Anna Potapova & Arnaud Frattini With more than a billion internet users and half of all global e-commerce transactions, digital business in China is huge. Anna Potapova and Arnaud Frattini work in content roles at Alibaba, the biggest online merchant in China. Lately they have been looking beyond their desks, trying to connect with their peers at other companies and to develop a broader understanding of content practice in the country. They've shared some of their discoveries in an article on content design in China, and they're building a new community to share practice ideas with other content strategists and designers. Here's a QR code if you'd like join their new Wechat community. We talked about: their work as content designers for the AliExpress app at Alibaba the fast-paced and competitive business environment in which they work a foundational difference in the information density preferences of Chinese consumers how they localize their content-design content how content design is organized and managed at Alibaba the new content-design community meetup that they are organizing the origins of their article about content design in China two major approaches to content design that they identified as they researched their article Anna's curiosity about - and her hot take on - whether consistency is truly important their take on the difference between user experience and customer experience the unique nature of branding and customer service in China an invitation to join their new content community Anna's bio Anna Potapova is the Content Strategy team leader at AliExpress (part of Alibaba Global Digital Commerce group). She changed team positioning from pure localization to Content Design, built a style guide and a system to maintain it, initiated the upgrade of internal writing and translation tools, and improved business metrics while reducing production and localization costs. She spoke at Button Conference and UX Evening @ Google. Previously she worked as a localization specialist, and hosted LocLunch Shanghai. In addition to her work, Anna writes a blog, teaches cross-cultural communication class at Alibaba new employees training, and mentors Content Designers at ADPList. She’s currently working on building a content community in China.” Arnaud's bio Arnaud is a content designer at Alibaba Group helping AliExpress expand into new markets. His role is to oversee product documentation and help strategize different content forms that best communicate with users and answer business needs. His expertise spans user research, localization, UX writing, customer acquisition and member retention. His passion lies in crafting stories for digital product, facilitating user interaction, engagement, and learning. Beyond his work, Arnaud enjoys sharing his experience on how to build a career in China, and works on building a content community there. Connect with Anna and Arnaud online Anna Potapova on LinkedIn Arnaud Frattini on LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM7mj8cEv6M Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 178. China is home to over a billion internet users, and half of all global e-commerce transactions happen there. Given these statistics, you might picture companies with huge design teams. But business works differently in China. Anna Potapova and Arnaud Frattini work together in content roles at Alibaba, the biggest online merchant in China. They're researching and writing about content strategy and design practice in China and building a new content community there. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 178 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Anna Potapova. Sorry, I'm doing my best to pronounce that. And Arnaud Frattini.