Hello, I'm Louise Leone, a senior content strategist based in the UK with two decades across editorial, structured content, digital experience, and content operations. This page sets out how I think and work: the position I hold, the principles that drive the work, and how an engagement actually moves from discovery to handover.

I work at the integration of strategic, operational, and structural content, holding the content perspective as a peer to UX, product, and engineering rather than a translator between them. The result is content that serves the business and the user at the same time, built as systems that survive contact with real teams.

The position:

UK content design centres user needs ruthlessly, with evidence, and that rigour is non-negotiable in my work. But content also has to serve a commercial objective and survive the real organisation that maintains it. My career has been almost entirely commercial, so I have never had the luxury of designing for users without a business target to hit. I take the user-needs discipline the field rightly demands and join it to the business-objectives and process discipline that user-led models tend to underplay. Holding both poles at once, user and business, design and systems, editorial and governance, is the work.

How I think:

Content as data, not pages. Structured content types, references between them, and reusable blocks designed for multi-channel delivery rather than single-page contexts. The platform changes; the discipline is constant.

Tone of voice succeeds as a system, not a document. Voice has to be built into how content is reviewed, approved, and structured at field level. Written once and shelved, it fails. Built into the workflow, it holds.

Design for the real team, not the ideal one. The test of a content system is not its sophistication. It is whether it survives contact with the people actually making the content. Infrastructure that gets used and lasts is worth more than an elegant strategy that quietly fails to embed.

Peer, not translator. I hold the content perspective inside the cross-functional conversation, weighing trade-offs strategically: adjusting where technical constraints are real, and pushing back where technical convenience would damage the editorial or customer experience.

Audits are the diagnostic layer, not the deliverable. The value is in what happens between gathering the data and making the recommendations. A weak audit produces an inventory read once. A strong one produces a synthesis tied to the client's actual business objectives.

Content that serves the business and the user at once, built as systems that last

How I work:

• Voice and intent (editorial). Editorial mission, point of view, tone, and brand standards: what an organisation believes, how it sounds, and what it wants the reader to think, feel, and do. For enterprise clients with multiple sub-brands, the real work is governance: who owns the master voice, how sub-brand voices nest under it, and how it adapts across touchpoints without losing coherence.

• Audience and need (user). User needs, research, journeys, accessibility, and plain language. Knowing the audience and their needs, then balancing those against business goals to define what useful, usable content actually requires. This is where the rigour of UK content design is fully honoured: nothing moves without evidence.

• Structure and system (architecture). Content modelling, structured and composable content, reuse, and taxonomy. I design the model from the editorial and customer-experience side, then hold the content perspective through the technical conversation with developers on validation, references, performance, and editor experience. Across Umbraco, Storyblok, Strapi, and Sitecore the platforms vary, but the discipline is the same: structured content types and reusable blocks built for multi-channel delivery, not single pages.

• Operations and governance (sustainability). Lifecycle, roles, accountability, measurement, and adoption: who creates, who is accountable, who maintains, and how quality and performance are measured. This is the pillar most approaches underplay and the one that decides whether anything survives. Built around the real team, with governance that holds across team changes, agency changes, and time.

How an engagement moves:

Discovery and audit. Establish the business objective and user need; audit existing content and the technical stack; synthesise findings into prioritised, objective-anchored recommendations. Strategy and definition.

Define editorial positioning, voice, and audience segments; set the content requirements that serve both business and user; frame the architecture direction. Modelling and structure. Model content as structured, reusable types; specify components with fields, references, and acceptance criteria; iterate with developers through testing without breaking the system. Build, QA, and embedding. Support delivery; QA against the model and editorial standards; embed voice into review and approval so structure enforces quality at field level. Governance and handover. Establish the operating model: roles, workflow, measurement, and maintenance, designed for the real team so adoption sticks after handover.

Working across teams:

I operate inside cross-functional matrices: content, UX, UI, service design, product, and engineering, often alongside nearshore and farshore development teams. I produce the content model from the editorial and customer-experience side, the engineering side challenges it on technical grounds, and I hold the content perspective through the conversation: adjusting where constraints are real, pushing back where convenience would compromise the experience. Stakeholder alignment runs throughout: chairing working sessions, capturing decisions so they stick, and translating between business, technical, and editorial languages.

The work in practice:

This is the approach. The case studies show it applied: The Open University editorial system built to last, and further work with Lucy & Yak and Wazoku.

Go deeper:

The full framework, including the guiding principles and their origins, is available as a PDF.