Content Strategy Insights: Recent Episodes
Larry Swanson
Conversations with content strategists from all backgrounds: enterprise, agencies, UX, content design, technical communication, marketing, SEO, publishing, journalism, etc.
Good communication has always been about understanding your audience — shaping your message to match how they think, what they need, and what they'll do with it.
Information typing, the "IT" in the technical documentation standard DITA, codifies that practice into a design discipline that organizes content around its function rather than its form.
Rob Hanna and Lance Cummings explore how information typing clarifies writing for human readers and have discovered in the process that those same structural principles help AI deliver better results.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/info-typing/
Few people have advanced the craft and management of content design as much as Melanie Seibert. She's been designing content experiences and managing design teams for more than 25 years. She recently captured some of her best insights in a new book, "Managing Content Design Teams."
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/melanie-seibert-2/
Technical documentation of software products is critical work that needs to accurately inform end users, regardless of how quickly and substantially the software might be changing.
Manny Silva has created Docs as Tests, a system that integrates a set of well-developed practices and a collection of engineering tooling, to help technical communicators streamline and constantly improve their software documentation work.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/manny-silva/
Modern content systems are complex and abstract, presenting problems for managers who want to understand how their content is performing.
At Autogram, Jeff Eaton and Karen McGrane have developed a content observability framework to address this complexity.
Their framework evaluates the composition, quality, health, and effectiveness of content programs to help enterprises measure the return on their content investment.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jeff-eaton-2/
Aligning and orchestrating product content for complex business use cases is much easier when you have a framework to structure and guide your efforts.
Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire and his business partner developed the "value map" framework to structure and organize product marketing information. This helps them to align internal stakeholders on strategy and messaging and to efficiently deliver the right content to both business and technical users of the product.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jam/
Experience design for readers of online content gets a lot of attention. The authors who create the content and get it ready for publication aren't as well served.
In his new book, Designing Content Authoring Experiences, Greg Dunlap addresses this situation, showing content-system creators how to design better interfaces, streamline workflows, and otherwise improve the lives of content authors and managers.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/greg-dunlap-2/
Sarah Johnson asks, "If a digital experience is a conversation with a user, how can you have that conversation if you don't know what the words are?"
Sarah addresses the crucial role of content in her new book, "Content-first Design," tackling both the pragmatic aspects of a content-first approach to design as well as how to advocate for content practice.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sarah-johnson/
Both UX and content professionals routinely find themselves on teams where they are the sole practitioner of their craft.
Leah Buley and Joe Natoli recently revised "The UX Team of One" to share their pragmatic take on solo UX practice, deftly balancing the application of human-centered research insights with the need to show the business value of UX work.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ux-team-of-one/
A truly customer-focused content strategy is the cornerstone of good customer experiences.
Over the past 25 years, Rob Punselie has developed and honed content discovery research methods based on time-tested usability knowledge and the Jobs to Be Done product-development framework.
This approach has helped him consistently deliver to his clients effective and durable content and customer experience strategies.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rob-punselie/
Alan J. PorterStorytelling is the oldest content practice. Alan Porter helps enterprises and content practitioners improve their story craft.Alan shows how better stories both convey the unique benefits of a business to their customers and improve cross-functional communication within organizations.We talked about: Content Pool, the enterprise content services organization he runs and its recent focus on storytelling the shift he's seeing in his clients' needs from formal to more informal communications the importance he sees in delivering consistent and aligned stories and content experiences irrespective of delivery channel the crucial role of memorable storytelling for brands his immersion in storytelling outside of his content work, writing fiction, for example the importance of changing your storytelling mindset from inside-out to outside-in his inclusion in his workshops of content practitioners from functional groups across organizations his belief that there's no B2C or B2B or B2B2C, just people communicating with each other the four C's of storytelling that he learned from an editor at Marvel comics - character, conflict, choice, and consequences - and how he applies them in business storytelling how he uses customer journey mapping in his storytelling work how storytelling techniques apply in internal stakeholder interactions predictable storytelling patterns used in Hollywood and how he applies them in his workshops how he engages and connects content people across organizational functions like tech comm, marketing, customer support, UX design, and even cyber securityAlan's bioAlan J. Porter is first and foremost a storyteller, with close to 40 fiction and non-fiction book publishing credits. He is the Founder and Chief Content Officer of The Content Pool, that provides storytelling-driven content services to enable brands to deliver exceptional engaging customer experiences.He has held senior leadership roles in Content Operations, Product Marketing, and Customer Experience.Named one of the Top 25 Content Strategy Influencers and a Digital Strategy thought leader.Connect with Alan online The Content Pool website The Content Pool newsletter email: ajp at 4jsgroup dot comVideoHere’s the video version of our conversation:https://youtu.be/GhVD3XR8NG8Podcast intro transcriptThis is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 206. The craft of storytelling is the original content practice. From that famous cave painting 44,000 years ago, to countless campfire conversations over the centuries, to modern content strategy, content design, and marketing practices, humans have always been driven to share stories that inspire, inform, and educate. Alan Porter helps story crafters in modern enterprises communicate more effectively, both with their customers and with each other.Interview transcriptLarry:Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 206 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Alan Porter. Alan is a longtime storyteller in the content community and does a number of other things and has done a number of things in the content world. He's currently the Founder and the Chief Content Officer at the Content Pool, his company. So, welcome, Alan. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.Alan:Hey, well first off, thanks Larry. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, the Content Pool is an enterprise content services organization, but actually, really interesting around the subject we're going to talk about, storytelling. Probably over the last nine months, my clients have pretty much told me that the thing they're really interested in is how to apply storytelling to their businesses. So I've been doing more and more of that, more consulting around that, running workshops for clients around actually bringing storytelling into their corpora...
Storytelling is the oldest content practice. Alan Porter helps enterprises and content practitioners improve their story craft.
Alan shows how better stories both convey the unique benefits of a business to their customers and improve cross-functional communication within organizations.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/alan-porter/
As recently as 40 years ago, we didn't have much need for the word "content."
But as soon as we started delivering the same information via multiple channels, we needed a way to identify the essential elements of content assemblies and to work with them independent of their various manifestations in information products. So the concept of "content" was born.
Joe Gollner has worked with content from its earliest days and has crafted a multi-layered definition to account for its many aspects.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/joe-gollner/
Stephanie PereiraLocalizing digital product content is challenging on its own. When you add the need to communicate about sensitive financial topics to very specific audiences, the complexity of the work quickly grows.Stephanie Pereira is a content design manager working on the Google Payments product. She deftly balances a range of internal compliance and design concerns with the very specific hyper-localization needs of her audience.(We had an internet connection issue around 28:00 - apologies for the break in continuity.)We talked about: her hyper-localization work as a content design manager at Google Payments how localization work can highlight product features that may need to be contextualized differently or otherwise changed how she balances global brand policies and very specific local design and language considerations how even presentation-level information architecture decisions can vary by locale how variety in voice and tone and language can vary even in the context of one interaction environment how dealing with that dynamic variation in content shows up elsewhere in her work how the Google design system supports her work the different levels at which you can hyper-localize a product the variety of privacy issues that arise in her hyper-localization work how her multi-lingual family history influences her work how even the smallest local touches can improve a customer's experience of a productStephanie's bioStephanie Pereira currently leads content design for Google Payments in APAC, supporting hyperlocalized experiences in markets like India and Japan. After deciding that law was just not her thing, Stephanie spent the decade pre-Google leading regional content and business operations teams at local startups like Groupon APAC, Fave Asia, and honestbee.In her day to day work, Stephanie enjoys figuring out how to write with empathy for different cultures and being best friends with all her legal counsels.Connect with Stephanie online LinkedInVideoHere’s the video version of our conversation:https://youtu.be/SA8X22N6sOsPodcast intro transcriptThis is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 204. The internet has made the world a lot smaller, and some aspects of communicating online lend themselves to one-size-fits-all, globalized content. But product and content designers still need to serve the needs of local populations, and sometimes these groups can have very specific needs. At Google, Stephanie Pereira works on hyper-localized content, balancing a mix of challenging internal product demands with a rich variety of external cultural concerns.Interview transcriptLarry:Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 204 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Stephanie Pereira. Stephanie is a content design manager at Google Pay. She's based in Singapore. And welcome to the show, Stephanie. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.Stephanie:Thank you for having me. So, I work on payments. I'm based in Singapore, as you just mentioned. A lot of the work I do is hyper-localized in the sense that we work on very specific markets. And that's sort of given me the opportunity to think about how we write for different people, what their mental model is in a lot of these different places. Because I work in payments, especially how their relationship with money, how that translates to language as well. So yeah, it's been a very fun journey.Larry:Yeah. Well, language ... I've had a few people from the financial industry world, and money stuff is notoriously fraught. So, that kind of adds a whole accountability level to your job, I'm imagining, and the important-Stephanie:Yeah.Larry:But it's also like for the individual end user, it's really important to understand specifically what's going on and how to complete that trans...
Localizing digital product content is challenging on its own. When you add the need to communicate about sensitive financial topics to very specific audiences, the complexity of the work quickly grows.
Stephanie Pereira is a content design manager working on the Google Payments product. She deftly balances a range of internal compliance and design concerns with the very specific hyper-localization needs of her audience.
(We had an internet connection issue around 28:00 - apologies for the break in continuity.)
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/stephanie-pereira/
Now in its third edition, Colleen Jones's book "The Content Advantage" has become a classic in the content-profession literature.
The new edition of the book continues to highlight content intelligence and content effectiveness and adds a new focus on the impact and use of AI in content programs. It also takes a fresh look at the enduring concepts of digital disruption and digital transformation, both of which have been accelerated by the arrival of new AI technology.
https://contentandai.com/colleen-jones/
Over the past ten years, Chris Bach has been at the forefront of the transformation of web development.
Chris coined the term "Jamstack," which refers to one of the first conceptions of a composable web architecture (the acronym JAM accounts for the JavaScript, APIs, and markdown that make up a simple decoupled web system).
He also founded Netlify, a company that supports these new architectures and which now serves tens of millions of customers.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/chris-bach/
There is always more taxonomy work to be done than there are practitioners to do it. Fran Alexander's solution to this imbalance is to democratize taxonomy practice.
Fran's work actually spans the full range of semantic practices, from simple term lists to taxonomies, thesauruses, and ontologies and knowledge graphs. Wherever she's working in this span of activities, she's always happy to bring other practitioners along with her.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/fran-alexander/
Where web accessibility, digital sustainability, content management, open-source software, and web standards intersect, you'll find Mike Gifford.
Mike is the open standards and practices lead at Civic Actions, a company that helps governments deliver better digital services.
Through his practice, Mike ensures that the content systems they deliver are built as sustainably as possible, deliver accessible experiences to citizens, and work well for authors and others who use the system.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/mike-gifford/
Michele Ann JenkinsThrough her taxonomy and other information architecture work, Michele Ann Jenkins helps people across the organizations she works with align their mental models and terminology usage.This alignment of concerns and language forms the foundation of the semantic architecture that is so crucial to modern content systems.We talked about: her work as a consultant focusing on taxonomy but also working on information architecture, search, digital asset management, ontologies, knowledge graphs, and AI the focus at her consultancy on technology-agnostic frameworks and best practices, including governance the threshold at which to move from a CMS's built-in taxonomy tools to a dedicated taxonomy management tool her description of the semantic layer and how it can help span organizational silos the benefits of a technology-agnostic enterprise content model and how far most organizations are from having one how the practice of taxonomy can help stakeholders understand each others' mental models and terminology how the well-established idea of "concept-based indexing" can help bring semantic clarity to terminology work and take projects from taxonomy to ontology the baby steps an organization can take into ontology and an example of how an ontological representation of enterprise knowledge can help auto-tag content coming from different sources and infer levels of trust some interesting examples of rule-based classificiations going haywire her exposure to working with a "content graph" with a complex globally distributed product how to find the "creative edge" where the capabilities of computers end and only human judgement is necessary the enduring importance of governance, people, processes, consensus building, and using open standards that permit interoperabilityMichele's bioMichele And Jenkins, MLIS, is an information management consultant specializing in taxonomy-driven content strategy. She has more than 20 years’ experience working with organizations across various industries, including Harvard Business Publishing, EA Games, and the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR).Michele takes a holistic approach to information and content management, drawing from a multidisciplinary background in programming, IA/UX design, information science, and publishing. She is skilled at guiding clients through the entire content management process: from creating high-level strategic roadmaps through development, implementation, and migration to ongoing support and training.Prior to joining Dovecot Studio in 2012, Michele was an independent consultant focusing on web development projects including large scale migrations, platform integrations, and implementing taxonomy-driven IA designs. Michele has over 15 years of experience customizing, coding, and developing IA for Drupal CMS.Michele has contributed a chapter to “Taxonomies: Practical approaches to developing and managing vocabularies for digital information” (Facet Publishing, 2022). She is also a regular guest lecturer and occasional course instructor at McGill University, where she earned a Master’s in Library and Information Studies with a specialization in knowledge management. She frequently presents at conferences including DrupalCon and Taxonomy Bootcamp (part of KMWorld).Connect with Michele online Dovecot Studio maj at dovecotstudio dot comVideoHere’s the video version of our conversation:https://youtu.be/LTfQrfOiIkkPodcast intro transcriptThis is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 200. The practice of taxonomy plays a crucial role in tying together the worlds of content management and semantic practice. Michele Ann Jenkins is an information management consultant who specializes in taxonomy. Her work helps stakeholders understand each others' mental models and terminology and ensconce them in technical content systems.
Through her taxonomy and other information architecture work, Michele Ann Jenkins helps people across the organizations she works with align their mental models and terminology usage.
This alignment of concerns and language forms the foundation of the semantic architecture that is so crucial to modern content systems.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michele-ann-jenkins/
Modern content projects get the best results when content strategy and conceptual meaning are considered together, and the results can really shine when long-time collaborators do the work.
Ilse Jonker and Joyce van Aalten are independent consultants who have teamed up on many content projects over the past dozen years.
Ilse focuses on content strategy and structure, and Joyce focuses on taxonomy and semantics. Together they build the scaffolding the supports their clients' content operations.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ilse-and-joyce/
Vinish Garg takes a holistic and pragmatic view of the role of content and other crafts in digital product design, using an approach he calls "product sense."
Content strategy and design are just two of many practices that contribute to the success of any digital product. All digital practitioners justifiably take pride in their individual crafts, but Vinish encourages content, design, and other practitioners to favor product utility over their individual crafts.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/vinish-garg/
The CMS landscape has evolved a lot over the past couple of decades. Recently, headless CMSs and decoupled content architectures have appeared to address the need for omnichannel content experiences.
While their separation of the management of content from its presentation offers many benefits, these systems have left many users dissatisfied and disillusioned.
Preston So argues that the solution to this situation is universal CMS.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/preston-so-3/
David ConnisA crucial skill for any content practitioner is the ability to sort out complex work environments and thrive within them.David Connis shows how a systems thinking mindset can help you cope with the upheaval of AI, the messy realities of content work, and other complex design challenges.He teaches a course on systems thinking for content designers but shows how any content or design practitioner can benefit from a systematic approach to their work.We talked about: his role as as a lead content designer on the design systems team at OutSystems how he discovered his innate focus on systems thinking in a Netflix documentary about chefs how a brief stint as a UX developer and his holistic approach to design work revealed the benefits of systems thinking the role of systems thinking in his growth and development as a content leader his observation that "work is weird" his approach to remote working and management the crucial role of facilitation in remote work how his personal growth and professional growth intersect the importance of being intentional in your approach to work and leadership his observation that "everything you do influences everything you do" how he links words and concepts and objects in his work and how they help digital products tell their story to the user his advice to systems thinking course at the UX Content CollectiveDave's bioDuring a brief stint as a junior UX developer, Dave found that he loved the UX part more than the development part, so he took a job as a technical writer. From there, he discovered content design. Now, he’s a Lead Content Designer at OutSystems.Connect with Dave online LinkedIn InstagramSystems thinking resources Systems Thinking for UX Content workshop at UX Content Collective Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, Sheryl Cababa (interview)VideoHere’s the video version of our conversation:https://youtu.be/XAgcKmOOZ3IPodcast intro transcriptThis is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 196. As everyone tries to cope with onslaught of AI and as content practitioners try to develop the right combination of strategy, design, and people skills, Dave Connis says we can all benefit from a systems thinking mindset. Whether you're connecting the words and concepts and objects in digital products or connecting the people who are building the product experience, a holistic view of your work can help everyone involved understand the ecosystem you share.Interview transcriptLarry:Yeah. Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 196 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really delighted today to welcome to the show, Dave Connis. Dave is lead content designer at OutSystems. I believe you're based in Portugal, but you're in the US, right, Dave?Dave:Yes, that is accurate. Yep.Larry:Tell folks a little bit more about...Dave:There is an office in Boston, so it's kind of US-ey, but it's mainly Portugal.Larry:Nice. And as a lead content designer there, you do... Well, tell me a little bit about your role there, what kind of stuff you're working on and...Dave:Yeah, so I am on the design system team. So we're working on all sorts of patterns and lots of systems thinking, lots of components, design tokens. We're in the middle of redoing design tokens right now. I'm doing a lot of content pattern things, lots of content strategy, working with a bunch of cross-functional teams to get stuff done that is reusable and scalable and all the nice other cool, buzzy words that we like to talk about all the time. So it's always something different, always something new, and it's always a big challenge, so it's good time.Larry:Well, that's interesting. So I'm really curious now because I've worked on a few design systems and talked to a lot of people who do that. Well,
A crucial skill for any content practitioner is the ability to sort out complex work environments and thrive within them.
David Connis shows how a systems thinking mindset can help you cope with the upheaval of AI, the messy realities of content work, and other complex design challenges.
He teaches a course on systems thinking for content designers but shows how any content or design practitioner can benefit from a systematic approach to their work.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/david-connis/
Timi Stoop-AlcalaWhen the concept of "content" comes up it can be hard to get everyone aligned on exactly what you're talking about.At IKEA, Timi Stoop-Alcala focuses on the "what" of content via the practice of knowledge domain modeling both to deal with the complexity of content and to highlight its importance.Her knowledge-focused, human-centered approach has also elevated the role of content in the organization so that content is now recognized as a core competency.We talked about: her work as a principal content strategist at IKEA in their Content Center of Expertise her recent talk on "Falling in Love with the What," an introduction to knowledge domain modeling their attitude at IKEA that "content is the interface between our brands and our customers" the ubiquitous and varied forms that content takes and how she communicates the importance of this idea to her colleagues and stakeholders how she stealthily instills in her org the superpower of an ontological mindset through her use of knowledge domain modeling how the concept of world-building from world of role-playing games can help content creators and strategists how knowledge domain modeling in the context of a human-centered design practice cultivates empathy and helps in dealing with ambiguity and complexity the challenge of deciding where in a typical design development process to put knowledge domain modeling the interactions between content modeling and knowledge domain modeling the maxim that she includes at the end of every email: "Content starts and ends with people. It rises and falls with relationships." the enduring importance of seeing how content relates to real world objects and their relationships with each otherTimi's bioTimi is Principal Content Strategist at IKEA where she strives to cultivate quality, innovation, and confidence in content using a broad set of human-centric design principles and systems thinking. The content maxim she lives by: “Content starts and ends with people; it rises and falls with relationships.”She’s a change leader and driving force in creating structural and semantic foundations to enable contextual content — essential components for enabling customer agency and responsible personalisation. She weaves the disciplines of knowledge domain and content modelling, taxonomies, game thinking, teaching, and AI conversation modelling in her work.Timi hails from the Philippines and now lives in The Netherlands. She swears that playing the tabletop RPG ‘Pathfinder’ is essential to becoming a good and happy content strategist.Connect with Timi online LinkedInVideoHere’s the video version of our conversation:https://youtu.be/obaybjOz2T8Podcast intro transcriptThis is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 195. The word "content" can mean something different to everyone who utters it. The fact that content is ubiquitous and complex and can take different forms across its many varied delivery formats and uses doesn't really help people grasp its importance. At IKEA, Timi Stoop-Alcala helps here colleagues understand the scope and impact of content with a simple and succinct observation: "Content is the interface between our brands and our customers."Interview transcriptLarry:Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 195 of The Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Timi:. Timi is a principal content strategist at IKEA. And welcome to the show, Timi. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing these days.Timi::Hey, Larry. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so I'm Timi, and I am a principal content strategist at IKEA. And specifically, I am with the Content Center of Expertise in the Experience Design Group. And so my team and I, we're made up of content strategists and content designers and content writers. And yes, we focus a lot on making sure that we look at how ...
Organizations of all types and sizes struggle with presenting their content so that it both makes sense to readers and aligns with the organization's intentions.
Hilary Marsh introduced the concept of the "digital council" to address this issue. Councils can take many forms, depending on the nature of the organization, but the intent always is to glue back together content that has been disconnected by organizational silos.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/hilary-marsh/
Cruce SaundersContent is a precious business asset and should be treated as such in enterprise accounting records.Cruce Saunders has been making the case for content as a financial asset for many years, arguing that much of it should be accounted for like the durable machinery that powers a factory, not like an ephemeral one-time business expense.He still sees a lot of work ahead, but Cruce is more hopeful lately that coordinated efforts by content leaders can get content out of the expense category and into an asset category on the corporate balance sheet.We talked about: his work at [A], a consultancy that focuses on intelligent content supply chains for large enterprises the accounting principles that show why content should be viewed as an asset on a balance sheet, not an expense on a profit and loss statement the kinds of content that should be treated as enterprise assets: documentation, support content, durable marketing content, and other types of content that deliver value over the long term how to calculate the value of content assets and to track their performance how the absence of financial-industry standards make it difficult to capitalize some content assets the first step in showing the value of content: building an ROI framework the unique value of content models in transforming content from an expense item to a valuable asset the benefits of the service-oriented architectures that well-modeled content permits the need for content-industry leaders to come together around the goal of ensconcing content as an enterprise assetCruce's bioCruce Saunders is the Founder and principal at [A], simplea.com. [A] serves organizations utilizing headless, composable content and generative AI to craft next generation content supply chains and publishing architecture. Clients include complex enterprise publishers as well as growing mid-market companies.As a thought leader, Cruce hosts the Towards a Smarter World podcast and The Invisible World of Content YouTube series. He has been a keynote speaker around the world at conferences and an invited speaker at enterprises in the US, Europe, and Asia. Topics regularly discussed in these series and talks include AI, content intelligence, content operations, content engineering, personalization, governance, content structural and semantic standards, and enterprise transformation.Cruce also founded a product team that builds tools to support the content data modeling needs. This group has built the Schematica suite of tools for content interoperability, including CoreModels, RealContent, and ContentFlow.Connect with Cruce online LinkedIn [A] simplea.com Towards a Smarter World podcast The Invisible World of Content YouTube series Schematica VideoHere’s the video version of our conversation:https://youtu.be/X2vUHxqpNXYPodcast intro transcriptThis is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 193. Anyone who works with content understands its value. But getting business executives and financial standards bodies to treat content like the valuable asset that it is has been a challenge. Cruce Saunders has advanced the idea of content as a precious business asset for years. There's still lots to do, but he's hopeful now that coordinated efforts by content leaders might get content out of the expense category and onto the corporate balance sheet, where it belongs.Interview transcriptLarry:Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 193 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Cruce Saunders. Cruce is the principal and founder at [A], which you can find at simplea.com. He also does this brilliant website (actually a podcast; I misspoke) called Towards a Smarter World. So welcome Cruce. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.Cruce:Hey, Larry, it's great to be here. And it's amazing,
Twenty years ago at IBM, the company's commitment to user-focused content led to the decision to develop a standard way of structuring content so that it could be used in multiple channels.
Michael Priestley was uniquely positioned to lead the effort to create the corporate standard that became DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michael-priestley/
Michael PriestleyTwenty years ago at IBM, the company's commitment to user-focused content led to the decision to develop a standard way of structuring content so that it could be used in multiple channels.Michael Priestley was uniquely positioned to lead the effort to create the corporate standard that became DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture.We talked about: his current role as Principal Information Architect and Taxonomist at avalara.com the DITA origin story how his IA and writing backgrounds and familiarity with XML the concept, task, and reference information typing at the core of the DITA standard how the notion of specialization led to the addition of "Darwin" to the information typing architecture they had developed the role of XSLT in the development of the DITA standard how their focus at IBM on user needs - specifically the need for modular content organized around topics delivered in multiple formats - resulted in a standard that also permitted content to be re-used in other ways how the need to organize content at the topic level both serves user needs and creates an optimal content-element size for re-use the three C's of DITA: content, collections (DITA maps), and classification (metadata) how the technical writing heritage at IBM facilitated the introduction of structured authoring there his happiness with the success of DITA to this point, and how the challenges going forward mostly involve people and the organizations they work in the wide range of content roles he held at IBM in his 24 years there his ongoing preoccupation with always staying connected and working with other writers and content disciplinesMichael's bioMichael is the Principal Information Architect and Taxonomist for avalara.com, focused on the intersection of semantic content, user experience, and SEO at the enterprise scale. Michael has experience working with and across marketing, sales, training, documentation, and support content, coordinating requirements, and delivering common processes and standards. He was named an OASIS Distinguished Contributor for his development of the DITA content standard.Connect with Michael online LinkedInVideoHere’s the video version of our conversation:https://youtu.be/1BGNQx1wcSUPodcast intro transcriptThis is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 192. If you've ever worked in or around support documentation or technical communication, you've probably come across the DITA standard for creating and managing structured content. Michael Priestley developed this standard during his long tenure at IBM. DITA - an acronym for Darwin Information Typing Architecture - arose from the need for Michael and his colleagues to help users of IBM products by sharing the same topical content across different channels.Interview transcriptLarry:Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 192 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am super delighted today to welcome to the show Michael Priestley. Michael is currently the Principal Information Architect and Taxonomist at avalara.com, the big tax software services company. But welcome to the show, Michael. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing these days. Michael:Sure. I'm reorganizing a website, which is my weirdly happy place. It's funny. I spent most of my career at IBM in a lot of different content-related roles, but the last thing I was doing there was working on their website. It was a challenging, large website. I came up with a number of strategies. Then I got the opportunity to potentially execute them in a different space with a different set of webpages and it was a really good opportunity. It's a really supportive team. They're excited. They support information architecture. They support thinking about content, got a great executive team, great set of coworkers. So, yeah,
As the founder of the long-standing LavaCon conference and the principal at a technical content staffing agency, Jack Molisani gets a deeply informed view of the world of technical communication.
While he sees the opportunities that generative AI presents, he raises several concerns for technical content strategy practitioners, among them the inaccuracy of generative AI content and the inability of AI tools to comprehend subtle human communication clues.
https://contentandai.com/jack-molisani/
Serving personalized content about thousands of products to millions of people requires a sophisticated content operation.
At Albert Heijn, the big grocery store chain in the Netherlands, Rafaëla Ellensburg established a content engineering practice that lets the company deliver personalize-able omnichannel content at scale.
In the process, she also created a content engineering practice guild, positioned content within the company as an important enterprise asset, and began developing the semantic practices that will take their content operations into the future.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rafaela-ellensburg/
Pavel Samsonov is a UX designer with a deep appreciation of content.
His content-first approach to design is driven by his observation that navigating digital experiences is about accessing content, not clicking buttons.
Pavel has also cultivated a deep awareness of the semantic environments that he and his colleagues navigate and he uses that awareness to align and motivate stakeholders.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/pavel-samsonov/
Pavel SamsonovPavel Samsonov is a UX designer with a deep appreciation of content.His content-first approach to design is driven by his observation that navigating digital experiences is about accessing content, not clicking buttons.Pavel has also cultivated a deep awareness of the semantic environments that he and his colleagues navigate and he uses that awareness to align and motivate stakeholders.We talked about: his design work at Amazon Web Services working on products for cloud clients his content-first approach to design his observation that the web is simply made up of containers for forms and forms to input the content his take on the "semantic environment" in organizations the five working backwards questions they use at Amazon how he uses workshops to get executives and other stakeholders to "entertain different views of the world" his take on the difference between validation and research the benefits he sees in working with low-fidelity deliverables the "synthesis process" that he uses to guide user research throughout the design and life of a product the importance of "working locally," starting small and focusing on influencing stakeholders close to you in the orgPavel's bioPavel Samsonov is a New York-based UX leader exploring the applications of design as a decision-making framework for all areas of product development. He currently builds design practice and leads innovation engagements at AWS. His approach to product & design draws on his experience managing enterprise product teams at Bloomberg, design-driven rapid prototyping in the start-up world, traditional graphic design education, and an academic background in human-computer interaction.Connect with Pavel online LinkedIn BlueSky MediumVideoHere’s the video version of our conversation:https://youtu.be/aXsY_4V0yO4Podcast intro transcriptThis is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 190. When it comes to designing digital products, Pavel Samsonov takes a content-first approach, observing that navigating an interactive experience is about accessing content, not clicking a button. In addition to seeing content everywhere, he's deeply tuned in to the semantic environments that he and his colleagues navigate, and he uses that awareness, along with user research and workshops, to motivate stakeholders to entertain new ways of looking at the world.Interview transcriptLarry:Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 190 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Pavel Samsonov. Pavel's a design leader based in New York City, Brooklyn specifically. Welcome to the show, Pavel. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.Pavel:Thanks Larry, it's great to be here. For the past couple of years I've been at Amazon Web Services, and I know what everyone's thinking. It's not really necessarily known for incredible UX design. So my role is a bit interesting.Pavel:I work with customers who are in the AWS Cloud, sort of as a consultant, helping them design new experiences in more efficient ways than they're used to. So we're effectively bringing a cloud native design culture to those customers, and it's combining a lot of the things Amazon is known for, like the working backwards process, with some of the design knowledge that I bring from my experience, both as a UX designer and also as a product manager, which was my role before doing this.Pavel:It's been really, really interesting, because unlike a lot of designers, we start really high up in the value chain. We're right there when the account managers are first talking to these customers about, "Well, you've done the what we call lift and shift. You've taken all your stuff, you've moved the existing apps into the cloud, and now what? What do you do next?" And by the time they're talking to me,
Scalable content personalization systems create huge value for businesses. Like most valuable endeavors, they're really hard to do well.
Jeffrey MacIntyre orchestrates the activities - terminology and taxonomy work, metadata strategy, information architecture, and more - the help businesses build content operations that deliver the customer-focused experiences that consumers expect.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jeffrey-macintyre/
Content design jobs have become scarcer as the digital world adjusts to the post-pandemic tech economy.
Shannon Leahy does her best to make sure that her content colleagues discover the jobs that are available, scouring the internet for job listings and sharing them in her social media feeds.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to her contributions to the field. She's also a long-time meetup organizer and an avid and generous participant in the content design community.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/shannon-leahy/
John WilliamsThe rise of omnichannel content strategy and the emergence of new technical capabilities like cloud computing, API-delivered microservices, and headless software platforms have created entire new content ecosystems.John Williams explores these new ecosystems and modern content and experience architectures on his "Going Headless with John" YouTube channel and in his work as CTO at Amplience, a headless-CMS company.We talked about: his YouTube channel, Going Headless with John, and his role at Amplience, a headless CMS company the rationale behind the MACH alliance and the elements of the acronym Microservices API first Cloud native Headless the ability to scale and to implement version control that a multi-tenant architecture permits how decoupled architectures let companies choose "best of breed" software solutions his take on the differences between the concepts of "headless," "MACH architecture," and "composability" how to help content authors work in (non-WYSIWYG) decoupled systems the importance of understanding the "why" in decoupled content authoring environments the benefits of adopting an iterative approach to implementing composable architecturesJohn's bioJohn Williams is a highly experienced and innovative CTO with over 25 years of experience in the tech industry. He is passionate about leveraging technology to drive growth and innovation. His expertise lies in creating and executing technology strategies that deliver transformative results for businesses, and he has a proven track record of building high-performing teams that thrive in fast-paced and rapidly changing environments.Connect with John online LinkedIn Going Headless with John YouTube channelVideoHere’s the video version of our conversation:https://youtu.be/IFoI1fh8420Podcast intro transcriptThis is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 187. The rise of omnichannel content strategy and composable commerce - along with the emergence of new tech practices like microservices and headless software platforms - has given rise to new content systems architectures. It's also inspired many new conversations around concepts like composability and decoupled-ness. John Williams explores these topics on his "Going Headless with John" YouTube channel and in his work as the CTO at a headless CMS company.Interview transcriptLarry:Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 187 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show, John Williams. John is the CTO at Amplience, a commerce-oriented, headless CMS. He's also the host of Going Headless with John, a YouTube channel that I really enjoy. So welcome John. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.John:Yeah. Well, we're actually working on... In Amplience we're working on a whole bunch of things around headless. We're doing a whole new release around our content form. We are doing a hell of a lot around AI and how we incorporate that into the MACH world, which is what we're talking about today, and how we keep consistent with our technology practices around MACH and headless, as well as incorporating new technology.John:So we're all pretty busy at the minute. We've got a really big release coming up, out in June at Shoptalk. For anyone who's going there, coming over and see me have a chat at the booth, we'll show you some really cool things.Larry:Cool. Yeah, and you've just hit on the... We're all infinitely busy these days trying to keep up with, not with just AI. But there's also the fundamental architectural stuff that we're dealing with in this new composable, MACH-ey, headless world.Larry:I guess one of the things I like to do in this podcast, it's all about democratizing practice and principles and what's going on out in the world. And one of the things I like about your YouTube channel is you're really good ...
Deborah Carver sees direct connections between her academic study of literature and composition and her work as a content strategist, content marketer, and SEO.
She also sees similarities between AI engineers and content professionals, both of whom endeavor to create meaning with language.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/deborah-carver/
Tuija Riekkinen brings a unique perspective to scaling both content and design operations, as well as other digital initiatives.
She has applied her holistic and pragmatic enterprise product management skills at organizations like IKEA, where she has worked on both their design system and content management system.
Tuija is a persuasive advocate of keeping design and content concerns separate to enable "creativity at scale."
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/tuija-riekkinen/
Michael Haggerty-Villa's work with content and designs systems spans the history of these practices. From his work at eBay on one of the earliest design systems up until today, he has been at the forefront of both content strategy leadership and design system innovation.
This conversation focuses on design systems, but it was inevitable that Michael's content strategy wisdom would shine through, too.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michael-haggerty-villa/
Gladys Diandoki brings a strong research mindset and a consistent focus on strategy to her content work. Her approach results in both solid design results and an increased appreciation for content design among her colleagues and clients.
It's not only her clients who benefit from her work. Gladys is also an active leader in the field, speaking regularly at conferences, writing, and hosting gatherings like the "Beyond The Cover" book club.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/gladys-diandoki/
Wojtek Aleksander is a business-focused, inclusive content designer based in Poland.
Working in a profession in which English-language educational materials dominate, he addressed the need for Polish-language content guidance by writing "UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products."
One big challenge he faces when crafting inclusive content in Polish is working with the language's strongly gendered and inflected grammar.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/wojtek-aleksander/
Most enterprises and software companies now have design systems, and many have content operations and/or design operations teams.
At Cisco, Barbara Blythe works on the content design operations team. She focuses on sharing content guidance across the products she serves, enabling not only content designers but also their UX design and engineering partners to efficiently create consistent product content.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/barbara-blythe/
Nicole Michaelis brings a thoughtful leadership style and deep and varied experience to her content design work.
Like all of us, she is pondering how to best use AI in her practice and wrestling with the impacts of layoffs and other change in the content and design professions.
Despite the current challenging business and labor environment, she's hopeful for the future and offers encouragement to both current and future content designers.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/nicole-michaelis-2/
Terry Roach helps enterprises build a "web of connectedness" that helps them understand what's happening across the span of their business
Built on an ontological understanding of business that is expressed in a knowledge graph, his methods and technology help enterprises develop a holistic understanding that can be expressed as an operating manual that all stakeholders can consult.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/terry-roach/
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.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/content-in-china/
As the field of content design grows and matures, so too do the organizations in which content designers practice.
At Condé Nast, the publisher of iconic brands like The New Yorker, WIRED, and Vogue, Sophie Tahran has built content-design orgs from one-person units to company-spanning teams.
Her latest work has been informed by original research that she conducted to learn more about how others design and manage their content-design organizations.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sophie-tahran/
Matt Hayes is a staff content designer at LinkedIn, where he focuses on enterprise experience design and works closely with the design system team.
The content design team at LinkedIn is known in the industry as a small-but-mighty group that makes an outsized impact on their organization.
Among the secrets to their success: democratizating their content guidance, focusing on efficient decision-making, and working closely with their design-systems colleagues.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/matt-hayes/
The promise of computers augmenting our minds has been a long time coming. We're beginning to see better tools for extending human cognition, but good guidebooks for using them have been sparse.
Jorge Arango's new book, Duly Noted, fills this gap elegantly. It shows you how to extend your mind with connected digital notes that capture your thoughts and nourish them in a personal knowledge garden from which you can harvest and share your unique insights.
Through February 15, 2024, use the code ContentPod to get a 20% discount when you order the book at the Rosenfeld Media website.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jorge-arango/
Peter Compo says that "the number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy."
He's talking about the tendency of executives and managers to draft plans that present lists of goals and include a bullet point for every possible stakeholder in their purview.
Peter points out that true strategy involves tough trade-offs and lots of collaboration. His pragmatic approach lets strategic objectives emerge organically, includes a variety of stakeholders, and applies adaptive thinking to address questions that have no obvious answer.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/peter-compo/
Relly Annett-Baker recently said in a LinkedIn post, "The words are an expression of the solution, the last 20%, but we also need to do the 80% that comes before to know wtf to write. "
UX writers and content designers spend a lot of their time, arguably too much of it, explaining this core aspect of their work to their colleagues and collaborators.
While she sometimes bristles at the need to constantly defend and describe her team's work, Relly also realizes that that is, in fact, the most important part of her job.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/relly-annett-baker/
Like many digital practices, search engine optimization is becoming more conversational.
Not long ago, SEOs had to make their best educated guesses about what was working to get their websites to rank better. Now, by focusing on both feeding information to and gleaning feedback from Google's knowledge graph, Jason Barnard helps companies craft content strategies and messaging architectures that keep their brand prominent in Google's search results.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jason-barnard/
As content design becomes entrenched as a UX design practice, leaders from the craft are beginning to move into design leadership positions.
Melinda Belcher's ascent to her current design management role is an instructive and inspirational story of professional development, creative team leadership, and community building.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/melinda-belcher/
Navigating the complex and multifaceted online media landscape can be a disjointed and disorienting experience.
Scott Abel has a method for smoothing out online customers' experiences. His "content unification" approach benefits both the organizations that create content experiences and the customers who are navigating them.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-abel-2/
The basics of building a design system are fairly simple. Ensconcing a system in an organization's culture so that it's actually adopted and used is a more complex undertaking.
Dan Mall takes a content-first approach as he helps organizations evolve their design systems from projects to products and ultimately to firmly embedded practices that let teams deliver the efficiency and consistency benefits that such systems offer.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/dan-mall/
Jarno van Driel is a true pioneer on the semantic web.
Even before you could add machine-readable semantic markup to webpages, he was discovering ways to help search engines understand what web pages were about. Much of that success grew out of his early focus on accessibility and usability.
When semantic markup was introduced, he was among the first cadre of experts on RDFa, Microdata, schema.org, and other semantic practices, and he is to this day one of the most respected practitioners of this craft.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jarno-van-driel/
To conduct a good research-focused interview, you need to cultivate a professional interviewing mindset.
Steve Portigal has been doing this for years, and he has written a book to help other researchers and designers conduct better interviews.
Now in its second edition, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, covers interviewing techniques, of course, but also research best practices, how to document your work, and how to make sense of your discoveries.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/steve-portigal/
Michael Reid is a consultant who helps organizations with their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
A linquist by training, he is extremely attuned to the role of language in his work, which led to his explorations of the privilege given to English-language speakers in our modern, hyper-connected world.
His discoveries can help content professionals of all kinds identify and address the dynamics and biases that arise from the pivotal role that the English language plays in modern digital business.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michael-reid/
The arrival of decoupled content architectures and headless CMSs creates a new set of challenges for content modelers, authors, administrators, and others who work with content systems.
Lo Etheredge does developer relations for Hygraph, a headless CMS company. Dev rel folks don't typically drive organizational change and stakeholder alignment, but Lo's unique background in social work uniquely prepares them to help customers with the human side of content management.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/lo-etheridge/
The emergence of modular web architectures and complex digital experiences has created a need for new content-management practices and for new enterprise tools.
One of the most pressing new needs is the ability to orchestrate the assembly of content elements, which may come from a variety of sources and be used in a variety of distribution channels.
Sana Remekie started her company, Conscia, to help large enterprises deal with these new challenges.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sana-remekie/
Knowledge graphs let people and computers work from the same body of facts to create uniquely informative and powerful experiences.
Katariina Kari and her colleagues at IKEA use ontologies and knowledge graphs to drive applications like recommendation systems and to streamline back-end processes like image recognition.
Katariina balances her engineering expertise with a deep appreciation for the humans who create and use AI applications like knowledge graphs.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/katariina-kari/
Aligning brand messaging for a variety of customer segments across a number of communications channels is a complex endeavor.
Jenny Scribani has developed a messaging framework that streamlines the process of communicating brand messaging to colleagues across a variety of content practices, letting them focus on the task at hand.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jenny-scribani/
Ann Rockley first took the title of "content strategist" in 1989. Over the next 30 years she pioneered content management, intelligent content, and many other practices we now take for granted.
Until recently few knew that she accomplished all of that while managing health challenges that would have sidelined most people.
Ann now focuses on health coaching and career mentoring, two intertwined practices that help her clients, most of whom are content professionals, manage their health and wellness and thrive at work.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ann-rockley/
Content leaders are beginning to ascend the corporate org chart.
Alli Mooney is VP of Content Design at MasterCard, where she leads a large team of content designers and guides big organization-change initiatives.
Like many content professionals, she began her career in publishing and journalism, but her path also included a stint in trend reporting, which lead to a variety of leadership roles at Google.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/alli-mooney/
There are a lot of pioneers in the field of content strategy, but one of them can make a strong case for being a true original.
Ginny Redish was among the cadre of usability-testing professionals who founded the discipline of UX design.
She was making government content usable, readable, and accessible decades before the famous GOV.UK makeover.
She was talking about content as conversation years before chatbots and voice assistants became common.
Her book, Letting Go of the Words, guided content practitioners and UX designers in the decade before the second wave of UX writing and content design books arrived.
It's truly difficult to find an aspect of modern content practice that Ginny hasn't influenced or informed.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ginny-redish/
Elizabeth McGuaneContent designers are word nerds by nature. Like many other craftspeople who are passionately immersed in their work, they can forget to step back and fully articulate what we are doing.Elizabeth McGuane has addressed this issue for the craft of content design. Her new book, Design by Definition, sets out the linguistic, rhetorical, and grammatical elements of content design and shows how they work together in design projects.We talked about: her work as a UX director at Shopify the origins of her book in a talk she delivered at a design leadership conference her writing process and how it relates to conversational design an overview of the structure of the book her transition from content design to design leadership the enduring strength of the relationships between visual and words people a great story about the utility and importance of metaphor in design work the importance of being thoughtful about naming things - and the idea that "words mean things" the importance of remaining "unfettered by truisms and by hard and fast rules for yourself that ignore the context of what you're actually looking at" the challenges she faced in writing the chapter on narrative her hope that her book both adds to the content-design conversation and expands it beyond our fieldElizabeth's bioElizabeth McGuane is a designer and writer who recently published her first book, Design by Definition (A Book Apart, 2023). She has worked as a content designer for 15 years and now directs large, multidisciplinary design teams that include product designers, developers, researchers and content designers. Elizabeth divides her time between Ontario and Nova Scotia, Canada.Connect with Elizabeth online LinkedIn Twitter Medium ThreadsVideoHere’s the video version of our conversation:https://youtu.be/v-lRA6T_RAEPodcast intro transcriptThis is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 158. Content designers are, by nature, meticulous story crafters and notorious word nerds. For all of our word nerdery, though, we haven't yet had a book to refer to that sets out the linguistic, rhetorical, and grammatical elements of our craft. In her new book, Design by Definition, Elizabeth McGuane fixes this omission, diving deeply into the intricacies of how to bring clarity and meaning to the textual material that we use to design customer experiences.Interview transcriptLarry:Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 158 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Elizabeth McGuane. Elizabeth is a UX Director at Shopify, and she just wrote this brilliant book called Design by Definition, which is mostly what we'll talk about today. But welcome, Elizabeth, tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.Elizabeth:Hi, Larry. Really happy to be here. I've been at Shopify now for about five years. I'm a UX director there on the mobile app, and we call it the operate team, the admin team. I look after the whole experience of the backend navigation search, things like that, which I kind of love. If you ask me any questions about the deep inner workings of commerce, I will not be able to answer it. If you want to complain to me about how Shopify admin search works, then yes, I am your person. I come from a background in content design. I originally started out writing, working for a newspaper in Dublin, Ireland, which is where ... I was born in Ireland and raised in Canada, went back to Ireland for university.Elizabeth:Not to give you my whole life story, but I've then moved into content design in about 2007. It wasn't called "content design" then, of course, but I was heavily involved in the origins of content strategy and content design around 2009. Probably not its origins. No, they go back to probably before I was born, but those first conversations that were happening at that time ...
Abby Covert
As the digital practices have grown and evolved over the past few decades, the job title "information architect" has become less common. That doesn't necessarily mean that the work isn't being done, but IA is now often in the province of a designer, content strategist, or other practitioner.
Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign of progress and as an opportunity to more deliberately democratize the craft of information architecture.
We talked about:
her current work on democratizing information architecture her take on the relationship between information architecture and content strategy how the apparent current dearth of IA attention may actually be a sign of success how IA work is getting done, regardless of whether practitioners label their work as IA the importance of incentives and incentive structures the origins of her democratization work her shift from teaching corporations about information architecture to focusing on teaching individuals the hazards of bringing your IA ego into an organization when to step back from democratized practice and engage a true IA expert the crucial role of education in democratization opportunities as an IA to influence the incentives in an organization her stealth approach to teaching metadata
Abby's bio Abby Covert is an information architect, writer and community organizer with two decades of experience helping people make sense of messes. Abby has written two popular books, How to Make Sense of Any Mess and Stuck? Diagrams Help. She currently spends her time making things that help you to make the unclear, clear, many of which she makes available for free on her website www.abbycovert.com or at accessible price points in her popular Etsy shop AbbytheIA. In 2022 she started The Sensemakers Club where she brings together sensemakers from different walks of life to learn from one another. Abby currently lives and writes from Melbourne, Florida where her most important job title is ‘Mama’. Connect with Abby online
AbbyCovert.com The Practitioner's Guide to How to Make Sense of Any Mess The Teacher's Guide to How to Make Sense of Any Mess
Video Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMNfdoRw950 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 157. The field of information architecture has seen a lot of change over the past 25 years. One aspect of this evolution has been a reduced prevalence of the role of "information architect." IA work is still being done, but often by folks who don't have the term in their job description. Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign of progress and as an opportunity to more deliberately democratize the craft of information architecture. Interview transcript Larry: Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 157 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am super delighted today to have with us Abby Covert. Abby is a well-known information architect, who focuses these days on writing and teaching. Welcome Abby. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.
Abby: Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me. Let's see. These days, I'm really focusing on democratizing information architecture. I really want to bring the information architecture lessons I've learned over the last 20 years to as many people in as many industries as possible. So I've been focusing for the last few years on projects that really work on that.
Abby: The first was I expanded my authorship into my second book, which is about diagramming. It's called Stuck? Diagrams Help. And then around the same time, I also launched something called The Sensemakers Club, which is a place for people to learn how to make more sense. So I'm working on expanding that into a series of community events. We have some monthly things, some quarterly things. And then of course our annual celebration Makesensemess,...
Stephanie Lucas
Designing for trust is a team effort, and it's crucial to keep everyone aligned on such important work.
At LinkedIn, the trust team has created a framework to guide that alignment. The RISE framework is built on an acronym that describes how LinkedIn wants its members to feel: respected, informed, safe, and empowered.
We talked about:
her trust advocacy work as a content designer at LinkedIn the challenges presented by trying to measure trust the RISE framework they use at LinkedIn to help designers create trustworthy experiences its basis of the RISE framework in prior work at the company on codifying and articulating principles around trust the elements of the RISE acronym: respected, informed, safe, and empowered the importance of proactively engaging and involving a wide range of stakeholders when crafting a framework like this the key role of content design in designing for trust the way they have made trust everyone's job at LinkedIn the importance of instilling trust design as a routine practice, not a due diligence check box at the end of a process her enthusiasm for the release of Harry Brignull's new book Deceptive Patterns
Stephanie's bio Stephanie Lucas is a Staff Content Designer and Trust specialist at LinkedIn, where she’s focused on trust, privacy and other safety features. She’s been a vocal advocate for design ethics thinking, privacy best practice awareness, and making safe products for users.
Stephanie has led workshops at California College of the Arts and Northwestern University, as well as several user experience design industry groups. She’s been featured on multiple design podcasts as well as speaking engagements discussing ethical practices in product design. She’s also a member of the International Association of Privacy Professionals. Connect with Stephanie online
Video Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/lYLP5Hp9k3M Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 156. Designing the web's largest business-focused social media platform is a complex, highly collaborative endeavor. At LinkedIn, Stephanie Lucas and her colleagues pay particular attention to crafting experiences that instill trust for the platform among their members. Content design plays a key role in this effort. Stephanie's recent move from a trust advocate position into content design highlights the close alignment between trust and content. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 156 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Stephanie Lucas. Stephanie's a content designer at LinkedIn where she specializes in trust issues. Welcome, Stephanie. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.
Stephanie: Hi, Larry. This is great. I'm really excited to join you on this. I think your series is awesome. Yeah. I work at LinkedIn. I've been there over 11 years. I live in San Jose, California and I have four cats, so if you hear a meow in the background this... Hopefully that won't happen. But yeah, I've been working at LinkedIn for a while. And I started in the brand and marketing design team way back in 2012, and then I moved into product design. But at the time, what they needed most was help with their trust products.
Stephanie: And so, I was basically, "Sign me up," because I was new into product design at that time. And lo and behold, I found out I had a real fondness for the work. I felt it was very meaningful and impactful work and super important. This was before all of the Cambridge Analytica and GDPR stuff, but it just became very important to me and I decided to make it my own.
Stephanie: And so, I've been doing trust, first design. But then I rolled into being a trust advocate and helping to educate our design organization about emerging privacy regulations and so on.
Before you let a business manage your hard-earned money, you need to trust them.
Selene De La Cruz and her colleagues at Robinhood have developed principles-backed practices that earn the trust of customers who use Robinhood's brokerages services.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/selene-de-la-cruz/
Donna Lichaw
Crafting your identity as a leader is a lot like creating your superhero persona. You need to be able to discover your authentic identity and pursue a clear mission, and to do that you need to understand your unique superpowers.
In her new book The Leader's Journey, Donna Lichaw draws on her experience as an executive coach and shows how she helps leaders transform themselves into true workplace superheroes.
We talked about:
the origin story for her new book, The Leader's Journey how leaders can identify and activate their superpowers the three things that all superheroes have: identity, superpowers, and a mission how you can begin your development as a hero from any number of starting points how to measure your impact as a leader the importance of building on your unique awesomeness over simply acquiring new competencies how her background in documentary filmmaking has influenced her work how the best stories that leaders share demonstrate who they are, not a simple narrative about something they did how understanding the stories you tell yourself can improve your leadership abilities how it's possible, but takes a lot more work, to lead without a position of authority
Donna's bio Donna Lichaw is an executive coach, keynote speaker, and bestselling author of The Leader’s Journey, the much-awaited followup to the The User’s Journey. She helps high-growth CEOs, executives, and senior leadership teams transform their leadership so that they can more effectively propel their business forward. Subscribe to Donna's newsletter to get first dibs on tools, exercises, and courses to help you transform your leadership so that you, too, can accomplish the extraordinary. Connect with Donna online
DonnaLichaw.com LinkedIn
Video Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/YelGPzqH6VA Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 154. We talk a lot in the content world about the power of storytelling. But stories are complex and multifaceted, and storytelling insights can sometimes come from unexpected directions. Donna Lichaw developed a nuanced understanding of storytelling as a documentary filmmaker and applies that wisdom in her coaching practice to help leaders become superheros - to show their authentic identity, discover their true mission, and reveal their unique superpowers. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 154 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show, Donna Lichaw. Donna is the author of the the new book, The Leader's Journey, which is what we're going to mostly talk about today, which is it's a follow on to her bestselling earlier book from, I don't know, like five or six years ago called The User's Journey. She's an executive coach who works mostly with high-growth founders and tech executives and leadership team. So welcome, Donna, you want to tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days?
Donna: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Larry. And what am I up to? It's summertime. We almost have a break next week, I'm excited. Trying to chill as much as possible this summer. The book came out about six weeks ago and it's been busy and totally nuts and busy with work as well. So I'm excited to have some time to chill over the summer.
Larry: Well, good.
Donna: That's what's on my mind, basically.
Larry: Okay. That's why I keep the episodes to a half hour, so you can get off and enjoy your vacation.
Donna: There we go.
Larry: Yeah. Well, hey, I love your new book, The Leader's Journey. Well, I won't steal your thunder, but one of the things that I was most taken with it is the opening anecdote. The opening story in the book that you talk about, which is we also were talking just before we came on the air. That's pretty much the origin story for the book as well.
Hinrich von Haaren
Content work is never done. Among the most common, and challenging, types of content work are big transformation projects that consolidate, reorganize, and re-conceptualize big web properties.
Hinrich von Haaren has worked on many content transformation projects, including the famous GOV.UK website makeover in the early 2010s.
His new book, Content Transformation, is a manual for managing these big, complicated projects.
We talked about:
his work as a content strategist at Content Design London his work on content transformation projects and how it led to his book on the subject unique stakeholder management challenges that arise in big government projects and how to manage them the preference in his projects for workshops over meetings how he and his team set intentions around, and prepare for, workshops how they measure customer satisfaction and progress toward business goals the way content strategy emerges from his content transformation work how content transformation and culture change go hand in hand three key take-homes that he hopes everyone gets from the book:
the need to be simultaneously realistic and boldly ambitious the importance of being transparent with the team about goals and expectations the crucial role of communication
his intent for the book to be more like a handbook for reference than a procedures guide the vital role of cross-disciplinary collaboration in any content project
Hinrich's bio Originally from Germany, Hinrich moved to London to work in publishing and later in online content. Hinrich worked on all sorts of content from news to financial information before becoming part of the original Government Digital Service (GDS).
Working within a small team and with hundreds of sticky notes, Hinrich helped turn the unwieldy BusinessLink website into easy and practical content for the general public. Subsequently, he worked on the NHS transformation and many other bigger and smaller transformation projects in the legal sector, the arts, academia and lots of other content areas.
Hinrich is the co-founder of the Content Design Academy which offers training for people around the world. Connect with Hinrich online
LinkedIn Content Design London
Video Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/HnQ4A85z_pk Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 153. A content strategy career often includes big, transformative projects that serve a variety of customer needs and touch wide swaths of an organization. Hinrich von Haaren, a content strategist at the prestigious agency Content Design London, has worked on many of these projects, including the famous GOV.UK website consolidation in the early 2010s. His new book, Content Transformation, is a handbook for content practitioners tasked with managing these kinds of projects. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 153 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show, Hinrich von Haaren. Hinrich is a content strategist at Content Design London, which has to be one of the coolest jobs in the world. But welcome, Hinrich. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing there.
Hinrich: Hi, Larry. Nice to be here. So yes, I'm a content strategist at CDL - Content Design London - and my job is sort of a mix of three things. I work on projects for the companies, so where mostly we do transformation jobs, which is what the book is about. And I also do training. We have training courses. I develop and run part of the training program, and then I also write about content design, write online and write books. Book so far.
Larry: That's right. And I totally buried my lede I realized. The whole point of having you on the show is you wrote this great book. Oh, I've got my focus. Anyhow, so for folks watching on YouTube,
As strategists and designers, we often facilitate gatherings of stakeholders with a variety of priorities and approaches.
There can be a temptation in such groups to leap into action and start building solutions and creating content right away.
A good facilitator like Adam Lawrence can redirect this natural human enthusiasm to bring focus to our equally natural curiosity and humility, which almost always results in better products that address customers' actual problems.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/adam-lawrence/
Karen McGrane
The web has changed a lot over the past 25 years. Or maybe it hasn't.
Enterprise content architectures are maturing and finally beginning to separate content from its presentation. But old-fashioned artifacts like PDF files still abound, and authors still expect WYSIWYG editing experiences.
And when Karen McGrane reflects on her work at Razorfish 25 years ago she's struck by how the team structures and business practices they adopted there are still relevant today.
We talked about:
her work at Autogram, the agency she founded with Jeff Eaton and Ethan Marcotte the content modeling practice at Autogram the implications for content strategy practitioners of the emergence of headless CMSs and decoupled content architectures the enduring challenges presented by PDF documents and WYSIWYG interfaces her take on the benefits for any business of having a niche, like Autogram's focus on content modeling and design systems the evolution and possible merging of content systems and design systems in enterprises the uneven adoption of new kinds of authoring experiences for decoupled systems the role of language and the importance of using shared terminology her take on content personalization how they're using AI at Autogram her observation that tagging may be one of the best uses of AI tech in content workflows her reflection on the early days Razorfish and the genuinely visionary work practices that emerged there
Karen's bio Karen identifies and solves problems with content management and user experience design across print, web, and mobile. She has partnered with some of the world’s largest enterprise businesses to streamline their digital operations and governance. On a good day, I make the web more awesome. On a bad day, I just make it suck less. Connect with Karen online
Autogram Twitter Mastadon LinkedIn Reddit
Video Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/9xC3bPFieJ8 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 151. As web technologies and business practices have evolved over the past 25 years, publishing, user experience design, and enterprise software systems have all converged on each other. Few content strategists have had as good a front-row seat to observe and participate in these developments at Karen McGrane. From her early days at the pioneering agency Razorfish to her current work at Autogram, it's not an exaggeration to say that Karen has seen it all. Interview transcript Larry: Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 151 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am super extra delighted today to welcome to the show Karen McGrane. Karen probably needs no introduction, but I'm going to give her one anyway. She is one of the longest practicing content strategists out there, and she's gone by other labels, as well, information architect and other titles in the past. But one of the things that distinguishes her, many things distinguish her in this profession, but one is that she came in right out of a human computer interaction program at Rensselaer Polytech. So, she was ready for all this design stuff that we've been adding to the profession the last few years, way before any of us.
Larry: She was, famously, the UX lead at Razorfish in the early days of that famous agency. She's worked for everybody, the New York Times, Conde Nast, Disney, Citibank, Time Inc., you name it. She wrote a couple books on Content Strategy for Mobile, on Going Responsive on responsive web design. She also did a podcast with Ethan Marcotte, the inventor of responsive web design, and they codified and articulated the whole notion of this now embedded practice. And she taught for many years, and still does teach, at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I'm exhausted from that intro. Karen, tell the folks what you're up to nowadays.
Karen: Well,
The web has changed a lot over the past 25 years. Or maybe it hasn't.
Enterprise content architectures are maturing and finally beginning to separate content from its presentation. But old-fashioned artifacts like PDF files still abound, and authors still expect WYSIWYG editing experiences.
And when Karen McGrane reflects on her work 25 years ago at Razorfish she's struck by how the team structures and business practices they adopted there are still relevant today.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/karen-mcgrane/
As the field of content design has matured, leaders have emerged to guide their teams as well as the profession as a whole.
Both at LinkedIn, where she leads the content design team, and through her avid participation in the content community, Keri Maijala has helped shape the craft of content-design leadership.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/keri-maijala/
Margo Stern has landed desirable jobs at several prominent companies - places like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Peleton.
She has also built multiple content design teams in those same organizations.
Now she's writing a book to share both her job-hunting expertise and her extensive content hiring experience.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/margo-stern/
Vidhika Bansal
Humans are notoriously fickle creatures, hard-wired to behave in unpredictable ways. This makes experience design work challenging for both managers and practitioners.
Vidhika Bansal has led both UX research and content design teams. Her unique background in both the behavioral sciences and UX design gives her a unique toolkit for bridging the gaps between unpredictable human behavior and useful digital experiences.
We talked about:
her work at Intuit as a UX manager focused on content design the scope her work to apply behavioral sciences to design how understanding anxiety can help designers increase user confidence in product flows the "say-do" gap in human behavior and several ways it manifests in design work two common barriers to smooth journey flows - information overload and decision fatigue - and how to craft a "choice architecture" to address them the importance of ensuring that you're providing and gathering the right data as you help users make choices "behavioral science thinking" - a lens through which you can see your design work differently three truisms about human behavior that guide her work
people have limited attention humans' tendency to take the path of least resistance humans are social beings who want to be liked, to belong
ways to kindly and ethically engage users: progressive disclosure, instilling confidence, providing choice-making guardrails, etc. how adopting a behavioral science thinking mindset can help you design more effectively and ethically
Vidhika's bio Vidhika is a Group Design Manager at Intuit, where she leads teams of talented designers and researchers building QuickBooks. She has a background in cognitive science and cares deeply about designing for real life.
In her past (more like parallel) life as a consultant, she's helped shape product strategies for a wide range of clients from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies to stealth startups. She's also a frequent speaker, advisor, and coach for in-house teams and conferences worldwide.
Vidhika is convinced that words are magic and that stories — including the ones we tell ourselves! — can change the world. She feels strongly about empathetic leadership, ethical tech, and the power of human connection. She also really likes pasta. Connect with Vidhika online
Twitter LinkedIn
Video Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/TEQAnREQiOI Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 148. Left to our own devices, we humans routinely make a lot of what behavioral economists would label irrational decisions. Our job as content designers is to help users make good Vidhika Bansal. Vidhika Bansal spans the worlds of behavioral science and experience design. Her unique perspective helps her cultivate in her content-design and UX research teams the kind of thinking that bridges the gaps between messy human thinking and helpful digital experiences. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 148 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really excited today to welcome to the show Vidhika Bansal. Vidhika is a UX group manager at Intuit, where she focuses on content design. She migrated into that from research. Vidhika, welcome to the show, and tell the folks a little bit more about your work there at Intuit.
Vidhika: Yeah, sure. Thank you so much, Larry. Excited to be here and excited to be recording this. So at Intuit, like Larry said, I used to lead a research team, and last year transitioned to leading a content design team. So I consider myself fairly multidisciplinary and work on... Try to dabble still in research, bring a behavioral science lens to things, sometimes focus on interaction design too. And right now I work on QuickBooks, and so my team gets to... We all get to focus on businesses that are in that mid-market space,
The emergence of design systems has created new content strategy and content management needs.
As a long-time UX practitioner, content strategy evangelist, and content systems expert, Michael Andrews is uniquely qualified to talk about how to manage content in these new systems.
So far, the most important lesson he has learned from working with content in design systems: Don't forget to apply the basic content strategy lessons we've learned over the past 20 years.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michael-andrews-2/
Michael AndrewsThe emergence of design systems has created new content strategy and content management needs and opportunities, especially with the advent of headless CMSs.As a long-time UX practitioner, content strategy evangelist, and content systems expert, Michael Andrews is uniquely qualified to talk about how to manage content in these new systems.So far, the most important lesson he has learned from working with content in design systems: Don't forget to apply the basic content strategy lessons we've learned over the past 20 years."You really are not going to be as good a content designer as you can be if you don't tap into the incredible body of knowledge that's been developed over the past 20 years in content strategy."We talked about: his work at Kontent.ai and his history as a UX and content practitioner the emergence of content practice in design systems, currently "more guidelines than executable processes" the problems with tightly tying content to specific uses in a design the main benefit of headless content management - "decouple the visual layout of the UI design from the content itself" - so the same message can be conveyed in multiple channels how content strategy practice manifests in design-system work the current state of tooling for working with content in design systems the benefits of working with content from a single source of truth governance issues that can arise when working with content in design systems the benefits of bringing well-established content strategy and content modeling craft to design-system content how a content model can help manage content variants and variations in a design systems the importance of having the right content structured and ready for uses like personalization experiencesMichael's bioMichael Andrews is content strategy evangelist at Kontent.ai, a headless CMS. In this role, he champions better practices for managing all kinds of digital content. Over the past two decades, he has worked as a consultant in the fields of user experience and content strategy in the United States, Europe, and Asia, advising clients in a diverse range of industries. He’s spoken at various content-related conferences, blogs extensively, and has written two books about content metadata. He has an MSc in human-centered computing systems from the University of Sussex.Connect with Michael online: LinkedIn TwitterVideoHere’s the video version of our conversation:lksjdfPodcast intro transcriptThis is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 147. As design systems have emerged over the past several years, content designers and content strategists have begun to work with their design and engineering colleagues in new ways. As a content strategy evangelist working for a headless-CMS company, Michael Andrews has a unique perspective on this growing segment of the design and content worlds. His biggest take-home lesson so far? Don't forget the basic content strategy lessons we've learned over the past 20 years.Interview transcriptLarry:All right. Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 147 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really delighted today to welcome back to the show, Michael Andrews. Michael was on about three years ago talking about metadata strategy, but we have a much more topical thing to talk about today. We're going to talk about the role of content and design systems. So Michael, welcome. Michael's an evangelist, a content strategy evangelist at Kontent.ai, and welcome Michael. Tell the folks a little bit more about your work there at Kontent.ai?Michael:Well, thanks again for having me on again, Larry, delighted to be here. Yeah, I work at Kontent.ai, which is a headless content management system and really trying to bring the new and best practices of content strategy to our customers and folks who might be interested in moving to a headless approach to content m...
Paula Land wrote the definitive guide to content audits and inventories almost ten years ago. A lot has changed since then.
The new edition of "Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis" has been extensively updated to account for the evolution of auditing practice, including 100 pages of new content and a new emphasis on the importance of analyzing and operationalizing the results of content audits.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/paula-land-2/
When your organization talks about "bringing your whole self to work," they're likely picturing an idealized version of you, not the complex human that you actually are.
Eileen Webb helps people and teams build better relationships at work by connecting them with their actual authentic selves.
Her approach isn't touchy-feely, summer-camp trust-fall theater. It's pragmatic professional-development work that can remove obstacles to collaboration and build trust among teams.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/eileen-webb/
Designing content for immersive experiences has been around longer than you might think.
Many people jump straight to modern VR headsets when they think about immersive digital experiences, but the craft of immersive content design also shows up in applications like location-aware text alerts and games like Pokemon Go.
Preston So has just written the first book on immersive content design, drawing on his unique background in programming, product management, design, and content strategy.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/preston-so-2/
Building a content design team is typically a long process. At Hotjar, Kaysie Garza has had the chance to build a new content-design practice with two colleagues at her side from the very beginning.
Hotjar offers a variety of research products, so Kaysie and her team have also been able to inform their work with plenty of research insights.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/kaysie-garza/
Content has always been a key element of any design system, but content designers have only recently become part of these system teams. It's still early days, but the role of content in design systems is evolving rapidly. Rebekah Wolf has been part of that evolution through her work as a content designer on Microsoft's Fluent design system. She has also built a professional community around the subject with the Design System Content Club Slack that she founded and facilitates. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rebekah-wolf/
Sheryl Cababa wants to help designers of all kinds cultivate a systems-thinking mindset.
Her new book - Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers - shows designers how they can expand their impact by adding a systems-thinking lens to their view of their work.
Rather than setting out specific methods or practices, Sheryl focuses on how to leverage systems concepts like interconnectedness, causality, and wholeness to help you design better experiences.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sheryl-cababa/
Any business you ask will claim to be focused on their customers' needs. But it can be hard to find companies that embody actual customer centricity in their design and business processes.
Debbie Levitt helps companies discover the actual pathways that their customers are taking and shows them how they can help customers accomplish the tasks that move them along their journey.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/debbie-levitt/
Content strategy work is largely about language and how people use it. So to do our best work, we need to have a strong understanding of the language ecosystems we navigate.
Jane Ruffino comes to content strategy and design with a background in archaeology. She shows how practices that archaeologists use to understand how different cultures name and label things can be applied to content work.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jane-ruffino/
Technical content strategy has evolved dramatically over the past 25 years, and Sarah O'Keefe has had a bird's-eye view of the whole process.
As the CEO of Scriptorium, a leading content-operations consultancy, Sarah has both witnessed and participated in the massive changes that have unfolded in the world of technical documentation.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sarah-okeefe/
The benefits of inclusive design practices are clear: better business results and more satisfied users of our digital products.
Our task now is to sharpen our focus on inclusion in our content-design craft. We also need to get better at convincing leadership to support this work.
Jonathan McFadden has been practicing inclusive design for years and gets better every year at persuading executives and managers to support this important work.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jonathan-mcfadden/
Sam Bhagwat is the co-founder of Gatsby, a popular framework for creating content experiences.
He is also the author of Modular: The Web's New Architecture. If you're not sure how the terms "headless," "decoupled," or "composable" might affect your content work in the future, the book can help you understand these concepts and the technical ecosystems that enable them.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sam-bhagwat/
If you stop to really think about it - and Torrey Podmajersky has - everything is content.
We think of content as the words, pictures, and recordings that we view online and in apps and other digital products.
But even when words and illustrations are removed, the graphical elements and technical experiences that surround still them convey meaning, which is the main job of content.
Therefore, everything is content.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/torrey-2/
Erica Jorgensen has just written the first UX book that focuses on content research.
Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX gives content designers a comprehensive guide to content-specific UX research techniques.
Erica is on a mission to bring more respect to content to content practice. This book gives you the tools you need to show to your design, product, and engineering colleagues the usability and effectiveness of your content work.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/erica-jorgensen/
Nearly every episode of this podcast has included the observation that content strategy is fundamentally a people practice.
We talk a lot about practices, procedures, tools, techniques, and technology. But they are always implemented in service to our customers and users and in collaboration with our colleagues and stakeholders.
Scott Peltin is the co-founder and Chief Catalyst at TIGNUM, a company that helps executives and their teams optimize their performance at work. He typically works in the C-suite, so it was a real treat to chat in his office about how his insights might benefit managers and practitioners in the content world.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-peltin/
About a dozen years ago, as designers grappled with the need to serve similar experiences to both desktop and mobile computer users, Ethan Marcotte developed the practice of responsive web design.
I think we're at an analogous juncture now in content design. The need to serve similar content experiences across a variety of channels, devices, and touchpoints - and in a variety of contexts, like personalization - reveals the need for more flexible and adaptive content-design practices and systems.
Responsive web design was adopted almost immediately and remains relevant and important today. "Responsive content design" is just my way of describing a strategic practice that many others (hello, Rahel, Noz, Val, Cruce, Ann, Scott, et al.) have already articulated and developed in different ways.
It was fun and instructive to noodle on this topic with Ethan.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ethan-marcotte/
Hanson Hosein was my first guest on this podcast, and now he's also guest 131.
Hanson is a natural leader with a fascinating background that includes frontline wartime reporting, innovative multimedia storytelling, and executive leadership in academia.
His current work articulates his leadership approach in a declaration entitled "A Wind Rose Can Make Sense of Forces Beyond Our Control: Sixteen Tenets and 10,000 Words for Real-Time Leadership."
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/hanson-hosein-2/
UX writers and other design professionals are famously, and correctly, user-centered.
Yael Ben-David thinks that UX writers can sometimes benefit from slight course corrections to better account for the business side of our work.
Her new book, "The Business of UX Writing," makes the argument for this kind of approach, and shows you how to craft more business-aware UX writing programs.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/yael-ben-david/
As the field of content strategy matures and advances, one thing remains the same: the ubiquity and importance of building websites.
Few practitioners are more versed in this craft than Corey Vilhauer and Deane Barker.
Then they worked together at Blend Interactive, Corey and Deane wrote The Web Project Guide, a comprehensive book that can help anyone manage the process of creating and building a new or updated website.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/corey-deane/
Like many content designers, Aladrian Goods discovered the field of UX design after working in writing, communications, and other roles.
Aladrian found content design a few years ago and quickly rose into a leadership role at Intuit.
In this conversation, we talk about the story of her ascent into leadership, the design practice at Intuit, and how her focus on values, culture, and communication benefits both her and her colleagues.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/aladrian-goods/
Jess Sand organizes the Content + UX Slack, a vibrant community of 15,000 content professionals.
While it may be best known for the salary-transparency requirement in its very active jobs channel, members of the community also appreciate the wide-ranging conversations there and the support of their fellow content practitioners.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jess-sand/
Jess Sand organizes the Content + UX Slack, a vibrant community of 15,000 content professionals.
While it may be best known for the salary-transparency requirement in its very active jobs channel, members of the community also appreciate the wide-ranging conversations there and the support of their fellow content practitioners.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jess-sand/
Meghan Casey literally wrote the book on content strategy practice.
Her book, "The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right," has helped innumerable content strategists do better content work.
Meghan is updating the book now to bring it into line with modern practices and to account for the many changes in the field since the book was first published.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/meghan-casey/
Greg Dunlap is on a mission to help people create better content for the web.
As Director of Strategy for Lullabot - a well-known consultancy that is best known for its work with the Drupal content management system - Greg helps clients develop good websites.
As the author of a forthcoming book on web content authoring, Greg is taking his next step toward helping people create better content for the modern web.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/greg-dunlap/
Artificial intelligence is driving a wave of change in content strategy practice.
AI is here now and will soon touch virtually every aspect of content work, from ideation and creation to management and analytics.
Jeff Coyle can help you understand and navigate how these new AI-driven practices will affect your content career.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jeff-coyle/
In the late 1990s, as digital practices like web design and development emerged, experiences were being created and users were getting attention, but the practices that guided that work had not yet been articulated.
That's when Jesse James Garrett wrote his book, The Elements of User Experience. After sharing his ideas in numerous client pitches and sketching them on whiteboards for his co-workers, Jesse collected his discoveries into a manuscript that would become the first textbook for the new field of UX design.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jesse-james-garrett/
As content strategists and designers we do our best to create experiences that inform and empower our users.
Unfortunately, we sometimes fall short of perfect, human-centered, user-focused design practice.
Two of our most common failings occur when we bombard our users with excessive cognitive load and impose on them unnecessary emotional labor.
David Dylan Thomas and Dayana Kibilds are having an ongoing dialog about these important topics and let me eavesdrop on their conversation.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/dave-day/
Knowledge graph technology can help content programs in many ways: to aid content discoverability, to discover valuable insights in existing content, and to build transparent personalization programs that build brand loyalty and foster customer trust.
Ashleigh Faith has worked with content and knowledge graphs for more than 15 years and has a knack for explaining the benefits of the technology, most notably via her very popular YouTube channel.
Ashleigh Faith works with content knowledge graphs and explains the technology via her very popular YouTube channel.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ashleigh-faith/
The use of artificial intelligence in content design and content operations is emerging and evolving quickly.
As is the case with many new technologies, it might at first look like robots are coming to steal jobs from humans. But, according to May Habib, AI is more likely to create more, and more interesting, work for people.
May and her team at Writer are developing an AI platform that's designed to support human creativity and improve content operations.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/may-habib/
Modern communication on the web is best when it's semantic and meaningful, networked and conversational.
Creating web conversations starts with collaborative internal communication and then invites the marketplace to join in.
Teodora Petkova is a semantic web explorer with a PhD in digital marketing and communication. She loves to share her fascination with the evolution of web content and her expertise in cultivating marketing conversations.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/teodora-petkova/
Natalie Dunbar can help you build your content strategy practice, whether you're running a one-person content show, building a content department, or incorporating a content team into a design operation.
Drawing on experiences from her long and eclectic content strategy career and adding the insights of several other industry veterans, Natalie's new book is a must-read for anyone building or managing a content strategy program.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/natalie-dunbar/
Kate Thomas is leading the transformation of marketing content at PayPal from hand-crafted web pages to structured content stored in a headless CMS.
Like many organizational-transformation projects, this one has highlighted both the benefits of structuring content and the challenges of getting content authors to work in new ways.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/kate-thomas/
Seth Earley helps enterprises use ontologies to power the intelligent content experiences that create personalized content interactions and that run chatbots, voice assistants, and other new technologies.
An ontology is a business practice that helps you understand the knowledge in your business and connect and share it in new and powerful ways.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/seth-earley/
Katrin Suetterlin is a content architect, a content designer, and an expert on designing for neurodivergent populations.
You hear jokes about ADHD, dyslexia, and similar neurological conditions all the time, but as designers we need to take neurodivergence seriously.
Research shows that at least 20% of the population exhibits one or more types of neurodiversity. If you're a human-centered design practitioner, you don't want to overlook this important group of humans.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/katrin-suetterlin/
Dan Brown has focused his design work on information architecture for the past 25 years.
Along the way, he has written three books, designed a design game, and created one of the the most-used tools in the profession, the Information Architecture Lenses card deck.
Dan is very thoughtful about the practice of IA and has a lot to say about how the field has evolved.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/dan-brown/
Design systems are quickly being adopted across companies of all sizes and types, from big enterprises to burgeoning startups. As in all digital practices, content is a crucial element in these systems.
Nicole Michaelis has worked with content in design systems for several years and has learned a lot about how to create and manage the content that goes into, and comes out of, design systems.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/nicole-michaelis/
Donna Spencer has practiced information architecture at the highest levels for more than two decades. She has taught innumerable workshops and courses, and she wrote an entire book on the subject.
Still, to this day, when she teaches IA, she feels inadequate.
This speaks in no way to her professional knowledge or her skills as a teacher. Donna knows this field as well as anyone and speaks eloquently about it. Rather, it gets at the "jigsaw mess" of the practice of information architecture and the constraints of modern educational environments.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/donna-spencer/
Content programs need to be guided by a sound model and built on a strong foundation. They need to put people first but to also account for the technical systems that handle the details of turning abstract concepts into tangible and useful content artifacts.
Deane Barker has been modeling and building content management systems for more than 25 years. In this conversation, he shares some of the insights gleaned during his career.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/deane-barker/
In just a few short years, design systems have been adopted by most digital organizations.
These systems free designers from many mundane design-production details, letting them focus on the creative aspects of their work.
To this point, content has been an afterthought in many of these systems. Chris Strahl sees that changing in the next few years and predicts that content concerns will assume an important place in design systems.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/chris-strahl/
Many content professionals were first introduced to the practice of content modeling by Rachel Lovinger's 2012 A List Apart article on the subject.
Content modeling gives teams of authors, managers, designers, and programmers a shared understanding of a content ecosystem. Before they write a single sentence or line of code, teams align on a common language that keeps their work in sync.
Content modeling accounts for everything from the authoring experience to metadata strategy to the end-user experience. It helps team visualize the content landscapes they are creating, and it serves as a conversation starter for any number of important stakeholder interactions.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rachel-lovinger/
Are Halland's "Core Model" has guided the work of content strategists, information architects, web marketers, and other digital professionals for more than 15 years.
The model grew out of the need to align stakeholders around a practice that could balance user needs, business concerns, and content creation for websites.
It has evolved into a versatile tool that can improve the content experience in any digital product.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/are-halland/
Finding the right job in the content strategy field has always been a challenge, and it's getting harder as computers take over more of the applicant screening process.
Changes in the industry - especially the convergence of technical and marketing communication duties - also mean that you you have to be proactive about managing your career, even if you aren't job hunting.
Jack Molisani knows how to navigate this challenging landscape. He is both the principal of a staffing agency that focuses on content talent and the organizer of the LavaCon content strategy conference.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jack-molisani-2/
John Collins is a content engineer at Atlassian, where they are well along in their transition from old-fashioned bespoke content models to modern connected content.
Creating and managing content for intelligent content ecosystems requires a fresh approach and a new set of skills.
This new content engineering discipline helps enterprises address some of the biggest challenges of the digital era: personalization, omnichannel strategy, and localization.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/john-collins/
Preston So is an expert in both omnichannel strategy and voice design, as well as a number of other digital business and design practices.
As communications channels proliferate and the variety of digital devices grows, we need strategies to give our customers and users a consistent experience, no matter where they are or how they are consuming our content.
Preston weaves together elements of omnichannel strategy, voice usability, and other modern digital practices into an "immersive content strategy" that can help you craft content programs that address these new challenges.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/preston-so/
Aaron Bradley uses knowledge graphs to create intelligent content experiences at Electronic Arts.
Knowledge graphs are a relatively new technology that lets content engineers create more meaningful and versatile content experiences.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/aaron-bradley/
After showing up in the content strategy world and generously sharing her expertise for more than 20 years, Margot Bloomstein has earned the trust of this community.
Margot's new book, Trustworthy, shows you how to earn the trust of your customers and users.
As reliance on experts fades and is replaced with crowd-sourced trust, the work of content strategists has to evolve to account for these new dynamics.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/margot-bloomstein/
Lisa Welchman recognized early in her career that companies would need help managing the business challenges that come with new technologies.
In the ensuing 20 years, she has become the leading expert in the new field of digital governance.
Today, Lisa helps large enterprises, NGOs, and other companies develop frameworks, policies, and standards that let them collaborate effectively and operate responsibly.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/lisa-welchman/
Kristina Halvorson is to many the face and the voice of the content strategy profession.
She came to prominence a dozen years ago with the publication of her book Content Strategy for the Web, and she had been practicing content strategy for a dozen years before that.
Since 2011 she has organized Confab, the leading content strategy conference, and founded in 2020 the Button conference, which focuses on digital product content.
She hosts the Content Strategy podcast. And she leads Brain Traffic, a top content strategy consultancy.
She is working now on her second book, about content leadership in organizations that excel at customer experience.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/kristina-halvorson/
Jeff Eaton looks at content modeling two ways, both the traditional boxes-and-arrows way and the title-case Content Modeling way.
Thinking about how you'll structure and organize your content will always be important.
But the real power of content modeling emerges when it rises to a higher level and accounts for the shared understanding the people across your organization have of your content. Jeff calls this more sophisticated approach "The Content Model."
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jeff-eaton/
Beth Dunn is the author of Cultivating Content Design, a book that shows content leaders how to create the kind of successful content design program she has built at HubSpot.
The secret to Beth's approach is communication. First, she listens intently to her colleagues and stakeholders. Then she invites them to workshops and other activities where they co-discover content concerns and figure out together how to address them.
The key to Beth's success is her pragmatic approach. She always focuses on the issue at hand and always works with what she finds, not with "best practices" or other off-the-shelf solutions.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/beth-dunn/
Patrick Bosek helps businesses author and manage content that is structured so that it can be used for many purposes, not just one-off publications.
Structuring documentation this way creates intelligent content that both addresses current customer needs and anticipates future demands.
The DITA standard underlies this approach to creating and managing the smart, adaptable content that modern businesses need to complete their digital transformation.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/patrick-bosek/
Patricia Gomez and Mario Ferrer lead the content design team at King Games, the makers of Candy Crush and other popular mobile games.
They operate at a scale that might intimidate some people, designing experiences for nearly a quarter of a billion users. Serving that many customers forces them to be thoughtful about the tools they use and about how they work with their colleagues.
They and their team have become the "glue" that connects designers, developers, product managers, support staff, and other teams at King, always keeping their motto in mind: "make friends, break silos, build bridges."
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/king-games/
Modern digital experiences meet humans where they are.
Talking to a voice assistant. Typing on a keyboard. Reacting to a vibration delivered by your smart watch. Controlling a VR game character with a gesture controller. Wherever you want to be, there is now a device and an interaction modality to take you there.
Cheryl Platz is the expert guide who can help you navigate the practice of multimodal design, the new UX approach that connects these many interactions to create one coherent human-centered digital experience.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/cheryl-platz/
Marcelo Lewin focuses on content modeling, a long-standing practice that is growing in importance as the need for intelligent content emerges.
Content modeling helps you manage your content separately from its presentation in any one medium. This skill is crucial in the new world of omnichannel content delivery, where your content is as likely to show up in a voice app or chatbot as in a mobile app or website.
Marcelo is a natural educator and evangelist who can help anyone - content creators, web developers, or business executives - appreciate the benefits of understanding your content's purpose independent of its presentation in any one communication channel.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/marcelo-lewin/
Patrick Stafford has a unique view of the state of content work in the fields of UX design and product management.
As the CEO of the UX Writers Collective, his livelihood depends on understanding where the profession is going, which skills are in demand, and how writers and designers can best prepare themselves for UX writing and content design careers.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/patrick-stafford/
In Rachel McConnell's world, if content strategy is the engine, then content operations is the oil that keeps it running smoothly.
Rachel leads one of the biggest content operations in the world, a team of 100 content designers and editors at BT, a large communications services company in the UK.
Her team is a mix of content professionals from both UX and publishing backgrounds who work across a variety of products. This gives her plenty of opportunities to optimize their internal systems and plenty of ideas for both formal training programs and informal knowledge sharing.
As her team increases its capabilities and design maturity, they also help raise the digital maturity of the whole company.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rachel-mcconnell/
Nicole Buckenwolf organizes the product information that you see at businesses like Amazon and Etsy.
Big retailers use product graphs, ontologies, and taxonomies to classify and categorize the millions of products they carry.
Building these massive catalogs involves a variety of users and collaborators. Both the vendors who provide the products and the shoppers who buy them - as well as the in-house teams that build these complex shopping systems - benefit from the valuable metadata that Nicole and her colleagues create.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/nicole-buckenwolf/
Scott Berkun can help you understand design.
His new book, How Design Makes the World, helps both practitioners of the discipline and consumers of the products that they create understand of how design shapes our world.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-berkun/
Sabine Ocker helps enterprises organize their content. She uses taxonomies and other content metadata to make sure that customers get the information they need, when they need it.
Sabine's superpower is her ability to talk about her work in a way that resonates with business decision makers. This ensures that she always has the budget and other support that she needs to do this important work.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sabine-ocker/
When you're drowning in data, it's good to have an information designer like Noah Iliinsky looking out for you.
Noah takes a human-centered approach to a data visualization, connecting people with information tucked away in massive datasets.
His purpose-driven process is designed to help users quickly extract the insights they need from a flood of information.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/noah-iliinsky/
Documenting APIs is one of the newer jobs in the technical writing domain.
Tom Johnson enjoys the unique challenges of collaborating with and writing for the developers who create and use these Application Programming Interfaces.
He also enjoys reflecting on his work and sharing his insights with his fellow technical communicators.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/tom-johnson/
Chris Savage founded Wistia to help businesses understand how well their video content was performing.
Early on they stumbled across content marketing, using their own how-to videos to grow their own business. When COVID-19 hit and customers started interacting with companies virtually, Wistia really took off.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/chris-savage/
Rahel Anne Bailie has earned the title Content Empress.
One of the original cohort of content strategists, she has become a leading expert on content operations.
While she focuses on content, she might better be described as a business analyst who helps companies with their digital transformation.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rahel-bailie/
Noz Urbina can help you navigate the hype around personalization and create genuinely helpful customized content experiences.
Noz focuses on the fundamentals that create useful, usable adaptive content. He starts with customer journey mapping and persona creation to develop an evidence-based picture of his users. Then he builds modularized content models that address those user needs.
The result is a human-centered content system that serves up content tailored to answer users' questions wherever they are in their journey.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/noz-urbina/
Orchestrating the strategy, design, and software work that comes with enterprise-scale digital projects is a complex and painstaking mission. It's hard to imagine a team better equipped to take on these challenges than the founders of Autogram.
Karen McGrane, Ethan Marcotte, and Jeff Eaton have each mastered huge swaths of digital business practice.
Karen built the venerable UX and content practices at Razorfish and has arguably done more enterprise content strategy work than anyone else on the planet. It's hard to find a content strategist who doesn't cite her as a mentor or source of inspiration.
Ethan introduced the now-ubiquitous practice of responsive web design ten years ago. He's working now to develop a holistic approach to creating design systems.
Jeff is an accomplished web developer and content management systems expert who has guided the content strategy for many of the largest sites on the web.
Together they help digital teams collaborate more effectively.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/autogram/
Carmen Martinez and Paulo Azevedo combine her linguistics and ethnography skills with his computing and product skills to create computer interactions that feel almost human.
Carmen and Paulo collaborate to design conversation experiences for FlixBus, a company that helps millions of travelers around the world book bus travel.
It's hard to create natural-feeling conversations between humans and computers, but they get better at it with every product launch.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/flixbus/
Sara Wachter-Boettcher helps design and content professionals discover and express their leadership ability.
Leaders can come from anywhere. You don't have to be in a management role. With some personal work and a little courage, you can lead from wherever you are in the digital design and content world.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sara-w-b/
Scott Abel is a content strategy original.
He first took the title of "content strategist" in 1999. Since then, Scott has practiced content strategy and become a leading voice for the discipline.
When he's not running his consultancy, Scott organizes content events, publishes and writes books and articles, and keynotes and speaks at industry conferences.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-abel/
David Dylan Thomas can help you tame the unconscious biases that can undermine your design decision-making.
These biases are strong. You may never conquer them all. But recognizing them and accounting for them in your content strategy and design work can mitigate the hazards they present.
You need to be on your toes at every turn to account for these cognitive biases. They can affect the products and experiences you design, your collaborations with your team, and your own behavior. Dave's book shows you how to deal with each of these challenges.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/david-dylan-thomas-2/
Andrea Volpini creates products that help search engines and other computers find your web content.
Adding semantic meaning to your content helps artificial intelligence agents and other computers understand how your information relates to other content on the web.
Revealing these relationships helps both computers and the human users who rely on them find and use your content.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/andrea-volpini/
Erin Golden and her colleagues have created a model that shows the evolution of the practice of content strategy.
Drawing on the Kardashev scale – an astrophysics method for measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement – they rank content strategy practice along a 1-to-5 range. K1 represents the first stage, when content strategists were mostly concerned with putting words on webpages instead of in paper documents. K5 represents the science-fiction-ey AI future of the practice.
This reflection on the advancement of the discipline has led Erin to bolster her own professional toolkit, adding to her content skills new practices like UX research.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/erin-golden/
Erin Golden and her colleagues have created a model that shows the evolution of the practice of content strategy.
Drawing on the Kardashev scale – an astrophysics method for measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement – they rank content strategy practice along a 1-to-5 range. K1 represents the first stage, when content strategists were mostly concerned with putting words on webpages instead of in paper documents. K5 represents the science-fiction-ey AI future of the practice.
This reflection on the advancement of the discipline has led Erin to bolster her own professional toolkit, adding to her content skills new practices like UX research.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/erin-golden/
Bob Kasenchak is an expert on taxonomy for web publishers. He's one of a handful of information architects who focuses on this powerful practice.
A good taxonomy helps people find and navigate your content. It helps search engines index and list your content. It helps connect your content to similar content on the web.
The process of building a taxonomy can help align different business units in your organization around a central knowledge model that can power a number of different information systems.
People like Bob devote their careers to the practice of taxonomy. But you don't have become a professional to benefit from well-organized content.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/bob-kasenchak/
Laurah Mwirichia is a product-writing enthusiast. She loves her work and wants you to jump into this burgeoning field, too.
Laurah applies her writing skills as a product writer at Square. She loves using words in her design practice there, and she enjoys her collaborations with her product and technical colleagues.
She's gleaned a lot wisdom in her UX writing career and is eager to share it.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/laurah-mwirichia/
Carlos Evia teaches structured content authoring using DITA and similar tools at Virginia Tech.
Structured authoring offers a number of benefits, most notably easy content re-use. By carefully structuring content as it goes into a repository, it can be used later in a variety of publications and applications.
Structured authoring has its roots in the technical communications field. As other fields discover the benefits of structured content, interest in the practice has grown. This led Carlos and his colleagues on the DITA Technical Committee to develop a less-technical version of the DITA standard - Lightweight DITA - that can be used by marketers and other non-technical content creators.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/carlos-evia/
Michael Andrews literally wrote the book on metadata for web content (actually two books).
Metadata puts the structure in structured content. It helps both humans and computers understand what your content is about and how it relates to other content. It ensures that your content is always up to date, easy to find, and able to be tailored to your customers' unique needs.
In today's hyper-connected and ever-evolving digital media landscape, every online publisher needs a content metadata strategy.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michael-andrews/
Regardless of your job title, if you are the word person on a design team, you are a designer first and a writer second. Scott Kubie shows you how to collaborate with your tech and design colleagues while you get the writing done.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-kubie/
Scott Kubie
Scott Kubie believes in you.
If you're a writer contributing the words on a product team, he believes in you. If you're a front-end designer or developer tasked with writing, he believes in you.
In his book Writing for Designers, Scott sets out a simple path to help you get the writing done. He also has good ideas about how to organize content work for digital products.
He's not a fan of prescriptive style manuals and guidelines. Instead, he shows how helpful tools can guide writing work.
Nor does he like "best practices." Instead, he shares collaborative methods that make "good design work happen."
Scott and I talked about:
his background in communications, information architecture, UX design an early UX writing job he held at Wolfram Research and the variety of terms used there to describe his work: UI Writer, Content Strategist, Copywriter the need for both product-oriented writers and writers who work on marketing and website content the proliferation of job titles related to UX writing and content strategy the importance of thinking like a designer when you are working on a UX or product team his distinction between two common content strategy job titles: "content design is an elevated form of writing; UX writing is very app and interface specific"" the importance of tailoring content workflows and governance to the unique needs of each organization the importance of documenting your content model and of embedding it into your organization culture the almost-universal disconnect between design and content job descriptions and what people actually do the importance of collaboratively making "good design work happen" - as opposed to adopting best practices how his main inspiration comes from users, not from product goals, team structure, etc. how there's nothing wrong with being "just the writer" how he shows the bigger value of writing at a macro level - continuity, consistency, conceptual development, etc. the importance of taking in and considering the big picture, of not "staring at the button," and how he helps his collaborators in this process the superiority of helpful tools over style guides and other rules his inspirational closing message: "I believe in you. You can do good design."
Scott's Bio Scott Kubie is the author of Writing for Designers and a general champion of all things UX + content. He loves to empower design teams with tools that add clarity, reduce complexity, and lead to better products. Scott publishes the UX Writing Events newsletter, a personal blog called Brutalist Bookends, and the creatively-named You Get Email from Scott Kubie, a personal newsletter. Video Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/-bMpBDbIccs Podcast Intro Transcript When you're a writer on a design or a product team, you need all the inspiration you can get. Scott Kubie can help you. His book Writing for Designers sets out a simple, sensible path to get writing work done. He also has plenty of pragmatic advice to help word people collaborate effectively with their design and technical colleagues. But the most significant insight you may take away from this interview is Scott's relentless focus on his source of inspiration: his users and customers. Interview Transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 73 of The Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us, Scott Kubie. Scott is the author of Writing For Designers and well, that's how he's best known. He's known for a lot of things, but that's what I wanted to talk to him today about, is writing for designers. Tell the folks a little bit more about your background Scott. Welcome to the show and tell us how you got to the point of writing that book.
Scott: Sure. Thanks, Larry. Very happy to be here today. My book is the distillation of most specifically a work experience I had at a company called Wolfram Research,
Ilarna Nche is an award-winning expert on the technical aspects of building voice applications for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung Bixby.
She designs and develops voice apps for clients who want to capitalize on the branding power that voice products bring to digital content mix.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ilarna-nche/
Designing voice conversations requires new skills and new ways of thinking about how people interact with your digital product.
Rebecca Evanhoe and Diana Deibel are experts in this new approach to interaction design.
Like many content strategists, they are learning on the fly. And they are constantly studying the steady stream of research in their field. They'll share their discoveries in a book, Conversations With Things, in the spring of 2021.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/conv-design/
Hannah Kirk has great ideas about how technical writing and content strategy can support each other.
She's not a typical tech writer. She loves and appreciates technical documentation and enjoys practicing it. But she has always been more interested in strategy. And she has always spent a lot of time thinking behind how content is organized.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/hannah-kirk/
Carrie Hane sees content strategy as a complex information ecosystem, not a simple stream of publications.
Looking at content strategy as a system helps her give her clients a more complete picture of how content works.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/carrie-hane/
Nam-ho Park is a digital strategist who always puts people first and technology last.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/nam-ho-park/
There are huge gaps between the human needs of digital-content consumers and the constraints and requirements of the digital systems that manage it. Andy Fitzgerald shows how information architects use data, stories, and meaning to bridge these gaps and bring content to life for the human beings who need it.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/andy-fitzgerald/
Jack Molisani really knows how to put on an engaging and edifying professional conference.
He founded and organizes the LavaCon technical content strategy conference, which draws hundreds of content professionals to cities like New Orleans and Portland each year.
Jack has experimented over the years with virtualizing parts of his conferences, and he shares in this episode his discoveries about how to run online events.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jack-molisani/
Back in early March, when it was still safe to gather in person, we convened a panel of UX strategy experts at the ConveyUX conference in Seattle.
- Cora Cowles is Associate Experience Director at Huge Detroit
- Laura Joss is Global Director of the Design Research team at Motorola
- Brent Summers is Director of Marketing at Blink UX
We had a broad-ranging discussion about how to balance quantitative and qualitative inputs into UX strategy. Each panelist brought a unique perspective. And the audience asked some great questions.
This was the first "live" recording of this podcast. The format is a little different from the interviews I usually conduct. What do you think? Should I continue to experiment with different formats for the show?
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/conveyux-panel/
Elly Searle is a fierce advocate for UX writing.
Like any UX professional, her advocacy starts with the end users of the products she works on.
But Elly is probably best known for her work advocating for pay equity for her content teams. Thanks to her efforts, Elly's writers are treated the same as their design, research, and engineering counterparts.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/elly-searle/
Andrea Ames has been a content leader for more than 35 years.
From her early work as a technical writer, she has gone on to guide huge content teams and to become an advisor to other content leaders.
Some folks might get jaded after three and a half decades in big enterprises. Not Andrea. Her enthusiasm for her work is always contagious and inspiring.
Nowadays she focuses on helping content professionals become more effective and businesses more successful.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/andrea-ames/
Yuval Keshtcher is building a community around the new field of UX writing.
He first discovered the need for UX writing as a product designer. Since then, Yuval has convened product writers in discussion forums and classes. He studies the field constantly and hosts a podcast on Writers in Tech. This fall, he'll host a UX writing conference.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/yuval-keshtcher/
Yuval Keshtcher is building a community around the new field of UX writing.
He first discovered the need for UX writing as a product designer. Since then, Yuval has convened product writers in discussion forums and classes. He studies the field constantly and hosts a podcast on Writers in Tech. This fall, he'll host a UX writing conference.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/yuval-keshtcher/
Forest Gibson and his colleagues at Pluto VR have an ambitious purpose: "to help humanity transcend physical location."
Even before they formed their company, Forest and his fellow founders did deep work to align on their purpose. That clarity helps them evaluate ideas and make better decisions faster.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/forest-gibson/
Amy Balliett grounds the power of images in strong narratives. Her visual stories deliver the kind of content that humans are hard-wired to crave.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/amy-balliett/
Tamara Adlin uses the power of user personas to align teams and help them develop better products.
Tamara literally co-wrote the first book on how to develop and use personas. She has subsequently developed several practices that help teams align executives and other stakeholders on how to build genuinely customer-focused products and services.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/tamara-adlin/
Andy Welfle and Michael J. Metts are on a mission to empower word people. Specifically the people who craft words as part of product-design teams.
Their new book, Writing Is Designing: Words and the User Experience, shows UX content creators how to apply design principles to their writing craft.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/writing-is-designing/
Brittney Urich has been connecting content strategy to UX design from the very start of her career.
As a senior user experience designer at Ogilvy's Denver office, Brittney educates both her clients and her colleagues about how content and design support each other.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/brittney-urich/
Kylie Hansen is a tireless evangelist for the field of UX design. By demonstrating the ROI of content design, she has been able to build a team that is making better products now - and is ready to design the conversational and data-driven content of the not-too-distant future.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/kylie-hansen/
Ian Lurie is a leading technical SEO expert. But he doesn't recommend spending a lot of time on fancy optimization techniques. Instead, he urges content creators to focus on their users' intent and on quality content.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ian-lurie/
Eric Best helps business leaders look into the future. As a scenario-thinking consultant, he helps you discover insights that let you formulate an actionable strategy in the face of uncertainty.
In other words, scenario thinking gives you a tool to explore the differences between your currently planned future and the one that may actually unfold.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/eric-best/
Rob Mills thinks a lot about content operations. As Head of Content at GatherContent, which provides a content operations platform, he both manages and writes about content ops. So, yes, this episode gets a little meta at times :)
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rob-mills/
Emily Triplett Lentz is committed to making her content as welcoming as possible to everyone who encounters it. Her inclusive-content work not only ensures that traditionally excluded groups feel included. It also delivers stronger business results and promotes better writing.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/emily-triplett-lentz/
Jonathon Colman knows how to build content teams and integrate them into big digital programs. He deftly navigates the challenges that come with creating complex products in fast-growing organizations, always championing the best content practices.
Jonathon's career arc mirrors the growth of content strategy and content design. He started out as a technical writer and webmaster. He was a content marketing pioneer. He worked in both SEO and UX at REI. Recently, he has practiced and managed strategy and design work at Facebook and Intercom. Wherever he's been, Jonathon has always been at the forefront of the content profession.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jonathon-colman/
Caitlin Moran & Monica Guzman
Mónica Guzmán and Caitlin Moran are thoughtful practitioners of a new kind of reporting - conversational journalism. Their team at WhereBy.Us builds community in five U.S. cities with newsletters that engage their readers in ways that old media couldn't.
I invited Monica and Caitlin to the podcast because I was impressed with how they had maintained a consistent voice in their Seattle publication, The Evergrey, during a staff transition.
We talked about:
their impressive journalism backgrounds the deliberate approach to voice and tone that they take at The Evergrey, but also the ability of each reporter to contribute their unique voice the elements of their publication's voice and tone:
clarity of meaning, no jargon conversational tone, always "hello" and "have a nice day" delightful, light energy, even when the news is heavy light cognitive load: short sentences, simple language and sentence structure
how their reporting is an ongoing conversation with their readers how they developed their style guide how the principles of the parent organization style (conversational, friendly, welcoming, warm, energetic) inform their local style how local WhereBy.Us publications work to reflect local community concerns their development of a conversational approach to journalism how conversational journalism is more like writing an email than a conventional journalistic report how traditional journalism values like concision and precision are still valuable how events fit in with The Evergrey's reporting - closing a loop with the power of in-person relationships how events and in-person interactions result in bigger benefits than quantitative measures can demonstrate how they measure the qualitative impact of their work - one way is with a Slack bot that let's them report and record reader interactions how readers' appreciation of their city fits their style: "Love for our cities is one of the ways that we connect with people in them." how old journalism principles are impractical in the modern connected media age how "transparency is the only way you can do it now" the changing role of journalists from informants to mediators, moderators, and sense-makers - and the ensuing responsibility to be aware of which role they're in and their aims and intention the importance of being aware that everything is always evolving and the need to "stay nimble and open to whatever's coming down the road" how to figure out which stories matter in "a time when we're all overwhelmed with content"
Mónica and Caitlin's Bios Mónica Guzmán is Vice President of Local at WhereBy.Us, leading a team of entrepreneurial journalists who are helping locals in five cities “live like you live here." She is the cofounder and former director of The Evergrey, the essential newsletter for Seattleites who want to make the most of their city, and a former columnist at The Seattle Times, GeekWire, The Daily Beast and The Columbia Journalism Review. Moni studied how to connect journalists and the public as a 2016 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and is studying political and social divisions as a 2019 Henry M. Jackson Leadership Fellow. She is the author of the influential 2016 API strategy study "The best ways to build audience and relevance by listening to and engaging your audience,” served as vice-chair of the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Committee, and was as a juror for the 2013 and 2014 Pulitzer Prizes. Moni's a big fan of chocolate, karaoke, nerdy board games, and good stouts, and lives in Seattle's Wedgwood neighborhood with her husband, Jason Preston, and their two kids.
Caitlin Moran is a Seattle-based journalist who has split her 10-year career between traditional newsrooms and digital media startups. After working as a reporter and editor at newspapers on the East Coast, Caitlin moved back to Seattle and launched a hyperloca...
Mónica Guzmán and Caitlin Moran are thoughtful practitioners of a new kind of reporting - conversational journalism. Their team at WhereBy.Us builds community in five U.S. cities with newsletters that engage their readers in ways that old media couldn't.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/the-evergrey/
Tracy Playle has a super-power: people skills that help her run effective content strategy workshops. Clarify your "why." Get the right people together. Engage them in focused and creative activities. Great strategy is the result.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/tracy-playle/
Phillip Hunter has been designing digital conversations for 20 years. He started with touch-tone phone applications. More recently, he has worked on Alexa and other voice-based technologies.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/phillip-hunter/
Colleen Jones is a Jedi Master of content effectiveness. She helps organizations plan, create, and improve operations that produce user-focused content.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/coleen-jones/
Torrey Podmajersky is a true UX writing pioneer. As a "content developer" for Microsoft's Xbox she cultivated the skills she now uses as a UX writer at Google. Her new book, "Strategic Writing for UX," shares the insights she has gleaned over 10 years of UX writing practice.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/torrey-podmajersky/
Do you love your CMS? Laura Robertson asked the audience at her Confab 2019 talk whether any of them loved their CMS. In a room of 750 people, only one hand went up. This sad state of affairs has prompted Laura to reflect deeply on content management systems.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/laura-robertson/
Mike Atherton applies insights from information architecture to help content strategists develop domain models. These models help align content stakeholders and create a powerful way to organize, discover, and display content.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/mike-atherton/
Flora Paul developed an analytics practice she calls "editorial intelligence" during her time at BuzzFeed Brasil. She firmly believes that writers and content strategists "can be friends with numbers and data."
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/flora-paul/
Flora Paul developed an analytics practice she calls "editorial intelligence" during her time at BuzzFeed Brasil. She firmly believes that writers and content strategists "can be friends with numbers and data."
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/flora-paul/
Rachel Van't Land
Rachel Van't Land helps businesses speak in a credible voice that aligns with their brand. She is a copywriter, brand strategist, and content strategist based in Seattle, WA.
Rachel and I talked about:
how she defines "voice" and how she helps her clients find theirs the importance of voice - it's every bit as, if not more important than, your logo and other visual branding elements how you can end up with an "accidental" brand voice if you don't pay enough attention to it up front how there's a perception that "anyone can do the writing," whereas not everyone can use Photoshop or make a logo her process for helping clients articulate their voice - it works best if you can work alongside the brand and leadership team from the start the importance of deep foundational work to inform the articulation of the brand voice the combination of qualitative and quantitative (analytics) research to inform voice development how the starting point in her projects can vary depending on how much of that fundamental work has already been done how the terms "conversational" and "authentic" drive her nuts her hunch that most people mean "relaxed" and "approachable" when they say "conversational" Microsoft's success in developing a conversational tone in their consumer messages her thoughts on the differences between "voice" and "tone" - you usually speak in the same voice but adopt a different tone depending on the context (e.g., Target using a pun in an Easter promo but being much more formal when letting you know about a data breach) the unique benefits of establishing voice in a consulting role, as opposed to an in-house role or as part of an ongoing agency team how "voice" is a living, breathing thing, worth revisiting on a regular basis her work with a company that has grown and added products by acquisition and how to maintain a consistent voice through the process her use of a "this not that" methodology to fine-tune one-word descriptions of an aspect of voice the differences between voice-and-tone and grammatical-style guides her work with chatbot auto-answers, making sure they conform with the brand voice, and how it is often really more of a tone problem that needs to be solved "It's never to late to work on brand voice." - never to late to revisit - a quick site audit against the current voice and tone guide, e.g. circling back the "conversational" voice - how The Evergrey has established a genuinely conversational style in their publication
Rachel's Bio Rachel Van’t Land is a copywriter and consultant who helps organizations use storytelling to bring the right messages into their marketing. When she’s not at the keyboard, she’s meeting up with friends, coordinating her family schedule, or nerding out over marketing books. Her favorite things are desert hikes and free refills on coffee. You can find her at suncatchercopy.com. Video Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/E7KzYc0h4IU Transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 42 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us, Rachel Van't Land. Rachel's a copywriter, a content strategist, and a brand strategist here in Seattle, Washington. She runs an outfit called Suncatcher Copy, and I'll let Rachel tell you a little bit more about herself.
Rachel: Yeah, thanks Larry. Thank you for having me. So as Larry said, I am the founder of Suncatcher Copy. And I help brands come up with the right messaging and positioning, and then the way to convey it effectively to their audience. That involves a lot of storytelling, but it also involves finding the right voice and the way to connect the message with the audience. So that's what we'll be talking about today.
Larry: Right. That's why I ask ... Rachel and I are old friends, and we're also both members of the Impact Hub in Seattle.
Rachel Van't Land is a copywriter, brand strategist, and content strategist. Rachel helps businesses speak in a credible voice that aligns with their brand.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rachel-vant-land/
Blaine Kyllo helps enterprises understand and optimize their content processes. A key part of his work is helping his clients develop governance models that keep content operations on track.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/blaine-kyllo/
Crystal Taggart helps small- to medium-sized businesses improve their business results with artificial intelligence. AI is rapidly emerging as a viable technology that even small businesses can use to optimize their marketing efforts.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/crystal-taggart/
Neal Sofian
Neal Sofian leads a company that builds conversation bots for the health-care industry. Using algorithms, machine learning, and contextual storytelling, they create complex, customized content on the fly to help people change their health behavior.
Neal and I talked about:
conversational AI and how conversation bots can create conversations and build relationships how technology that permits the creation of unique compelling content helps people change their behavior their "Mad Libs" model for creating conversational content on the fly the differences between machine learning and AI and how natural language processing relates to these technologies how his background in public health leads to a people-first, behavior-first approach to the tech solutions he works on how establishing conversational context - with concepts like the "vulnerability index," like information about relationships, etc. - drives the tone of the content they deliver the importance of starting conversations by asking questions how his service adds an "engagement layer," making them the concierge that helps you find the info you need to solve your problem - smoking cessation, for example how they protect the privacy of users by giving control of their information to the consumer how some medical content has been diluted by focusing on compliance with HIPAA and other standards, which reduces opportunities to create interesting, compelling content Jamie, their gender-fluid bot whose personality can be programmed to be like your mom, a drill sergeant, coach, mentor, BFF, and whose vocabulary, patience, and how other voice and style choices can be customized for the context how establishing context enables content creators to use vocabulary and deliver content that is appropriate for the exact situation the reader is in how writing to one generic reading level is a relic of old mass communication - now we have "segments of one" with the customization that is possible how storytelling with a narrative customized to the user's needs is superior to generic advice like, "You need to exercise. Here's why." how the conversation itself provides the permission mechanism they need to include third-party information in the profiles from which they derive the context of the conversation the ongoing need for good writers to create compelling content for their "Mad Libs" how to go from "pushing information to creating a conversation and a relationship" "Always start with people."
Neal's Bio Neal Sofian is the CEO of tuzag, Inc., a digital, conversational AI health company that has built an "infinite" tailored-content & engagement platform, using conversational AI to drive exponentially greater consumer behavior change. Previously Neal was the Director of Member Engagement at Premera Blue Cross where he was responsible for development strategies to engage the 2.2 million members of Premera in reaching their optimal health.
Neal is a noted author and speaker and continues to be acknowledged as one of the true innovators in the world of health behavior change., and the role of personalization and social networking. Neal holds a master's degree in public health from the University of Missouri School of Medicine. He is also a working potter/sculpture and has done stand-up comedy in a vaudeville show. Video Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/prCO94A9PMg Transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 39 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Neal Sofian. Neal is the CEO of Tuzag, which is a really interesting company that helps folks do behavior change in the healthcare field. One of the online ... I think the website says they do hyper-personalized content and interactive storytelling to promote health. Is that accurate, Neal?
Neal: Yeah, I think it might grow a little bit. You'd almost say now,
Neal Sofian leads a company that builds conversation bots for the health-care industry. Using algorithms, machine learning, and contextual storytelling, they create complex, customized content on the fly to help people change their health behavior.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/neal-sofian/
Jennifer Bourn helps small businesses create systems to plan and create their content. She also helps other small-agency owners streamline and systematize their operations.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jennifer-bourn/
Kronda Adair helps mission-driven businesses succeed online. Helping her clients authentically share their expertise as digital content is a key part of this mission.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/kronda-adair/
Jenn Marie helps small businesses share their authentic selves online. She focuses on personality-driven content marketing that helps her clients start conversations with their customers and prospects.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jenn-marie/
John Sechrest helps startups tell their stories. By managing the narrative around their startup idea, founders can improve their odds of raising money, attracting the right talent, and – most importantly – connecting with the right customers.
https://ellessmedia.com/csi/john-sechrest/
Andrea Zoellner is passionate about making the web more accessible and usable. With clear UX copywriting and a single-minded focus on the user, she helps people succeed online.
When the field of SEO emerged in the late 1990s, Heather Lloyd-Martin was one of the first writers to focus on search engines. She’s still at it 20 years later – writing, coaching, training, and consulting on SEO copywriting.
Kate Saul
Kate Saul and Andre Francisco work at 18F, an internal government agency that helps other federal agencies improve their digital services, including web content.
Soon after the agency's founding they discovered that they would benefit from having a reference guide - the 18F Content Guide - for both their organization and their clients.
Andre Francisco
We talked about:
Andre and Kate's backgrounds the origins in 2015 of the 18F Content Guide - driven by their need for a standardized resource for their team how their content guide serves as a "ready-to-go" resource for their clients, as a template for their clients' guides how clients adapt and customize the manual for their needs the content guide's adoption beyond federal government websites the composition of their team at 18F, and the group of them who created the content guide the "Content Guild," an internal working group that offers content guidance to the rest of the organization and maintains the guide how frequently they update the guide (approx. monthly) the organizational structure of 18F and how it fits in the GSA how well-followed their content guide is (pretty well) the benefits of their "co-design" process, involving collaborators of all kinds from day one in all parts of their process
gets buy-in streamlines and accelerates their process
how there is no "typical" project in their portfolio how scope change from project to project while principles remain the same their belief that "involving content from the start is a really great way to go" how they work with stakeholders to organically uncover the right solution the role of research throughout their content strategy process
highlighter testing, for example, having users highlight paper print-outs of content to let readers show how clear they find the content
how their focus on cross-functionality and drawing together folks coming from different backgrounds creates an awesome team about 18F's huge number of open-source resources, including:
more than 1,000 repositories at GitHub their collection of technical guides
Kate's Bio Kate Garklavs Saul is a content team lead at 18F, where she helps federal agencies with strategic planning and crafting impactful, user-centered content. She has worked on my.uscis.gov, standards.usa.gov, usaspending.gov, and more.
A longtime lover of language, Kate earned her MFA in fiction writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and had her first chapbook ("Diffusely Yours") published in August 2018. Before joining 18F, she led editorial and education strategy at Scripted.com, and also designed online fine arts coursework. Find her on Twitter as @ueberkatester. Andre's Bio Andre Francisco is the Acting Director of Outreach at 18F, helping the federal consulting office better communicate with other federal agencies. A graduate of Northwestern University, he’s previously worked at a government reform non-profit and as an English teacher. Video Here's the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/uuJnYkJyBJ0 Transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to Episode number 32 of the Content Strategy Interviews Podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Andre Franciso and Kate Saul. Andre is the head of outreach at 18F. It's a digital... I'll let them describe it. I understand 18F to be sort of like a digital services company within the Government Services Administration and the US Government. And his college, Kate, Kate Saul, is a content strategist there. And I what I want to talk to them about today is the content guide that they created there. But first I want to let Andre and Kate talk a little bit more about each of their backgrounds. So whichever one of you wants to go first.
Andre: Yeah, I'll start. So this is my first government job, which is common at 18F, before this I was at a government reform non-profit actually that kind of ...
Kate Saul & Andre Francisco work at 18F, an federal government agency that helps other agencies improve their digital services, including web content. Soon after the agency's founding they discovered that they would benefit from having a master reference guide - the 18F Content Guide - for both their organization and their clients. The 18F Content Guide helps federal government agencies keep their web content consistent and usable.
Shelley Keith is a digital strategist with Modern Tribe. Her pragmatic approach to content governance aligns stakeholders on the "why" behind content decisions and uses techniques like "guerrilla governance" to get the content outcomes that executives demand.
Simon Thompson runs an agency in Melbourne, Australia, that focuses on helping B2B businesses add podcasts to their content marketing mix.
Malaika Carpenter is a solo content strategist in Philadelphia. Working on her own with non-content-focused clients has sharpened her focus on having a clearly articulated, replicable content-strategy process.
Jamie Schmid is a content enthusiast. She has been building websites since the late 1990s. Over that time, she has honed processes that result in websites that give both internal and external users intuitive and robust content experiences.
David Dylan Thomas studies human behavior to develop better content strategies. Dave's cognitive-bias hacks help you tame counter-productive thought processes to create less biased content experiences.
Joe Welinske creates content strategies and other crafted communication as a UX practitioner, teacher, and event organizer.
Joe is super-thoughtful about the role of content in helping people use technology. We had a great conversation about his journey from old-school technical communicator to leading-edge UX practitioner.
For nearly 40 years, Jared Spool has been helping publishers and software developers create better experiences for their users. Along the way, he has also helped companies apply UX design principles to the process of creating content for their customers.
Jared is one of the best-known and most widely cited practitioners and educators in the UX field. We had a wide-ranging conversation on content strategy and how it manifests in user experience design.
Jason Preston & Steve Broback co-founded the Dent Conference, an annual gathering and a year-round community of innovators looking to make a dent in the universe. They quickly realized that the event was really the centerpiece of an ongoing, year-round community they had created.
Gerry McGovern helps customers complete their most important tasks when they arrive at a website. His proven process routinely results in the removal of as much as 90% of the content on a website. This requires content managers to shift their mindset from a simple production model to an ongoing customer-centric "eternal beta."
Sarah Richards created the field of content design as she revamped gov.uk's web presence. From a messy amalgam of hundreds of government websites, she created a user-focused "storefront" where UK citizens could get their most common questions answered.
Todd Bishop and his colleagues at GeekWire have strategically blended business journalism with leading-edge media business practices to create a regional tech publication with worldwide readership.
Laura Porto Stockwell has developed a strategy process that connects the dots between business goals, brand aspirations, market opportunities, and user needs. That she says, "Is where the magic happens."
Laura applies her strategic approach to both top-level digital strategies and to content strategies for her clients as the CEO of Big Thinkers Society.
Anika Anand loves engaging with her readers, not just giving them "fly-by content." In her role as a startup founder, she always asks, "What do we want people to do with what we're making?" This approach gives Anika plenty of opportunities to engage in one of her favorite activities: nerding out about content strategy.
Andrew Himes was one of the world's first digital content strategists. Working at Microsoft in the early 1990s, he helped found the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) and helped build the first content management system, dynamically generating hypertext documents from a database.
David Fried integrates content strategy throughout his branding work at the digital agency EFM. Whether he's crafting a branding strategy from the ground up or executing a campaign for an existing brand, content is always a key element.
Russell SparkmanRussell Sparkman has been doing content marketing for almost 20 years. We talked about purpose-driven content marketing, how not to commit "random acts of content," and the neuroscience of storytelling. Russell's Bio Since 2000, Russell Sparkman has been a practitioner and proponent of story-based, purpose-focused content marketing. Starting with the launch of One World Journeys as a branded content experience for Seiko Epson Corporation, he has been a content strategist, information architect, executive producer and storyteller for a range of B2B, B2C, nonprofit, and government clients and projects. Russell’s passion is creating and delivering highly shareable, purpose-focused content that is aligned with measureable goals and desired outcomes. Video Here's the video version of our conversation.
https://youtu.be/UsvX1KROzZk
Russell Sparkman has been doing content marketing for almost 20 years. We talked about purpose-driven content marketing, how not to commit "random acts of content," and the neuroscience of storytelling.
Morten Rand-Hendriksen
Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a broadly accomplished web designer and educator. He is very active in the WordPress open-source project and is known there for his strong opinions on topics like the Gutenberg project. I also learned in this interview that he was originally trained as a philosopher and is currently working on an ethical framework for web content creators.
Morten and I talked about the content strategy behind his Lynda.com content-strategy course, about the implications of Gutenberg for content strategists in the WordPress world, and about his work on web-industry ethics. Morten's Bio Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a senior staff instructor at LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com with 60+ courses published on WordPress, web standards, design and UX, and future technologies. He also teaches Interaction Design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and contributes to WordPress core and community projects.
When he’s not working you’ll find Morten playing with his son, reading philosophy and science fiction, talking to people about the internet and how it shapes our society, and wearing out his shoes on the ballroom dance floor. Video Here's the video version of our conversation.
https://youtu.be/T5yuAr_YE5s Show Notes/"Transcript" [Not an actual transcript - just my quick notes on first listen-through]
0:30 - Morten history and background - built first website in 1998 - 2:50 - impact of hyperlinking on how we access, publish, access again, etc. content - huge changes - and we'll see an perceive, understand and share content - and we'll see another dramatic 4:15 - origins of his content strategy course at Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning (which are the same thing) - get those who don't identify as content strategists to think like one - goal was to show wider scope of content strategy and help everyone understand how they fit into it - it shows up in all aspects of web development - e.g., why would back-end engineer care? - even at database level, decisions about how/where to store content have strategy implications - thinking about how end user might want to access the content can/should dictate aspects of underlying data 8:35 - sorting out data chunks from blobs - make it efficient to display - e.g. go to Google now and search for a product and Google will return shopping options (along with other info) - importance of markup so that Google can understand and index properly 10:00 - and that's a glimpse to the future - contextual information served up because devices can understand your content and its structure - future technologies (AR glasses, etc.) require same way of thinking - data needs to be split up and connected together - only output data that is necessary, in individual pieces of data, which is stored properly, and properly connected - and THAT is content strategy - "truly contextualizing your data and explaining what it is, and then figuring out which parts of that matter to which users and giving them only what matters when they need it, in a format they can use" 12:00 - process at Lynda culminated with approval of the course 12:40 - Gutenberg initiative at WordPress open-source project - "WordPress Block Editor" - used to be just "posts" and "pages" in WordPress - what Gutenberg currently says is that all of the stuff that happens in a content block - different content types - each paragraph, image, list, etc. has its own context and characteristics - but that's just tip of iceberg - can get more specific - doing content modeling exercise - figuring out pieces fit in - for each piece of content - currently done in WordPress editor 16:20 - Gutenberg Step 2 - extend block way of thinking outside of the editor - e.g. can define shareable blocks to use elsewhere - e.g. for book reviews "about author" block - can use same block in multiple places - called a "resuable block" in Gutenberg - can change reusable block and all instances will change -
Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a broadly accomplished web designer and educator. He is very active in the WordPress open-source project and is widely known there for his strong opinions on topics like the Gutenberg project.
Natasha Banta McDermott: 1990s Content Strategist
Natasha Banta McDermott began her content-strategy career in 1997 at Clement Mok's Studio Archetype. Mok, who had been the creative director at Apple in the 1980s, put content right alongside design in their clients' web projects, creating some really cool opportunities for Natasha and her content team.
Natasha and I talked about content strategy, creative collaboration, and team building in a visionary agency at the dawn of the dot-com era.
(Sorry about the scritching noise in parts of the audio. I think Natasha's mic was rubbing against her sweater. I barely noticed it during our conversation, but it's a little distracting at points in the recording. Unfortunately, it's the kind of sound that you can't really edit out in post-production :( ). Natasha's Bio Natasha Banta McDermott is a strategist with nearly 25 years’ experience in the print and online world. She helps clients explore and articulate big ideas. The bulk of her experience has been in content strategy, translating business objectives, brand strategy, and user needs into holistic content strategies that inspire, motivate, and engage. She’s a storyteller at heart, and understands that strategy and storytelling are inextricably linked.
Before becoming an independent consultant, Natasha co-founded Storyhouse Partners, a communications consulting company that helped clients define their vision and brand through clear and compelling user experiences, including content and design. She ran several hands-on client workshops, focusing on content development and strategy. She helped attendees see the bigger picture first, then worked with them to create user experiences and content that aligned with and supported the brand.
Prior to Storyhouse, Natasha was a director of content strategy at Sapient Corp., a large consulting firm, and collaborated on projects with designers, business strategists, and information architects. Natasha started her career as a writer and editor at Sterling’s Magazine Group before joining Addison Wesley Longman Publishers where she was an assistant editor and a writer.
Her client list includes Consumer Reports, EMC, Ford Motor Company, Exxon-Mobil, Visa, TravelChannel, Global Giving, PeopleSoft, Sustainable Conservation, Janus, WageWorks, and Wells Fargo. As an independent consultant, she has worked with a variety of agencies, including Razorfish, Sullivan, Huge Media, and others.
Natasha holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Skidmore College. Video Here's the video version of our conversation.
https://youtu.be/-rzq0mWpJck
Natasha Banta McDermott began her content-strategy career in 1997 at Clement Mok's Studio Archetype. Mok, who had been the creative director at Apple in the 1980s, put content right alongside design in their clients' web projects, creating some really cool opportunities for Natasha and her content team.
Natasha and I talked about content strategy, creative collaboration, and team building in a visionary agency at the dawn of the dot-com era.
Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number 13. As I prepared for this 13th episode, one scheduled guest fell ill and my back-up guest's kid got sick just as we were about to start the interview. Rather than risk the health of another guest, I recorded this quick overview of the podcast to this point.
Melanie Seibert is senior content strategist on a UX team at WillowTree, a mobile-focused agency that creates apps chatbots, websites, and other digital products for some of the world’s best-known companies. She also teaches content-strategy courses both online and in real life.
Melanie and I talked about both her work at WillowTree and her work as a content-strategy educator.
Warren Etheredge can help you find the stories you need to generate the content your customers crave. I talked with Warren about his Storyfinding method and about the art of conversation in general and interviewing in particular.
Journalism veteran Peter Herford talks about how little the management principles that underlie content strategy have changed since he began his career at CBS news in 1962.
Susan Walker uses a "30 Questions" method to test the accessibility and usability of the content they create at the Rutgers University Camden campus.
Content Strategy Interviews are hosted by Larry Swanson of Elless Media.
Content research studies reveal which content performs best, garnering social-media shares and earning in-bound links. Few experts know as much about measuring the effectiveness of content as Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting.
Eric and I talked about research that can inform your content strategy for SEO, content marketing, and social media.
Rand Fishkin talks about “the SEO as content strategist” and much more, including empathy and teamwork, “10X Content,” voice search, and his thoughts on this week’s FCC decision to roll back net neutrality.
Rand goes by the ludicrous title, Wizard of Moz. He’s founder and former CEO of SEO software startup Moz, the host of Whiteboard Friday.
Content Strategy Interviews are hosted by Larry Swanson of Elless Media.
Julie Copley is a Connections Strategist at Pop, a digital media agency in Seattle. We talked about how Pop is improving its clients' websites by being more attentive to inclusion.
Julia is a content strategist and user experience designer with 10 years' experience in connecting customers and communities with product experiences they'll love. Her expertise includes assessing product-market fit, creating and executing market positioning strategies, and building collaborative relationships with both executives and cross-functional peer teams.
Content Strategy Interviews are hosted by Larry Swanson of Elless Media.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher talks about structuring content, and - more importantly - how to help people and organizations create and manage it.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher runs Rare Union, a Philly-based content strategy and user experience consultancy. She is the author of Content Everywhere (2012, Rosenfeld Media) and the co-author, with Eric Meyer, of Design for Real Life (2016, A Book Apart). Her latest book is Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech (W.W. Norton, 2017).
Content Strategy Interviews are hosted by Larry Swanson of Elless Media.
Duane Forrester is currently VP of is VP of Industry Insights at Yext. He previously served as the lead SEO for Microsoft’s MSN and then as the webmaster outreach lead for the Bing search engine. He has written on SEO and other marketing and technology subjects for Search Engine Land and other industry publications.
http://www.yext.com/
Adam Fout is a "content sorcerer" with Blue Steele Solutions in Dallas, TX, where he develops content-marketing strategy and writes emails, blog posts, and other marketing content.
https://bluesteelesolutions.com/
https://adamfout.com/
Paula Land comes to content strategy via a career in publishing and a ten-year stint at Microsoft where she managed millions of pages on the MSDN website. She currently operates a content strategy consultancy.
Do we really need any more content? Hanson Hosein has some thoughts on this, and much more, in this premiere episode of the "Content Strategy Interviews" podcast.
Hanson Hosein was a pioneering digital storyteller as an NBC war correspondent and as a freelance news producer. He is currently the Director of the Communication Leadership program at the University of Washington in Seattle.