Content Strategy Insights

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/

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/