Content Strategy Insights

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 s...

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 bi...

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...

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 structure...

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/

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 d...

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...

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 r...

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...

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...

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 su...

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, ca...

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....

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. htt...

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 an...

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/...

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, ev...

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 e...

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 compan...

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 per...

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 T...

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://el...