Content Strategy Insights

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 informat...

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...

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 th...

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 r...

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 an...

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-on...

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 experie...

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 fro...

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...

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,...

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...

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 ot...

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 acce...

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...

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...

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 t...

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...

When 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 organizat...

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 disconnect...

Content 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 la...

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/