Content Strategy Insights

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 practic...

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 dy...

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 pre...

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 h...

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 h...

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 pra...

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...

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 b...

Content 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 wo...

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 democ...

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. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/stephanie-lucas/

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/

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/