Content Strategy Insights

Mike Atherton is well-known in the content world for his work at institutions like the BBC and Facebook and for his co-authorship of the influential book Designing Connected Content. His latest content project appears at first to be less serious.  Newsbang is a daily AI-produced satirical news show. Its content is based on real historical news but delivered by AI-created stereotypical newscasters....

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 strong...

As AI is storming into content design and operations, Elizabeth Beasley is taking a patient and deliberate approach to adopting it in her practice. Elizabeth works on security and identity products at Intuit, so the experiences she designs have to be reliable and trustworthy, hence her identification as a "risk nerd."  She has also navigated big business changes before, like the shift from cable b...

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 c...

Maaike Groenewege began her content career in technical communication. She is now a leading voice in conversation design for AI. Maaike draws on her technical writing background in her conversational AI practice, having observed that whether you're writing for humans or designing prompts for LLMs, you have to truly understand your audience and consistently provide clear and specific instructions....

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...

Rebecca Evanhoe practices, teaches, and writes about conversation design, a key UX practice that is taking on fresh importance in the age of chat-based AI applications. Since the publication of her book "Conversations with Things" (co-authored with Diana Deibel) three years ago, the tech and media worlds have fundamentally transformed, but the conversation-design principles that set the foundation...

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://elless...

Andy Crestodina has been developing high-quality content for his business customers at Orbit Media for more than 20 years. As they have incorporated AI into their workflows at the agency, Andy has discovered that the best use of these new tools is to improve the quality of their content and service offerings rather than simply doing more. https://contentandai.com/andy-crestodina/

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 c...

Markus Edgar Hormess offers this advice: "Never prompt alone." Markus was working with AI long before the current wave of excitement. He experimented with early versions of ChatGPT and quickly identified new opportunities to collaborate with both his human colleagues and his new AI coworkers. He's currently building a community - Teaming with AI - to study and share these new practices and to expl...

A few years ago, Dan Porder was teaching poetry to university students. Now he's training large language models to generate useful, usable content for user experiences. He's picked up new skills along the way, like Python programming, but much of his work still relies on well-established content and design crafts like content strategy and inclusive design.  https://contentandai.com/dan-porder/

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 d...

In her work as a content designer at Indeed.com, Rebecca Nguyen is finding new opportunities to assume a leadership role on teams working with generative AI. Rebecca feels fortunate to work with teams that recognize the value of writing and design skills. She's also finding that generative AI is the perfect place for content design to take the lead. https://contentandai.com/rebecca-nguyen/

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-mak...

May Habib is the CEO at Writer.com, a generative-AI platform that has been helping enterprises use generative AI since 2020. Her company builds its own award-winning large language models and is pioneering approaches like "headless AI" to help employees across an enterprise use AI to be more creative and productive. https://contentandai.com/may-habib/

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 f...

Laura Costantino is watching the emergence of AI in content professions from two interesting and valuable perspectives: as a content designer working on LLMs at Google and as an active participant in the social-media communities where content professionals gathers. In their work at Google, they have returned to their roots as a content strategist to manage the challenges that come with designing c...

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 obj...

At Booking.com, they've been helping travelers with their trip planning for many years.  The arrival of generative AI has given them new ways to help travelers with this business-critical task. Over the past year, Chris Cameron has applied his UX writing and content strategy skills in ways both familiar and new to help build a new AI-powered Trip Planner tool that integrates with Booking.com's tra...

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 cons...

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 k...

Education often lags behind tech trends. Not in the case of AI. And not when Lance Cummings is involved. Lance conducts academic research on AI content operations and has worked both with technical communicators and with content entrepreneurs in the creator economy. Along the way he has discovered concepts and practices around structured content that apply across prompt engineering, tech writing,...

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/

Dave Birss has had a busy 2023. Since developing his first AI course for LinkedIn Learning early in the year, he has produced five more courses and has become the learning platform's most popular AI instructor. https://contentandai.com/dave-birss/