Content Strategy Insights

Andrea Volpini creates products that help search engines and other computers find your web content. Adding semantic meaning to your content helps artificial intelligence agents and other computers understand how your information relates to other content on the web. Revealing these relationships helps both computers and the human users who rely on them find and use your content. https://ellessmedia...

Erin Golden and her colleagues have created a model that shows the evolution of the practice of content strategy. Drawing on the Kardashev scale – an astrophysics method for measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement – they rank content strategy practice along a 1-to-5 range. K1 represents the first stage, when content strategists were mostly concerned with putting words on webp...

Erin Golden and her colleagues have created a model that shows the evolution of the practice of content strategy. Drawing on the Kardashev scale – an astrophysics method for measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement – they rank content strategy practice along a 1-to-5 range. K1 represents the first stage, when content strategists were mostly concerned with putting words on webp...

Bob Kasenchak is an expert on taxonomy for web publishers. He's one of a handful of information architects who focuses on this powerful practice. A good taxonomy helps people find and navigate your content. It helps search engines index and list your content. It helps connect your content to similar content on the web. The process of building a taxonomy can help align different business units in y...

Laurah Mwirichia is a product-writing enthusiast. She loves her work and wants you to jump into this burgeoning field, too. Laurah applies her writing skills as a product writer at Square. She loves using words in her design practice there, and she enjoys her collaborations with her product and technical colleagues. She's gleaned a lot wisdom in her UX writing career and is eager to share it. http...

Carlos Evia teaches structured content authoring using DITA and similar tools at Virginia Tech. Structured authoring offers a number of benefits, most notably easy content re-use. By carefully structuring content as it goes into a repository, it can be used later in a variety of publications and applications. Structured authoring has its roots in the technical communications field. As other fields...

Michael Andrews literally wrote the book on metadata for web content (actually two books). Metadata puts the structure in structured content. It helps both humans and computers understand what your content is about and how it relates to other content. It ensures that your content is always up to date, easy to find, and able to be tailored to your customers' unique needs. In today's hyper-connected...

Regardless of your job title, if you are the word person on a design team, you are a designer first and a writer second. Scott Kubie shows you how to collaborate with your tech and design colleagues while you get the writing done. ` ` https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-kubie/

Ilarna Nche is an award-winning expert on the technical aspects of building voice applications for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung Bixby. She designs and develops voice apps for clients who want to capitalize on the branding power that voice products bring to digital content mix. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ ilarna-nche/

Designing voice conversations requires new skills and new ways of thinking about how people interact with your digital product. Rebecca Evanhoe and Diana Deibel are experts in this new approach to interaction design. Like many content strategists, they are learning on the fly. And they are constantly studying the steady stream of research in their field. They'll share their discoveries in a book,...

Hannah Kirk has great ideas about how technical writing and content strategy can support each other. She's not a typical tech writer. She loves and appreciates technical documentation and enjoys practicing it. But she has always been more interested in strategy. And she has always spent a lot of time thinking behind how content is organized. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/hannah-kirk/

Carrie Hane sees content strategy as a complex information ecosystem, not a simple stream of publications. Looking at content strategy as a system helps her give her clients a more complete picture of how content works. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/carrie-hane/

Nam-ho Park is a digital strategist who always puts people first and technology last. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/nam-ho-park/

There are huge gaps between the human needs of digital-content consumers and the constraints and requirements of the digital systems that manage it. Andy Fitzgerald shows how information architects use data, stories, and meaning to bridge these gaps and bring content to life for the human beings who need it. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/andy-fitzgerald/

Jack Molisani really knows how to put on an engaging and edifying professional conference. He founded and organizes the LavaCon technical content strategy conference, which draws hundreds of content professionals to cities like New Orleans and Portland each year. Jack has experimented over the years with virtualizing parts of his conferences, and he shares in this episode his discoveries about how...

Back in early March, when it was still safe to gather in person, we convened a panel of UX strategy experts at the ConveyUX conference in Seattle. Cora Cowles is Associate Experience Director at Huge Detroit Laura Joss is Global Director of the Design Research team at Motorola Brent Summers is Director of Marketing at Blink UX We had a broad-ranging discussion about how to balance quantitative and...

Elly Searle is a fierce advocate for UX writing. Like any UX professional, her advocacy starts with the end users of the products she works on. But Elly is probably best known for her work advocating for pay equity for her content teams. Thanks to her efforts, Elly's writers are treated the same as their design, research, and engineering counterparts. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/elly-searle/

Andrea Ames has been a content leader for more than 35 years. From her early work as a technical writer, she has gone on to guide huge content teams and to become an advisor to other content leaders. Some folks might get jaded after three and a half decades in big enterprises. Not Andrea.  Her enthusiasm for her work is always contagious and inspiring. Nowadays she focuses on helping content profe...

Yuval Keshtcher is building a community around the new field of UX writing.  He first discovered the need for UX writing as a product designer. Since then, Yuval has convened product writers in discussion forums and classes. He studies the field constantly and hosts a podcast on Writers in Tech. This fall, he'll host a UX writing conference. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/yuval-keshtcher/

Yuval Keshtcher is building a community around the new field of UX writing.  He first discovered the need for UX writing as a product designer. Since then, Yuval has convened product writers in discussion forums and classes. He studies the field constantly and hosts a podcast on Writers in Tech. This fall, he'll host a UX writing conference. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/yuval-keshtcher/

Forest Gibson and his colleagues at Pluto VR have an ambitious purpose: "to help humanity transcend physical location." Even before they formed their company, Forest and his fellow founders did deep work to align on their purpose. That clarity helps them evaluate ideas and make better decisions faster. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/forest-gibson/

Amy Balliett grounds the power of images in strong narratives. Her visual stories deliver the kind of content that humans are hard-wired to crave. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/amy-balliett/

Tamara Adlin uses the power of user personas to align teams and help them develop better products. Tamara literally co-wrote the first book on how to develop and use personas. She has subsequently developed several practices that help teams align executives and other stakeholders on how to build genuinely customer-focused products and services. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/tamara-adlin/

Andy Welfle and Michael J. Metts are on a mission to empower word people. Specifically the people who craft words as part of product-design teams. Their new book, Writing Is Designing: Words and the User Experience , shows UX content creators how to apply design principles to their writing craft. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/writing-is-designing/

Brittney Urich has been connecting content strategy to UX design from the very start of her career. As a senior user experience designer at Ogilvy's Denver office, Brittney educates both her clients and her colleagues about how content and design support each other. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/brittney-urich/