Content Strategy Interviews

Hinrich von Haaren 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 big, complicated projects. We talked about: his work as a content strategist at Content Design London his work on content transformation projects and how it led to his book on the subject unique stakeholder management challenges that arise in big government projects and how to manage them the preference in his projects for workshops over meetings how he and his team set intentions around, and prepare for, workshops how they measure customer satisfaction and progress toward business goals the way content strategy emerges from his content transformation work how content transformat

Adam Lawrence: Facilitation Skills for Content Designers and Strategists 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 always results in better products that address customers' actual problems. We talked about: his work with This is Service Design Doing and the Global Service Jam the "facilitator's challenge" - the tendency of people in workshops to leap to action rather than remaining curious as the actual problem at hand the need for humility and curiosity when evaluating ideas the importance of creating safe space in workshops the insight that "an early prototype is not a proposal, it's an experiment" how to manage the intention of a worksho

Karen McGrane 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 at Razorfish 25 years ago she's struck by how the team structures and business practices they adopted there are still relevant today. We talked about: her work at Autogram, the agency she founded with Jeff Eaton and Ethan Marcotte the content modeling practice at Autogram the implications for content strategy practitioners of the emergence of headless CMSs and decoupled content architectures the enduring challenges presented by PDF documents and WYSIWYG interfaces her take on the benefits for any business of having a niche, like Autogram's focus on content modeling and design systems the evolution and possible merging of content systems and design s

Keri Maijala 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. We talked about: her leadership of the content design team at LinkedIn her transition from an individual contributor (IC) role into leadership the huge differences between IC roles and management and how to structure your work to manage transitions between them how to deal with differing methods of measuring success and impact when collaborating across multiple functional areas her real-time untangling of the distinctions between leadership and management her thoughts on navigating a content-design job hunt the importance of her professional community her involvement with several content conferences the importance when you're in a leadership role of self-care for bot

Margo Stern 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. We talked about: her work as a the content design lead at Peleton and her prior roles at Google, Twitter and Facebook her knack for landing jobs, and her realization that not everyone has that ability - and how that insight led to the book idea the foundational elements for a good job search: resume polishing, how to work with recruiters, interviewing, and negotiating an offer what a good portfolio should include so that it codifies the job-search story you're telling the importance in her experience as a hiring manager of showing your process and collaboration abilities, not necessarily the outcomes of your work how to identify and address the real problems and needs of the

Vidhika Bansal 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 background in both the behavioral sciences and UX design gives her a unique toolkit for bridging the gaps between unpredictable human behavior and useful digital experiences. We talked about: her work at Intuit as a UX manager focused on content design the scope her work to apply behavioral sciences to design how understanding anxiety can help designers increase user confidence in product flows the "say-do" gap in human behavior and several ways it manifests in design work two common barriers to smooth journey flows - information overload and decision fatigue - and how to craft a "choice architecture" to address them the importance of ensuring that you're providing and gathering the right data as you help users make choices "behavioral science

Michael Andrews The emergence of design systems has created new content strategy and content management needs and opportunities, especially with the advent of headless CMSs. 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 basic content strategy lessons we've learned over the past 20 years. "You really are not going to be as good a content designer as you can be if you don't tap into the incredible body of knowledge that's been developed over the past 20 years in content strategy." We talked about: his work at Kontent.ai and his history as a UX and content practitioner the emergence of content practice in design systems, currently "more guidelines than executable processes" the problems with tightly tying content to specific uses in a design the

Paula Land 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 results of content audits. We talked about: the new edition of her book, Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis - and the significance of the addition of "analysis" to the subtitle the difference between a (quantitative) content inventory and a (qualitative) content audit the variety of circumstances that can trigger the need for a content audit how to determine the criteria that guide a content audit the up-front work that sets the stage for conducting an audit and gets commitment from the organization to support the work the importance of getting buy-in from all of

Eileen Webb 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 work that can remove obstacles to collaboration and build trust among teams. We talked about: her work at her consultancy, webmeadow, where she is Director of Strategy and Livestock (only partly a joke) the evolution of her work from backend web development to structured content and information architecture and then to content strategy her affection for working with mission-driven, progressive non-profits how curiosity drives her and has kept her in the strategy world how her technical background helps her in her strategy role how she discovered in reflecting on her work that projects in

Preston So 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 on his unique background in programming, product management, design, and content strategy. We talked about: his background at companies like Oracle, Acquia, Gatsby, and Time Inc. an orientation to immersive design the differences between how we experience web content and how we experience immersive content the two types of immersive content: embedded and environmental how the idea of locomotion fits in immersive content the unique challenges of addressing accessibility in immersive designs the relevance of disciplines like architecture and urban planning to immersive design the benefi

Kaysie Garza 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. We talked about: her work as a Content Design Lead at Hotjar and the origin story of her team the growth of their content design operation how she worked with product leadership to establish a successful content design practice her take on the relationship between UX writing and content design how her team works with the researchers at Hotjar and with the Hotjar product, which is itself a research tool how research insights help her team balance word crafting and task accomplishment her thoughts on democratizing content design and how to ensconce content guidance in documentation of design systems how her team applies behavior and other res

Rebekah Wolf 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 subject with the Design System Content Club Slack that she founded and facilitates. We talked about: the Design System Content Club community Slack that she facilitates her take on the state of the discipline of content in design systems how to get design system leaders to invest in content her content-design work on Microsoft's design system the need to educate executive sponsors of design systems the value of content how to deal with the challenges of inheriting design-system content that was created without a content designer's help the benefits of including guidance elements like deci

Sheryl Cababa 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, causality, and wholeness to help you design better experiences. We talked about: her work as Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial, a design and software development consultancy in Seattle the scope her new book, "Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers" and its intent to help designers develop a systems-thinking mindset the three key concepts in her approach to systems thinking: interconnectedness, causality, and wholeness how systems thinking and design thinking can interact and intertwine in a designer's practice how systems thinking can help you expand the purview and scope of

Debbie Levitt 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. We talked about: her work as a CX/UX consultant her definition and description of a customer journey map how to get out of your own head and into your customer's with sound research methods how agile and lean practitioners have strayed from the original customer-focused conceptions of those practices the importance of discerning whether a company actually truly cares about customer centricity pragmatic ways of connecting customer centricity to other business prerogatives how to find stakeholders in your organization who are likely to be your allies how to identify the actual customer problems that need

Jane Ruffino 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. We talked about: her work as a consultant helping content and design orgs with training and enablement her UX writing course at the Berghs School of Communication the development of the fields of UX writing and content design how she thinks about her content design practice the connections between her archaeology study and her work in media her belief that "there's no better skill than field reporting when it comes to content design" the role and importance of story how her field research insights inform her content design work the importance of understanding language ecosystems as you

Sarah O'Keefe 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. We talked about: the technical- and product-content work that she and her team do at Scriptorium the job of technical content: "to enable people to do things" the challenges of building complex content that draws on information from multiple sources how content ops helps govern and guide the process of retrieving content from multiple sources and integrating it on a page the paradox of how technical documentation can sometimes be more accurate than original designs because tech writers have documented the features that engineers actually built how revealing the cost in both time and money can help disconnection problems like these the differences i

Jonathan McFadden 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 and managers to support this important work. We talked about: his work on the "Shop" app at Shopify the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs the current round of tech layoffs the improvement in representation of diverse employees at Shopify the importance of gaining the attention of leadership to advance DEI initiatives, and how to do it how he builds inclusive and diverse teams the benefits of having a diverse design team, so that the full range of human experience is included in the design process how reaching out to universities may be a good way to cope with

Sam Bhagwat 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. We talked about: the Gatsby origin story (we recorded this just before Gatsby was acquired by Netlify - more on this below) his book, Modular: The Web's New Architecture the tech and design trends driving the adoption of modular architectures the ways that modular architectures help different kinds of businesses - merchants, publishers, and marketers the "solar system" of different classes of development tools that support modular architectures workflows and practices that support the federation and orchestration of modular systems the future of content roles in a modular landscape the benefits of thinking of con

Torrey Podmajersky 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, everything is content. We talked about: the success of her book "Strategic Writing for UX" her ongoing focus on content strategy how she grew up with the idea that "everything is content" and how she applies that insight in her content work how an empty state is content how there can be content in a layout even when there are no words displayed the evolving roles represented in digital experience design how underlying software architecture can affect content the span from globally understandable to individually personalized content the enduring importance of the role of content

Erica Jorgensen 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 engineering colleagues the usability and effectiveness of your content work. We talked about: the origins of her book in workshops she held at Microsoft how she came to being doing workshops on content research, featuring a powerful story from the health care industry the power of content research, including its ability to give content work more credence the variety of methods that you can use in content research and how to apply them the benefits of mixing quantitative and qualitative research methods how research can inform content and design-system guidance how research can bolster