Templates, trainings, threats: I’ve tried everything to get content from clients and colleagues sooner—and mobile hasn’t made things easier. Instead of planning pages, now we’re asking stakeholders to prioritize and manage a million bits of modular content.
So how do we keep our subject-matter experts from feeling overwhelmed, prevent carousel-obsessed executives from endless homepage arguments, and get the content we need to make design and development decisions?
The answer is in using content strategy as a means to orchestrate, not dictate.
Keynote presentation at Future of Web Design 2014 in NYC
Templates, trainings, threats: I’ve tried everything to get content from clients and colleagues sooner—and mobile hasn’t made things easier. Instead of planning pages, now we’re asking stakeholders to prioritize and manage a million bits of modular content. So how do we keep our subject-matter experts from feeling overwhelmed, prevent carousel-obsessed executives from endless homepage arguments, and get the content we need to make design and development decisions? The answer is in using content strategy as a means to orchestrate, not dictate.
Content’s a funny beast: it's both part of our web projects, and outside of them. You need to define your strategy and work with real content during the design process, and also prepare people for all the implications of your decisions: rewriting, reorganizing, archiving, migrating, and a million other tasks that take time, skill, and planning—not to mention all the stuff people will post and change after launch.
But you’re a project manager, not an everything-all-the-time manager. How can you guide all that content work that exists beyond your project’s boundaries without losing sight of your scope? In this talk, you’ll learn how to create a parallel process for content—one where the content decisions made within the design process are vetted against real-world constraints, and where PMs can rally the right people at the right time to keep content on track.
Organizations are messy places: politics thwart progress, departmental squabbles are status quo, and decision-making often takes months. This chaos makes its way right to our websites, filling them with crap users don't want, need, or sometimes even understand. We’re practicing content strategy now, so what gives? Why are we still designing around all this clutter and corporate-speak? Because strategy documents and style rules alone won’t make people actually produce content that meets users’ needs and aligns with our designs. In this talk, you’ll hear what will: embracing (okay, tolerating) content chaos, instead of anguishing over imperfections. You'll learn strategic approaches for defining meaningful content problems in your organization—and solving them one at a time.
Whether you’re talking about APIs, responsive sites, or content repositories, you’re going to need structured content. But if you want structure to really work, you have to change more than your CMS. You have to change your organization.
When I turned my web writing job into this “content strategy” thing back in 2008, I thought I’d hit the jackpot: Finally, I had the tools to solve the problems that plagued my projects. Content wasn’t left ’til last, projects weren’t delayed, concerns weren’t limited to design and development. Win, win, win.
But then some terrible someone always came along to spoil my party. I’d make a style guide; the authors would stop following it. I’d work out a content model; the designer would insist on an interface it couldn’t support. I’d go through the audit results; the client would smile, nod...and go back to business as usual. I wanted to make content meaningful. Instead, I was making documents. I was making fantasies. Sometimes, I was even making enemies.
I was overwhelmed, overworked, and disappointed—until I changed the way I saw my role. Instead of tying things up with a bow and delivering it to others’ doorsteps, I learned how to make the work theirs instead—to create strategy with them, not for them.
In this talk, I share the ways I overhauled how I work, and how that’s led to more successful projects and more satisfying client relationships.
Responsive. Adaptive. Mobile first. Cross-channel. We all want a web that's more flexible, future-friendly, and ready for unknowns. There’s only one little flaw: Our content is stuck in the past. Locked into inflexible pages and documents, our content is far from ready for today's world of apps, APIs, read-later services, and responsive sites—much less for the coming one, where the web is embedded in everything from autos to appliances.
We can't keep creating more content for each of these new devices and channels. We'd go nuts trying to manage and maintain all of it. Instead, we need content that does more for us: Content that's structured and defined so it can travel and shift while keeping its meaning and message intact. Content that's trim, focused, and clear—for mobile users and for everyone else, too. Content that matters, wherever it's being consumed.
But it's not just that our content is stuck. Truth is, our organizations and clients are stuck, too—and unless we, web professionals of all stripes, take the lead to do things differently, they won't be able to keep up. In this session, well start with revisiting our legacy content and adding the structure and metadata we'll need to make it more flexible. Then, we'll also tackle the heart of the problem: organizational cultures that are terrified of change.
What you don't know will hurt you: Designing with and for existing contentSara Wachter-Boettcher
Are you trying to make responsive design scale for a complex site? Building an app, but your organization doesn't have an API yet? If so, you've probably got legacy content—content that already exists, and that doesn't fit neatly into your new project.
What do you do? You could ignore it and end up with one of those responsive homepages that devolve into big content blobs after just one tap, or a one-off mobile site that no one can remember to maintain. You could put it off until it becomes the bane of your existence: the thing that "breaks" your design, because it's way messier than you’ve planned for. Or, you could deal with it.
Keynote presentation at Future of Web Design 2014 in NYC
Templates, trainings, threats: I’ve tried everything to get content from clients and colleagues sooner—and mobile hasn’t made things easier. Instead of planning pages, now we’re asking stakeholders to prioritize and manage a million bits of modular content. So how do we keep our subject-matter experts from feeling overwhelmed, prevent carousel-obsessed executives from endless homepage arguments, and get the content we need to make design and development decisions? The answer is in using content strategy as a means to orchestrate, not dictate.
Content’s a funny beast: it's both part of our web projects, and outside of them. You need to define your strategy and work with real content during the design process, and also prepare people for all the implications of your decisions: rewriting, reorganizing, archiving, migrating, and a million other tasks that take time, skill, and planning—not to mention all the stuff people will post and change after launch.
But you’re a project manager, not an everything-all-the-time manager. How can you guide all that content work that exists beyond your project’s boundaries without losing sight of your scope? In this talk, you’ll learn how to create a parallel process for content—one where the content decisions made within the design process are vetted against real-world constraints, and where PMs can rally the right people at the right time to keep content on track.
Organizations are messy places: politics thwart progress, departmental squabbles are status quo, and decision-making often takes months. This chaos makes its way right to our websites, filling them with crap users don't want, need, or sometimes even understand. We’re practicing content strategy now, so what gives? Why are we still designing around all this clutter and corporate-speak? Because strategy documents and style rules alone won’t make people actually produce content that meets users’ needs and aligns with our designs. In this talk, you’ll hear what will: embracing (okay, tolerating) content chaos, instead of anguishing over imperfections. You'll learn strategic approaches for defining meaningful content problems in your organization—and solving them one at a time.
Whether you’re talking about APIs, responsive sites, or content repositories, you’re going to need structured content. But if you want structure to really work, you have to change more than your CMS. You have to change your organization.
When I turned my web writing job into this “content strategy” thing back in 2008, I thought I’d hit the jackpot: Finally, I had the tools to solve the problems that plagued my projects. Content wasn’t left ’til last, projects weren’t delayed, concerns weren’t limited to design and development. Win, win, win.
But then some terrible someone always came along to spoil my party. I’d make a style guide; the authors would stop following it. I’d work out a content model; the designer would insist on an interface it couldn’t support. I’d go through the audit results; the client would smile, nod...and go back to business as usual. I wanted to make content meaningful. Instead, I was making documents. I was making fantasies. Sometimes, I was even making enemies.
I was overwhelmed, overworked, and disappointed—until I changed the way I saw my role. Instead of tying things up with a bow and delivering it to others’ doorsteps, I learned how to make the work theirs instead—to create strategy with them, not for them.
In this talk, I share the ways I overhauled how I work, and how that’s led to more successful projects and more satisfying client relationships.
Responsive. Adaptive. Mobile first. Cross-channel. We all want a web that's more flexible, future-friendly, and ready for unknowns. There’s only one little flaw: Our content is stuck in the past. Locked into inflexible pages and documents, our content is far from ready for today's world of apps, APIs, read-later services, and responsive sites—much less for the coming one, where the web is embedded in everything from autos to appliances.
We can't keep creating more content for each of these new devices and channels. We'd go nuts trying to manage and maintain all of it. Instead, we need content that does more for us: Content that's structured and defined so it can travel and shift while keeping its meaning and message intact. Content that's trim, focused, and clear—for mobile users and for everyone else, too. Content that matters, wherever it's being consumed.
But it's not just that our content is stuck. Truth is, our organizations and clients are stuck, too—and unless we, web professionals of all stripes, take the lead to do things differently, they won't be able to keep up. In this session, well start with revisiting our legacy content and adding the structure and metadata we'll need to make it more flexible. Then, we'll also tackle the heart of the problem: organizational cultures that are terrified of change.
What you don't know will hurt you: Designing with and for existing contentSara Wachter-Boettcher
Are you trying to make responsive design scale for a complex site? Building an app, but your organization doesn't have an API yet? If so, you've probably got legacy content—content that already exists, and that doesn't fit neatly into your new project.
What do you do? You could ignore it and end up with one of those responsive homepages that devolve into big content blobs after just one tap, or a one-off mobile site that no one can remember to maintain. You could put it off until it becomes the bane of your existence: the thing that "breaks" your design, because it's way messier than you’ve planned for. Or, you could deal with it.
Great content is human, refreshing, and relatable—not robotic. But the more users expect content to cross devices and platforms, the more we need to think like our robot friends.
No designer can lay out thousands of pages to make sure every possible permutation of a large responsive site looks right. No Readability editor can review every article someone saves and decide which elements are important. No magical elf can add cross-reference links to every deep layer of content.
Instead, we must rely on systems that automatically determine how content should be assembled, rendered, formatted, and connected. And the more we understand how these systems work, the better we can put them to work at ensuring our content stays lively and lovable, wherever it goes.
Optimizing Content Visibility (St. Louis WordCamp)Teresa Lane
If you enter content in a WordPress site and no one can find it, does it make an impact? Find out how to increase the visibility of the content in your WordPress site.
Designing for the web can be exhausting. Between arguing over which department gets to be on the homepage and explaining why a 47-page PDF won't work online, it's amazing we ever get anything designed at all. But it doesn't have to be that way.
By learning more about content—and how to talk about it, plan for it, and deal with it online—you’ll stop going round and round with the same endless conversations, and start designing with focus, clarity, and substance instead.
Organizations are messy places: politics thwart progress, departmental squabbles are status quo, and decision-making often takes months. This chaos makes its way right to our websites, filling them with crap users don't want, need, or sometimes even understand. We’re practicing content strategy now, so what gives? Why are we still designing around all this clutter and corporate-speak? Because strategy documents and style rules alone won’t make people actually produce content that meets users’ needs and aligns with our designs. In this talk, you’ll hear what will: embracing (okay, tolerating) content chaos, instead of anguishing over imperfections. You'll learn strategic approaches for defining meaningful content problems in your organisation—and solving them one at a time.
6 essential skills required to be a successful digital nomadChris Schwarz
Being a digital nomad takes a certain type of person that has obtained a unique skill set over a long period of time. From Rapid Skill Building to being a communicator here are my 6.
Thawing the Frozen Middle: The role of Managers in organisations using ScrumEm Campbell-Pretty
Many enterprise Agile adoptions begin with a CIO on a stage announcing a Call to Agility. Coaches are engaged, teams respond enthusiastically and the executives eagerly await the promised benefits. When reality hits and things aren’t changing fast enough, the finger pointing starts, and more often than not the frozen middle are caught in the crossfire.
To add insult to injury, when an organisation introduces Scrum, middle management is often left wondering what their role is and how can they contribute? Many Agilists have suggested we should get rid of them. In my view, you need to embrace them as they do have a role to play, and an important one at that.
In this session, we will explore techniques for harnessing the energy of managers at any level: frozen or otherwise! We will help them accelerate their journey towards becoming agile leaders.
The presentation was given at Scrum Australia on 29th April 20166.
How can we harness the energy of Middle Management (aka the Frozen Middle) to lead, rather than hinder, an agile transition?
Learning Objectives:
Attendees will be able to:
use empathy mapping to put themselves in the shoes of middle
management
appreciate that middle managers can feel trapped in an organization
undergoing an agile transformation understand the
support middle managers in understanding their role in agile world
apply new techniques to educating middle management on lean and agile
help middle managers "learn to see"
inspire middle managers to change
appreciate that middle managers are people too
Presented at the Global Scrum Gathering® Orlando 2016
I gave a talk at the Art Institute of Washington DC's "Pizza With the Pros" event to a group of Web Design and other media art students. This presentation was geared towards this group of students, ranging from Freshmen to Seniors, with the goal of delivering some tips to help them get ahead in the world of Web Design.
Presentation given at ITSSM.com's software dev best practices workshop. Focus on risks of SD and how Agile best addresses them, followed by instructions for learning game to teach Scrum.
This is a talk I gave in Sub Saharan Africa trip with Google and other Google Developer Experts at the end of September 2016.
https://events.withgoogle.com/launchpad-build-ssa/
Delivered 2016/09/26 - Nairobi, Kenya
Delivered 2016/09/27 - Nairobi, Kenya
Delivered 2016/09/29 - Cape Town, South Africa
Introduction to Email Marketing by Alexander ZagoumenovAlex Zagoumenov
Why should you use email marketing to build loyalty with your partners, clients, vendors? What are the main ingredients in an email marketing campaign? How to play by the rules: CAN-SPAM key points. Alex presented at the City of Calgary's Youth Employment Centre.
Getting Flexible: Working Content into Responsive Design—MIMA SummitSara Wachter-Boettcher
Responsive design is about more than canvases and code. It’s about adopting a flexible mindset—and that means rethinking our content workflow, too. To create sites that keep meaning intact as they shift and reshape to fit smartphones and tablets, you need to know which messages are critical to meeting both business goals and users’ needs and how content elements should work together to communicate them. Content strategy can answer these questions—if you incorporate it into your project at the right time and place.
(Presented in the Digital Workflow track at the 2012 Minneapolis Interactive Marketing Association Summit)
Maps are more than just diagrams of the route from A to B – to draw one is to bring together the whole view of our surrounding world so that we can gain a better understanding of it. Even a single, simple example has the ability to delight, unsettle and reveal truths. In politically-charged environments an objective visual map can reinforce, influence or challenge held perceptions and beliefs, making them a vital tool in designing pliable, people-focused content systems that are fit for purpose. Their proactive and reactive qualities force ourselves and others to see things as they really are; to contemplate the relationship between them and how they vary together.
Presented at UX Scotland 2014 in Edinburgh on 19th June 2014.
Great content is human, refreshing, and relatable—not robotic. But the more users expect content to cross devices and platforms, the more we need to think like our robot friends.
No designer can lay out thousands of pages to make sure every possible permutation of a large responsive site looks right. No Readability editor can review every article someone saves and decide which elements are important. No magical elf can add cross-reference links to every deep layer of content.
Instead, we must rely on systems that automatically determine how content should be assembled, rendered, formatted, and connected. And the more we understand how these systems work, the better we can put them to work at ensuring our content stays lively and lovable, wherever it goes.
Optimizing Content Visibility (St. Louis WordCamp)Teresa Lane
If you enter content in a WordPress site and no one can find it, does it make an impact? Find out how to increase the visibility of the content in your WordPress site.
Designing for the web can be exhausting. Between arguing over which department gets to be on the homepage and explaining why a 47-page PDF won't work online, it's amazing we ever get anything designed at all. But it doesn't have to be that way.
By learning more about content—and how to talk about it, plan for it, and deal with it online—you’ll stop going round and round with the same endless conversations, and start designing with focus, clarity, and substance instead.
Organizations are messy places: politics thwart progress, departmental squabbles are status quo, and decision-making often takes months. This chaos makes its way right to our websites, filling them with crap users don't want, need, or sometimes even understand. We’re practicing content strategy now, so what gives? Why are we still designing around all this clutter and corporate-speak? Because strategy documents and style rules alone won’t make people actually produce content that meets users’ needs and aligns with our designs. In this talk, you’ll hear what will: embracing (okay, tolerating) content chaos, instead of anguishing over imperfections. You'll learn strategic approaches for defining meaningful content problems in your organisation—and solving them one at a time.
6 essential skills required to be a successful digital nomadChris Schwarz
Being a digital nomad takes a certain type of person that has obtained a unique skill set over a long period of time. From Rapid Skill Building to being a communicator here are my 6.
Thawing the Frozen Middle: The role of Managers in organisations using ScrumEm Campbell-Pretty
Many enterprise Agile adoptions begin with a CIO on a stage announcing a Call to Agility. Coaches are engaged, teams respond enthusiastically and the executives eagerly await the promised benefits. When reality hits and things aren’t changing fast enough, the finger pointing starts, and more often than not the frozen middle are caught in the crossfire.
To add insult to injury, when an organisation introduces Scrum, middle management is often left wondering what their role is and how can they contribute? Many Agilists have suggested we should get rid of them. In my view, you need to embrace them as they do have a role to play, and an important one at that.
In this session, we will explore techniques for harnessing the energy of managers at any level: frozen or otherwise! We will help them accelerate their journey towards becoming agile leaders.
The presentation was given at Scrum Australia on 29th April 20166.
How can we harness the energy of Middle Management (aka the Frozen Middle) to lead, rather than hinder, an agile transition?
Learning Objectives:
Attendees will be able to:
use empathy mapping to put themselves in the shoes of middle
management
appreciate that middle managers can feel trapped in an organization
undergoing an agile transformation understand the
support middle managers in understanding their role in agile world
apply new techniques to educating middle management on lean and agile
help middle managers "learn to see"
inspire middle managers to change
appreciate that middle managers are people too
Presented at the Global Scrum Gathering® Orlando 2016
I gave a talk at the Art Institute of Washington DC's "Pizza With the Pros" event to a group of Web Design and other media art students. This presentation was geared towards this group of students, ranging from Freshmen to Seniors, with the goal of delivering some tips to help them get ahead in the world of Web Design.
Presentation given at ITSSM.com's software dev best practices workshop. Focus on risks of SD and how Agile best addresses them, followed by instructions for learning game to teach Scrum.
This is a talk I gave in Sub Saharan Africa trip with Google and other Google Developer Experts at the end of September 2016.
https://events.withgoogle.com/launchpad-build-ssa/
Delivered 2016/09/26 - Nairobi, Kenya
Delivered 2016/09/27 - Nairobi, Kenya
Delivered 2016/09/29 - Cape Town, South Africa
Introduction to Email Marketing by Alexander ZagoumenovAlex Zagoumenov
Why should you use email marketing to build loyalty with your partners, clients, vendors? What are the main ingredients in an email marketing campaign? How to play by the rules: CAN-SPAM key points. Alex presented at the City of Calgary's Youth Employment Centre.
Getting Flexible: Working Content into Responsive Design—MIMA SummitSara Wachter-Boettcher
Responsive design is about more than canvases and code. It’s about adopting a flexible mindset—and that means rethinking our content workflow, too. To create sites that keep meaning intact as they shift and reshape to fit smartphones and tablets, you need to know which messages are critical to meeting both business goals and users’ needs and how content elements should work together to communicate them. Content strategy can answer these questions—if you incorporate it into your project at the right time and place.
(Presented in the Digital Workflow track at the 2012 Minneapolis Interactive Marketing Association Summit)
Maps are more than just diagrams of the route from A to B – to draw one is to bring together the whole view of our surrounding world so that we can gain a better understanding of it. Even a single, simple example has the ability to delight, unsettle and reveal truths. In politically-charged environments an objective visual map can reinforce, influence or challenge held perceptions and beliefs, making them a vital tool in designing pliable, people-focused content systems that are fit for purpose. Their proactive and reactive qualities force ourselves and others to see things as they really are; to contemplate the relationship between them and how they vary together.
Presented at UX Scotland 2014 in Edinburgh on 19th June 2014.
Prepare now for the next disruption! Future friendly content is stored, structured, and connected for people and computers outside of any user interface. We’ll explore how to create content-first designs that can restructure, reuse, and remix content, making it easier to find, explore, and share.
Companion article available:https://medium.com/@carriehd/designing-future-friendly-content-modeling-structure-for-every-user-interface-7737c3952edd
Journey Mapping for Damn Good Digital Design - PHX Digital Summit 2015Rebekah Baggs
Designing digital experiences that delight our users and meet our organizational objectives isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible. User journeys can help. Understanding our users context is critical to the success of every app or responsive website. But more often than not, we jump right into discussing functionality and technical requirements without ever stopping to consider who our users are and what they need.
While many of us seek out shiny new tools to prototype products, mapping the users’s journey is still the most reliable tool we can use to understand context and design mobile experiences that matter.
In this talk I cover:
- What journey mapping entails and why it is an essential tool for designing effective mobile experiences
- Practical tools and exercises you can use to understand user context and consider those insights in your app or responsive design
- Techniques for mapping user journeys with your team and applying what you've learned to build better user flows, features, interactions and interfaces
Content & Design: How a Lean team rebuilt BNZ's websiteMichelle Anderson
My CSForum 2016 talk on how good things happen when design and content people work together - and even better things can happen when you throw Lean UX into the mix.
As content has become an ubiquitous part of our lives, content strategy has evolved from a modest practice into a global discipline that reaches across existing areas of digital expertise and shapes new opportunities for content specialists. Content design is one such opportunity.
Informed by content strategy, content design has emerged in recent years thanks to the brilliant work of pioneers like the GDS Team at GOV.UK. Where content strategy excels (pun intended) at the meticulous work of enterprise site redesigns and the like, content design is ideal for the iterative sprints often associated with product design.
At its core, content design empowers creative thinkers and systematic doers who understand the nature of interactive content to partner with designers and technologists in order to build amazing digital products that meet the needs of real people. Join Content Director Hawk Thompson to find out how the multidisciplinary design team at Chaotic Moon Studios has incorporated content design into its agile-informed process for product engagements and hear how this emergent discipline is shaping the future of digital content in bold new ways.
What terms and concepts do you use to deliver your product experience? What organizational structures do you use to present those terms and concepts? To what degree is the meaning you intend through those choices clear to the person for which you intended it? These are the questions to ask yourself when attempting to make a product make sense to others.
Information Architecture is the practice of making sense of meaning through the consideration of ontology, taxonomy and choreography. In this three hour workshop we will discuss and work through what it means to think about affecting the information architecture of a product.
Content types – the patterns of content in an organization's digital presence – are an essential building block for any effective redesign. However, content strategists, user experience designers, and visual designers have very different understandings of what "content type" means. By coming to a common understanding, these experts can work together to craft a smart, sustainable online presence. There are several purposes for identifying the types of content on a website:
- Identifying content models, which enable better presentation on multiple devices and power dynamically created collections
- Enabling rules for content creation, review, promotion, and expiration
- Making it easier for content creators to choose effective metadata
Technologists and content management systems tend to define content types very broadly, considering them equivalent to templates. Visual designers und user experience designers often define content types in terms of various elements and their size and relation to one another. Content strategists think about what the content is about, what its business rules need to be, and how it is surfaced.
Bringing these perspectives together ensures the most robust definition, conception, and execution of content types. This presentation looks at lots of examples of content types and identifies how they would best work in different environments and for different purposes.
We all want interfaces that feel human—where the content is friendly and everything flows right along. But being human isn’t just about being breezy.
Every user who interacts with your site comes there with personal histories—with pain and problems, with past traumas or present crises. How can we take our users’ vulnerabilities, triggers, and touchy subjects into account when we don’t even know what they are? What would it mean to optimize not just for seamlessness, but for kindness? This talk discusses how clear intentions and compassionate communication can strengthen everything from form questions to headlines to site structures.
Responsive. Adaptive. Mobile first. Cross-channel. We all want a web that’s more flexible, future-friendly, and ready for unknowns. There’s only one little flaw: our content is stuck in the past. Locked into inflexible pages and documents, our content is far from ready for today’s world of apps, APIs, read-later services, and responsive sites—much less for the coming one, where the web is embedded in everything from autos to appliances.
We can’t keep creating more content for each of these new devices and channels. We’d go nuts trying to manage and maintain all of it. Instead, we need content that does more for us: Content that can travel and shift while keeping its meaning and message intact. Content that’s trim, focused, and clear—for mobile users and for everyone else, too. Content that matters, wherever it’s being consumed.
Defining the content strategy is the easy part. But how are you actually going to make it work? Not just today, but tomorrow, and next year, and the year after that? How can you continually evolve and mature your internal content practices, create rock-star content teams, and produce better content faster? Sound magical? Nope, it’s just good content governance.
My deck from the opening keynote of HighEdWeb Michigan 2014. More info and print-ready handout available at kubie.co/vmt
This talk introduced VMT, a framework for articulating and/or debugging the purpose behind your products and initiatives. The things we believe, the things we do, and the people we impact shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we speak.
The tools and teachings of content strategy are well-suited to facilitating understanding within product teams. Clarity in each of these areas will empower designers, writers, and business leaders to do their best work.
Introductory workshop to content modelling and personalisation. Learn how to design content for deliver contextually relevant, personalised experiences.
Sine Qua Non: Core Values and Content StrategyJonathon Colman
Core values aren't created; they’re found. They're not selected; they’re discovered. And they’re not your mission or vision; they're what support them. But for most of our organizations or clients, content and design are not—and never will be—core values. Rather, they’re simply just commodities.
Our content strategy work so often focuses on tactics, techniques, and tools that when it comes to creating a core content strategy, we find ourselves blocked. Never for the lack of goals or objectives, but for the values that help us create authentic experiences in support of them. Our values help us find our voice and delight our audience.
Using real-world examples, we’ll walk through the hard questions that you need to ask in order to discover your organization's core values and build them into your content and design.
In this presentation, you'll learn:
- What are core values (and what aren't!)
- How to discover your organization's core values and build them into your brand
- How to align your content with your core values to build lasting results
Based on the works of Jim Collins, Jerry Porras, Patrick Lencioni, and several others. Featuring examples from NatureBridge, Etsy, Moz, Pack, and Facebook. Originally presented at the Content Strategy Forum #csforum13 in Helsinki, Finland on September 12, 2013.
You can learn more about Jonathon Colman at http://www.jonathoncolman.org/ and follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jcolman
Also see 200+ free Content Strategy resources at http://www.jonathoncolman.org/2013/02/04/content-strategy-resources/
A keynote on aliens, nuclear waste, wicked problems, and the one big thing that unites everyone working in user experience: AMBIGUITY.
See a video and the full transcript of this keynote at http://www.jonathoncolman.org/2015/05/21/wicked-ambiguity/
How do you solve the world’s hardest problems? And how do you respond if they’re unsolvable? As user experience professionals, we're focused on people who live and work in the here and now. We dive into research, define the problem, break down silos, and build value by focusing on intent.
But how does our UX work change when a project lasts not for one year, or even 10 years, but for 10,000 years or more? Enter the “Wicked Problem,” or situations with so much ambiguity, complexity, and interdependencies that—by definition—they can’t be solved.
Using real-world examples from NASA’s Voyager program, the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, and other long-term UX efforts, we’ll talk about the challenges of creating solutions for people whom we’ll never know in our lifetimes. The ways we grapple with ambiguity give us a new perspective on our work and on what it means to build experiences that last.
Originally presented as the opening keynote for the 2014 Society for Technical Communication Summit in Phoenix, Arizona. Redeveloped as the opening keynote for the 2015 Confab Central conference and presented on May 21, 2015 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Your organization produces a lot of content, but does it have purpose? Does it help meet strategic goals and encourage member engagement? In this in-depth workshop, learn how to create a content strategy that works. Through small group exercises and real world examples, you will learn to break down content strategy into its parts, build from the information you may already have, and incorporate tactics and processes to make your digital communications successful. Attendees will get access to a workbook of ideas and learn tactics to use in your organization.
Content strategy workshop at the 2015 ASAE Tech Conference, given with Dina Lewis, CAE, president, Distilled Logic LLC and Carrie Hane Dennison, content and digital strategist
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If you’re working on a large project with a lot of hands in the CSS pot, then your CSS may be doomed to code bloat failure. Scalable and modular CSS architectures and approaches are the new hotness and rightfully so. They provide sanity, predictably and scalability in a potentially crazy coding world. This session will give an overview of some the most popular approaches, including OOCSS, SMACSS, CSS for Grownups, and DRY CSS as well as discussing some general principles for keeping your CSS clean, optimized, and easy to maintain.
If you're working on a large project with a lot of hands in the CSS pot, then your CSS may be doomed to code bloat failure. Scalable and modular CSS architectures and approaches are the new hotness and rightfully so. They provide sanity, predictably and scalability in a potentially crazy coding world. This session will give an overview of some the most popular approaches, including OOCSS, SMACSS, CSS for Grownups, and DRY CSS as well as discussing some general principles for keeping your CSS clean, optimized, and easy to maintain. Presented at FITC Amsterdam 2013
User Love and how to get it through good documentationPaulWay
It is a well-acknowledged fact that users love good documentation. It is a less well known fact that developers love good documentation too. This talk, aimed at developers, shows why you should love good documentation, and proves that it's not difficult to write. It also explains what tools you should use and a couple of points on how to make documentation that users will want to help write.
Slides from my talk at Cambridge Usability Group on the 12th of May 2014
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/designing-better-ux-deliverables-tickets-11542298325
Needing to produce some kind of deliverables throughout a project is inevitable: it might be user research reports to inform senior stakeholder; usability test results to communicate to developers; sketches and wireframes to pass on to web designers.
Just as we make the products and services we design easy to use, the UX of UX is about communicating your thinking in a way that ensures that what you've defined is easy to understand for the reader. It's about adapting the work you do to the project in question and finding the right balance of making people want to look through your work whilst not spending unnecessary time on making it pretty.
The Importance of Storytelling in Web Design, WordCamp Miami 2013Denise Jacobs
What if we strengthened our creations for the web by building them upon a foundation of Story? Let's explore the growing importance of storytelling in web design, how to communicate Story through all aspects of a website from content, to design, to ux; and how to apply key components of great storytelling in literature to the medium of the web.
Best Practice For UX Deliverables - Eventhandler, London, 05 March 2014Anna Dahlström
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https://school.uxfika.co/p/best-practice-for-ux-deliverables/?product_id=325265&coupon_code=SLIDESHARE
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Slides from my 'Best practice for UX deliverables' workshop that I ran for Eventhandler in London on the 05th of March 2014.
http://www.eventhandler.co.uk/events/uxnightclass-uxdeliverables3
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Please note that for copyright reasons & client privacy the examples in this presentation are slightly different than from the workshop. The examples included are for reference only in terms of what I talked through in the 'Good examples' section.
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ABSTRACT
Whilst the work we do is not meant to be hanged on a wall for people to admire, nor is meant to be put in a drawer and forgotten about. Just as we make the products and services we design easy to use, the UX of UX is about communicating your thinking in a way that ensures that what you've defined is easy to understand for the reader. It's about adapting the work you do to the project in question and finding the right balance of making people want to look through your work whilst not spending unnecessary time on making it pretty.
Who is it for?
This workshop is suitable for anyone starting out in UX, or who's worked with it for a while but is looking to improve the way they present their work.
What you'll learn
In this hands on workshop we'll walk through real life examples of why the UX of UX deliverables matter. We'll cover how who the reader is effects the way we should present our work, both on paper and verbally, and how to ensure that the work you do adds value. Coming out of the workshop you'll have practical examples and hands on experience with:
// How to adapt and sell your UX deliverable to the reader (from clients, your team, in house and outsourced developers)
// Guiding principles for creating good UX deliverables (both low and high fidelity)
// Best practice for presentations, personas, user journeys, flows, sitemaps, wireframes and other documents
// Simple, low effort but big impact tools for improving the visual presentation of your UX deliverables
All Together Now: Content & Collaboration in a Responsive RedesignSara Wachter-Boettcher
Harvard College knew it was time for a website overhaul: While prospective students who visited campus raved about the welcoming staff, those who only used the website said Harvard felt distant and formal. Users had to navigate three different but often near-duplicate websites—the College, Admissions, and Financial Aid—to get critical information. Amid it all, mobile visits were soaring—and the College needed to support those users equally.
The answer? A single, responsive website that unified content from all three groups, brought the Harvard College experience to life online, and better communicated information about key topics like financial aid. But getting there took more than editorial revisions and layout decisions. It took changing how each department saw its content, transforming it from a departmental output into a student-centric resource.
Hear how web design studio Happy Cog, Harvard, and a content strategist partnered to transform multiple websites into a single, student-centered system, and learn how leading with content can:
- Help diverse departments embrace a single vision and shared roadmap
- Keep projects on time and on budget
- Ensure responsive design systems and CMS specs actually fit your content’s needs
Content problems. We all have them: Your clients can't get you copy on time. Marketing's massive paragraphs break your tidy designs. Or maybe your site's overflowing with stuff, and no one's responsible for keeping track of where things are and why they're there.
Content strategy to the rescue, right? Well, sorta.
It'd be nice if a few well-placed deliverables could solve the problem. But editorial plans and style guides won't change things. Neither will structured content and a custom CMS. We can't mastermind solutions and expect them to stick in organizations full of complex people, histories, and challenges.
When it comes to improving content, it's not about fixing. It's about facilitating—helping organizations adapt, so their content can adapt with them. If you're used to designing and building, this is a big shift. This talk will help you get started.
Mobile creates a million challenges, but it's also been a boon for content specialists. It's shown how much content matters—and how hard it is to deal with changing devices and unpredictable screen sizes without considering key messages and communication priorities first. Suddenly, content strategists are in demand.
But we're not here to be the new hotness—the must-have tech hire of the moment. We're here to make an impact on our users' experiences and our organizations' success. We're here to solve problems.
Those problems won't be fixed with audit spreadsheets and editorial plans alone, though. They require a new set of skills: not just doing, but educating, collaborating, and facilitating change. By taking advantage of this moment—our moment—we can do more than fix today's mobile issues. We can give our digital initiatives focus, our projects purpose, and our organizations the ability to adapt.
What you don't know will hurt you: designing with and for existing contentSara Wachter-Boettcher
Are you trying to make responsive design scale for a complex site? Building an app, but your organization doesn't have an API yet? If so, you've probably got legacy content—content that already exists, and that doesn't fit neatly into your new project.
What do you do? You could ignore it and end up with one of those responsive homepages that devolve into big content blobs after just one tap, or a one-off mobile site that no one can remember to maintain. You could put it off until it becomes the bane of your existence: the thing that "breaks" your design, because it's way messier than you’ve planned for.
Or, you could deal with it. If you take the time to make existing content work for you—by understanding what you've got, identifying patterns and relationships in its structure, and cutting the cruft along the way—you'll end up with a system that will not just support your content, but _enhance_ its meaning, message, and power.
More than ever, content needs to cross boundaries—be they device or country, channel or language—to keep up with the pace of organizations, users, and the web at large. But fixed firmly to inflexible pages, today’s content is often stuck, only accessible and understandable from a single location, in a single layout, using a single language. When pushed and pulled by everything from responsive designs and mobile sites to APIs, read-later apps, and internationalization efforts, it simply can’t keep up. There’s a better way: a way to stop creating more content for every new device or channel, and to start creating content that does more. It all starts with structure.
Responsive. Adaptive. Mobile first. Cross-channel. We all want a future that’s flexible, fluid, and unfixed from the desktop, right?
Great. Then it’s time to get to the core of the matter: the content.
Fixed firmly to inflexible pages, today’s content is too often stuck in meaningless blobs—blobs that break under the weight of responsive designs, mobile sites, and cross-channel distribution.
Which elements are most important? What’s primary and what’s corollary? What’s related or interdependent? What stays, what goes, and what gets truncated on small screens?
When we can answer these questions—and structure our content accordingly—we’ll replace those messy blobs with content that bends, shifting and reshaping to fit varied displays and devices.
Responsive. Adaptive. Mobile first. Cross-channel. Everywhere you turn, web workers are chattering about a more flexible future. There’s only one little flaw: our content’s not ready for the party. Fixed firmly to inflexible pages, today’s content is stuck in meaningless blobs that break long before they bend.
We can't keep creating more content for every new device and channel. Instead, we need content that does more for us—content that can travel and shift with its meaning and message intact.
Why should agency account executives, managers, planners and the like care about content? Here's the business case for making content strategy a part of your agency's offerings.
How to Run Landing Page Tests On and Off Paid Social PlatformsVWO
Join us for an exclusive webinar featuring Mariate, Alexandra and Nima where we will unveil a comprehensive blueprint for crafting a successful paid media strategy focused on landing page testing.With escalating costs in paid advertising, understanding how to maximize each visitor’s experience is crucial for retention and conversion.
This session will dive into the methodologies for executing and analyzing landing page tests within paid social channels, offering a blend of theoretical knowledge and practical insights.
The Pearmill team will guide you through the nuances of setting up and managing landing page experiments on paid social platforms. You will learn about the critical rules to follow, the structure of effective tests, optimal conversion duration and budget allocation.
The session will also cover data analysis techniques and criteria for graduating landing pages.
In the second part of the webinar, Pearmill will explore the use of A/B testing platforms. Discover common pitfalls to avoid in A/B testing and gain insights into analyzing A/B tests results effectively.
Digital marketing is the art and science of promoting products or services using digital channels to reach and engage with potential customers. It encompasses a wide range of online tactics and strategies aimed at increasing brand visibility, driving website traffic, generating leads, and ultimately, converting those leads into customers.
https://nidmindia.com/
Mastering Local SEO for Service Businesses in the AI Era is tailored specifically for local service providers like plumbers, dentists, and others seeking to dominate their local search landscape. This session delves into leveraging AI advancements to enhance your online visibility and search rankings through the Content Factory model, designed for creating high-impact, SEO-driven content. Discover the Dollar-a-Day advertising strategy, a cost-effective approach to boost your local SEO efforts and attract more customers with minimal investment. Gain practical insights on optimizing your online presence to meet the specific needs of local service seekers, ensuring your business not only appears but stands out in local searches. This concise, action-oriented workshop is your roadmap to navigating the complexities of digital marketing in the AI age, driving more leads, conversions, and ultimately, success for your local service business.
Key Takeaways:
Embrace AI for Local SEO: Learn to harness the power of AI technologies to optimize your website and content for local search. Understand the pivotal role AI plays in analyzing search trends and consumer behavior, enabling you to tailor your SEO strategies to meet the specific demands of your target local audience. Leverage the Content Factory Model: Discover the step-by-step process of creating SEO-optimized content at scale. This approach ensures a steady stream of high-quality content that engages local customers and boosts your search rankings. Get an action guide on implementing this model, complete with templates and scheduling strategies to maintain a consistent online presence. Maximize ROI with Dollar-a-Day Advertising: Dive into the cost-effective Dollar-a-Day advertising strategy that amplifies your visibility in local searches without breaking the bank. Learn how to strategically allocate your budget across platforms to target potential local customers effectively. The session includes an action guide on setting up, monitoring, and optimizing your ad campaigns to ensure maximum impact with minimal investment.
The digital marketing industry is changing faster than ever and those who don’t adapt with the times are losing market share. Where should marketers be focusing their efforts? What strategies are the experts seeing get the best results? Get up-to-speed with the latest industry insights, trends and predictions for the future in this panel discussion with some leading digital marketing experts.
For too many years marketing and sales have operated in silos...while in some forward thinking companies, the two organizations work together to drive new opportunity development and revenue. This session will explore the lessons learned in that beautiful dance that can occur when marketing and sales work together...to drive new opportunity development, account expansion and customer satisfaction.
No, this is not a conversation about MQLs and SQLs. Instead we will focus on a framework that allows the two organizations to drive company success together.
It's another new era of digital and marketers are faced with making big bets on their digital strategy. If you are looking at modernizing your tech stack to support your digital evolution, there are a few can't miss (often overlooked) areas that should be part of every conversation. We'll cover setting your vision, avoiding siloes, adding a democratized approach to data strategy, localization, creating critical governance requirements and more. Attendees will walk away with actions they can take into initiatives they are running today and consider for the future.
Search Engine Marketing - Competitor and Keyword researchETMARK ACADEMY
Over 2 Trillion searches are made per day in Google search, which means there are more than 2 Trillion visits happening across the websites of the world wide web.
People search various questions, phrases or words. But some words and phrases are searched
more often than others.
For example, the words, ‘running shoes’ are searched more often than ‘best road running
shoes for men’
These words or phrases which people use to search on Google are called Keywords.
Some keywords are searched more often than others. Number of times a keyword is searched
for in a month is called keyword volume.
Some keywords have more relevant results than others. For the phrase “running shoes” we
get more than 80M relevant results, whereas for “best road running shoes for men” we get
only 8.
The former keyword ‘running shoes’ has way more competition from popular websites to
new and small blogs, whereas the latter keyword doesn’t have that much competition. This
search competition for a keyword is called search difficulty of a keyword or keyword
difficulty.
In other words, if the keyword difficulty is ‘low’ or ‘easy’, there won’t be any competition
and if you target such keywords on your site, you can easily rank on the front page of Google.
Some keywords are searched for, just to know or to learn some information about something,
that’s their search intention. For example, “What shoe size should I choose?” or “How to pick
the right shoe size?”
These keywords which are searched just to know about stuff are called informational
keywords. Typically people who are searching this type of keywords are top of a Conversion
funnel.
Conversion funnel is the journey that search visitors go through on their way to an email
subscription or a premium subscription to the services you offer or a purchase of products
you sell or recommend using your referral link.
For some buyers, research is the most important part when they have to buy a product.
Depending on that, their journey either widens or narrows down. These types of buyers are
Researchers and they spend more time with informational keywords.
Conversion is the action you want from your search visitors. Number of conversions that you
get for every 100 search visitors is called Conversion rate.
People who are at different stages of a conversion funnel use different types of keywords.
Most small businesses struggle to see marketing results. In this session, we will eliminate any confusion about what to do next, solving your marketing problems so your business can thrive. You’ll learn how to create a foundational marketing OS (operating system) based on neuroscience and backed by real-world results. You’ll be taught how to develop deep customer connections, and how to have your CRM dynamically segment and sell at any stage in the customer’s journey. By the end of the session, you’ll remove confusion and chaos and replace it with clarity and confidence for long-term marketing success.
Key Takeaways:
• Uncover the power of a foundational marketing system that dynamically communicates with prospects and customers on autopilot.
• Harness neuroscience and Tribal Alignment to transform your communication strategies, turning potential clients into fans and those fans into loyal customers.
• Discover the art of automated segmentation, pinpointing your most lucrative customers and identifying the optimal moments for successful conversions.
• Streamline your business with a content production plan that eliminates guesswork, wasted time, and money.
In this presentation, Danny Leibrandt explains the impact of AI on SEO and what Google has been doing about it. Learn how to take your SEO game to the next level and win over Google with his new strategy anyone can use. Get actionable steps to rank your name, your business, and your clients on Google - the right way.
Key Takeaways:
1. Real content is king
2. Find ways to show EEAT
3. Repurpose across all platforms
SEO as the Backbone of Digital MarketingFelipe Bazon
In this talk Felipe Bazon will share how him and his team at Hedgehog Digital share our journey of making C-Levels alike, specially CMOS realize that SEO is the backbone of digital marketing by showing how SEO can contribute to brand awareness, reputation and authority and above all how to use SEO to create more robust global marketing strategies.
Short video marketing has sweeped the nation and is the fastest way to build an online brand on social media in 2024. In this session you will learn:- What is short video marketing- Which platforms work best for your business- Content strategies that are on brand for your business- How to sell organically without paying for ads.
Unleash the power of UK SEO with Brand Highlighters! Our guide delves into the unique search landscape of Britain, equipping you with targeted strategies to dominate UK search engine results. Discover local SEO tactics, keyword magic for UK audiences, and mobile optimization secrets. Get your website seen by the right people and propel your brand to the top of UK searches.
To learn more: https://brandhighlighters.co.uk/blog/top-seo-agencies-uk/
Digital Commerce Lecture for Advanced Digital & Social Media Strategy at UCLA...Valters Lauzums
E-commerce in 2024 is characterized by a dynamic blend of opportunities and significant challenges. Supply chain disruptions and inventory shortages are critical issues, leading to increased shipping delays and rising costs, which impact timely delivery and squeeze profit margins. Efficient logistics management is essential, yet it is often hampered by these external factors. Payment processing, while needing to ensure security and user convenience, grapples with preventing fraud and integrating diverse payment methods, adding another layer of complexity. Furthermore, fulfillment operations require a streamlined approach to handle volume spikes and maintain accuracy in order picking, packing, and shipping, all while meeting customers' heightened expectations for faster delivery times.
Amid these operational challenges, customer data has emerged as an important strategy. By focusing on personalization and enhancing customer experience from historical behavior, businesses can deliver improved website and brand experienced, better product recommendations, optimal promotions, and content to meet individual preferences. Better data analytics can also help in effectively creating marketing campaigns, improving customer retention, and driving product development and inventory management.
Innovative formats such as social commerce and live shopping are beginning to impact the digital commerce landscape, offering new ways to engage with customers and drive sales, and may provide opportunity for brands that have been priced out or seen a downturn with post-pandemic shopping behavior. Social commerce integrates shopping experiences directly into social media platforms, tapping into the massive user bases of these networks to increase reach and engagement. Live shopping, on the other hand, combines entertainment and real-time interaction, providing a dynamic platform for showcasing products and encouraging immediate purchases. These innovations not only enhance customer engagement but also provide valuable data for businesses to refine their strategies and deliver superior shopping experiences.
The e-commerce sector is evolving rapidly, and businesses that effectively manage operational challenges and implement innovative strategies are best positioned for long-term success.
Top 3 Ways to Align Sales and Marketing Teams for Rapid GrowthDemandbase
In this session, Demandbase’s Stephanie Quinn, Sr. Director of Integrated and Digital Marketing, Devin Rosenberg, Director of Sales, and Kevin Rooney, Senior Director of Sales Development will share how sales and marketing shapes their day-to-day and what key areas are needed for true alignment.
44. “Wait, you want ME
2 to do WHAT?!
flickr.com/photos/bevgoodwin/9482142313/
45. ‘‘Publishing is easy! Just choose a
category, fill out these nine fields,
select three related items, and add
at least four tags from this PDF.
—Every CMS training