When you’re drowning in data, it’s good to have an information designer like Noah Iliinsky looking out for you. Noah takes a human-centered approach to a data visualization, connecting people with information tucked away in massive datasets. His purpose-driven process is designed to help users quickly extract the insights they need from a flood of […]
Tom Johnson: Documenting APIs – Episode 88
Documenting APIs is one of the newer jobs in the technical writing domain. Tom Johnson enjoys the unique challenges of collaborating with and writing for the developers who create and use these Application Programming Interfaces. He also enjoys reflecting on his work and sharing his insights with his fellow technical communicators. We talked about: his […]
Chris Savage: Video Content Marketing and Analytics – Episode 87
Chris Savage founded Wistia to help businesses understand how well their video content was performing. Early on they stumbled across content marketing, using their own how-to videos to grow their own business. When COVID-19 hit and customers started interacting with companies virtually, Wistia really took off. We talked about: how he founded and has grown […]
Rahel Anne Bailie: The Content Empress – Episode 86
Rahel Anne Bailie has earned the title Content Empress. One of the original cohort of content strategists, over the past couple of decades she has become a leading expert on content operations. While she focuses on content, she might better be described as a business analyst and consultant who helps companies with their digital transformation. […]
Noz Urbina: Adaptive Content for Personalization – Episode 85
Noz Urbina can help you navigate the hype around personalization and create genuinely helpful customized content experiences. Noz focuses on the fundamentals that create useful, usable adaptive content. He starts with customer journey mapping and persona creation to develop an evidence-based picture of his users. Then he builds modularized content models that address those user […]
Autogram: Content and Design Systems for Enterprises – Episode 84
Orchestrating the strategy, design, and software work that comes with enterprise-scale digital projects is a complex and painstaking mission. It’s hard to imagine a team better equipped to take on these challenges than the founders of Autogram. Karen McGrane, Ethan Marcotte, and Jeff Eaton have each mastered huge swaths of digital business practice. Karen built […]
Carmen Martinez and Paulo Azevedo: Conversation Design Teamwork at Flixbus – Episode 83
Carmen Martinez and Paulo Azevedo combine her linguistics and ethnography skills with his computing and product skills to create computer interactions that feel almost human. Carmen and Paulo collaborate to design conversation experiences for FlixBus, a company that helps millions of travelers around the world book bus travel. It’s hard to create natural-feeling conversations between […]
Sara Wachter-Boettcher: Design and Content Leadership – Episode 82
Sara Wachter-Boettcher helps design and content professionals discover and express their leadership ability. Leaders can come from anywhere. You don’t have to be in a management role. With some personal work and a little courage, you can lead from wherever you are in the digital design and content world. Sara and I talked about: the […]
Scott Abel: The Content Wrangler – Episode 81
Scott Abel is a content strategy original. He first took the title of “content strategist” in 1999. Since then, Scott has practiced content strategy and become a leading voice for the discipline. When he’s not running his consultancy, Scott organizes content events, publishes and writes books and articles, and keynotes and speaks at industry conferences. […]
David Dylan Thomas: Design for Cognitive Bias – Episode 80
David Dylan Thomas can help you tame the unconscious biases that can undermine your design decision-making. These biases are strong. You may never conquer them all. But recognizing them and accounting for them in your content strategy and design work can mitigate the hazards they present. You need to be on your toes at every […]
Andrea Volpini: Structuring Unstructured Content – Episode 79
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 […]
Erin Golden: The Evolution of Content Strategy – Episode 78
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 […]
Bob Kasenchak: Taxonomy for Web Publishers – Episode 77
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 […]
Laurah Mwirichia: Product Writing Enthusiast – Episode 76
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 […]
Carlos Evia: Structured Content Authoring – Episode 75
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 […]
Michael Andrews: Content Metadata Strategy – Episode 74
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 […]
Scott Kubie: Writing for Designers – Episode 73
Scott Kubie believes in you. If you’re a writer contributing the words on a product team, he believes in you. If you’re a front-end designer or developer tasked with writing, he believes in you. In his book Writing for Designers, Scott sets out a simple path to help you get the writing done. He also […]
Ilarna Nche: Creating Voice Skills, Actions, and Capsules – Episode 72
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 the digital content mix. Ilarna and I talked about: her path into […]
Rebecca Evanhoe and Diana Deibel: Voice Conversation Design – Episode 71
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 […]
Hannah Kirk: Connecting Technical Writing and Content Strategy – Episode 70
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 about how content is […]