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 […]
Carrie Hane: Content Strategy as a System – Episode 69
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. Carrie and I talked about: her recent decision to describe herself professionally by the activities she does instead of […]
Nam-ho Park: People-First Digital Experience Design – Episode 68
Nam-ho Park is a digital strategist who always puts people first and technology last. Nam-ho first designed experiences for people as an architecture student at Columbia University. The appreciation he developed then for the importance of genuinely human-centered design practice serves him well today. In fact, he hopes that we’ll someday drop the word “digital” […]
Andy Fitzgerald: Information Architecture for Digital Content – Episode 67
Andy Fitzgerald is an information architect who focuses on content for digital experiences. He helps organizations bridge the gaps between their users’ human needs and the constraints and requirements of their digital systems. A website or other digital product will always have an information architecture. Being purposeful and intentional about its design yields better digital […]
Jack Molisani: Content Strategy Events – Episode 66
Jack Molisani 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 […]
ConveyUX Strategy Panel: Balancing Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives – Episode 65
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 […]