Content Strategy Interviews

Ethan Marcotte About a dozen years ago, as designers grappled with the need to serve similar experiences to both desktop and mobile computer users, Ethan Marcotte developed the practice of responsive web design. I think we're at an analogous juncture now in content design. The need to serve similar content experiences across a variety of channels, devices, and touchpoints - and in a variety of contexts, like personalization - reveals the need for more flexible and adaptive content-design practices and systems. Responsive web design was adopted almost immediately and remains relevant and important today. "Responsive content design" is just my way of describing a strategic practice that many others (hello, Rahel, Noz, Val, Cruce, Ann, Scott, et al.) have already articulated and developed in different ways. It was fun and instructive to noodle on this topic with Ethan. We talked about: the origin story of responsive web design how content was a first-class citizen in his early responsive web design wor

Hanson Hosein Hanson Hosein was my first guest on this podcast, and now he's also guest 131. Hanson is a natural leader with a fascinating background that includes frontline wartime reporting, innovative multimedia storytelling, and executive leadership in academia. His current work articulates his leadership approach in a declaration entitled "A Wind Rose Can Make Sense of Forces Beyond Our Control: Sixteen Tenets and 10,000 Words for Real-Time Leadership." We talked about: his transition into a new kind of leadership role his "Wind Rose" project the paradoxical strength that you can find when you make yourself powerless and vulnerable how our first encounter in a sea kayaking class is the perfect metaphor for our current situation, far out at sea and floundering in uncertainty his process for discovering and stating the 16 elements in his declaration the importance of creating "your own internal constitution" in uncertain times like these why you need to develop leadership "muscle memory"

Yael Ben-David UX writers and other design professionals are famously, and correctly, user-centered. Yael Ben-David thinks that UX writers can sometimes benefit from slight course corrections to better account for the business side of our work. Her new book, "The Business of UX Writing," makes the argument for this kind of approach, and shows you how to craft more business-aware UX writing programs. We talked about: the origin story behind her new book, "The Business of UX Writing" the lack of clear pathways into the UX writing field how her background in neurobiology helped make her equally interested in quantitative and qualitative measurements the need for UX writers to course-correct on how we balance user concerns and business goals examples of how to balance user needs and business goals how to think about and measure the ROI (return on investment) of UX writing her KAPOW framework for measuring content ROI the importance of listening in stakeholder interactions and in speaking thei

As the field of content strategy matures and advances, one thing remains the same: the ubiquity and importance of building websites. Few practitioners are more versed in this craft than Corey Vilhauer and Deane Barker. Corey Vilhauer Deane Barker Then they worked together at Blend Interactive, Corey and Deane wrote The Web Project Guide, a comprehensive book that can help anyone manage the process of creating and building a new or updated website. We talked about: the birth of their book, The Web Project Guide, in the parking lot of a Cheesecake Factory in Omaha, Nebraska, and its development in Stockholm, Stuttgart, and other cities around the world their process in co-authoring the book the reasoning behind the number of chapters in their book and their length why they released the book free online as they developed it how the voice and tone of the book arose organically from their writing and editing process the website-development practices that inform the book the podcast that ac

Aladrian Goods Like many content designers, Aladrian Goods discovered the field of UX design after working in writing, communications, and other roles. Aladrian found content design a few years ago and quickly rose into a leadership role at Intuit. In this conversation, we talk about the story of her ascent into leadership, the design practice at Intuit, and how her focus on values, culture, and communication benefits both her and her colleagues. We talked about: our experience at the Button conference her take on the difference between management and leadership her first role at Intuit as the first in-product content designer on the team how she used Meghan Casey's book as her cheat code in that first role her quick path to a senior role and then a team manager how her genuine love for people prepared her for a management role her academic background in communications and writing and early career roles how her discovery of the field of UX design pulled together threads from earlier in he

Jess Sand Jess Sand organizes the Content + UX Slack, a vibrant community of 15,000 content professionals. While it may be best known for the salary-transparency requirement in its very active jobs channel, members of the community also appreciate the wide-ranging conversations there and the support of their fellow content practitioners. We talked about: her take on the current state of the content strategy profession her ongoing reflection on community and professional relationships professional authenticity and the risks of bringing your true self to work the role of the Content + UX Slack as a professional support group the rapid changes in the growth and nature of content professions, and its reflection in the rapid growth of the Content + UX community the globalization of content practice the challenges of staying intentional and conscientious about her stewardship of the Content + UX community the Content + UX Slack community's decision to mandate salary disclosure in the jobs channe

Meghan Casey Meghan Casey literally wrote the book on content strategy practice. Her book, "The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right," has helped innumerable content strategists do better content work. Meghan is updating the book now to bring it into line with modern practices and to account for the many changes in the field since the book was first published. We talked about: her work as the principal consultant at Do Better Content Consulting the upcoming revised edition of her book, "The Content Strategy Toolkit," including: new coverage of cross-discipline collaboration expansion of the coverage of content design new coverage of change management a new section on building your content playbook new coverage of process optimization the hazards of using research to validate our own thinking how lessons from failed experiments are not "lost work" her task-based approach to content testing how to structure and model content for mul

Greg Dunlap Greg Dunlap is on a mission to help people create better content for the web. As Director of Strategy for Lullabot - a well-known consultancy that is best known for its work with the Drupal content management system - Greg helps clients develop good websites. As the author of a forthcoming book on web content authoring, Greg is taking his next step toward helping people create better content for the modern web. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/greg-dunlap/ We talked about: his work as the Director of Strategy at Lullabot their approach to content consulting at Lullabot trust, the most important quality in consulting practice the importance of being straightforward in your conversations with clients the three elements in the consultant's "iron triangle" - "good, fast, cheap" and the give-and-take process for picking the right two (because you can never have all three) how the process for helping clients pick the right elements in their decision-making process the importance of focusi

Jeff Coyle Artificial intelligence is driving a wave of change in content strategy practice. AI is here now and will soon touch virtually every aspect of content work, from ideation and creation to management and analytics. Jeff Coyle can help you understand and navigate how these new AI-driven practices will affect your content career. We talked about: his work at Marketmuse, a content intelligence platform some highlights of the recent Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, where he spoke about language and content effectiveness the prevalence of AI in the work he does what you need to understand about AI as a content practitioner how AI tools can help identify content opportunities that you might not have seen before and make better decisions some of the specific benefits of AI for content: automated inventories, better search, evaluating content quality, identifying plagiarism, governance, etc. new job opportunities that AI will create the importance of staying focused on qualit

Jesse James Garrett In the late 1990s, as digital practices like web design and development emerged, experiences were being created and users were getting attention, but the practices that guided that work had not yet been articulated. That's when Jesse James Garrett wrote his book, The Elements of User Experience. After sharing his ideas in numerous client pitches and sketching them on whiteboards for his co-workers, Jesse collected his discoveries into a manuscript that would become the first textbook for the new field of UX design. We talked about: his content origins as a journalist and web writer and how that led to the narrative focus of his design work the origins of Adaptive Path, the UX consultancy he co-founded in 2001 and sold to Capital One in 2014 how his book, The Elements of User Experience, began as a whiteboard drawing that he used in team meetings the origins of his five-planes model as a way "to disentangle all of the different kinds of problems that you have to solve and questi

As content strategists and designers we do our best to create experiences that inform and empower our users. David Dylan Thomas Dayana Kibilds Unfortunately, we sometimes fall short of perfect, human-centered, user-focused design practice. Two of our most common failings occur when we bombard our users with excessive cognitive load and impose on them unnecessary emotional labor. David Dylan Thomas and Dayana Kibilds are having an ongoing dialog about these important topics and let me eavesdrop on their conversation. We talked about: how emotional labor and cognitive load can put up a brick wall between you and your users how Day's personal story about her college admissions experience informs her current work the implications of higher ed institutions being slow to adopt content strategy practices the disconnect between the language on admissions webpages and student reading ability and how simply paying more attention to language could help the dynamics behind emotional labor and how we

Ashleigh Faith Knowledge graph technology can help content programs in many ways: to aid content discoverability, to discover valuable insights in existing content, and to build transparent personalization programs that build brand loyalty and foster customer trust. Ashleigh Faith has worked with content and knowledge graphs for more than 15 years and has a knack for explaining the benefits of the technology, most notably via her very popular YouTube channel. We talked about: how structured content aids in content discoverability how to help both machines and humans understand the content in documents the right way to benefit from machine learning in content practice the difference between AI and machine learning what a knowledge graph is, how it works, and it can help you infer and extract meaning from content how knowledge graphs enable linked data (not necessarily Linked Open Data) how a knowledge graph used as a data fabric or a data mesh can quickly connect disparate data and content so

May Habib The use of artificial intelligence in content design and content operations is emerging and evolving quickly. As is the case with many new technologies, it might at first look like robots are coming to steal jobs from humans. But, according to May Habib, AI is more likely to create more, and more interesting, work for people. May and her team at Writer are developing an AI platform that's designed to support human creativity and improve content operations. We talked about: Writer.com, her startup that makes an AI writing and editing platform the difference between large language models and actual AI how AI can support human creativity and content productivity the give and take between AI and humans across the continuum of creative and writing processes the evolution of the traditional style guide with the arrival of AI the difference between genuine human creativity and pseudo-creative AI creations the implications of AI for the structure of the content workplace the kinds of wr

Teodora Petkova Modern communication on the web is best when it's semantic and meaningful, networked and conversational. Creating web conversations starts with collaborative internal communication and then invites the marketplace to join in. Teodora Petkova is a semantic web explorer with a PhD in digital marketing and communication. She loves to share her fascination with the evolution of web content and her expertise in cultivating marketing conversations. We talked about: her identity as a semantic web explorer how our abilities as "intertextual animals" help us find meaning amidst the noise of modern media her discovery of "dialogic communication" and how it applies to content marketing the stakeholder's theory of communication the importance of internal communication the role of internal communication in dialogic communication strategy, and the importance of documenting common understandings why she doesn't like to talk about content marketing her definition of content: digital objec

Natalie Dunbar Natalie Dunbar can help you build your content strategy practice, whether you're running a one-person content show, building a content department, or incorporating a content team into a design operation. Drawing on experiences from her long and eclectic content strategy career and adding the insights of several other industry veterans, Natalie's new book is a must-read for anyone building or managing a content strategy program. We talked about: the origins of her new book From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice the differences between building a team, a department, or a practice her early content strategy work in agencies, where she quickly grew teams for a variety of clients how she learned many of her content strategy skills before she was called a "content strategist" her realization after working with a variety of types of clients in her agency work that she needed a structure for her content strategy work, and her subsequent development of the pr

Kate Thomas Kate Thomas is leading the transformation of marketing content at PayPal from hand-crafted web pages to structured content stored in a headless CMS. Like many organizational-transformation projects, this one has highlighted both the benefits of structuring content and the challenges of getting content authors to work in new ways. We talked about: the migration of the PayPal marketing content from hand-crafted web pages to structured content managed in a headless CMS her prior work at PayPal modeling their legal content how they structured their content and ascribed meaning to it with metadata the main benefits of structuring content, foremost among them speed to market, the ability to scale, and to more efficient content localization her first foray into structured content when she worked on a developer portal how the governance issues she dealt with in content roles in higher education and government, as well as the governance processes she saw in agency roles, led to her interest

Seth Earley Seth Earley helps enterprises use ontologies to power the intelligent content experiences that create personalized content interactions and that run chatbots, voice assistants, and other new technologies. An ontology is a business practice that helps you understand the knowledge in your business and connect and share it in new and powerful ways. We talked about: his consultancy, Earley Information Science what an ontology is and how to use ontologies to describe a domain of knowledge how an ontology can help traverse the knowledge in an organization the difference between "is-ness" and "about-ness" the importance in ontology practice of starting with concepts that are important to the business how an ontology can help content strategy practice how these technologies and practices can help understand user intent to deliver the correct content the importance of structuring content to avoid TL;DR situations how ontologically organized structured content can help deliver personal

Katrin Suetterlin Katrin Suetterlin is a content architect, a content designer, and an expert on designing for neurodivergent populations. You hear jokes about ADHD, dyslexia, and similar neurological conditions all the time, but as designers we need to take neurodivergence seriously. Research shows that at least 20% of the population exhibits one or more types of neurodiversity. If you're a human-centered design practitioner, you don't want to overlook this important group of humans. We talked about: her work at wefox, a German insuretech company, where she is a UX content architect what neurodiversity is (not just ADHD and dyslexia), how it affects people, and how gender identity can affect a person's experience of it the role accessibility in designing for neurodiversity the incidence of neurodiversity - at least one in five people worldwide how to address neurodiversity in your content-design practice, and how folks who are not neurodivergent can also benefit from these practices how phys

Dan Brown Dan Brown has focused his design work on information architecture for the past 25 years. Along the way, he has written three books, designed a design game, and created one of the the most-used tools in the profession, the Information Architecture Lenses card deck. Dan is very thoughtful about the practice of IA and has a lot to say about how the field has evolved. We talked about: his information architecture work at EightShapes his recent podcast interview series covering his Information Architecture Lenses project and insights he had as he talked with his guests his discovery that even apparently solitary elements of IA practice always involve collaboration with other people the evolution of information architecture practice and thinking over the past 25 years and the increasing clarity around systematic thinking the relationship between information architecture and content strategy his appreciation gained in the study of physical architecture of the constraints that physical spac

Nicole Michaelis Design systems are quickly being adopted across companies of all sizes and types, from big enterprises to burgeoning startups. As in all digital practices, content is a crucial element in these systems. Nicole Michaelis has worked with content in design systems for many years and has learned a lot about how to create and manage the content that powers design systems. We talked about: her journey into UX writing how her brief stint as a material engineering student helped to prepare her for a UX career her transition from her first job into a career as an independent content professional her description of a design system: a set of standards that helps companies scale their design efforts how she sees content fitting into design systems the importance of keeping design systems up to date, and how content strategy can help with this the role of string management in design systems and related tooling systems how basic writing guidance can help both writers and non-writers cr