Marli Mesibov: Content Strategist & Writer

One of the most infuriating – and most often used – statements in a UX practitioner’s vocabulary is “it depends.”

While it’s true, there’s no one answer for how long a page should be, how many items should be in a top-level navigation, or how many photos to have on a homepage, there are best practices and guidelines.

This week, UX Planet has published my article “Please Don’t Scroll (and other page length myths),” to explain what page length depends on, and how to make the right decision. Give it a read for some concrete explanations, guidelines, and definitions, such as:

“A concise sentence or paragraph has no unnecessary terms, but contains all the information required to be well understood and valuable.”

Check it out! People Don’t Scroll

Last night my husband made dinner at a friend’s house. At our house, he often has 3-4 timers running on his phone as he cooks. At our friend’s home, there was Alexa.

As I sat making conversation, I overheard him say “Alexa, please set a timer for 4 minutes.” and I felt a rush of pride for how polite he was. Then I felt ridiculous.

Why should it bother me that other people tell Alexa to set a timer and don’t say please or thank you? Why should anyone care if you thank an algorithm? Continue Reading →

We often talk about making the complex simple. For years, I thought that the biggest challenge in working on a large scale project was to simplify complexity for our clients. But lately, I’ve recognized a flaw in that way of thinking.

Simplify, simplify

I have a lot of great recommendations for how to simplify complex information. For example…

• Start with a synopsis
• Pull out the top 5 areas to focus on
• Provide details at the end of a presentation, in written form, for those who are interested
• Color code wherever possible

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to reduce 1000+ (and 10,000+) page sites to a few bullet points or a handful of slides. I create excel sheets, word docs, PDFs, and PPTs to share findings and recommendations that address multiple problems with a variety of audiences across dozens of internal teams… and I try to keep it simple enough that we can discuss it in an hour or less.

I thought that was the goal. But now I’m not so sure. Continue Reading →

I’m grateful for many things, personal and professional. I’ve worked hard to build my career, and been exceptionally lucky to see that pay off. This year, I’m particularly grateful for:

1. My amazing team of content strategists at Mad*Pow! Dana, Allison, and our newest addition Rick are brilliant strategists, fun to work with, and inspiring to collaborate with.
2. The Content Strategy Facebook group. This is a caring, inquisitive, fascinating group of people who share relevant articles and get interesting conversations going. I love being part of it.
3. Our favorite tools: GatherContent, and Mindjet. We’ve started using GatherContent exclusively for tracking workflows during content creation, and I couldn’t be happier. Mindjet is our go-to tool for sitemaps and IA creation, and I highly recommend it.
4. My Mad*Pow coworkers. Our content strategy team is only as great as the people we work alongside, and luckily we work alongside some spectacular teammates.

What are you grateful for this year?