Adventures in Content Strategy
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." Benjamin Franklin
Picture this: you’ve hired a design team. You come to a meeting, ready to see the latest designs. But when the team presents, you notice typos… things you asked to be changed after the last review… small problems, but problems nonetheless. You’re frustrated and lose confidence in the designer. Now picture this: you’re a designer…
I’m catching up on Agents of Shield. No spoilers, I promise, but FYI there’s an Android who looks human in a Season 4 episode. She’s a nearly-perfect humanesque Android, and her creator pronounces she has come “through the Uncanny Valley and out the other side!” She’s any techie’s dream creation – ideally, the future of UI….
When Jason Levin and I published our article, Mobile First Is Just Not Good Enough: Meet Journey-Driven Design, the responses were largely negative. They ranged from “this is obvious – why publish it?” to “mobile first is very important! Why are you denigrating it?” We didn’t respond to most of these comments, though in my…
There is no purpose to design. It’s a trick question, see, because design is a tool. It’s a process, an action. When we ask “what’s the purpose of design?” we might as well ask “what’s the purpose of creating?” The answer is tautological: the purpose of creating is to create. But really, we’re not asking the…
It’s been three years since UX Kitteh made us laugh, and cry, and feel understood in the UX world. I was recently revisiting my own UX Kitteh contribution, and realized that I now own kittehs of my own. So I can create UX Kittehs based off their actions! Here they are, Nikki and Sim, putting…
Agile and the Elusive Big Picture: How Storymapping Brings UX into the Agile Framework, by Elisa Miller Where do user stories come from? Elisa read User Story Mapping, by Jeff Patton, and went to find everything else he read. She felt that it helps get developers out of the weeds. It’s not difficult, but it’s…
Don’t Make a Journey Map, by Shahrzad Samadzadeh This is not an aspirational talk, or a formula to follow. It is a review of common journey map archetypes. When Sha figured out that she could make a journey map based on needs and findings, she realized they could be really useful! However, after working on…
Journey maps are a key component of building a strategy. But when we talk about “strategy” it can mean a lot of different things: Creating a set of plans for creating and promoting content over time Setting up a plan for a content migration and content governance Defining the content touch points for a user’s…
Following a handful of stakeholder meetings, one of my coworkers recently gave me a heads up that we should concentrate our content creation around video. I was a little surprised to hear that, since we hadn’t spoken to end-users yet. As we discussed the situation, it became clear that there were three main reasons the…
Designing for Behavior Change: New Models, New Directions, Panel Q: What are we talking about when we talk about behavior change? A’s: Helping people to form habits and behavior that is beneficial to the person. We want to create something sustainable, and also do something ethical and improves peoples lives. There’s literature and theory about…
