“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

— Hans Hofmann

Content Strategy 101

Laura

Creekmore

In the UX world, we spend most of our time worrying about the structure and design of our websites. The content…well, we’ve already got that. Or, we can certainly whip it up. Marketing will take care of it! And heck, we all have Microsoft Word and email. That’s content!

Right? Not quite.

What happens in many organizations—maybe you’ve seen it yourself—is that web projects get way down the road before anyone talks content. You already know the problem; as a UX person, this makes your job very hard. It’s more than a minor pain when everyone figures out right before launch that you don’t have content to fit the design, or there’s no one to manage the content you actually have.

Content has to work in concert with technology and design: content cannot be an afterthought. It has to be as carefully designed as the rest of your site.

This workshop will take you through the nuts and bolts of content strategy—both the mindset and the toolbox. You’ll learn:

• How to advocate for content in the design process

• How to identify the right people to do it [And what to do if that person is you!]

• The tools you need to analyze your content

• How to get rid of ROT [Redundant, outdated, trivial content]

• How to develop a navigation and a back-end system that are easy to use

• The importance of developing long-term governance processes

The result?

You’ll come out of this workshop with tools to be an advocate for your content. You’ll understand how to manage your content strategically. You’ll also have resources to get support and continue learning about the emerging discipline of content strategy.

Experience Design Practice Development

Livia

Labate

In my experience building teams and introducing experience design praxis in different organizations, I have observed patterns and approaches that both support and hinder practice development.

How do you define what kind of Experience Design practice your organization needs? How do you go about establishing it? Who do you need? What will they do? How do you gain support? The answer lies in appreciating what type of problems and opportunities are and will be available, along with an understanding of the organization’s level of design maturity.

In this workshop I will share a few tools to help UX practitioners frame their challenges and some perspectives for how to pursue a long-term practice development goals.

This workshop will be most valuable for people who are in organizations where an internal experience design practice is needed or exists; this focus is not intended to address practice development in the context of design firms as external experts (focused on providing consulting services to organizations).