Marcelo Lewin focuses on content modeling, a long-standing practice that is growing in importance as the need for intelligent content emerges. Content modeling helps you manage your content separately from its presentation in any one medium. This skill is crucial in the new world of omnichannel content delivery, where your content is as likely to show up in a voice app or chatbot as in a mobile app or website. Marcelo is a natural educator and evangelist who can help anyone - content creators, w...
Apr 20, 2021•30 min•Season 4Ep. 95
Patrick Stafford has a unique view of the state of content work in the fields of UX design and product management. As the CEO of the UX Writers Collective, his livelihood depends on understanding where the profession is going, which skills are in demand, and how writers and designers can best prepare themselves for UX writing and content design careers. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/patrick-stafford/
Apr 09, 2021•40 min•Season 4Ep. 94
In Rachel McConnell's world, if content strategy is the engine, then content operations is the oil that keeps it running smoothly. Rachel leads one of the biggest content operations in the world, a team of 100 content designers and editors at BT, a large communications services company in the UK. Her team is a mix of content professionals from both UX and publishing backgrounds who work across a variety of products. This gives her plenty of opportunities to optimize their internal systems and pl...
Apr 02, 2021•32 min•Season 4Ep. 93
Nicole Buckenwolf organizes the product information that you see at businesses like Amazon and Etsy. Big retailers use product graphs, ontologies, and taxonomies to classify and categorize the millions of products they carry. Building these massive catalogs involves a variety of users and collaborators. Both the vendors who provide the products and the shoppers who buy them - as well as the in-house teams that build these complex shopping systems - benefit from the valuable metadata that Nicole ...
Mar 23, 2021•29 min•Season 4Ep. 92
Scott Berkun can help you understand design. His new book, How Design Makes the World, helps both practitioners of the discipline and consumers of the products that they create understand of how design shapes our world. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-berkun/
Feb 16, 2021•32 min•Season 4Ep. 91
Sabine Ocker helps enterprises organize their content. She uses taxonomies and other content metadata to make sure that customers get the information they need, when they need it. Sabine's superpower is her ability to talk about her work in a way that resonates with business decision makers. This ensures that she always has the budget and other support that she needs to do this important work. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sabine-ocker/
Jan 22, 2021•34 min•Season 4Ep. 90
When you're drowning in data, it's good to have an information designer like Noah Iliinsky looking out for you. Noah takes a human-centered approach to a data visualization, connecting people with information tucked away in massive datasets. His purpose-driven process is designed to help users quickly extract the insights they need from a flood of information. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/noah-iliinsky/
Dec 24, 2020•33 min•Season 3Ep. 89
Documenting APIs is one of the newer jobs in the technical writing domain. Tom Johnson enjoys the unique challenges of collaborating with and writing for the developers who create and use these Application Programming Interfaces. He also enjoys reflecting on his work and sharing his insights with his fellow technical communicators. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/tom-johnson/
Dec 04, 2020•34 min•Season 3Ep. 88
Chris Savage founded Wistia to help businesses understand how well their video content was performing. Early on they stumbled across content marketing, using their own how-to videos to grow their own business. When COVID-19 hit and customers started interacting with companies virtually, Wistia really took off. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/chris-savage/
Nov 21, 2020•35 min•Season 3Ep. 87
Rahel Anne Bailie has earned the title Content Empress. One of the original cohort of content strategists, she has become a leading expert on content operations. While she focuses on content, she might better be described as a business analyst who helps companies with their digital transformation. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rahel-bailie/
Nov 06, 2020•52 min•Season 3Ep. 86
Noz Urbina can help you navigate the hype around personalization and create genuinely helpful customized content experiences. Noz focuses on the fundamentals that create useful, usable adaptive content. He starts with customer journey mapping and persona creation to develop an evidence-based picture of his users. Then he builds modularized content models that address those user needs. The result is a human-centered content system that serves up content tailored to answer users' questions whereve...
Oct 20, 2020•31 min•Season 3Ep. 85
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 the venerable UX and content practices at Razorfish and has arguably done more enterprise content strategy work than anyone else on the ...
Oct 01, 2020•42 min•Season 3Ep. 84
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 humans and computers, but they get better at it with every product launch. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/flixbus/...
Sep 25, 2020•35 min•Season 3Ep. 83
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. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sara-w-b/
Sep 15, 2020•33 min•Season 3Ep. 82
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. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-abel/
Sep 03, 2020•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 81
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 turn to account for these cognitive biases. They can affect the products and experiences you design, your collaborations with your team, and your own behavior. Dave's book s...
Aug 25, 2020•31 min•Season 3Ep. 80
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 use your content. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/andrea-volpini/
Aug 19, 2020•31 min•Season 3Ep. 79
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 mostly concerned with putting words on webpages instead of in paper documents. K5 represents the science-fiction-ey AI future of the practice. ...
Aug 12, 2020•30 min•Season 3Ep. 78
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 process of building a taxonomy can help align different business units in your organization around a central knowledge model that can power a number of different information s...
Aug 05, 2020•30 min•Season 3Ep. 77
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 wisdom in her UX writing career and is eager to share it. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/laurah-mwirichia/
Jul 31, 2020•28 min•Season 3Ep. 76
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 technical communications field. As other fields discover the benefits of structured content, interest in the practice has grown. This led Carlos an...
Jul 25, 2020•33 min•Season 3Ep. 75
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 to be tailored to your customers' unique needs. In today's hyper-connected and ever-evolving digital media landscape, every online publisher needs a content metadata strategy...
Jul 17, 2020•30 min•Season 3Ep. 74
Regardless of your job title, if you are the word person on a design team, you are a designer first and a writer second. Scott Kubie shows you how to collaborate with your tech and design colleagues while you get the writing done. ` ` https://ellessmedia.com/csi/scott-kubie/
Jul 09, 2020•32 min•Season 3Ep. 73
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 digital content mix. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ilarna-nche/
Jul 01, 2020•30 min•Season 3Ep. 72
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 field. They'll share their discoveries in a book, Conversations With Things, in the spring of 2021. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/conv-design/...
Jun 23, 2020•35 min•Season 3Ep. 71
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 behind how content is organized. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/hannah-kirk/
Jun 16, 2020•32 min•Season 3Ep. 70
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. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/carrie-hane/
Jun 02, 2020•31 min•Season 3Ep. 69
Nam-ho Park is a digital strategist who always puts people first and technology last. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/nam-ho-park/
May 26, 2020•29 min•Season 3Ep. 68
There are huge gaps between the human needs of digital-content consumers and the constraints and requirements of the digital systems that manage it. Andy Fitzgerald shows how information architects use data, stories, and meaning to bridge these gaps and bring content to life for the human beings who need it. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/andy-fitzgerald/
May 07, 2020•37 min•Season 3Ep. 67
Jack Molisani really 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 episode his discoveries about how to run online events. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jack-molisani/
Apr 30, 2020•32 min•Season 3Ep. 66
