Alexa Apallas was one of the first five content strategy leads at PayPal. Alexa talks to Kristina about her path into content and what it takes to advance to a content leadership role. Alexa also shares how content designers collaborate with product for a better customer experience, getting people to care about content and content success stories at PayPal.
Preston So shares his thoughts and advice for new ways of delivering content. He offers examples and insights into omni-channel content audits, thinking about audiences holistically and techniques for enabling content strategy whatever the channel and format.
With experience in technical writing, UX writing, content strategy and content design, John Collins shares his thoughts on maturing content disciplines. In his chat with Kristina John also talks about centralizing and scaling Atlassian’s content practice, content titles versus content roles and demonstrating the value of content work.
When communicating about difficult topics, like death, using the right words, voice and tone is essential. Helen Lawson shares how she approaches this with empathy at Co-op Funeralcare to ensure clarity in their communication. Helen also gives an insight into leading on the change of language, building self-serve products and why avoiding euphemisms in content is necessary.
Erica Jorgensen offers an insight into content practices at Microsoft. From more content not being better, ensuring content is an asset and the relationship between content and brand. Erica’s chat with Kristina covers using style guides to talk the same language across teams, the way that content works with research and testing and measuring content.
Jonathan McFadden moved into content strategy to solve problems and help people. He talks about using content strategy for change by advocating for underrepresented users, building designated spaces of inclusion and ultimately working towards an inclusive and diverse industry.
Jordan Craig has worked at Twitter for 18 months as the lead of their content design team. Jordan shares her experience of growing the team, managing Twitter’s terminology, using AI for style guidance, finding a community and creating paths into content design.
When Andy Welfle joined Adobe four years ago he got to work founding and building their content design practice. He now manages a growing team and talks about the relationship between content design and UX writing, content as part of a design system and equitable terminology in tech.
Kristina welcomes Robert Mills of GatherContent to talk about his experience as head of content for GatherContent. He talks about what content ops is, not just in the context of his team’s product but also as part of a larger conversation about the field of content strategy. Rob also shares how he handles content operations internally at GatherContent (how very meta).
As the UX operations lead at HubSpot, Beth Dunn applies a content strategy lens to the way she’s helping lead the company’s UX practice. In this episode, she and Kristina talk about how HubSpot defines UX operations and design, how she’s working to advance the practice, and how teams can get aligned on terminology and goals.
Bram Wessel is a co-founder of Factor, a Seattle-based consultancy that brings user-centered design principles and practice to enterprise-scale information problems. In this episode, he breaks down the types of taxonomy problems many large orgs face, including problems with findability, site search, and navigation. Bram’s work aims to cater to how customers think, applying user research to ensure everyone is speaking the same language through information.
Abby Covert, better known as Abby the IA, returns to the show for a repeat appearance to talk about information architecture, her influential book, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, and life in the design world as a new mom (congratulations!). In this episode, she breaks down the steps to information architecture as outlined in her book, and shares some real-world stories of sensemaking from her readers.
Ryan Skinner is the principal marketing analyst at Forrester, where he advises enterprise clients on content marketing activities through a strategic lens. In this episode, he and Kristina talk about the blind spots marketers (or sometimes entire companies) have when it comes to the customer experience, specifically in creating content that ties back to both the user needs and business goals. Ryan offers advice for those tasked with shifting an organization to a more strategic approach to conten...
Christine is the Service Director of Content Strategy and Operations at SiriusDecisions. In this week’s podcast, she describes the Content Transformation Roadmap she uses to identify the strategy, people, processes, and technology needed to achieve these milestones. She also shares some thoughts on the definitions of “content marketing” and “content strategy” in B2B environments. (Kristina gets VERY excited.)
This week, Kristina discovers that user-centered SEO isn’t just some magic you sprinkle on finished web copy right before hitting publish. After clashing on projects and stepping on each others’ toes, Chris Corak (an SEO) and Rebekah Baggs (a content and UX strategist) found smarter ways to integrate their work and create helpful, relevant web experiences that are search-engine friendly, too.
Dana DiTomaso joins Kristina this week to stray only slightly from the topic of content strategy—this time diving into the world of marketing and measuring content performance. As president and partner at Kick Point, an Edmonton-based digital marketing agency, Dana works with clients to untangle their varied and sometimes disjointed marketing efforts. In this episode, she shares specific tools her team uses to analyze content consumption and build more data-based and customer-centric marketing s...
Mike Petroff and Aaron Baker have teamed up to create a custom editorial analytics dashboard called “Scoop,” which they use to serve the content teams at Harvard University and the online version of The Harvard Gazette. Their goal? To give power back to the content creators, using data to answer their questions and help make informed decisions about content. Instead of just number crunching, they’re able to use data to tell a cohesive story about content performance and get to the questions that...
This week, Tina O’Shea (Director, Content Design & Strategy at QuickBooks) talks in depth about how content design went from being “just writing the words” to a key part of the QuickBooks product design process. She describes her team structure, and how she won executive support for their contributions to design. She also digs into how they created the QuickBooks voice and tone guide—and how they’re making sure it’s getting used across the global company.
Author, publisher, conference organizer, and all-around renaissance man Lou Rosenfeld talks shop about writing the first book on IA, watching the evolution of design practices, and how he’s helping to keep people at the forefront of their respective industries.
Cruce Saunders joins Kristina this week to talk about multi-channel content publishing at the enterprise level. He describes how enterprises are starting (or hopefully starting) to take a more holistic approach to their content and customer experiences, moving away from the “content center of excellence” approach present in so many large organizations. He also shares some thoughts on content marketing in general—what’s working and what isn’t.
Karen Cross is head of content design at Atlassian, an Australian-based company known for their suite of software development and collaboration tools like Trello and Jira. Karen’s work to build a centralized content design team at Atlassian has unified their various product teams and finally brought writers and designers working together. The ultimate goal? More efficiency and better experiences for their customers. In this episode, Karen describes some of the tactics she’s used to build this ne...
This week, content strategy pioneer Rachel Lovinger covers a wide range of topics with Kristina, including her content modeling work at Publicis Sapient and the core challenges faced by today’s publishers. They also dive into the intersection between content design and systems design, as well as how the role of the content strategist has evolved over time.
This week’s guests are a dynamic trio of content strategists who recently concluded an extensive associations research project that resulted in their defining the 17 elements of content strategy and the three stages of content maturity. In this episode, they will also share ideas for identifying pain points, establishing governance policies, and getting buy-in from the top to help guide a content strategy project—tactics that can be applied to any organization, association or not.
Tracy Playle is well known in the content strategy industry for her expertise in content specific to the higher education community. In this episode, she and Kristina chat about both the challenges and positive trends Tracy is seeing in higher ed, and how she has been helping universities design user-first experiences by truly understanding their audiences—both students and stakeholders.
Angela Gorden, UX writer at Dropbox, shares how working with cross-disciplinary teams day-to-day makes for better writing and better overall experiences. She offers ideas on how to ensure writing is a part of any project right from the start, and how best to give and receive feedback.
Kristina welcomes Sarah DeAtley, a content and customer experience analytics expert who has worked with major corporations including Dell, Expedia, and most recently, Microsoft. Sarah shares what she’s seen from the trenches of content analytics, including how she determines what works and what doesn’t, and how she uses data to answer the age-old question: “How much content do we really need?”
Gene Shannon is a content strategy lead at Shopify. In this episode, he joins Kristina to talk about what content strategy and UX look like at a large organization like Shopify. He shares how his teams have been able to advocate for themselves and clarify their roles within the organization, all while establishing a culture that truly values content and UX.
Kristina welcomes Laura Trujillo and Ashlee Harris to talk about their work making the City of Austin's website content easier and more accessible for residents. They share their tried-and-true techniques for conducting user research, getting buy-in from stakeholders (hint: “funshops”), and creating empathy for their users.
In this episode, Kristina speaks with Lisa Maria Martin, an independent consultant in information architecture and content strategy, and the managing editor at A Book Apart. Lisa Maria shares her insights on how to work collaboratively in a content vacuum, and about imposing order on content chaos through structure and audits.
Author, speaker, and noted information architect Abby Covert joins Kristina to talk about the IA community and finding your own community of discipline. They also touch on the relationship (and overlap) between content strategy and IA, and what IA looks like at a large company like Etsy where Abby works.
