Ellessmedia Podcasts

Navigating the complex and multifaceted online media landscape can be a disjointed and disorienting experience. Scott Abel has a method for smoothing out online customers' experiences. His "content unification" approach benefits both the organizations that create content experiences and the customers who are navigating them. https://ellessmedia.com…

The basics of building a design system are fairly simple. Ensconcing a system in an organization's culture so that it's actually adopted and used is a more complex undertaking. Dan Mall takes a content-first approach as he helps organizations evolve their design systems from projects to products and ultimately to firmly embedded practices that let …

Jarno van Driel is a true pioneer on the semantic web. Even before you could add machine-readable semantic markup to webpages, he was discovering ways to help search engines understand what web pages were about. Much of that success grew out of his early focus on accessibility and usability. When semantic markup was introduced, he was among the fir…

To conduct a good research-focused interview, you need to cultivate a professional interviewing mindset. Steve Portigal has been doing this for years, and he has written a book to help other researchers and designers conduct better interviews. Now in its second edition, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, covers interviewing tec…

Michael Reid is a consultant who helps organizations with their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. A linquist by training, he is extremely attuned to the role of language in his work, which led to his explorations of the privilege given to English-language speakers in our modern, hyper-connected world. His discoveries can help content profe…

The arrival of decoupled content architectures and headless CMSs creates a new set of challenges for content modelers, authors, administrators, and others who work with content systems. Lo Etheredge does developer relations for Hygraph, a headless CMS company. Dev rel folks don't typically drive organizational change and stakeholder alignment, but …

The emergence of modular web architectures and complex digital experiences has created a need for new content-management practices and for new enterprise tools. One of the most pressing new needs is the ability to orchestrate the assembly of content elements, which may come from a variety of sources and be used in a variety of distribution channels…

Knowledge graphs let people and computers work from the same body of facts to create uniquely informative and powerful experiences. Katariina Kari and her colleagues at IKEA use ontologies and knowledge graphs to drive applications like recommendation systems and to streamline back-end processes like image recognition. Katariina balances her engine…

Aligning brand messaging for a variety of customer segments across a number of communications channels is a complex endeavor. Jenny Scribani has developed a messaging framework that streamlines the process of communicating brand messaging to colleagues across a variety of content practices, letting them focus on the task at hand. https://ellessmedi…

Ann Rockley first took the title of "content strategist" in 1989. Over the next 30 years she pioneered content management, intelligent content, and many other practices we now take for granted. Until recently few knew that she accomplished all of that while managing health challenges that would have sidelined most people. Ann now focuses on health …

Content leaders are beginning to ascend the corporate org chart. Alli Mooney is VP of Content Design at MasterCard, where she leads a large team of content designers and guides big organization-change initiatives. Like many content professionals, she began her career in publishing and journalism, but her path also included a stint in trend reportin…

There are a lot of pioneers in the field of content strategy, but one of them can make a strong case for being a true original. Ginny Redish was among the cadre of usability-testing professionals who founded the discipline of UX design. She was making government content usable, readable, and accessible decades before the famous GOV.UK makeover. She…

Content designers are word nerds by nature. Like many other craftspeople who are passionately immersed in their work, they can forget to step back and fully articulate what we are doing. Elizabeth McGuane has addressed this issue for the craft of content design. Her new book, Design by Definition, sets out the linguistic, rhetorical, and grammatica…

As the digital practices have grown and evolved over the past few decades, the job title "information architect" has become less common. That doesn't necessarily mean that the work isn't being done, but IA is now often in the province of a designer, content strategist, or other practitioner. Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign of progres…

Designing for trust is a team effort, and it's crucial to keep everyone aligned on such important work. At LinkedIn, the trust team has created a framework to guide that alignment. The RISE framework is built on an acronym that describes how LinkedIn wants its members to feel: respected, informed, safe, and empowered. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/st…

Before you let a business manage your hard-earned money, you need to trust them. Selene De La Cruz and her colleagues at Robinhood have developed principles-backed practices that earn the trust of customers who use Robinhood's brokerages services. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/selene-de-la-cruz/By Larry Swanson

Crafting your identity as a leader is a lot like creating your superhero persona. You need to be able to discover your authentic identity and pursue a clear mission, and to do that you need to understand your unique superpowers. In her new book The Leader's Journey, Donna Lichaw draws on her experience as an executive coach and shows how she helps …

Content work is never done. Among the most common, and challenging, types of content work are big transformation projects that consolidate, reorganize, and re-conceptualize big web properties. Hinrich von Haaren has worked on many content transformation projects, including the famous GOV.UK website makeover in the early 2010s. His new book, Content…

As strategists and designers, we often facilitate gatherings of stakeholders with a variety of priorities and approaches. There can be a temptation in such groups to leap into action and start building solutions and creating content right away. A good facilitator like Adam Lawrence can redirect this natural human enthusiasm to bring focus to our eq…

The web has changed a lot over the past 25 years. Or maybe it hasn't. Enterprise content architectures are maturing and finally beginning to separate content from its presentation. But old-fashioned artifacts like PDF files still abound, and authors still expect WYSIWYG editing experiences. And when Karen McGrane reflects on her work 25 years ago a…

As the field of content design has matured, leaders have emerged to guide their teams as well as the profession as a whole. Both at LinkedIn, where she leads the content design team, and through her avid participation in the content community, Keri Maijala has helped shape the craft of content-design leadership. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/keri-mai…

Margo Stern has landed desirable jobs at several prominent companies - places like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Peleton. She has also built multiple content design teams in those same organizations. Now she's writing a book to share both her job-hunting expertise and her extensive content hiring experience. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/margo-stern…

Humans are notoriously fickle creatures, hard-wired to behave in unpredictable ways. This makes experience design work challenging for both managers and practitioners. Vidhika Bansal has led both UX research and content design teams. Her unique background in both the behavioral sciences and UX design gives her a unique toolkit for bridging the gaps…

The emergence of design systems has created new content strategy and content management needs. As a long-time UX practitioner, content strategy evangelist, and content systems expert, Michael Andrews is uniquely qualified to talk about how to manage content in these new systems. So far, the most important lesson he has learned from working with con…

Paula Land wrote the definitive guide to content audits and inventories almost ten years ago. A lot has changed since then. The new edition of "Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis" has been extensively updated to account for the evolution of auditing practice, including 100 pages of new content and a new emphasis on the …

When your organization talks about "bringing your whole self to work," they're likely picturing an idealized version of you, not the complex human that you actually are. Eileen Webb helps people and teams build better relationships at work by connecting them with their actual authentic selves. Her approach isn't touchy-feely, summer-camp trust-fall…

Designing content for immersive experiences has been around longer than you might think. Many people jump straight to modern VR headsets when they think about immersive digital experiences, but the craft of immersive content design also shows up in applications like location-aware text alerts and games like Pokemon Go. Preston So has just written t…

Building a content design team is typically a long process. At Hotjar, Kaysie Garza has had the chance to build a new content-design practice with two colleagues at her side from the very beginning. Hotjar offers a variety of research products, so Kaysie and her team have also been able to inform their work with plenty of research insights. https:/…

Content has always been a key element of any design system, but content designers have only recently become part of these system teams. It's still early days, but the role of content in design systems is evolving rapidly. Rebekah Wolf has been part of that evolution through her work as a content designer on Microsoft's Fluent design system. She has…

Sheryl Cababa wants to help designers of all kinds cultivate a systems-thinking mindset. Her new book - Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers - shows designers how they can expand their impact by adding a systems-thinking lens to their view of their work. Rather than setting out specific methods or practices, Sheryl focuses on how to lev…

Any business you ask will claim to be focused on their customers' needs. But it can be hard to find companies that embody actual customer centricity in their design and business processes. Debbie Levitt helps companies discover the actual pathways that their customers are taking and shows them how they can help customers accomplish the tasks that m…

Content strategy work is largely about language and how people use it. So to do our best work, we need to have a strong understanding of the language ecosystems we navigate. Jane Ruffino comes to content strategy and design with a background in archaeology. She shows how practices that archaeologists use to understand how different cultures name an…

Technical content strategy has evolved dramatically over the past 25 years, and Sarah O'Keefe has had a bird's-eye view of the whole process. As the CEO of Scriptorium, a leading content-operations consultancy, Sarah has both witnessed and participated in the massive changes that have unfolded in the world of technical documentation. https://elless…

The benefits of inclusive design practices are clear: better business results and more satisfied users of our digital products. Our task now is to sharpen our focus on inclusion in our content-design craft. We also need to get better at convincing leadership to support this work. Jonathan McFadden has been practicing inclusive design for years and …

Sam Bhagwat is the co-founder of Gatsby, a popular framework for creating content experiences. He is also the author of Modular: The Web's New Architecture. If you're not sure how the terms "headless," "decoupled," or "composable" might affect your content work in the future, the book can help you understand these concepts and the technical ecosyst…

If you stop to really think about it - and Torrey Podmajersky has - everything is content. We think of content as the words, pictures, and recordings that we view online and in apps and other digital products. But even when words and illustrations are removed, the graphical elements and technical experiences that surround still them convey meaning,…

Erica Jorgensen has just written the first UX book that focuses on content research. Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX gives content designers a comprehensive guide to content-specific UX research techniques. Erica is on a mission to bring more respect to content to content practice. This book gives you the tools…

Nearly every episode of this podcast has included the observation that content strategy is fundamentally a people practice. We talk a lot about practices, procedures, tools, techniques, and technology. But they are always implemented in service to our customers and users and in collaboration with our colleagues and stakeholders. Scott Peltin is the…

About a dozen years ago, as designers grappled with the need to serve similar experiences to both desktop and mobile computer users, Ethan Marcotte developed the practice of responsive web design. I think we're at an analogous juncture now in content design. The need to serve similar content experiences across a variety of channels, devices, and to…

Hanson Hosein was my first guest on this podcast, and now he's also guest 131. Hanson is a natural leader with a fascinating background that includes frontline wartime reporting, innovative multimedia storytelling, and executive leadership in academia. His current work articulates his leadership approach in a declaration entitled "A Wind Rose Can M…

UX writers and other design professionals are famously, and correctly, user-centered. Yael Ben-David thinks that UX writers can sometimes benefit from slight course corrections to better account for the business side of our work. Her new book, "The Business of UX Writing," makes the argument for this kind of approach, and shows you how to craft mor…

As the field of content strategy matures and advances, one thing remains the same: the ubiquity and importance of building websites. Few practitioners are more versed in this craft than Corey Vilhauer and Deane Barker. Then they worked together at Blend Interactive, Corey and Deane wrote The Web Project Guide, a comprehensive book that can help any…

Like many content designers, Aladrian Goods discovered the field of UX design after working in writing, communications, and other roles. Aladrian found content design a few years ago and quickly rose into a leadership role at Intuit. In this conversation, we talk about the story of her ascent into leadership, the design practice at Intuit, and how …

Jess Sand organizes the Content + UX Slack, a vibrant community of 15,000 content professionals. While it may be best known for the salary-transparency requirement in its very active jobs channel, members of the community also appreciate the wide-ranging conversations there and the support of their fellow content practitioners. https://ellessmedia.…

Meghan Casey literally wrote the book on content strategy practice. Her book, "The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right," has helped innumerable content strategists do better content work. Meghan is updating the book now to bring it into line with modern practices and to account for the many changes…

Greg Dunlap is on a mission to help people create better content for the web. As Director of Strategy for Lullabot - a well-known consultancy that is best known for its work with the Drupal content management system - Greg helps clients develop good websites. As the author of a forthcoming book on web content authoring, Greg is taking his next step…

Artificial intelligence is driving a wave of change in content strategy practice. AI is here now and will soon touch virtually every aspect of content work, from ideation and creation to management and analytics. Jeff Coyle can help you understand and navigate how these new AI-driven practices will affect your content career. https://ellessmedia.co…

In the late 1990s, as digital practices like web design and development emerged, experiences were being created and users were getting attention, but the practices that guided that work had not yet been articulated. That's when Jesse James Garrett wrote his book, The Elements of User Experience. After sharing his ideas in numerous client pitches an…

As content strategists and designers we do our best to create experiences that inform and empower our users. Unfortunately, we sometimes fall short of perfect, human-centered, user-focused design practice. Two of our most common failings occur when we bombard our users with excessive cognitive load and impose on them unnecessary emotional labor. Da…

Knowledge graph technology can help content programs in many ways: to aid content discoverability, to discover valuable insights in existing content, and to build transparent personalization programs that build brand loyalty and foster customer trust. Ashleigh Faith has worked with content and knowledge graphs for more than 15 years and has a knack…