Content Strategy Insights

Abby Covert discusses the changing role of information architecture and the democratization of the craft. They emphasize the importance of education and awareness in advancing the field. The impact of incentives on information architects' work is explored, highlighting the misalignments between design and product teams. They discuss the importance of metadata and the frustration with product designers who don't understand its potential. The development of a comprehensive teacher's guide for an information architecture book is also discussed.

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/stephanie-lucas/

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/

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 leaders transform themselves into true workplace superheroes. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/donna-lichaw/

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 Transformation, is a manual for managing these big, complicated projects. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/hinrich-von-haaren/

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 equally natural curiosity and humility, which almost always results in better products that address customers' actual problems. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/adam-lawrence/

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 at Razorfish she's struck by how the team structures and business practices they adopted there are still relevant today. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/karen-mcgrane/

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-maijala/

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 between unpredictable human behavior and useful digital experiences. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/vidhika-bansal/