Trying to manage feature creep? What about seagulling stakeholders? And what content matters most, anyhow?
These questions and other challenges drive content strategy; they’re basic issues to any strategist planning for content and the workflow behind it. But what if you’re not a content strategist? What if you need to empower a team, wrangle a whinging client, and rally everyone around a common vocabulary for your primary navigation… not to mention branded error messaging? No matter your title, it’s time to embrace content strategy, starting with the message architecture.
Brand-driven content strategy complements user-centered design, and this workshop will help you get up to speed on the philosophy, questions, tools, and exercises to implement it. We’ll conduct a hands-on exercise to prioritize communication goals and develop a message architecture—ideal whether you design for the web, mobile apps, social media, or offline experiences. Fancy more efficient engagements? You’ll also discover how a brand attributes cardsort can help you identify potential pitfalls and points of disagreement while you improve organizational alignment.
Then use this foundation to conduct a qualitative and quantitative content audit. We’ll discuss the content opportunities a gap analysis reveals when we use the message architecture as a metric of quality. You’ll leave with the savvy and experience to bring brand-driven content strategy techniques and thinking into your own work.
Presented as a workshop at UX London, #UXLondon, April 12 2013, in Greenwich UK.
63. Audit to understand what you
have and what you need.
Don’t just do it for fun.
Before you can start, you need
to know why.
What are you trying to learn?