Communicating Content Strategy: Visual Tools for Content Planning and Production
Workshop scheduled at 8:30-11:30 in Room 1 (Johnson)
A spoonful of wireframes helps the content strategy go down. Just because the output of most content planning is written words doesn’t mean our deliverables have to be dry. Impatient stakeholders and “visual thinkers” too happily skip past content strategy, singing Lorem Ipsum all the way. Who can blame them? Spreadsheets and briefs aren’t as fun like prototypes nor pretty like mockups. Enough complaining. Let’s learn better ways to communicate content strategy.
Learn how to identify opportunities for visualizing your content, new techniques and deliverables for creating these visuals, and tips on how to apply them in your process. If you’re having trouble selling content strategy in your organization, or even understanding it yourself, this workshop will help.
Participants will learn a number of techniques for helping their team understand things like multi-channel campaigns, publishing schedules, progressive disclosure of important information, adapting tone to context and audience, and the impact and importance of style guidelines and brand hierarchies. Techniques will include quick-and-dirty frameworks perfect for sketching on a whiteboard to robust interactive deliverables that can become the centerpiece of a UX process.
Learning Outcomes:
- Able to identify opportunities for increasing clarity of content strategy thinking with visual artifact
- Mental framework for adapting existing UX deliverables and tools to suit the needs of content strategy
- Clear understanding of the role of visual artifacts within the process
- Hands-on experience with several useful deliverables for content strategists that they may not have used before
- Exposure to many more tools and techniques they may wish to explore further in their own practice
Attendee Skill Level: Beginner to intermediate experience working in any capacity on projects that involve web and interactive content.
Presented By
Scott Kubie
Scott Kubie is a designer from Des Moines, Iowa. As a consultant, speaker, and workshop facilitator, Scott helps individuals and teams better understand how their tools, processes, and principles affect the quality of their products and communication.
As head nerd and founder of Content Nerds Des Moines, he helps organize monthly meetups of like-minded web and design professionals in Des Moines, and organized Des Moines’ first World Information Architecture Day event in 2014.
Scott has spoken and led workshops at events including the Information Architecture Summit, the Web Conference at Penn State, the University of Illinois Web Conference, and MinneWebCon. He recently delivered the keynote address at HighEdWeb Michigan.
Follow @scottkubie on Twitter
Michael Metts
Michael Metts is a Chicago-based content strategist / copywriter at Wolfram and co-owner of Metts Photo. His journalism training and experience has led him to believe that great UX work involves listening and telling a story, in that order.
Prior to joining Wolfram, Michael was a content strategist at the Free Methodist Church – USA where he worked on web content and processes that served over 1000 churches. He has spoken previously at Confab Central as well as smaller workshops and training sessions.
Follow @mjmetts on Twitter