How do you identify and remove the barriers to strong, effective content work?
This is the focus of Rachel McConnell’s recent book 'Leading Content Design', which shares how to create common standards, improve collaboration, iron out wrinkles in the design process, and build advocacy—so you can lead your team with impact.
Rachel works as Head of UX content at Flo, a women’s health app and was previously in various content roles at BT. In a recent member call, she shared her thinking behind the work and introduced us to her work on content operations.
Read moreIf you want to validate an idea or wondering how something works, it is almost always a good idea to ask the customer, but response rates are generally down on all surveys. Bad surveys can both stress your customers and alienate them.
In her recent book 'Surveys That Work', UK-based forms expert Caroline Jarrett explains a seven-step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no-nonsense style with plenty of examples about real-world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology.
Read moreEmergencies—landing a malfunctioning plane, resuscitating a heart attack victim, or avoiding a head-on car crash—all require split-second decisions that can mean life or death. Fortunately, designers of life-saving products have leveraged research and brain science to help users reduce panic and harness their best instincts. In her new book called Life and Death Design, Katie Swindler brings these techniques to everyday designers who want to help their users think clearly and act safely.
Katie works as is Innovation Design Strategist, Sr. Manager at insurance firm Allstate in Chicago, IL and recently hosted a member call introducing her book. She included some of the many insightful stories featured in the book and told us more about what she learned while researching on the topic. Below you’ll find my notes with some of the highlights from the call.
She opened with a true story on how famous astronaut Neil Armstrong once had a life and death experience and turned to reading the manual.
Read moreBuilding and managing a web project is a big, complex process — one that branches far beyond the phases directly in front of us.
On one hand, there’s the multi-disciplinary nuts and bolts work of creating the site itself. But beyond that, there’s the connective points — the ideas, the strategy, the decision making, and the upkeep. Even if you’re an expert in your field, it can still be a struggle to find context across the entire project landscape.
With The Web Project Guide, Corey Vilhauer and Deane Barker teamed up to bridge those gaps to help understand how each stage of the website process fits in with the next.
Read moreWith spoken content fast becoming a preferred way to get information, how will you prepare your content when navigation becomes negotiation and when links, calls to action, and breadcrumbs become a matter of aural and verbal gestures?
Preston So has written the first-ever book from A Book Apart about voice interface design. It's also the first-ever book to hit bookshelves about voice content, with everything you need to know about voice content strategy and voice content design.
In a recent member conference call, Preston joined us for more about what's inside the new book: Voice Content and Usability.
Read moreTech companies exploiting consumers is unfortunately nothing new and dark patterns remain commonplace.
Still, we are experiencing a shift in consumer behaviour, where ethics matter more. How do you actually do ethical design from the beginning? To answer this and to and share practical techniques to make honest interfaces work, To answer this and to and share practical techniques to make honest interfaces work, Trine Falbe, Kim Andersen and Martin Michael Frederiksen have co-authored the new Ethical Design Handbook.
Read moreThe art and science of selecting the right tool is something we’ve covered on these pages for almost 20 years. It remains hard to navigate the marketplace and the list of potential bidders is long, so how do you approach it?
In a helpful new book, Deane Barker has shared his 25 lessons learned about buying content technology and services. In a recent CMS Expert member call, he shared insights from the book and we co-created 3 more lessons learned.
Read moreHow do we to turn New Year’s resolutions into sustainable habits?
BJ Fogg is the world’s leading expert on habit formation and he was our guest star for the 1st member conference call of 2020. According to BJ, we are doing resolutions the wrong way and we need to take a new approach to changing habits.
Read moreToo often, content models are developed with no consideration of the system in which they have to operate. This leads to a horrible editorial experience, which is one of the overlooked topics in today’s digital workplace.
In Real World Content Modelling, the new book by Deane Barker, he examines how content actually gets modeled inside a content management system.
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