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My name's Jonathan Kahn I'd like to talk about why content strategy
is a big deal for user experience professionals.
So content strategy, you've heard about it, right? Everyone's talking about it, have you
got a content strategy? So, why is it so hot? It's been around for as long as the web's
been around, it's not really anything new, it's part of user experience. Why the big
deal? So I think the reason it's such a big deal is we've been talking for a long time
about stuff like information architecture, usability, UX, research, all this different stuff. They're disciplines that people have grown and talked about for ages.
If you think about content and content strategy, it hasn't really happened. We've only just recently been starting to talk about it, to write books about it, to have conferences about it.
So I think we've been ignoring content and all of its complexities and hoping that it will go away, and that's kinda caused a bit of a crisis.
So I think content strategy is the moment when you realise that you need to do some more thinking.
If you think about all the complexities associated with planning and creating and governing and editing content, they raise all these questions that most organisations aren't really very well placed to answer.
So think about the organisation you're working with as a UX professional. They need to cover 4 components in order to really have a content strategy and be able to deal with content
properly. And two of them concern content itself, which are substance, which is things
like a messaging architecture, what are our key messages, and style guides, and structure
which talks about the way that people navigate that stuff, classifications, you know, classic
IA stuff. And then people components which include workflow, in real life which human
beings are going to do what when, with all the content, and governance, which talks about
decision-making processes, how do we set policies, how do we have ownership, standards, that
type of thing. And the problem that we have as people who come from the IA background,
speaking for myself, is that we've really focused on the structure piece only, and ignored
all the other ones, which makes a lot of what we do kind of like a fantasy that may never
actually get implemented.
So I think content strategy is an appropriate context to discuss some deeper business issues
that are broader than any particular product or project that you're working on right now,
it's an appropriate place to talk about bigger stuff. It doesn't necessarily have all the answers,
you can't kinda go to the book and say right, content strategy, what's the answer to this problem. But it think it has some really good questions, and that's how we should
think of it, it's a way in, some things it's OK to ask that come raise some bigger stuff.
I think as UX designers, we are helping our organisations move through a time of great change, right, you know, the web revolution like the industrial revolution. And we're
all trying to help our clients or organisations deal with some big scary words, like these.
Product strategy, corporate governance, metrics, or ethics. And I think content touches all
of these things, so we can talk about these things in the context of content. So just
to take ethics for an example.
What type of persuasion techniques are we using as an organisation, you know, are we
straightforward with people, are we upfront, are we transparent, or do we use unethical
marketing tricks for example, like Harry's documented, and I know he's going to talk
more about that later, the dark patterns like this. Everyone in this room would like our
organisations to not do any of this stuff, and I think content strategy is a great way
to talk about why we need to have an ethical stance, and what bad things will happen if
we do unethical things.
So if you think about your design context you might think of an oil tanker heading the
wrong way, as if the web never happened. And in that context how on earth can we change
some of the things I've been talking about, like how the organisation deals with content.
I think the answer is, we have to become content strategy advocates, that's what I'm asking
you to do today, become an advocate. Which means you're the person who's bringing up
these issues, and saying this is a problem, we need to deal with this problem. So the
way to do that is to become, sorry, to thrash early. If you can get everyone in the room
as early as possible an bring this up, on whatever level you can, and say, this is a
problem, are we dealing with this, if not let's create a plan to deal with it. I think
that's the way to start to turn that oil tanker around, because it can be done, it just takes
a long time. So if you'd to learn more about content strategy I have a shameless plug for
you this evening, which is I'm helping to organise a conference here in London in September
about content strategy, keynoted by Gerry McGovern and Karen McGrane, which will be
really good so I hope to see you there. And that's why I think content strategy is a big
deal for UX professionals. Thank you.