Content Strategy Insights

Tuija Riekkinen brings a unique perspective to scaling both content and design operations, as well as other digital initiatives. She has applied her holistic and pragmatic enterprise product management skills at organizations like IKEA, where she has worked on both their design system and content management system. Tuija is a persuasive advocate of keeping design and content concerns separate to enable "creativity at scale." https://ellessmedia.com/csi/tuija-riekkinen/

Design systems and content strategy expert, Michael Haggerty-Villa, discusses challenges in creating design systems, simplifying content for consumers, collaboration between design and content teams, and the importance of content management systems in design systems. The conversation highlights the evolution of TerraData's design system and emphasizes the significance of clear and concise content in consumer-facing design systems.

Gladys Diandoki, a content designer with a strong research mindset, shares insights on audience-focused storytelling, strategic problem-solving, and the importance of structured content. She emphasizes the value of research and testing in content strategy, offering valuable resources for content professionals.

Wojtek Aleksander is a business-focused, inclusive content designer based in Poland. Working in a profession in which English-language educational materials dominate, he addressed the need for Polish-language content guidance by writing "UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products." One big challenge he faces when crafting inclusive content in Polish is working with the language's strongly gendered and inflected grammar.  https://ellessmedia.com/csi/wojtek-aleksander/

Most enterprises and software companies now have design systems, and many have content operations and/or design operations teams. At Cisco, Barbara Blythe works on the content design operations team. She focuses on sharing content guidance across the products she serves, enabling not only content designers but also their UX design and engineering partners to efficiently create consistent product content. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/barbara-blythe/

Nicole Michaelis brings a thoughtful leadership style and deep and varied experience to her content design work. Like all of us, she is pondering how to best use AI in her practice and wrestling with the impacts of layoffs and other change in the content and design professions.  Despite the current challenging business and labor environment, she's hopeful for the future and offers encouragement to both current and future content designers. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/nicole-michaelis-2/

Terry Roach discusses building a 'web of connectedness' through ontological understanding of business and knowledge graph. Topics include comprehensive business representation, measuring progress in business practices, exploring business operating models, and standardizing information concepts in enterprise content architecture.

With more than a billion internet users and half of all global e-commerce transactions, digital business in China is huge. Anna Potapova and Arnaud Frattini work in content roles at Alibaba, the biggest online merchant in China. Lately they have been looking beyond their desks, trying to connect with their peers at other companies and to develop a broader understanding of content practice in the country. They've shared some of their discoveries in an article on content design in China, and they're building a new community to share practice ideas with other content strategists and designers. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/content-in-china/

Sophie Tahran, an experienced content designer, discusses her role in designing content-design organizations at Condé Nast. She explores the growth and evolution of content design teams, the unique role of content design in publishing, and the benefits of centralizing content design organizations. She also explores the necessity of an industry organization for research collaboration and expresses excitement for the future of UX design.

Matt Hayes, a staff content designer at LinkedIn, discusses democratizing content guidance, efficient decision-making, and collaboration within the content design team. They also talk about the role of AI in content design, prioritizing questions and issues, reducing cognitive load, implementing efficient communication, executive guidance, and content design challenges.