Workshops (Day 1)

Day 1 of the conference kicks-off with four workshops; two in the morning and two in the afternoon, with a leisurely 90-minute lunch in between. This is also the day of the river boat dinner cruise, a social event on the Seine with all of the conference's speakers. Cruise ticket holders will rendezvous at the quai in time for a prompt 20:00 (8:00pm) departure.

Morning Workshops (09:00-12:30): Content Strategy: Purpose and Practice; Content Analysis
Afternoon Workshops (14:00-17:30): Practical Applications of Content Strategy in the Workplace; The Evolution of Content

Content Strategy: Purpose and Practice

Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic

What is "content strategy"?

Go ahead. Pick a definition. This practice (in one form or another) has been around for more than a decade, but somehow we haven't quite agreed on what it is, how it should work, and why it really matters.

One thing everyone does agree on: Dealing with web content is hard. It's complicated, expensive, time-consuming, and often overwhelming. There's new content. Legacy content. User-generated content. Print to web. Text to video. Static to dynamic. The list goes on and on.

But who's responsible for wrangling all this content into submission? Agencies want the client to do it, but the client doesn't have the necessary infrastructure to plan for and execute user-centered content. The client wants the agency to do it, but the agency doesn't have the subject matter expertise—let alone the internal resources—required create content that's always accurate, relevant, and consistent over time.

Good news: The practice of content strategy gives us tools and processes that can help bring order out of your content chaos. But before we can sell our organizations on investing time and money in content strategy, we need to help stakeholders understand exactly how content can make or break user experience, and what the costs are when we wait until the 11th hour to deal with it.

What will be covered?

Content strategy is the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. In this workshop, we'll learn how to:

Integrate content strategy responsibilities into your current web content role using a repeatable methodology
Conduct a quantitative and qualitative content audit
Structure content strategy documentation
Use techniques for getting stakeholders to understand and align on the business value of content strategy

Who should attend?

This workshop is for anyone who's convinced that great content is central to a successful user experience and wants the tools to make it happen: Marketers, web editors and writers, user experience designers, information architects, product managers, and anyone else who deals with web content.

Content Analysis

Rachel Lovinger, Razorfish
Karen McGrane, Bond Art + Science

As digital interactions begin to permeate nearly every moment and activity of our lives, we find that we’re generating and consuming digital information at rates we couldn’t have possibly imagined just a few years ago. Interaction design is a highly-evolved discipline, but many web designers proceed with only a vague understanding of the content around which they’re designing online experiences. This is like trying to cook a meal without knowing what ingredients you have. It can result in sites that look beautiful, and may even provide fun interactions, but fail to engage long-term because they don’t effectively deliver the content that users want and need.

This workshop will provide structure and techniques for auditing and analyzing content. Karen McGrane and Rachel Lovinger will describe the kinds of things you need to know about content, explain the practices used to get the answers, and discuss the kinds of decisions that will be influenced by this information. These are skills that will help content strategy professionals add incredible value to any web development project.

Practical Applications of Content Strategy in the Workplace

Rahel Anne Bailie, Intentional Design, Inc.

Whether we’re marketing or technical communicators, we’re being asked to use and re-use our content in more inventive ways. The complexity of content production can compound once it starts converging with content from other departments, partners, or public sources. You might be at the stage where the “more” part includes methods or technologies that are unfamiliar, or where “more” means satisfying customer needs with a better content experience.

To successfully tackle a situation, it helps to have a framework in which to understand the environment and trends.

During this workshop, participants will learn about how to think about content differently, and use content to its maximum potential. We will use case studies to identify the concepts that can be put to use in the workplace. We will cover how to choose and manage content that is portable and has semantic properties, meets business requirements, and provides a better user experience.

The Evolution of Content

Elizabeth McGuane, iQ Content
Randall Snare, iQ Content

Against the backdrop of the evolution of content in the UX industry, we’ll look at how our content development process has evolved over the last two years – and how our entire design process has changed because of it.

Using practical examples from projects we’ve run, we’ll show how integrating content at the core of the design process has strengthened every part of the project – from information architecture, to interaction design, to coding and analytics – as well as improving the way we work.

We’ll also talk about how our company is moving toward an Agile development method for user experience design projects, with a core team working together in short sprints, rather than the IA, content analyst, interaction designer and visual designer working independently.

As the UX industry has grown in Ireland, content strategy has begun to take centre stage. Other European countries may witness the same course of events. We will show how to effectively make content the foundation of the design process, using hands on practical exercises that mirror a project from start to finish. We will also talk specifically about the growing role of content strategy in the field and how it needs to integrate with other parts of the UX industry.