Enterprise UX 2023 Conference Materials are Available

If you attended our recent conference, Enterprise UX 2023, head over to the program page to view the videos, sketchnotes, slides, resources, and session notes! If you didn’t attend, you can also get access to these materials by purchasing the recordings.

Podcast: Changemakers Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland discuss their new book

Authors Maria Giudice & Christopher Ireland join Lou to discuss their new book, Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World, which comes out on January 17.

Get a taste of what they cover in the book, from systems thinking to navigating change, and how to look broadly at patterns to understand the context in which you are establishing change. The authors explain the wide range of industries they drew from in their research and interviews, as well as the highly emotional aspect of changemaking in society today. Bonus: they share some tools you can use to become a changemaker.

Maria recommends: The Knowledge Project podcast – interviews with an eclectic range of people. Host Shane Parrish is one of the best interviewers Maria has ever heard!

Christopher recommends: Non-profit Interact Project, which provides free design education to kids in underserved communities.

This week: What Every Designer Should Know about Interface Engineering

Bill Scott, veteran of Yahoo! and Netflix and author of O’Reilly’s Designing Web Interfaces, tackles interface engineering in our next live webinar, scheduled for 1-2pm EST this Thursday, February 26.
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Mobile Design Strategy: Don’t Make This Mistake

On September 12, our next event, The Mobile UX Summit, is coming to your virtual office! We’ve asked Josh Clark, Brad Frost, Theresa Neil, Greg Nudelman, Jason CranfordTeague, and Mike Fisher for 27 tips and 2 case studies on designing mobile experiences. You’ll walk away with new mobile UX insight and skills, get some questions answered—and the session recordings are included with your registration.

This week we talked to Greg Nudelman about an important mistake to avoid in mobile design strategy:

Greg Nudelman: I think one huge mistake people make is to assume that by using a simple app porting service they can turn an iOS app into an Android app. While this may work for some games (well… sometimes… and sort of), the same assumption FAILS for any content or search-driven apps in most other categories. The truth is there are about one million apps in each of the app stores (Android and Apple) so the competition is fierce in every category.

There is simply no substitute for knowing the OS conventions and using some of the basics as the anchor to start your mobile design. And OS formats are changing rapidly—witness nothing less than fundamental changes in both leading mobile platforms from Android 2.x to 4.x and Apple iOS 6 to iOS 7. And if you do decide to break the app conventions, it helps to know them first—that’s where design pattern books can be of help; books like Theresa Neil’s Mobile Design Patterns Gallery (O’Reilly Media, 2012) and my own Android Design Patterns (Wiley, 2013) are great resources. So to succeed with your mobile app, you will need to:

1. Understand the conventions of the OS you are building for
2. Start with a simple paper or sticky notes prototype to allow yourself to explore various design directions, fail quickly and cheaply and iterate rapidly
3. Test early and test often to make sure the app uses the appropriate patterns and meets your customers’ needs and does so in an original, intuitive and delightful way

Good luck and see you at the Summit!

Sign up now to reserve your virtual seat at our Mobile UX Summit on September 12!

Podcast: Design Beyond Devices—Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences with Cheryl Platz

Cheryl Platz—Rosenfeld Media author, emcee of our Advancing Research and Enterprise Experience conferences, puppeteer, and Principal UX Designer at Gates Foundation—shares the inspiration that drove her new book Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences (due out in late 2020). If you’re an interaction designer, you’ll want to listen as Cheryl dramatically expands our understanding of one of interaction design’s final frontiers.

Cheryl recommends:

• Wired for Speech by Clifford Nass and Scott Brave
• Follow Cheryl on Twitter
• Get updates on her new book

Podcast: Making Conferences More Accessible with Darryl Adams, Intel’s Director of Accessibility

With the surge in popularity of, and need for, hybrid and virtual events, Lou sits down with Intel’s Director of Accessibility, Darryl Adams, to discuss how technology can make in-person and virtual conferences more accessible and inclusive to speakers and audience members with disabilities. He also speaks to how accessible conference design can be improved and fine-tuned for speakers with disabilities, and help those without disabilities feel more comfortable presenting. What kind of accessibility principles and design factors should conference hosts consider for audience members with disabilities and those without disabilities when setting up for in-person and virtual events? How does this technology increase engagement and diversity in attendance? Listen as Darryl and Lou touch on all these topics, and more.

Darryl recommends: Demystifying Disability by Emily Ladau

Darryl Adams is the Director of Accessibility at Intel.?Darryl leads a team that works at the intersection of technology and human experience helping discover new ways for people with disabilities to work, interact, and thrive. Darryl’s mission is to connect his passion for technology innovation with Intel’s disability inclusion efforts to help make computing and access to digital information more accessible for everyone and to make Intel an employer of choice for employees with disabilities.

Community Videoconference: Leading through the long tail of trauma

Please join our free Advancing Research community or Enterprise Experience community for access to the recording. You’ll receive a welcome email with a Dropbox link to our archive of past calls. 

The fatigue and trauma from events of the past few years has affected many of us – not just personally, but also professionally, and at the organizational level as well. For the most part, the corporate world has recognized the impact these past years have had on employees and teams. However, many organizations have only recently become aware of the longer-term effects and are struggling to support their people as they work through the long tail of trauma

In this special community call, produced in partnership by Rosenfeld Media’s Advancing Research and Enterprise Experience curation teams, Uday Gajendar will facilitate a discussion about the long tail of trauma, with Rachael Dietkus, LCSW, Dawn E. Shedrick, LCSW, and Dr. Dawn Emerick.

They will cover:
• What it means to be a “trauma-informed leader”
• Ideas to keep in mind when handling stressful/anxious events or circumstances with your team
• Differences in supporting people during an event and its immediate aftermath, vs in the long tail of trauma
• Specific actions you can take with your team

Please register to join us via Zoom on July 13th at 11am ET and learn more about the long tail of trauma, how it can affect your organization, and what steps you can take toward a sustained and intentional strategy for leading your team through long-term, post-pandemic challenges. The panel will be recorded, but we will turn off the recording for audience Q&A.

The speakers:

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW

Rachael is a macro-focused clinical social worker focusing on trauma-conscious practices in design. She is the founder and Chief Compassion Officer for Social Workers Who Design, a consultancy focused on integrating ethical understanding and trauma-conscious approaches in design. She is a two-time alumna of UIUC, where she studied Sociology and Social Work.

Dr. Dawn Emerick

Dr. Dawn Emerick is a speaker, trainer, and coach, focused on trauma-informed leadership. She’s a LinkedIn Learning instructor, a 2021 TEDx Jacksonville speaker, and host of the Leadership Uncensored podcast. Over a span of 30 years, she crafted her leadership, organizational development, and engagement skills at various private, government, and non-profit organizations in Florida, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, and Texas.

Dawn E. Shedrick, LCSW

Dawn Shedrick, LCSW-R, is the founder and CEO of JenTex Training & Consulting, a professional development company that offers continuing education training; leadership development training and coaching; and consulting to the human services, healthcare, and social justice sectors. Dawn has also designed and delivered mental and emotional wellness and LGBTQ inclusion seminars in corporate workplaces including Travelers Insurance, JP Morgan Chase, GE, The NY Mets, Office Depot, GlaxoSmithKline, National Grid, Columbia University, and Canon USA North American Headquarters. She has delivered trainings to in-person audiences throughout the United States and abroad in Canada, Puerto Rico, Tanzania, and China and has created interactive virtual learning events for global audiences.

Uday Gajendar (Co-curator, Enterprise Experience Community)

Uday is a Design Manager for Aurora Solar who specializes in next-gen innovation projects and “three-in-a-box” product development with business and engineering leads. He also regularly writes for ACM Interactions and speaks worldwide on design topics at SXSW, UX Australia, IxDA, Midwest UX, and other venues. You can read Uday’s thoughts on design at his blog and on Medium.

Excerpt: Chapter One of our Newest Title, From Solo to Scaled by Natalie M. Dunbar

Chapter 1

The Content Strategy Practice Blueprint

I’m fascinated by buildings: single family structures, high-rise dwellings, and especially office towers. As such, I’ve always had a healthy curiosity about the construction process. For example, Figure 1.1 shows a Habitat for Humanity building that I worked on. From the initial breaking of ground to the completion of a building’s façade, I find comfort in both the art and order of construction—how foundations support columns, columns support beams, and beams support floors. When the building plans are followed as written, every element comes together perfectly to create a strong structure that is capable of withstanding natural elements like wind and earthquakes.

In my career as a content strategist, I’ve heard colleagues speak about “standing up a team,” or “standing up a practice.” There was familiarity in the concept of building a figurative structure that had a specific function or purpose. And, of course, that familiarity stemmed from my fascination with buildings, so the construction metaphor made sense to me.

That metaphor also reminded me of one of my favorite books, Why Buildings Stand Up, by Mario Salvadori. Before writing and content strategy became my full-time job, I worked in various roles in residential and commercial real estate. All of those roles exposed me to various phases of building construction and tenant improvements, and reading Salvadori’s book helped me understand construction and architecture in an engaging way.

The familiarity I felt when hearing the phrase “stand up a practice” in the digital experience world often stopped short of the idea of the building metaphor. For example, practices were “stood up” with no attention to order. Foundations were poured before soil tests were completed, often resulting in skipping the addition of the footings that might be needed to support the foundation, or in the case of the practice, doing the work to ensure that the practice followed the necessary processes to create digital experiences that met the needs of users as well as the goal of the client or business. And inevitably, the structure—or the practice—began to crumble.

And sometimes those practices failed completely.

From the Ground Up

Having had the opportunity to build an agency-based content strategy practice from the ground up, and later expanding and maintaining an existing practice within a mid-to-large sized organization, I began to see that failures often happened because steps crucial to supporting the structure had been skipped. Or perhaps the structure had been compromised because the framework used to build it—if one was used at all—couldn’t withstand the constant stress of tension and compression.

When I started to think about what caused these seemingly strong practices to crumble—I returned to the building and construction metaphor to look for possible answers. That’s because it’s sometimes easier to, er, construct a mental model that’s more tangible than the nebulousness nature of digital information spaces.

If the building metaphor still feels a bit weird to you, then try this: think of the last time someone asked what you did for a living. If you’re a UX practitioner, or if you collaborate with members of a UX team, you’ve likely experienced the feeling of the listener’s eyes glazing over as you tried to explain the concept of user experience—or as I once saw it described, “making websites and apps stink less.” Then think of what might happen if you described the user experience using a more relatable metaphor, such as one of the following:

• The internet is a space.
• A website or mobile app is a destination within that space (and in the case of websites, a space complete with its own address).
• The work you do helps people avoid getting lost in that space.

In keeping with this theme, now imagine that the opportunity that’s immediately in front of you—that of building a UX-focused content strategy practice—is a pristine plot of land. Provided you have a solid plan and the right materials and tools, this untilled soil is ready for you to break ground and to stand up a healthy content strategy practice.

So this figurative plot of land you’ve been given needs someone—you—to till the soil and prepare the space for a structure to be built. And the creation of the plans for that structure, as well as sourcing the building materials and the tools you’ll need to build it, has also fallen to you.

Lucky for you, this book is your blueprint.

To continue reading, order your copy of From Solo to Scaled!

A Guide to Success for Content Designers and Strategists

The following article is based on a recent interview conducted by Lou Rosenfeld, Publisher of Rosenfeld Media from his podcast, the Rosenfeld Review.  In this episode, Lou speaks with Natalie Marie Dunbar, author of From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice, just published by Rosenfeld Media.  The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

[Lou] Welcome to the Rosenfeld Review. I’m your host, Lou Rosenfeld. I’m very happy to have today’s guest, Natalie Dunbar, author of the newest Rosenfeld Media book, From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice. Now, Natalie, first of all, welcome.

[Natalie] Thank you, Lou. Thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here.

[Lou] So we’ve talked about this topic before. I know it sounds to people listening like it might be somewhat technical. And actually speaking of engineering, well, really maybe architecture, you’ve got a lot of construction metaphors throughout the book visually as well as textually. And yet when we talk about this subject, a lot of it kind of boils down to how someone is feeling about the prospect of building a content strategy practice and building one that’s sustainable over time.

Why is this more of an emotional topic than I had expected?

That’s a great question. I think in my experience, and experience of people that I’ve spoken with while writing the book, the process can be lonely. If you are a solo content strategist attempting to build a practice, you’re by yourself as the lone content person in the room and you’re trying to figure out who the people are that you can talk with that will help in understanding what it is that you’re trying to build and then come alongside you when you’re building it.

If you’re leading a team in a larger organization, you may be interacting with levels of leadership that you may not have had to interface with on a regular basis. And all of a sudden you’re like, “This is how we’re going to do it. This is the process. These are the things that I need. This is the resource that we need.” So I think having a companion and a guide surfaced as I kept hearing, I wish I had a narrator or a guide telling me, “Okay, take this step. Take this step.” And then to step back and take a breath before you move on and keep pushing. I think that’s where the emotion comes in. 

Have you found any inspiration or lessons from the growth of design practices that’ve been useful for you as you’ve tried to work your way through building content strategy practices.

I don’t want to simplify the ways that design has come to this place of being at that product development table with the developers and everybody else. But I’ll say that I think as content strategists and designers, we’ve got the seat at the table and we’ve also started building our own tables. It depends on how your organization or agency is set up. You may be seated at the table with people, or you may have your own table and people are coming like I said to sample whatever you’ve got there. What I’ve learned over the years is how to speak the language of all the various cross-functional teammates. There’s a whole chapter in the book about how important it is to build alliances. And that’s a theme that runs throughout the book. This is not something that you do in a vacuum. 

I made the rookie mistake early on of going into an agency like I’m here to save the day. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that I was the first content strategist at that agency. So everyone was asking me, what exactly is it that you do? I was talking about things that the team had already done and after a couple of weeks of back and forth and not really having any forward motion, I thought, okay, so let’s start again. Let’s sit down and figure out where does the product development cycle begin? How does it kick off and how much lead time do we need? So, from that, I remember sitting in a conference room that had whiteboards all the way around. Lots of markers, lots of post-it notes. And we created a process framework and figured out where are those crucial handoffs. And at every moment that we identified another cross-functional teammate, it was like… How can I speak to that teammate? How can I speak to a designer? I can use design thinking language. I can use service blueprint language. I can use different language that helps everyone understand what it is that I’m trying to do as a content strategy.

Are you having to be the one who learns that language everywhere you go?

Yes. There’s something that I call the “Persistent Principles” that I wrote about in a book and one of the very first ones is “Always Be Educating.” So even when your practice is established, someone new is going to come along, a new developer, a new IA, a new designer, and they’ve maybe never worked with a content strategist or content designer before.

Maybe they’re used to tossing designs over the proverbial fence and asking for the words to be plugged in instead of the other way around, which is particularly difficult in highly regulated spaces. Insurance and healthcare, in particular, you’ll have this lovely design and then the content breaks that design because it’s required. And then there’s this big kerfuffle and we’ve got to start over again. 

How does “Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice” get started? How do you build? How do you scale?

So the steps of building the practice are going to be the same, whether you’re solo or building with a small team. I’ve provided a blueprint called the “Content Strategy Practice Blueprint.” There are five components to that blueprint and they include making the business case, building strong relationships with cross-functional teams and departmental partners, creating frameworks and curating tools to build with right-sizing the practice. So now we’re talking about starting to scale the number of people or practitioners. If you’re at an agency like I was when I built my first practice, that might mean bringing on contractors for a specific client relationship that you have.

And then the final component in the blueprint is establishing meaningful success measures. We’re talking about what are the practice OKRs? What are the goals of the practice? Not at the project level, but at the practice level. And once you have gone through those steps, that’s when you step back and you look at those success measures and you say, “Have I been able to meet these goals that I told leadership that I was going to?” And, “Do I need to go back through any of these steps and shore things up?”

Then you can decide if the structure is healthy enough for us to start scaling. That’s where the growth happens. That’s where, if you’re at an agency, maybe you’ve established yourself as a solo practitioner and you don’t need more bodies, but you have people coming in as contractors as you are bringing on clients who are establishing this demand for the content strategy work to happen.

Within an enterprise, that might look like all of a sudden, more and more teams are asking for content strategy expertise. And all of a sudden, your project list is growing, and you need to bring in more people and more practitioners. There’s never anything that’s really basic about a content strategy project, but there are some where we’re going to launch this new feature. We need content. We need copy. But we also need to figure out, where does it live on the site? What’s the nomenclature that we’re using? Is it consistent with other topics that might be similar on whatever digital experience that we’re building in?

I think this is a good point, as you’re looking at bringing in and scaling your practice, to look around your product table. Look around the practice that you’ve established and consider the importance of bringing in a diverse team. When you start to diversify your practice team, you’re going to start to hear different perspectives. And then that will broaden your reach as your audience starts to grow.

Let’s say you have a 15-person practice. Is there like any type of ideal ratio of UX writers to information architects to something else?

Ideally, we would have all the above embedded into product teams. That’s a tricky question because there are so many names that we go by. I’m a purist. I stayed with content strategy because that’s how I learned it and that’s what I know. But I also have worked in roles where I’ve been a content designer. I’ve done IA work. I’ve also been on teams where I was the strategist. I figured out the strategy and handed it off to a UX writer.

So now we’re talking about diversification of skills within a content strategy practice. Your practice may include only people who produce content, but you may find that in order to scale, you need to consider what Ann Rockley refers to as your “frontend and your backend content strategist.” So, your people who identify more as a frontend – I like being in the research. I like the closest I can get to the user, or the audience that we’re creating experience for. That’s my happy place. And then someone who is more than happy to sit down with developers and engineers who is perhaps more comfortable working on the backend. So, as you scale, you might find that in order to continue to sustain a healthy practice, you need to diversify in those specialties within content strategy.

I think it’s good that you’re also framing them, not as roles, but more specialties or skills. Would it be safe to say that if you’re building that practice, you have to hire people that are ultimately willing to wear different hats? They may have their comfort zones, their happy places, but ultimately, it’s a new enough area that sometimes in a given day, one of your people might have to be doing Ann Rockley’s frontend work, another day backend work?

That’s right.

Is that still the case even in a mature content strategy practice?

Yeah. I did a fireside chat recently about the fact that there’s so many specializations within the content world. And it really boils down to understanding what it is that I think that you are passionate about. And also being very honest about what areas I am passionate about. For example, content modeling is still a world of wonder for me. If I don’t have anyone else on the team, then I have to do it. And if I get a little stuck, maybe there’s an architect that I can confer with on a previous job that I was on. 

I sat down with the project manager, who had passion for the backend piece of content strategy. He walked me through a couple of examples and all of a sudden, I’m doing content monologue documentation. So just be open and get out of your own way. Certainly, if you are more comfortable with certain aspects of content strategy, don’t try to shoehorn yourself into something that you’re ultimately going to get stuck. But instead of immediately fleeing from a different job, see it as an opportunity instead of a weakness. 

There’s so much to developing a content strategy practice and I know we just really scratch the surface here, but I’m really glad that those who are overwhelmed by it, including myself now have a handy guide, From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice. It’s been delightful to spend time talking with you about it.

From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice is now available from Rosenfeld Media.

The Rosenfeld Review podcast is brought to you by Rosenfeld Media. Please subscribe and listen on iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast platform. Tell a friend to have a listen and check out our website for over 100 podcasts with other fascinating people from the UX community. You’ll find them all at RosenfeldReview.com.

Natalie Dunbar, author of our newest title, on The Rosenfeld Review Podcast