Just Published: From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice
With her new book, From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice, UX-focused content strategist Natalie Marie Dunbar delivers a comprehensive blueprint for building and scaling a content strategy practice.
Businesses that are struggling to scale their content strategy and design practices missing out on critical opportunities to communicate effectively with customers. The book’s goal is to help content strategists, UX managers, creative leads and others create and grow scalable, sustainable UX content strategy practices that organizations require for communicating effectively and impactfully.
Kristina Halvorson, author of Content Strategy for the Web, writes in the foreword, “There is no magical, fail-safe formula for scaling up a content strategy practice…However, this book presents a five-part ‘blueprint’ for change that doesn’t require months of banging your head against the wall trying to get people to get it.”
“I’ve had to build and scale a content strategy practice from scratch, and I can tell you that it would have been 100% easier if I’d had Dunbar’s book in my hands,” said David Dylan Thomas, author of Design for Cognitive Bias.
At present, From Solo to Scaled is available exclusively from Rosenfeld Media, and will be available through Amazon and other retailers globally beginning July 25.
About the Author: Natalie Marie Dunbar is a UX-focused content strategist with a unique blend of skills as a journalist, content writer, and user experience researcher. Natalie has worked in various roles as a content writer and strategist for brands that include Anthem, Farmers Insurance, Kaiser Permanente, Walmart, and YP.com. She’s also produced original content for federal agencies that include the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), Centers for Tobacco Prevention (CTP), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Veterans Administration (VA). Natalie is also an active member of Women Talk Design and was a founding member of the Content Strategy Los Angeles meetup group.
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Podcast: Preview the Design at Scale 2022 Conference
Covid has fragmented our teams, workplaces, work rituals, and in some circumstances, our self-confidence. It has also forced us to learn, adapt, and improve our work at a stunningly rapid pace.
It’s a great time to take stock of what we learned these past two years, and get ready to apply those lessons in the years to come. In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Lou speaks with long-time Design at Scale conference curators Kit Unger and Lada Gorlenko to discuss how the conference presents the perfect opportunity to make that pivot—and make the case for you to be a part of the conference program.
Topics discussed include:
• How closely-aligned teams can forge ahead despite the challenges Covid has presented
• The importance of reconsidering how teams currently support objectives
• Learning to work together in new ways that help shift the existing work dynamic into a positive and more powerful frame
• Uncovering drivers that allow teams to surpass pre-established boundaries around collaboration
• Shifting how we perceive ownership—across all levels—in organizations
Podcast: Learnings from Applying Trauma-Informed Principles to the Research Process
If the past two years haven’t made it clear, researchers and designers absolutely must be prepared to understand and address trauma as a factor in our work and our lives. Social worker, designer, and Advancing Research 2022 speaker Rachael Dietkus joins Lou on the Rosenfeld Review to plumb the intersection of social work, UX, and how these play out in trauma-informed research and design. She shares her approach to applying trauma-informed principles to the research process, and highlights important key factors including:
- Defining Rachael’s three main intersections between design and social work: social work values, design research methodologies, and trauma-informed (also known as trauma-responsive) principles
- The importance of asking how the above three principles meld together in design to foster a humanistically-informed lens
- The ways social work as a care field translates into user experience design, and why this is a necessary step to include in design methodology
- How the concept of “care,” which includes building relationships, establishing rapport, hearing other people’s stories, and more is central to ensuring human-centered design principles
- Addressing the preexisting disconnect between designers (from a process-based perspective) and social workers (from a humanistic perspective), and how collaboration between the two can positively impact end users
- Ensuring the preconditions that need to exist are shared and maintained at the highest level of integrity, and how a safety plan can help bring this to reality
- The importance of assessing risk when building new programs and policies, as well as addressing adjacent process methodology-related contexts
- How engaging with people from a design perspective means engaging with trauma, and why that positively challenges designers to show up in wholesome capacity
- What it means to weave compassion and understanding into design
- How the trauma-informed approach can serve as a set of preventive measures that can help mitigate potential negative impacts for users
Learn more from Rachael’s talk, “Learnings from Applying Trauma-Informed Principles to the Research Process” at our upcoming virtual conference, Advancing Research 2022 (virtual, March 9-11). Register today!
Podcast: Women Talk Design with Danielle Barnes
Creating and maintaining an inclusive environment that makes anyone feel welcome requires conscious and consistent effort. Whether it’s presentation, operation, or curation—incorporating your team’s voices in a healthy and organic manner as a business practice requires thinking outside the box.
In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, you’ll hear from Danielle Barnes, CEO of Women Talk Design, as she and Lou discuss the fundamentals of designing meetings and conference presentations that are more inclusive.
Key points Danielle and Lou address include:
• Remolding non-inclusive systems to which women and non-binary folks are forced to adapt;
• Assigning rotating facilitator roles, and how those roles can promote inclusivity;
• How truly “listening” to those who are speaking can give facilitators the insights they need to curate a fantastic meeting;
• Raising awareness for the consequences of being talked over, and how to drive safety and accessibility in meetings for team members; and
• Tips to improve your natural stage presence when giving a talk.
You’ll also hear insights in how to create more inclusive environments by empowering those whose voices are not heard—and how safe spaces, when done right, help make this happen.
Podcast: Radical Participatory Research—Decolonizing Participatory Processes
Although large areas of the federal government focused on design as a practice do not closely involve the citizenry in their design processes, Victor Udoewa, Chief Experience Officer and Service Design Lead, NASA, has taken a vastly different approach to end user design methodology in government.
In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Victor brings us up to speed on participatory design and its pros and cons. He also explains his radical approach to it—a meta-methodology he’s used in service and system design—and how his radical approach enables people to participate in and influence high-level government design projects.
Victor shares his insights around key areas of participatory design, including:
• A redefined approach to “radical” participatory design, and how this difference meaningfully distinguishes his work from a socio-human perspective
• A focus on his department’s efforts to help develop the economy in support of small businesses
• Weighing the impact of “power” in design organizations as they shape methodology from a higher-level perspective
• How incorporating end user insights can holistically influence design outcomes despite existing power dynamics that may have previously stunted those opportunities
• How methods such as the collaborative design studio can derive a wider range of insights from end users
• Demystifying participatory design by bridging the gap between old and new perspectives
• Rethinking how information is shared from a socio-economic perspective
• The benefits in shifting research from an investigation-based methodology to a more humanistic approach, such as navigating a socio-human system
• Rethinking poverty as the lack of relationships from which money flows, and how this parallel can be drawn with information/research initiatives
Learn more from Victor’s talk, “Radical Participatory Research: Decolonizing Participatory Processes” at our upcoming virtual conference, Advancing Research 2022 (virtual, March 9-11). Register today! rosenfeldmedia.com/advancing-research-2022/
Apply for a Scholarship to Advancing Research 2022
Apply for a Scholarship to Advancing Research 2022
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Advancing Research 2022: We’re shifting from hybrid to virtual
The bad news, then the good news
Bad news first
Sadly, we’re reverting Advancing Research 2022 to a virtual only event; it’ll run three days (March 9-11) instead of two.
It’s heartbreaking—we had an incredibly innovative hybrid event designed for you. We desperately wanted to host you here in NYC. And three years in, we’ve still not had a chance to meet in person!!
But these are uncertain times, and we don’t want you, our speakers, or our team risking exposure to COVID. Let’s hope we’ll go hybrid in 2023.
Now the good part
If you’ve attended any of the seven COVID-era conferences that Rosenfeld Media has produced, you’ve seen (and helped) us tune the virtual experience to the point where it’s on par with great in-person events. From facilitated attendee cohorts and social events to incredibly engaging Slack discussions and our emcee Bria Alexander’s bad dad jokes, we’ve truly designed our way past Zoom fatigue. And you’ll walk away with notes, sketch notes, the decks, resource lists, and of course access to the recordings.
The speaker roster and program are coming together nicely, and the workshop lineup will be announced very soon. Ticket prices go up January 12; if you’re confident that our curation team of Jamika Burge, Jem Ahmed, and Chris Geison can deliver an amazing program along with our fantastic virtual experience (I think you should be!), you might want to register now.
We hope we’ll see you virtually at Advancing Research 2022!
Best,
—Lou Rosenfeld and the Rosenfeld Media team
