Speakers

Karen McGrane

Workshops: Why UX Design Needs Content Strategy

Web content: it’s the meat in the sandwich, not the icing on the cake. Too often, organizations fail to deliver content that meets user needs and serves their business goals. Even during website redesigns, the editorial process gets short shrift in favor of building new features and creating new designs. Thinking about the content is always left until the last minute, always thought to be “somebody else’s problem.”

Ever wonder why so many websites feature dense, unreadable prose? Force you to navigate through pages of brochure copy and legalese? Look like they backed up a truck full of PDFs and dumped them in the content management system?

No content strategy, that’s why.

Many UX designers have a blind spot when it comes to creating useful, usable content. If our goal is a great experience for users, then UX designers need to go beyond creating page templates and interaction models and focus on content strategy.

In this workshop, we'll discuss approaches you can use on projects to:
• Fit content strategy activities into your existing UX design process
• Plan for content that aligns with business goals and user needs
• Evaluate existing content and make decisions about what to do with it
• Maintain content over time, with clear ownership and review processes

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If the internet is more awesome than it was in 1995, Karen would like to claim a very tiny piece of the credit. For more than 15 years Karen has helped create more usable digital products through the power of user experience design and content strategy. Today, as Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science, she develops web strategies and interaction designs for publishers, financial services firms, and healthcare companies.

Prior to starting Bond, Karen helped build the User Experience practice at Razorfish, hired as the very first Information Architect and leaving as the VP and National Lead for UX. Over the decade she spent there, she led projects for dozens of clients, overseeing major redesign initiatives for The New York Times, Condé Nast, Disney, and Citibank.

Karen is also on the faculty of the new MFA in Interaction Design program at SVA in New York, where she teaches Interaction Design History, focusing on the key movements and trends that have shaped the field, and Design Management, which aims to give students the skills they need to run successful projects, teams, and businesses.