Facing feature creep and disagreements among stakeholders? Does your CMO prize modernity and innovation, while the CEO insists on passive voice… but can’t wait to start blogging? Sounds like you need to get a grip on content, the people who make it—and the brand they want to establish.
Brand-driven content strategy can complement your user-centered design techniques, and this workshop will help you get up to speed on the philosophy, questions, tools, and exercises to implement it. You’ll gain practical, hands-on experience by taking sample organisations through a website redesign engagement. First, we’ll conduct a hands-on exercise to prioritise communication goals and develop a message architecture—ideal whether you’re designing for the web, a mobile app, social media, or an offline experience. Discover how a brand attributes cardsort can help you identify potential pitfalls in the engagement and points of disagreement—and then improve organisational alignment around the brand and content.
Next you’ll use this foundation to conduct a qualitative and quantitative content audit. We’ll discuss the content opportunities a gap analysis reveals when we use the message architecture as a metric of quality content. You’ll leave with confidence, savvy, and experience to bring brand-driven content strategy techniques and thinking back to your own organisation.
- Learn how—and why—to establish a hierarchy of communication goals in a message architecture with a hands-on exercise.
- Discuss the right questions to ask—and how to ask them—to minimise distracting, off-brand features, like the blog no one has time to update.
- Use a content audit to evaluate content against the message architecture.
- Gain additional tools to keep your projects on track, on time, and on budget.
- Inform your work with an air-tight approach to better user experiences.
Presented as a workshop at CS Forum 2012, Cape Town South Africa; #CSForum12, October 24, 2012.