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Good communication has always been about understanding your audience — shaping your message to match how they think, what they need, and what they'll do with it.  Information typing, the "IT" in the technical documentation standard DITA, codifies that practice into a design discipline that organizes content around its function rather than its form. Rob Hanna and Lance Cummings explore how information typing clarifies writing for human readers and have discovered in the process that those same structural principles help AI deliver better results. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/info-typing/

Few people have advanced the craft and management of content design as much as Melanie Seibert. She's been designing content experiences and managing design teams for more than 25 years. She recently captured some of her best insights in a new book, "Managing Content Design Teams." https://ellessmedia.com/csi/melanie-seibert-2/

Technical documentation of software products is critical work that needs to accurately inform end users, regardless of how quickly and substantially the software might be changing. Manny Silva has created Docs as Tests, a system that integrates a set of well-developed practices and a collection of engineering tooling, to help technical communicators streamline and constantly improve their software documentation work. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/manny-silva/

Modern content systems are complex and abstract, presenting problems for managers who want to understand how their content is performing. At Autogram, Jeff Eaton and Karen McGrane have developed a content observability framework to address this complexity.  Their framework evaluates the composition, quality, health, and effectiveness of content programs to help enterprises measure the return on their content investment. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jeff-eaton-2/

Aligning and orchestrating product content for complex business use cases is much easier when you have a framework to structure and guide your efforts. Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire and his business partner developed the "value map" framework to structure and organize product marketing information. This helps them to align internal stakeholders on strategy and messaging and to efficiently deliver the right content to both business and technical users of the product. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jam/

Experience design for readers of online content gets a lot of attention. The authors who create the content and get it ready for publication aren't as well served. In his new book, Designing Content Authoring Experiences, Greg Dunlap addresses this situation, showing content-system creators how to design better interfaces, streamline workflows, and otherwise improve the lives of content authors and managers. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/greg-dunlap-2/

Sarah Johnson asks, "If a digital experience is a conversation with a user, how can you have that conversation if you don't know what the words are?" Sarah addresses the crucial role of content in her new book, "Content-first Design," tackling both the pragmatic aspects of a content-first approach to design as well as how to advocate for content practice. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sarah-johnson/

Both UX and content professionals routinely find themselves on teams where they are the sole practitioner of their craft. Leah Buley and Joe Natoli recently revised "The UX Team of One" to share their pragmatic take on solo UX practice, deftly balancing the application of human-centered research insights with the need to show the business value of UX work. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ux-team-of-one/

A truly customer-focused content strategy is the cornerstone of good customer experiences.  Over the past 25 years, Rob Punselie has developed and honed content discovery research methods based on time-tested usability knowledge and the Jobs to Be Done product-development framework.  This approach has helped him consistently deliver to his clients effective and durable content and customer experience strategies. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/rob-punselie/

Storytelling is the oldest content practice. Alan Porter helps enterprises and content practitioners improve their story craft.  Alan shows how better stories both convey the unique benefits of a business to their customers and improve cross-functional communication within organizations. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/alan-porter/

As recently as 40 years ago, we didn't have much need for the word "content." But as soon as we started delivering the same information via multiple channels, we needed a way to identify the essential elements of content assemblies and to work with them independent of their various manifestations in information products. So the concept of "content" was born. Joe Gollner has worked with content from its earliest days and has crafted a multi-layered definition to account for its many aspects. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/joe-gollner/

Localizing digital product content is challenging on its own. When you add the need to communicate about sensitive financial topics to very specific audiences, the complexity of the work quickly grows. Stephanie Pereira is a content design manager working on the Google Payments product. She deftly balances a range of internal compliance and design concerns with the very specific hyper-localization needs of her audience.  (We had an internet connection issue around 28:00 - apologies for the break in continuity.) https://ellessmedia.com/csi/stephanie-pereira/

Now in its third edition, Colleen Jones's book "The Content Advantage" has become a classic in the content-profession literature. The new edition of the book continues to highlight content intelligence and content effectiveness and adds a new focus on the impact and use of AI in content programs. It also takes a fresh look at the enduring concepts of digital disruption and digital transformation, both of which have been accelerated by the arrival of new AI technology. https://contentandai.com/colleen-jones/

Over the past ten years, Chris Bach has been at the forefront of the transformation of web development.  Chris coined the term "Jamstack," which refers to one of the first conceptions of a composable web architecture (the acronym JAM accounts for the JavaScript, APIs, and markdown that make up a simple decoupled web system). He also founded Netlify, a company that supports these new architectures and which now serves tens of millions of customers. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/chris-bach/

There is always more taxonomy work to be done than there are practitioners to do it. Fran Alexander's solution to this imbalance is to democratize taxonomy practice. Fran's work actually spans the full range of semantic practices, from simple term lists to taxonomies, thesauruses, and ontologies and knowledge graphs. Wherever she's working in this span of activities, she's always happy to bring other practitioners along with her. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/fran-alexander/