2. Valuable Content Transformed
• Document Digitization
• XML and HTML Conversion
• eBook Production
• Hosted Solutions
• Big Data Automation
• Conversion Management
• Editorial Services
• Harmonizer
3. Experience the DCL Difference
DCL blends years of conversion experience with cutting-edge technology and
the infrastructure to make the process easy and efficient.
• World-Class Services
• Leading-Edge Technology
• Unparalleled Infrastructure
• US-Based Management
• Complex-Content Expertise
• 24/7 Online Project Tracking
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• Global Capabilities
5. . . . Spanning All Industries
• Aerospace
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• Telecommunications
• Universities
• Utilities
6. Who am I?
Boston-based
content strategist
Marli Mesibov
@marsinthestars
UX specialist
What does that
mean?
7.
8. Whose Job is it Anyway?
UI Designer Information
Architect
Usability
Expert
Content
Strategist
Visual
Designer
Front End
Developer
9. Whose Job is it Anyway?
Validates content delivery by
developing and completing usability
test plans; evaluating user flows and
traffic patterns; studying user
feedback; coordinating with Usability
Specialists.
10. Whose Job is it Anyway?
UI Designer Information
Architect
Usability
Expert
Content
Strategist
Visual
Designer
Front End
Developer
11. Whose Job is it Anyway?
UI Designer Information
Architect
Usability
Expert
Content
Strategist
Visual
Designer
Front End
Developer
12. Whose Job is it Anyway?
…Responsible for designing,
developing, modifying and
implementing computer generated and
photographic artwork, images and
layouts for the Web.
13. Whose Job is it Anyway?
UI Designer Information
Architect
Usability
Expert
Content
Strategist
Visual
Designer
Front End
Developer
14. Whose Job is it Anyway?
UI Designer Information
Architect
Usability
Expert
Content
Strategist
Visual
Designer
Front End
Developer
15. Whose Job is it Anyway?
… Gather and synthesize business,
brand, market, and user requirements,
and collaborate on user workflows,
information architecture, and
wireframes.
16. Whose Job is it Anyway?
UI Designer Information
Architect
Usability
Expert
Content
Strategist
Visual
Designer
Front End
Developer
17. Whose Job is it Anyway?
UI Designer Information
Architect
Usability
Expert
Content
Strategist
Visual
Designer
Front End
Developer
18. Whose Job is it Anyway?
Candidate will develop content and
data information attributes and
classification schemes.
19. Whose Job is it Anyway?
UI Designer Information
Architect
Usability
Expert
Content
Strategist
Visual
Designer
Front End
Developer
20. Whose Job is it Anyway?
UI Designer Information
Architect
Usability
Expert
Content
Strategist
Visual
Designer
Front End
Developer
28. “A successful visual design does
not take away from the content on
the page or function. Instead, it
enhances it by engaging users and
helping to build trust and interest in
the brand.”
- usability.gov (2015)
33. “When we discuss the
“front end” of the web, what
we’re really talking about is
the part of the web that you
can see.”
– Josh Long, Frontend vs. Backend
(2012)
39. “User experience design
[improves] the usability, ease
of use, and pleasure provided
in the interaction between the
user and the product.”
– Interacting with Computers
(2010)
My name, content strategist
No one knows what a content strategist/UX strategist is
My mother tells people I do something with writing.
No one knows what any of us do
My Drew Carey impersonation
6 fields
Using job descriptions from LinkedIn
- IA
- Which one is it?
IA
- Front end dev
Which is it?
Front end dev
Visual designer
Visual designer
Last one!
problem with the words we’re using.
secret: we can’t fix it today.
Jobs and their titles are evolving, which means confusing
- We CAN understand how we evolved to this point and what our jobs are intended to accomplish.
Exciting time to be working in UX.
We are writing the book(s) and creating the best practices. We can make changes (write blog posts, change wikipedia articles)
But change is scary. So we end up in silos.
How are silos created?
Silos are specializations
Silos are isolated teams or people
Silos coming down
Story of company with everyone split up (conveyor belt)
End product looks messy, disjointed
We need to be able to work collaboratively together.
We need to understand all these different jobs, and how they interact.
we are a culture looking to the future
Past informs the future
Don Norman coined the term “UX design.”
We’ll look at 3 easily distinctive jobs and 3 people struggle to define.
Lastly, we’ll talk about how we – as designers, developers, strategists, or something else, can work well together.
Visual design sometimes used as a pejorative
Differentiated from UX design
Visual design is part of UI and IA
clients ask us to make something bigger, we say “we can actually make that more prominent through visual design”
Visual design is graphic design, imagery, use of color, shapes, typography, and form
Enhances usability and improve the user experience.
Visual designers are the closest to the original definition of “design,” and it’s what most layman think of when they hear the term “design.”
Many visual designers do their own interaction design, their own research, and their own usability.
Skillset employers are looking for is Photoshop skills.
Separates “design” from content or development work
Content strategy is very new.
Earliest references are ~1997
In 1998 Razorfish began a content strategy department,
Term gained momentum with A List Apart’s 2008 “Content Strategy” issue, which included the article in which Kristina Halvorson defined it.
Early 200s, poor economy
Companies hired copywriters, not content strategists, as though the two were interchangeable
Many CSs began as researchers, journalists, or creative directors
Common thread: empathy, big picture thinking
UI designers are often designers who learn UX best practices, content strategists are often people working in user-centric positions, who can then learn to apply that thinking to content.
In 1996, Bill Gates wrote an article entitled “Content is King”
In 1995, Ann Rockley started The Rockley Group, and began doing content strategy (though people seldom called it that).
In 2010 and 2011, suddenly content strategists picked up on the phrase.
Timing was right – Google’s Panda Update in February of 2011, economy was starting to pick up.
The iPhone had just come out, and people needed their content in two places, and they needed a strategy to do so.
Front-end dev is the third major area of our Venn diagram of UX roles
It sits at the intersection between development work and UI design work.
Front-end development is the part of a website that users interact with.
Dropdown menus, disabled buttons, sliders, and contact forms.
As far as UX is concerned, this is the development side of things.
Dev tells designers what the constraints are
So dev helps with design, tells us what interactions we can use
Reminder: easily distinguishable from visual design and content strategy.
Not easily distinguishable from interaction design or from usability.
Next three fields are in-between jobs, still focused on the user experience.
What differentiates them is their deliverables.
IA has a clear history,
term “IA” was coined in 1976, by Richard Saul Wurman.
Wurman co-founded the first TED talk in 1984, and he then chaired the TED conference until 2002.
Wurman was an artist, an architect, an urban planner and worked as a graphic designer.
He looked at the structure of data and design (before websites!) and said “why don’t we view this in the same way we view buildings?”
Approached TED as a way of organizing information into a successful structure.
IA has roots in architecture and structure.
Tools: connect meaning to form, identify relationships between content and design types.
Deliverables: blueprints for a website (sitemaps and nav)
UI Design is the most difficult area of UX to explain
“User interface” describes the buttons, menus, layout, literally the interface that we see.
But those are also created by visual designers.
Common definition of UX design.
Is it any surprise that many people use the terms UX design and UI design interchangeably?
UI design, (like IA or CS), can be done poorly or well.
I’m interested in taking a look at UI design separate from UX.
History of UI design can be summarized as “interfaces have existed as long as computer programs have existed.”
UI designers often have backgrounds in graphic design or other design-related fields, (same as visual designers).
Many UI designers found the field UX as designers, and began to learn UX best practices later.
I interviewed UX design employers, they are more comfortable hiring someone with strong design skills, not someone with good UX instincts who needs to be taught to use the design tools.
“UI design” is focused on the interactions, to the point that UI design is often interchangeably used with “interaction design.”
Good UI is typically UI with a focus on the user
Usability is the toughest area of UX design to define.
Usability doesn’t have a job associated with it.
I was unable to find a “usability specialist” job description.
Usability does have a specific definition. Jakob Nielsen has broken it down into 5 areas:
Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?
usability peeks out between content strategy and front-end development.
I disagree.
Usability is part of all of user experience
We all ensure products are learnable, efficient, memorable, satisfying, and unlikely to cause errors.
Can’t remove the confusion among the multiple user experience professions.
We can improve our ability to make projects run smoothly.
We can stay away from silos
I like my job – but when someone else is trying to do the work that I’m used to doing, I get protective and defensive. So do other people. We end up duplicating work unnecessarily.
We can’t work in silos.
Business wastes time and money when 2 people create personas and both do user research and both put together site maps
People who overlap don’t do things the same way, which means wasted work or will need to redo work
One of the benefits to not being a User Experience Team of One ability to share others’ expertise. Working in a silo removes that benefit.
If we don’t identify potential flaws in an idea, we work on the idea and waste tons of time. Harder to fix later
I get my activities from Gamestormin, by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo
Use to create an IA with multiple perspectives
They noticed that adults don’t actually get much out of brainstorming.
Either one person is louder than the rest of the room, or the team gets stuck on one idea, or there’s no specific goal in mind to inspire the team.
List Book website of activities
Gets designers, developers, IA, and user researchers together to discuss something that impacts all of us. It moves us past “my job” and “your job” and helps cement ideas as belonging to all of us.
Working together can mean literally working together.
2 developers side by side, swapping to check over work, digging into difficult areas
Content first & design first with a designer & content strategist
I don’t know everything (older person or younger)
You don’t know everything (developers)
Empathy and compassion
Keep an eye out for tools that allow us to work together.
Shared spaces can be in the cloud or in a room or on a whiteboard.