Content Strategy Insights

By Larry Swanson

Conversations with content strategists from all crafts (strategy, design, engineering, operations, etc.) and backgrounds (enterprise, agencies, UX, content design, technical communication, marketing, ... more

4.9

2222 ratings

Download on the App Store

Download on the App Store

Get it on Google Play

FAQs about Content Strategy Insights:

How many episodes does Content Strategy Insights have?

The podcast currently has 311 episodes available.

Content Strategy Insights episodes:

July 01, 2020 Ilarna Nche: Creating Voice Skills, Actions, and Capsules – Episode 72
Ilarna Nche

Ilarna Nche is an award-winning expert on the technical aspects of building voice applications for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung Bixby.

She designs and develops voice apps for clients who want to capitalize on the branding power that voice products bring to the digital content mix.

Ilarna and I talked about:

her path into the voice design industry
how easy it is, even for someone new to the field, to develop voice applications
how her team at Matchbox works together and with their clients
how voice creates new customer experience opportunities
some of the uses and situations that are well-suited to voice apps: games, wellness, cooking, car travel, etc.
some of the difference between voice platforms like Amazon Alexa and Samsung Bixby
how less-technical development tools like Jovo and Voiceflow permit folks with voice-design skills to build apps on their own
the wide range of platforms where voice apps can show up - Bixby for example in Samsung appliances - and the proliferation of devices designed for voice interaction
the importance of staying on top of trends in the fast-moving world of voice
the basics of the technical implementation of voice recognition, natural language understanding, and generating query responses
the future of voice technologies and applications
how to get started designing your own voice applications

Ilarna's Bio
Ilarna Nche is an award winning Alexa Champion and Bixby Premier Developer working as a Senior Software Engineer at matchbox.io. She has a huge portfolio of voice applications across Google, Bixby, and Alexa and is an expert and thought leader in the voice & conversation design field, from both a development and design perspective.
Links Mentioned in the Podcast

Jovo
Voiceflow
Question of the Day
Find My Phone
Music Bop Adventures
echo frames
echo loop

Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/mMOUja0bVb4

Podcast Intro Transcript
When she left university just a couple of years ago, Ilarna Nche started experimenting with voice technologies like Alexa and Bixby. She learned very quickly that her technology and design skills were a great fit for this new medium. Voice tech also plays to her preference for voice interactions over graphical interfaces. In just two years, Ilarna has already earned several industry awards for her work. But she's quick to point out that you don't have to be a technical expert like her to build engaging voice experiences.
Interview Transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 72 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us, Ilarna Nche. Ilarna is a senior software engineer at Matchbox.io. She's also won a number of awards for her work as a voice interaction designer. So welcome to Ilarna. Can you tell the folks a little bit more about yourself, your background?

Ilarna:
Hi everyone. Yes. So yeah, my name's Ilarna and as Larry says, I am a senior software engineer at Matchbox. But I started off my voice journey, building apps after university, where I just wanted to get to know the voice industry. It was completely new and I really enjoyed it, mostly because I didn't have to design anything visually because that's where I lack in my skills. So just to have this application where you could basically create an application without any visual interaction, was something that really attracted me to the voice industry. And so I've made over 50, 70 applications on Amazon Alexa, and that's where it started off for me.

Ilarna:
And I managed to create an app called Music Bop Adventures,
...more
31min
July 01, 2020 Ilarna Nche
Ilarna Nche is an award-winning expert on the technical aspects of building voice applications for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung Bixby. She designs and develops voice apps for clients who want to capitalize on the branding power that voice products bring to digital content mix. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ilarna-nche/
...more
31min
June 23, 2020 Rebecca Evanhoe and Diana Deibel: Voice Conversation Design – Episode 71
Designing voice conversations requires new skills and new ways of thinking about how people interact with your digital product.

Rebecca Evanhoe and Diana Deibel are experts in this new approach to interaction design.

Like many content strategists, they are learning on the fly. And they are constantly studying the steady stream of research in their field. They'll share their discoveries in a book, Conversations With Things, in the spring of 2021.

Diana Deibel

Rebecca Evanhoe

We talked about:

Rebbeca and Diana's backgrounds
the differences between designing for voice interfaces and for graphical interfaces
the higher expectations that people have for conversational voice interactions
some of the challenges of designing for voice interactions: navigation, lack of standardization, lower impatience thresholds in voice interactions, etc.
how conversation design fits in the UX field
the principles and concepts that underlie conversation design: personas (of the voice agent), prompts, training data, etc.
the implications for user trust in systems that use AI (artificial intelligence)
conventions around the transition from AI-driven bots to human agents in a conversation system
the ethics of conversation design
practices to instill trust in voice interfaces and allay user privacy concerns
racial and gender and geographical biases that can creep into conversation design
the rapid evolution of the research that underlies conversation design
the challenges of managing the content associated with conversation design
the value of the contributions of humanities disciplines to conversation design
the need for more diverse perspectives in conversational design, and the need to try harder in accomplishing this

Diana and Rebecca's Bios
Diana Deibel, Design Director at Grand Studio in Chicago, is a Brazilian-American award-winning writer and VUI designer with a background in fictional dialogue. She has designed multi-channel voice-first products, chatbots for healthcare, insurance and HR operations, smart speaker skills, and large IVR systems. She is a national speaker and VUI consultant who has set up voice practices for Fortune 100 companies, among others. In addition to conversational design, she has written and produced for a variety of networks and creatives including “Animal Planet” and “Blue Man Group”. She co-created two TV pilots, now in pre-development with One Bowl Productions, and has had several plays produced with the Modern-Day Griot Theatre Company in Brooklyn (under the name Diana de Souza). She loves learning, puns, and leading workshops on dialogue to help others find their voices.

Rebecca Evanhoe, author and conversation designer, has been developing technology that you talk to since 2011 at companies like Amazon Web Services, Mobiquity, and Shadow Health. She has created virtual patient characters for chat-based learning games, bots for fun and service, and interactive experiences for Alexa and Google Home platforms. Along with her experience in voice and conversation, she earned an MFA in creative writing. She teaches conversation design as a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute, and she leads workshops in a variety of writing genres, from creative to technical to UX. Her fiction can be found in the O. Henry Prize Collection, Harper’s Magazine, Vice, NOON, and Gulf Coast, among others.
Books Mentioned in the Podcast

Conversations With Things (their new book, coming in 2021)
Weapons of Math Destruction
Algorithms of Oppression

Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/MTd8LMejX8k
...more
35min
June 23, 2020 Rebecca Evanhoe and Diana Deibel
Designing voice conversations requires new skills and new ways of thinking about how people interact with your digital product.

Rebecca Evanhoe and Diana Deibel are experts in this new approach to interaction design.

Like many content strategists, they are learning on the fly. And they are constantly studying the steady stream of research in their field. They'll share their discoveries in a book, Conversations With Things, in the spring of 2021.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/conv-design/
...more
35min
June 16, 2020 Hannah Kirk
Hannah Kirk has great ideas about how technical writing and content strategy can support each other.

She's not a typical tech writer. She loves and appreciates technical documentation and enjoys practicing it. But she has always been more interested in strategy. And she has always spent a lot of time thinking behind how content is organized.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/hannah-kirk/
...more
33min
June 16, 2020 Hannah Kirk: Connecting Technical Writing and Content Strategy – Episode 70
Hannah Kirk

Hannah Kirk has great ideas about how technical writing and content strategy can support each other.

She's not a typical tech writer. She loves and appreciates technical documentation and enjoys practicing it. But she has always been more interested in strategy. And she has always spent a lot of time thinking about how content is organized.

Hannah and I talked about:

#BlackLivesMatter
her background in enterprise technical writing
her transition to identifying as a content strategist
the history of technical writing
the benefits of component-ized content, especially compared to old-fashioned documents and publications
the shift in the role of tech writers form being publication formatters to folks more focused on writing
topic-based authoring and DITA and Flare and Oxygen and similar tools
how she's not a "typical" technical writer
the four times she has been the sole technical writer/content strategist in an organization
a confusing juncture in her career when she went to Silicon Valley and found that they weren't at the cutting edge of technical documentation :)
tools for technical writers - from Microsoft Word, to Framemaker, XMetal, Oxygen, Markdown, DITA, DocBook, and more
the benefits of Markdown in tech-savvy organizations like startups
the importance for technical writers of having a few more technical skills than other content strategists
how she engages engineers and other sometimes-hard-to-engage folks in conversation
her message to the content strategy profession: Don't overlook technical writers as an ally in your work, and likewise her desire to learn from content strategists

Hannah's Bio
Hannah Kirk (a.k.a. “The Pink-haired Content Strategist”) is a content strategist in Silicon Valley, working primarily with B2B software products. Hannah started technical documentation departments and worked as a lone writer at four startups. She implemented processes, authoring tools, CMS's, and publishing flows in FrameMaker, DITA, Docbook, and Markdown and integrated small documentation departments into larger companies as a result of three acquisitions. She’s now at Inkling bringing customer content into the Inkling platform and advising customers on best practices of migrating, organizing, and optimizing content. Hannah also started the Medium publication, Content Strategy Adventures.
Follow Hannah on social media

HannahKirk215 on LinkedIn
PinkHairedCS on Twitter
PinkHairedCS on Medium

Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/2fg9DEufj1Q
Podcast Intro Transcript
Depending on how you look at it, the profession of technical writing may be the oldest branch of the field we now call content strategy. Technical documentation pre-dates the web by at least a couple of decades. And many of the practices now being adopted by content strategists have their origins in technical communications. Hannah Kirk has been writing technical documentation for more than 15 years. She has some great insights into how content strategy and technical communications can support each other.
Interview Transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode Number 70 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us, Hannah Kirk. We'll talk a little bit more about Hannah's background in just a couple of minutes, but I want to start this episode by just acknowledging that we are in a really fraught time right now. We're recording this episode on June 3, 2020. We're just a week or so out from the horrific murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests and other activities around that. I just want to say, we're not going to talk about that on this podcast,
...more
33min
June 02, 2020 Carrie Hane: Content Strategy as a System – Episode 69
Carrie Hane

Carrie Hane sees content strategy as a complex information ecosystem, not a simple stream of publications.

Looking at content strategy as a system helps her give her clients a more complete picture of how content works.

Carrie and I talked about:

her recent decision to describe herself professionally by the activities she does instead of a job title or similar label
her recent insight about the benefits of looking at content strategy as a system
the problem of dealing with short-term thinking when content strategy is a long-term investment
how the systems theory concepts of "stocks" and "flows" can provide a fuller picture of how content fits into an organization
her hope that the idea of looking at content strategy as a system catches on and starts a conversation in the discipline
how thinking about content strategy as a system can improve how agencies work with clients, and maybe even provide opportunities to deliver more and better service
her ongoing efforts to learn about other domains and other disciplines and apply their insights to her work
some of the fields of study that she thinks can make you a more well-rounded content strategist: statistics, psychology, marketing, relational databases, HTML, coding, design theory
how studying a field like systems theory can help content strategists expand their thinking
her frustration with folks who don't comprehend and appreciate the scope of content strategy
how content strategy is more of a practice than a discipline
the differences between the domain model used in her book and other models (systems models, mental models, ontology models, etc.)
how the domain model is a useful tool for capturing the language related to a project and how it helps clients see the broader impact of her work
what matters to her: "making sure people see all the pieces and can connect the dots that matter"

Links to publications and people mentioned in the interview:

Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella Meadows
You're Never Going to Sell Content Strategy blog post
Aaron Bradley's blog on knowledge graphs, linked data, and semantic technologies
taxonomy expert Bob Kasenchak
research paper on content maturity in associations with Hilary Marsh and Dina Lewis
her upcoming talk at OmnichannelX

Carrie's Bio
Carrie Hane is a creative problem solver and connector of people, processes, and technology. For more than 20 years, she's been helping organizations transform to meet the ever-changing needs of the people they serve and take advantage of the latest technology.

She is the co-author of Designing Connected Content: Plan and Model Digital Products for Today and Tomorrow (New Riders, 2018), a handbook for a pioneering approach to sustainable digital publishing. Today, Carrie helps make health communication more accessible and relevant along with her colleagues and clients at Palladian Partners.

She has a bachelor's degree in Political Science from Northern Michigan University and a Master's in International Affairs from The George Washington University. By far the most enlightening education she has received is being the mother of boys for over 17 years.

Follow Carrie:

Twitter
TanzenConsulting.com (blog)
LinkedIn

Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/Bn98ln5Cj84
Podcast Intro Transcript
The field of content strategy has a lot of moving parts. Some folks try to explain it with simple publishing flow models. Carrie Hane sees content strategy more like an information ecosystem than a stream of publications. By looking at the practice as a complex system she'...
...more
31min
June 02, 2020 Carrie Hane
Carrie Hane sees content strategy as a complex information ecosystem, not a simple stream of publications.

Looking at content strategy as a system helps her give her clients a more complete picture of how content works.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/carrie-hane/
...more
31min
May 26, 2020 Nam-ho Park: People-First Digital Experience Design – Episode 68
Nam-ho Park

Nam-ho Park is a digital strategist who always puts people first and technology last.

Nam-ho first designed experiences for people as an architecture student at Columbia University. The appreciation he developed then for the importance of genuinely human-centered design practice serves him well today.

In fact, he hopes that we'll someday drop the word "digital" and return to genuinely human-centered strategy and design practices.

Nam-ho and I talked about:

the giant spider that crawled across his desk as we began the interview
his role as a teacher at the University of Washington's iSchool
his work with Carina, a startup that connects Medicaid patients with home health care aides
his consulting work, helping clients navigate the technology landscape
the importance of resolving people issues before settling on a technical solution to a business problem
his comparison of content strategy and digital strategy practices
his original background as an architect - and insights he learned then about the importance of experience design
how his architecture background helps him visualize design complexity, appreciate standards, and properly contextualize tech platforms
how quickly the digital landscape is changing and the ensuing tension that that creates between established principles and new ways of doing things
David Weinberger's book Everything Is Miscellaneous and its insights about the benefits of being able to categorize bodies of knowledge in different user-focused ways
the "leakiness" of the logic around some kinds of knowledge
the challenges of truly understanding user intent, especially in the era of AI and machine learning
the implications for technology designers of the rapid change brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic
his hope that we'll drop the word "digital" at some point, and return to genuinely human-centered practices
dark design patterns that serve businesses more than their customers and users

Nam-ho's Bio
Nam-ho Park has been active in crafting compelling digital experiences for over 20 years. He is faculty at the University of Washington’s Information School and Senior Product Designer at Carina, a nonprofit platform that connects qualified caregivers with those seeking in-home care. He is also the principal of PLAIN Strategies, providing outcome-focused digital strategies for nonprofits and impact-driven organizations.

Having lived and worked in London, Seoul, Hanoi, New York, Washington D.C. and presently in Seattle for the past 9 years, he draws his experience from a lifetime of learning and exploring how we relate to technology and harness it for good. He has worked with the Washington Health Benefit Exchange, USAID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has been a speaker at conferences including the Nonprofit Technology Conference, WebVisions and Drupalcon. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University.
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/GAzBxrnWEAU
Podcast Intro Transcript
When you think about digital strategy, you might picture someone orchestrating the bits of information that zip across the networks that connect computers and other technological gadgets. In fact, technology is just a small part of the story. Nam-ho Park and his fellow digital strategists actually spend most of their time focused on the human beings who plan, design, and use websites, apps, and other products. I really enjoyed talking with Nam-ho about his people-first, technology-last approach to digital experience design.
Interview Transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 68 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast.
...more
30min
May 26, 2020 Nam-ho Park
Nam-ho Park is a digital strategist who always puts people first and technology last.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/nam-ho-park/
...more
30min

FAQs about Content Strategy Insights:

How many episodes does Content Strategy Insights have?

The podcast currently has 311 episodes available.

More shows like Content Strategy Insights

Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! by NPR

Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!

38,642 Listeners

Jordan, Jesse, GO! by MaximumFun.org

Jordan, Jesse, GO!

3,336 Listeners

The Tim Ferriss Show by Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig

The Tim Ferriss Show

16,065 Listeners

The Daily by The New York Times

The Daily

111,310 Listeners

Writers of Silicon Valley by Patrick Stafford

Writers of Silicon Valley

36 Listeners

Your Undivided Attention by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, The Center for Humane Technology

Your Undivided Attention

1,448 Listeners

Google DeepMind: The Podcast by Hannah Fry

Google DeepMind: The Podcast

196 Listeners

Huberman Lab by Scicomm Media

Huberman Lab

28,288 Listeners

Product Thinking by Melissa Perri

Product Thinking

144 Listeners

The Rest Is Politics by Goalhanger

The Rest Is Politics

3,090 Listeners

The Unplanned Podcast with Matt & Abby by Matt & Abby

The Unplanned Podcast with Matt & Abby

15,914 Listeners

Content, Briefly by Superpath

Content, Briefly

20 Listeners