Rekha Murthy — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:26:26 GMT

Hi Rachel!

I came across this article when I googled “Content Strategist”. One lingering question from setting up my freelance consultancy has been how to quickly transmit what I do. I’ve been putting “User Experience Designer + Content Developer” on my business card. But this article makes me want to try “Information Architect + Content Strategist”. To me (and several other commenters), they’re actually the same or should be the same, but breaking them out provides more keywords to hook a prospective client or collaborator. In fact, that you link Content Strategy so close to but separate from Information Architecture is not wrong, but it is a reminder that our field should do a better job of formalizing the skills expected of each title. An IA should be a content strategist as well. Otherwise, they’re a wireframe monkey and the client pays for two people instead of one (which they might be ok with if, as you say, time is of the essence).

I find “Content Strategist” has been most apt when it’s farther from design and closer to curation and distribution. One of my clients has a huge set of amazing content that they want to 1) Present on their Web site in a way that promotes purchase/licensing, and 2) Distribute in the form of curated collections honed to appeal to the audiences of the target online stores. That’s when I stop designing, and stop writing/recording/photographing… and take a bigger picture, “strategic” view of the content I’ve been asked to work with.

Rekha Murthy — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 05:21:25 GMT

Thanks for presenting a practical approach to public health/crisis information display, which is an area of growing interest among web designers, disaster planners, governments at all levels, and the media.

We confronted a related challenge with FluPortal http://www.fluportal.org , a Corporation for Public Broadcasting-funded project to provide H1N1 pandemic information to public radio and public television stations. Our target audience was not the public, rather stations’ editorial and technical staffs. We needed to present a large volume of specialized information and tools for reporters and web managers to access and deploy quickly and easily.

While design and layout were secondary to substance, they remained very important. The recurring comment from our public media users was that the site had a lot of great information, but it was too dense to sift through, especially when on deadline. While we never fully cracked the problem during the project’s short timeframe, we did make great progress in the technical tools section: http://www.fluportal.org/for-station-sites/ Here, we identified three kinds of station web managers: 1) limited technical skills and resources, 2) intermediate, and 3) advanced. We then created Quick, Easy, and Go Big guides based on each user type. Those guides were very well received.

Templates are a great idea, and there’s a similar need among public media stations who want to communicate important crisis information to their local audiences. Many of them don’t have the resources to build something from scratch each time, and templates can reduce the redundancy in effort across the public media system.

Best,
Rekha Murthy
Public Radio Exchange

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Rekha Murthy