How I established content strategy
As one of the earliest content strategists in UX, I’ve led and shaped the information architecture of many products across large consumer and business sites like Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Mail.
Role
Sr. Content Strategist/Information Architect
Impact
Established content strategy in Yahoo!, published a paper
Company
Yahoo!
Year
2009-2011
Back in 2009, I was hired as one of the first senior content strategists in a UX team. This was an incredible challenge as there were very few precedents to what I could or should do in the role. To get started, I wanted to ensure I established the culture of deep content thinking in product and design teams. In order to achieve it, I led regular brown bag sessions across the company, even getting featured as the “first” content strategist in Yahoo!’s internal web magazine and requested to be speak about the area in UX conferences and design schools.
In a few months I had been successful in mandating the need to start a project with content strategist in loop, and defined the scope of what the role could do depending on project’s reach.
Trailblazer
Yahoo! had at that time a suite of web products across sports, entertainment, business, news and mail. Each of these products were very content heavy. They required detailed analysis of how content should be 1. presented 2. maintained 3. structured 4. refreshed 5. written or aggregated.
My role not only involved bar raising existing content, but analyzing how content was syndicated and managing contributions of 3rd party content providers than included agencies and celebrity writers (like sports stars). I created my own process and templates to scale across scores of writing partners and over 5 products in parallel. I architected web content through gap analysis, content inventory, content template, taxonomy, voice/tone guidelines, and iterative reviews.
As part of my innovation on content strategy, I also created a quantitative methodology to automate content analysis and the paper was selected out of over 100 submissions in Yahoo! Techpulse 2010.
Between 2016 to 2020, as part of my Lead senior UX Design role in Juniper Networks, I incepted and created a help model that made access to help simpler and more contextual. As a direct outcome of this project, I also initiated an effort to modernize how technical help documentation was written.
I ran workshops and created templates to simplify documentation through use of personal tone, reduction of text-wall effect, balancing of visual techniques and emphasis on succinct explanations. This effort directly impacted how content was approached by 50+ technical writers.
My work with content ranged from creation of UI text guidelines to re-design of documentation pdf to designs of printed booklets.
In the process, I established guidelines to modernize content and also refined design of topic pages so that they are easier to read and access.
