Why I'm coming to CS Forum (guest post)

2 August 2011 ❧ Simon Whatley

We present a guest post from Simon Whatley, a user experience designer who’s studying Human-Computer Interaction at University College London, and is coming to CS Forum courtesy of FatDUX.

Content Strategy as a discipline has been around for a long time. However, the User Experience (UX) community has only started to pay any attention to it recently.

Louis Rosenfeld, the sage of Information Architecture, once said:

if [information architecture] is the spatial side of information, content strategy is the temporal side of the same coin.

It’s impossible to design great user experiences for bad content, no matter how compelling your designs are. We’re all taught, rightly or wrongly, that “content is king”; if you’re passionate about creating great user experiences you have to consider creating content that is not only useful, but usable and engaging too.

Rosenfeld’s abstraction is important for students of content strategy. Andrew Maier of UXBooth explains:

Information Architecture helps us decide “where” content lives, whilst Content Strategy helps us decide “when” it lives. The combination of the two helps us and our clients understand “why” it’s there in the first place.

This is where the Content Strategy Forum, to be held in London in September, is a must not only for the seasoned professional but also the budding student. If you’re new to content strategy like myself, you’ll be all too aware that something important is missing from your designs. It can be recognised on wireframes as “Lorem ipsum”. Although a boon for visual designers, “Lorem ipsum” is the antithesis of good design; no design can be complete without considering actual content.

What I’m looking forward to

The user experience design and content strategy track, for me, is a must-see set of talks with highlights coming in the form of Eric Reiss, Elizabeth McGuane and Martin Belam. But that’s not to say the likes of Erin Kissane, Relly Annett-Baker and Marko Hurst, or indeed the other speakers should be missed; they certainly shouldn’t. The CS Forum 2011 line-up really is one to inspire.