Designing Connected Content: Plan and Model Digital Products for Today and Tomorrow

For digital content to deliver on its potential, it must be easy to find, shareable, and available for all channels and devices. This requires careful upfront attention to back-end content strategy and its linkages with design and development. However, back-end content strategy is an emerging and complex area of practice with few useful resources for practitioners, and many organizations are struggling to deal with soaring amounts of content.

In Designing Future-Friendly Content, Mike Atherton and Carrie Hane introduce a comprehensive, up-to-date content strategy process that starts outside the interface, using research and modeling to build a shared map of a subject before a single pixel is drawn. Their content-first approach helps you reuse and remix valuable assets both for today’s needs and tomorrow’s opportunities, as you master the interplay of content strategy, design, and management, and smoothly orchestrate your entire content team.

Throughout, this practical and conversational guide demonstrates key concepts through case study examples and illustrations. You’ll learn how to:

• Model subject domains and use your models to plan web content
• Research and model content and use the results to inform UI and CMS design
• Plan for an effective CMS implementation
• Clarify the roles of designers, developers, and content strategists, and build cross-functional teams that work together well
• Tackle content overload, growing device diversity, fast-changing design trends, siloed content creation, and other key challenges