Developing a taxonomy to meet the business needs of your content collection is a crucial step toward regaining control of your content ecosystem. Too often, however, well-intentioned taxonomy solutions never fully make it to the systems they're meant to serve. Don't let this be your fate! Here's the process I use to migrate taxonomy drafts in a spreadsheet to the taxonomy management tool in Sanity CMS.
I helped the micro-learning education startup Elemeno Health design, develop, and release a structured content solution to more effectively create, publish, and reuse thousands of hyperlocal, clinician-focused resources at patient care locations across the country. Elemeno's content now works harder and lasts longer, allowing it to scale more effectively over time and deliver greater value to Elemeno customers.
By situating data in context, knowledge graphs create valuable opportunities for content creation, recommendation, and management—even at small scales. A boutique approach to knowledge graph design offers a scalable strategy for starting out small and solving well-defined communication and discovery problems to create measurable value.
Structured content design focuses on communicating effectively to an organization’s patrons, constituents, and customers, wherever they are and however they choose to access content. While it is the cornerstone of effective, scalable content design for the web, it’s also much more than just a “web” technique: it is a way to prioritize effective communication across contexts.
Sanity Studio offers a fantastic open source structured content editor that can be hosted anywhere. This comprehensive guide provides detailed steps on self-hosting Sanity Studio on DreamHost with continuous development using GitHub actions.
UX Methods is a progressive web app designed to help those new to the practice of user experience design explore and understand the purpose-driven connections between UX tools, techniques, and approaches. It is also a case study in boutique knowledge graph design which explores the benefits of bringing semantic web technologies to smaller scale projects.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a website in possession of a shiny new design, must be in want of good content. Unfortunately, the process of auditing, revising, migrating, and creating quality content can be daunting. Style guides can help! Here's a brief intro to web writing style guides—and a quick way to get started with creating your own.
Customer feedback is a cornerstone of user-centered design, but the insight it holds is often locked up in thousands of rows of unstructured text. Learn how free, open source Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools can help you understand and draw meaning from these datasets—even if you're new to (or terrified of!) working in code.
Over the last several years I’ve become an ardent advocate of “structured content design.” This is the process of designing digital resources (like websites and apps) from the content out, as opposed to creating interaction and visual design first, then shoehorning the content into it right before (or right after) launch. A structured content approach to digital work has a number of advantages over typical “interface first” processes.
With the growing need of responsive web solutions and adaptive, flexible content, there are new reasons for designers to roll up their sleeves and get into “code.” Since HTML is, at its core, a layer of description wrapped around content, working at this level helps designers think more critically about their content and about the architectural implications of that content. While considering markup won’t replace our content audit, user research, or taxonomy work any time soon, it can increasingly function as an important part of the design process.