In July, I’ll be speaking at the Design & Content Conference, in Vancouver. Recently, I was interviewed by Geoffrey Daniel (@Geoffrey_Daniel), one of the MCs from the conference. We talked about how the industry has evolved over the time I’ve been doing this kind of work (two decades now!), what I’ve learned, how my job has changed, and a little bit about what I’m going to be speaking about in July.
I also learned that if you’re the kind of person who uses their hands a lot while talking, and you’re doing a video interview, you should probably just sit on your hands. 🙂
Watch the video over on the DCC site. Check out some videos from some of the other speakers, while you’re there. And then come see us in person at the conference!
My colleague and friend, Robert Stribley, recently arranged for our User Experience department to watch Rams, a new documentary by Gary Hustwit about the designer Dieter Rams.
After initially training to be an architect, Dieter Rams became a renowned industrial designer, creating many iconic, minimalist products for Braun in the latter half of the 20th century. His designs have influenced generations of designers after him. At one point in his career he stepped back and asked himself how someone could tell if their designs were good, and he articulated Ten Principles for Good Design. He was approaching this from the perspective of industrial design, but the principles have since been applied to other design disciplines as well. So, I thought I’d revisit these principles and apply them to the world of content, including content design, content strategy, and content creation.
Ten Principles for Good Content
For each of Dieter Rams’ principles, I have replaced the word “design” with the word “content.”
Good content is innovative
For Rams, this was a statement about the relationship of technology and design – he was developing technological products, and even using new materials to build them. He felt his designs should be as innovative as the products and materials.
In the world of digital content, the most innovation is happening in the ways that content is distributed, shared, discovered, and consumed. Content publishers have to make their content ready to be viewed on everything from large-screen displays to smart watches, and keep an eye on what’s coming next. They also have to be aware of how people are finding and sharing their content, so they can structure and craft their content for increased exposure.
Good content makes a product useful
This is a funny one, because sometimes the content is about a product, and sometimes the content is the product. In either case, it should be useful – and that means from the perspective of the audience. This requires a deep understanding of your audience’s needs. What are they trying to get from interacting with this content, and how do you make sure it’s crafted in a way to satisfy that need?
Good content is aesthetic
This is pretty clear. Good content should be enjoyable to read, watch or listen to. Otherwise, even if it contains useful information, you’re creating an unnecessary barrier that people have to push through in order to receive its benefits.
Good content makes a product understandable
In this case, Rams was saying that the product should be self-evident from the design. Consider an item you’ve encountered with such a clever design that you couldn’t figure out how to open it or start it. In the realm of content, this may apply most directly to the field of UX Writing, and the economy of words needed to concisely convey an idea or function.
Additionally, digital content is far reaching and as it travels to different sites and devices, you should make sure that it’s as complete and self-contained as it needs to be. Your content needs to make sense where ever and whenever a person may encounter it, or people will skip right by it.
Good content is unobtrusive
Here Rams seems to be reacting to design-for-design’s-sake. Basically, he’s saying, get out of your own way. Don’t show off your verbal skills at the expense of comprehension. Or, as Mark Twain said, “Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”
Good content is honest
In other words: Follow through on the promise of your content. If people followed this one, we’d see significantly less linkbait online. It’s not just about “fake news” though – it’s about making sure you’re not promising more than your content can deliver.
Good content is long-lasting
I love this one, because digital content can stick around for a long, long time and yet it’s often written or produced as if it’s going to be consumed right in that moment and then disappear forever. Future-proofing your content is not just about avoiding current slang, it means considering if it will continue to make sense to people in 6 months, or 10 years. It also means including metadata for reference (date stamp, source info, etc), and ensuring content can be separated from visual design elements so that when people encounter it later (perhaps in a completely different layout) they will still have all the textual and contextual cues they need to understand it.
Good content is thorough down to the last detail
This principle is about process. It means that you should be thoughtful, do your research, and consider the impact of every aspect of your content. For Rams, this meant “Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance.” This creates an interesting challenge when we’re increasingly making use of algorithms to help create data-driven content and experiences. In my last post, The Algorithms are Hangry, I walked through some examples of both mundane and extraordinary bot failures. I think the best way to honor this principle, especially when working with dynamic content, is to consider way more edge cases than we would normally entertain, rather than just focusing on a handful of primary scenarios.
Good content is environmentally friendly
Taken literally, this principle applies to industrial design in a way that’s not particular relevant for digital endeavors. But at its core, it’s about conservation and if we consider the idea of “waste” more broadly, this one has a lot of applications.
For one, I think about the waste of content production time. In my own career, I’ve focused a lot on creating and improving tools and processes that make it easier to perform the repetitive tasks of creating and publishing content. This allows content creators to spend more of their time and energy being creative.
For another, I think about all the “contentless” content available. This content creates a lot of noise and makes it more difficult for people to find the content they really want or need. It’s content pollution, and in an attention economy, that should probably be considered a crime.
Good content is as little content as possible
For this principle, I weighed whether to leave the second instance of “design” as-is because I suspect there’s a nuance here where the first design is meant to convey “the resulting design” and the second design is meant to convey something more like “evidence of the process of doing design.” I don’t think the principle, as translated for the realm of content, is actually about having “as little content as possible” – although, that’s often going to be a side effect of keeping things simple, clear, and concise. I think this principle is really about making sure that the design process is invisible in the final product. It may take you hours to craft and edit your words, but in the end it should seem effortless, obvious, and inevitable.
Final thoughts
I find it curious that none of Rams’ principles include a concept of design being “universal,” though maybe, for him this was inherent in the idea that design should be simple and self-evident. When relating this to content principles, I couldn’t find the best place to talk about important topics like accessibility or localization, though, in some sense, these may be considered tactics for making content useful, understandable, and thorough down to the last detail. It all depends on having empathy for a wider audience with a broader, more varied set of needs.
It’s an interesting framework, though. And even if it doesn’t comprehensively cover important content considerations, it’s clearly flexible enough to allow for the addition of new areas of practice. What I like best about it is that it came from a spirit of self-reflection. We could all stand to take a step back from time to time and ask ourselves how we know when our work is good.
Lots of articles (some with shiny infographics) will tell you about how much data we’re now creating, and how it’s increasing at a stunning rate every year. And yet, it’s still not enough data to make algorithms actually useful most of the time.
When I first started talking with people in the content industry about what was happening with semantic technology about a decade ago, occasionally people wondered with concern if things like natural language processing and artificial intelligence were going to make human content professionals obsolete.
My feeling at the time was “not any time soon.” These technologies seemed useful for assisting people, especially for managing data at scale, but they were always going to need to be guided and tweaked by people.
The basic expectation that most content professionals have is that algorithms will help us understand what people are interested in, and this information will be used to dynamically serve up more content that will be of interest. Some organizations may even use this information to guide content creation. Ideally, smart systems will even provide some level of assistance in producing that content.
But, I’m not here today to go down the rabbit hole of horrifying, pre-apocalyptic examples of AI gone wrong. I’m not even here to talk about the trashy link-bait promos that have infected most online journalism like a plague. I want to talk about how, even in their most mundane, limited functions, algorithms just aren’t hitting the mark as much as I’d have expected them to by now.
The bots are boring!
My complaint is with Google Now. My Android phone knows more about me than any technology really should. It knows what I search for, it knows where I go, it reads my email and knows (among other things) what movie tickets I bought. So, in theory, it should be able to show me some interesting things in the daily feed. I mean, specifically interesting to me, based on my actual interests.
Sometimes it works. It showed me an interview with Wim Wenders about the recently remastered “Wings of Desire” after I bought tickets to see the movie. That was a pretty cool article that I wouldn’t have even guessed was available. But generally the feed is roughly 80-90% things that are completely uninteresting to me.
To some degree, this is because I do a limited set of things on my phone, even within the larger realm of things I do online. For example, I always look up Fortnite hints and maps on my phone because my computer is too far away when I’m in the living room using the Xbox. So, my phone obviously thinks I’m a huge Fortnite fan and it now constantly shows me news updates, leaks, and articles about fan suggestions for the game.
I also wonder if there’s some kind of crossed-signal demographic effect going on (“people who like Fortnite also like XYZ”), because my feed recently included a string of stories about various football figures, even though I have never once shown any interest in football in anything I’ve done online. I had to manually mark a whole bunch of topics as “not interested.”
However, the deeper source of failure really seems to be that there isn’t the volume of unique, high-quality content out there to meet the need that Google is trying to fill with this tailored feed. When I first started using Google Now, I noted that there were a lot of cases where I would read an article and then it would show me “similar” articles which were really just summaries that other sites had written of the original article.
Lately I’ve noticed a different trend, which I’m sure is also influenced by these algorithms and metrics. While Google has previously gone to great efforts to cut down on content farms, it has also created an appetite for nutritionless content. And there are plenty of sources ready to jump in and fill that hungry void.
For example, let’s take Avengers: Infinity War. I was very interested in seeing this movie, but I didn’t particularly read a lot about it. I probably looked up the release date at some point before it came out, watched the trailer when it was released, and then bought tickets to see it in a theater. After seeing it, I looked up the expected release date for the sequel. It’s possible (even likely) that I did all of these things on my phone.
Since the movie came out, last April, my phone has shown me content about it every single day. At first it was explanations of the ending, and analysis of the poster showing how it secretly contained spoilers for what happened in the movie. But it very quickly became a stream of non-stop speculation, fan theories, hints, spoilers, and occasionally legitimate news about the sequel (which is coming out this coming April).
I cannot tell you how uninterested I am in almost all of this. I definitely didn’t want to read about Avengers for an entire year between movies. I have zero interest in fan theories that explain some speculative aspect of the sequel. Sure, it ended with a dramatic cliff-hanger, but I just want to quietly go about my business for a year and then go see part 2 when it’s ready and I can enjoy the culmination of 10+ years of Marvel Cinematic Universe storytelling. Sure, I could mark this topic as “not interested” but that’s not the case. I am interested in it. Just not to that degree, and not wild speculation and rumors.
Maybe if Google Now knew more about my other interests, the feed would be more balanced. But my guess is that this topic, being broadly popular, has a more steady stream of source material than the obscure “long tail” topics I’m interested in.
So, is the failing with the algorithms, or is the failing with the sources of content? Or is it some kind of dysfunctional way that they learn from and influence each other? In all of the examples described above, from spectacularly disturbing to humdrum disappointing, the problem seems to call for the capability to course correct, to monitor the algorithms and tune them to be more discerning. That gets into some very subjective areas that our AIs are not quite read for. More likely, we will just keep feeding them whatever they demand and hope for the best.
The idea of going into your parents’ line of work seems kind of archaic these days. Unless maybe you’re the villain in a superhero movie. Which is why I was a little shocked to realize, while talking with a family friend several years ago, that I had gone into a field that is essentially a blend of the work my mother and father did.
I was trying to explain Content Strategy to Bruce, a man who had known my parents since they were all in college together, and I described it as “some parts like an editor and some parts like a database programmer.” He responded, “Well, then it sounds like the job you were born to do.” I was probably just trying to put it in terms that I knew he would understand, but it didn’t even occur to me that I was describing my work in terms of my father and mother’s life-long careers.
My mom
When I was in grade school, my mother, Ceil Silver, was a Systems Administrator for Sperry Univac. She trained and supported clients like NBC and SUNY Stony Brook on how to use giant mainframes. I had no idea what this meant, at the time, but I was playing with punchcards at a time when most kids had never heard of computers. Plus, I was watching my mom work in a male-dominated field and succeeding at it.
Later, we were one of the first families I knew of to have a personal computer in their home, and my mom became a database developer. She built custom applications in FoxPro for clients who used them for billing, course registration, and running other important aspects of their businesses. She went to user group meetings and conferences, became a Microsoft MVP, and wrote articles on FoxPro Tips. She didn’t talk about her work that much, but she was undeniably an expert in her field.
Me and my dad
My dad, Jay Lovinger, was working as a journalist when he discovered his true calling as an editor. He landed a job at a new magazine called Inside Sports, eventually becoming the second in command before the magazine folded. He worked at People magazine. He started a Sunday magazine for the Washington Post. He was the editor of Life Magazine for about a year. He’s worked at Sports Illustrated and ESPN. He’s won Emmy awards for online video stories that were ostensibly about sports, but really about people, challenge and triumph. If you’re a fan of sports journalism, he’s probably worked with your favorite writers, and he has a reputation for being one of the best long-form editors in the business.
None of this was consciously part of my decision to go into the field of digital content strategy, a field that didn’t even exist when I started my professional life. But I have always loved words, content and communication, and I have always been comfortable with computers and intrigued by the role they play in the way we create, share and find information.
I guess it’s just a good thing my parents weren’t underwater pirates, or I could have ended up like Black Manta.
Let’s talk about what I’m doing with this blog. When I started writing here, in 2007, I had two blogs. I had this blog for writing about content strategy and the semantic web, and I had a personal blog, where I mostly wrote about movies, sometimes about other pop culture things, and sporadically about weird things I experienced or overheard while living in NYC or traveling.
I updated both blogs most actively from 2007 through 2009. After that, I shifted most of my professional writing to a now-defunct content strategy blog we started at Razorfish, called scatter/gather, updating this blog only on rare occasions, and I switched to posting about weird experiences and pop culture on Facebook. I took notes about movies I saw at film festivals in notebooks, but didn’t bother to post them online anywhere.
Both blogs languished.
Since that time, the lines between professional personas and personal personas have increasingly blurred. Part of it is because of Twitter, Facebook, and other online forums which were ostensibly designed for “connecting” but turned into mostly “broadcasting.” Part of it was due to a movement in professional conference and writing circles to start telling more personal stories about empathy, vulnerability, roadblocks, and failure. I feel cynical about it when I hear people talk about their “brand,” but the reality is that empathy works a lot better when we interact as real, multi-faceted people, and not as business robots. I’ve seen many in my cohort do a pretty nice job of writing about the successes and challenges they encounter in both their work and their personal lives, together, in the same places.
So, as I bring this blog back up to speed, I’m still going to be writing about trends and ideas in the realm of digital content, but I’m also going to be weaving in some posts about non-work experiences and observations (like my last post, about movies I’ve seen recently at the Alamo draft house). But, I’ll probably still turn to Facebook to talk about those random celebrity encounters, or weird overheard conversations in an NYC bodega.
I mentioned that one of my goals for 2019 is to see more movies, specifically at the Alamo Drafthouse in Yonkers. In addition to just being one of our favorite movie theaters, the Alamo in Yonkers is piloting a “Season Pass” program. I’m not sure why this Texas-based chain has decided to pilot this program in a suburb of New York, but it works out well for me, since it’s the closest one to where I live.
The concept of the Season Pass is similar to Movie Pass – you pay a subscription fee and you can then see movies for free (or nearly free). While Movie Pass has been a notorious disaster, I think it has the potential to be a lot more successful for the Alamo because, in addition to showing lots of great first-run and classic movies, they serve food and beverages during the movie. So, while they might be losing a small amount of money by not charging us for tickets, we always shell out $40-60 per visit on meals and drinks and we’ve seen many more movies at the Alamo since getting the pass.
We signed up for the waiting list last summer, and got invited to join the beta program in November. Curiously, Jason got a different offer than I did. We both pay the same flat subscription fee, but he can reserve movies for free, while I pay $1 for each reservation I make. I know they’re testing different pricing models, it’s just funny that we got different ones.
Since signing up on November 9th, we’ve seen the following movies:
Bodied – A weird little movie about a young, white guy who gets involved in the world of rap battles. It’s produced by Eminem. I would have seen this even if we didn’t have the Season Pass, because I love the director, Joseph Kahn, but I’m not sure Jason would have gone. Or, it would have been more of a struggle to get him to go.
Ralph Breaks the Internet – If we had the opportunity to see this follow-up to Wreck-It Ralph while visiting family for Thanksgiving, we might not have gotten to see it the Alamo, but we were definitely going to see it, one way or another. Really good.
Creed II – This is an example of a movie that we both saw only because we had the season pass. I was optimistic because I like the cast, but there really wasn’t much of a story. It was pretty disappointing.
The Favourite – I saw this on my own, while waiting to pick Jason up at the airport. But he would have seen it too, had he been home. It looked beautiful, the plot was chewy, and the performances were amazing. If this one isn’t nominated for several Oscars, I’ll be shocked.
Mary Poppins Returns – We were both looking forward to this one. It was super entertaining – how could it not be? Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda are both adorable. But it’s hard to live up to a classic like the original.
Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse – Aside from the fact that some stylistic elements of the animation made me wonder if we accidentally stumbled into a 3D movie without the 3D glasses, I loved this. The story and the way it’s told live up to all of the praise that everyone is heaping on it. Go see it if you haven’t already! Actually, just thinking about it makes me want to go see it again.
Aquaman – We probably wouldn’t have seen this if we didn’t have the season pass, but if you’re going to see it, it’s definitely worth seeing in the theater. Nearly every scene looks like something you might paint on the side of a van (I stole that joke from my friend Rochelle, but it’s so very true!), and you need a big screen to appreciate that kind of airbrushed epic-ness. Jason Momoa is charming enough to make the whole thing enjoyable, even if it does feel a little like Thor underwater (I stole that joke, too, but I’m not sure from where).
The Hidden Fortress (1958) – This beloved Akira Kurosawa film inspired George Lucas in a variety of ways that impacted his work on Star Wars. The humor, the characterization, some of the plot points, and some of the visual style of Kurosawa’s film can all be seen reflected in the sci-fi classic. It was my first time seeing it, and it had me engrossed every minute.
We’ve already got a few things lined up for January. I’ll report back every month or two, to share what movies we’ve seen and what I thought of them.
Recently someone asked me if I had a personal mailing list. She wanted to keep up with what I’m doing, without having to use social media. I don’t have one, but it was an intriguing idea. I mentioned it to my partner, Jason, and he looked at me quizzically. I said “It’s like a blog post, but you mail it to people.” So, I decided, before starting a new thing, to try to get back to writing posts on this blog.
Due to some personal and health issues over the past couple years, I had stepped back from a lot of the things I used to do, like writing and public speaking. This blog fell by the wayside well before then, but it seems like a good way to get back into things.
So, what better way to kick off a blog on January 1st than with a list of goals. Here are some of the things I hope to do in 2019:
Get back into writing and public speaking. This blog is part of that, but there will be other outlets. I’ve already got an idea for my next talk.
Pitch an idea for a show at Caveat, with Jason. The concept is coming together, and we’re going to do a proof-of-concept soon.
Travel more. Well, more than I did in 2018 (which was much reduced from the previous years).
Sell my NYC apartment. Not a great time to do this, but I’m ready to move on.
Finish the regimen I started in 2017 to deal with this health issue, and figure out how that changes as I switch to long term health maintenance.
See lots of movies at the Alamo Drafthouse in Yonkers, where we were lucky enough to get into the Season Pass beta.
That doesn’t seem like a very ambitious list, but there are more things percolating. And, to be honest, the fact that I have the energy to make these kinds of plans, for the first time in over 2 year, is pretty fantastic.
Of course, I’ll write here about all of these goals, and other projects and adventures, as they develop. Oh, and thanks to Leticia Mooney for sending the email that inspired me to do this!
I realized recently that I haven’t updated the Resources page in three years. Obviously, there are a lot more recent, more interesting resources out there now. So many, in fact, that I should probably entirely replace what was there. But I do want to retain that info, so here it is in a post. Refreshed Resources page, coming soon.
[As of 10/7/09]
I gathered the following resources to be a handout to go along with my “Content Gone Wild!” talk at the MIMA Summit 2009. These articles and sites support the Content Strategy practices discussed in the examples from the presentation. These are not the only resources, and they’re not necessarily the final word on these topics, but they should provide some good information and get you started with practical techniques and tips.
TopBraid Composer™ – a commercial tool for building ontologies and semantic web applications. TopBraid Ensemble™ adds a layer that makes it more user-friendly for content providers, and may also be useful in prototyping.
Apparently, it’s time for my semi-annual blog update!
I’ve been focusing a bit more on work-work this year, and dialing it back on some of the writing and speaking. Not entirely, just gathering up my thoughts so that I can continue working on things that are interesting and relevant.
Writing: I’ve continued to post Scatter/Gather, Razorfish’s Content Strategy blog. And I also published some articles elsewhere this year.
Speaking: This year I got more serious about scaling back on the public speaking. The My Presentations page has been updated with info and links to recordings (when available). Here’s also a list of just the new ones:
Metadata Workshop – Content Strategy Applied, London, UK, March 1-2, 2012 (on slideshare)
Content Strategy: Why Now? – Sisältöstrategiaseminaari 2012 (Content Strategy Seminar 2012), Helsinki, Finland, February 8, 2012 (on slideshare)
Coming soon – I’ll be co-presenting a workshop and giving a talk at Content Strategy Forum 2012, Cape Town, South Africa, October 24-26, 2012
Attending: Even though I’m doing less speaking, I still love the inspiration of going to conferences. I also went to Confab, and soon I’ll be going to dconstruct and XOXO.
Other: One other thing I’ve been up to – I’m serving as Producer on a documentary that Jason Scott is shooting about DEFCON. Here’s a teaser trailer. There’s some other clips, teasers, and test footage on Jason’s YouTube channel.
Speaking: I gave a bunch of talks, and I’ve updated the My Presentations page with info and links to recordings (when available). Funny, because it looks like I did a lot of talks in 2010, and just one in 2011. I actually did a lot of talks in 2011, but many of these were panels, or were places where I was invited to cover topics that I had previously discussed elsewhere. Since there was no recording of these talks and the material wasn’t THAT different than what I’ve already posted, I didn’t see a reason to list all of them on the Presentations page, but if you’re curious, here’s what they were:
Make Your Content Nimble (a very brief version of the talk I gave at Confab) – Semantic Tech & Business Conference; London, UK; September 26-27, 2011
Meaningful Data 