It’s common for designers to use components, systems, and design patterns to help make consistent, visually coherent experiences. Content hasn’t been so easy to systematize, because each word, each verb tense, and even the punctuation carry such nuance! In this talk, Torrey Podmajersky will present patterns that make initial content adequate, freeing content designers to focus on the text changes that make the most impact.

When you have an environment where everyone from the brand team to backend engineering sees the value in words, good writing is easy... or easier, anyway. I'll use the clickbait structure of a listicle to explain how Monzo's approach to writing focuses on the people who don't think of themselves as 'writers' (which is almost everyone).

There’ll be anecdotes, more alliteration, good examples, bad jokes, and research respectfully borrowed from people much smarter than me.

In this talk, Amy will give you an introduction to the world of design systems, and explain the very important role she believes content designers need to play in making them a success.

Amy will talk about what happens when content design is left out of design systems, as well as the right (and wrong) ways to incorporate it.

Many older adults can, know, and want to be digitally active. Technology for them can create a discouraging experience of “I’m too old for this,” but it can also create an empowering “that was so easy for me to do!” type of experience.

We, as writers and designers, have the power to give them an empowering experience.

After a few months of collaborative learning with Michal Halperin Ben Zvi, PhD, an expert in the psychology of aging, I’m excited to share 7 guidelines for writing microcopy that helps older adults use your product.

Sometimes a product designer's role is to be the wind in a content designer's sails.

Though content design is here to stay, organisations still struggle to truly empower content designers to do their best work. I believe every product designer has an important role to play in being an enabler for great content design.

Say what? Is a candid conversation from designer to designers as to how we can better support each other to do our best work—ultimately leading to optimal experiences for the humans who use our products.

What happens after you've shifted an organization from bandaid copy to awareness and inclusion of content design? We all know the importance of increasing the content designer-to-designer ratio, but that ratio isn't the only way to mature content design as a craft in a company. Learn what content design maturity looks like and how to create it when the content designers in your company are outnumbered.

What do UX writing and content design hiring managers look for in a portfolio? What is a portfolio anyway? If I am just“writing the words,” how do I walk the reviewer through the workflow? Content design manager Andy Welfle breaks it down for you, shows you some good examples of UX writing portfolios, and gives you some thought technologies to build a relevant, compelling narrative that’ll help you get hired.

User needs. Consistency. Sentence case. Active voice. There are lots of ‘rules’ you’ll hear about content design. Useful ones too.

But what about the things you don’t hear about? The behind-the-scenes bloopers. The mascara-running mishaps and soul-shattering self-doubt.

In this talk, I’ll reflect on some of the less than perfect learnings and things I wish I’d know when I kicked off my career in content design many moons ago.

Expect uncensored realness, unpretentious imperfections and a good dose of content design self-care.

Collaborating with others is hard. And it’s even harder to convince them to try a new approach if they’ve never even heard about it.

As a content designer or UX writer you’ll constantly find yourself as an advocate for breaking silos and content-first design. This is one of our superpowers and a great way that we provide value to our teams and the business.

To help you out with your cause, let’s talk about content-first design and how to introduce it to your team and stakeholders. To get you to enable better collaboration with other content designers or UX writers, as well as your design team, stakeholders or even subject matter experts, this workshop will show you a set of tools and how to put them in practice. The best part is, they’re so simple, you can start using them next Monday.

In this workshop we will:

• Talk about content-first design
• Discuss how to collaborate better with peers and stakeholders
• Share collaboration tools for content-first design
• Practice how to use them

If your content can’t be found does it really exist?

People do two things online. They are either consuming content or navigating to it. As content designers we want people to spend more time engaging with our content and less time struggling to find it.

A great information architecture (IA) tells a story, creates flow and encourages discovery.

Too often information architecture is presented as a mysterious quasi-science. This workshop takes a content-led jargon-free approach.

In this interactive session, Chris will introduce you to some practical tips and tricks to make information architecture one of your superpowers.

You’ll come away from this workshop able to:

• Organise your content (and many other things in life)
• Test the effectiveness of your site structure and labels
• Create interesting connections between pages with metadata
• Spot the early warning signs for an ailing IA (and how to remedy it)
• Apply IA thinking to both your whole websites and individual pages

In this masterclass you’ll practice some techniques by working in small groups.

Say ‘accessibility’ to many people and their first thought will be: ‘screen readers’. But content design can make a big difference to your audience – whether they use screen readers or not and whether they have an impairment or not.

In this workshop, you will learn how to open up your information to anyone interested in consuming it. We will share a variety of tools and techniques that you can use to show colleagues and stakeholders the value of accessibility.

Conversational ideation is a great way to help design teams think about the content before jumping into sketching. This workshop takes you through a content-led design process, starting with a conversation and ending with a fully-designed wireframe.