HOW Design Conference
Monday, May 12
1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Establishing a Brand-Driven Message Architecture
Ballroom C Level 3Brand-driven content strategy complements user-centered design, and this workshop will help you get up to speed on the philosophy, questions, tools, and exercises to implement it. We’ll conduct a hands-on exercise to prioritize communication goals and develop a message architecture—ideal whether you design for the web, mobile apps, social media, or offline experiences.
Eager for more efficient engagements? You’ll also discover how a brand attributes cardsort can help you identify potential pitfalls and points of disagreement while you improve organizational alignment. Then use this foundation to conduct a qualitative and quantitative content audit. We’ll discuss the content opportunities a gap analysis reveals when we use the message architecture as a metric of quality.
Trying to manage scope creep? What about seagulling stakeholders? And what content matters most, anyhow? These questions and other challenges drive content strategy; they’re basic issues to any designer planning for content. But what if you’re not a content strategist? What if you need to empower a team, wrangle a client, and rally everyone around a common vocabulary for your primary navigation? No matter your title, it’s time to embrace content strategy, starting with the message architecture.
You’ll leave with the savvy and experience to bring brand-driven content strategy techniques and thinking into your own work.
3 Main Take-Aways:
- Learn how—and why—to establish a hierarchy of communication goals in a message architecture with a hands-on exercise.
- Discuss the right questions to ask—and how to ask them—to minimize distracting, off-brand features, like the blog no one has time to update.
- Gain additional tools to keep your projects on track, on time, and on budget.
