A Content Strategy Project Update
 
The design team and I just finished a two day workshop that found us digging out the scissors and tape. Yep, we went old school. If you've happened to read some of the past posts documenting our ongoing content strategy project, you may have noticed we've been employing some high tech solutions to our tasks. We've explored software for completing site inventories and cataloging content. We've employed spreadsheets, word docs, open source online collaboration tools (much to the chagrin of our IT team) and even new cloud based site mapping tools like slickplan.

But in the end, we've found ourselves returning again and again to the old ways. If we were to look at the process thus far through the lens of the Pareto principle (80/20 rule), my guess is that the 20% of our efforts that have driven the most insight, or provided the greatest thrust toward client deliverables will have come from tried and true analogue methods. Whiteboard sessions, standup meetings, and of course the cutting/pasting and red-pen markup of printed pages.

I'm encouraged by the myriad tools that are coming online to help us UX folk hone our skills. And while it feels a bit odd to dig so deeply into the old bag of tricks, I'm quite relieved to know that so much our craft can be accomplished via bootstrap tactics. As a leader of a small UX team housed within a small digital agency it's reassuring that high budgets and fancy office infrastructure aren't required to produce quality products. What's really needed? Good people, genuine concern for the client and the product evolution. And of course a sharp pair of scissors.