Services

How I Work

As an independent consultant, I have the luxury of being nimble and flexible in how I contribute to a project. This allows me to adapt to the requirements of the problem at hand—in whatever state it’s in.

Depending on a project’s needs, I may bridge a knowledge and experience gap for an organization that is missing a critical skillset. Or lead a team that has the know-how, but lacks direction to get where they need to go. Or immerse myself in a problem space and deliver an informed, outcome-based recommendation for a specific design goal.

Don’t worry—I will also help you decide which of these approaches is best for your goals, project, and team.

How I Can Help

After a decade and a half in user experience, information architecture, design research, and content strategy consulting, I have accumulated a wide-ranging set of methods and strategies I can bring to a project.

As an independent consultant, I focus on a subset of practices in which I can create the most significant impact for my clients.

Information Architecture

Information architecture (IA) is the structural design of a shared information space. Effective IA creates meaningful, goal-oriented connections between digital content, user needs, technical requirements, and business goals.

I specialize in research-driven modeling, design, and validation techniques that produce system-wide solutions for information organization, labeling, and navigation.

Common information architecture activities include:

• Collaborative organizational alignment on goals, priorities, and target outcomes
• Synthesis of existing research and scoping and execution of additional research efforts as warranted
• Qualitative and quantitative content and structure assessment, using both ML/NLP techniques and eyeballs-on-screens approaches as warranted
• Technical information architecture, including schema definitions, text extraction, classification scheme design, taxonomy design, and ontology creation
• Content-driven wireframing, page design, and template development
• Coaching internal teams on the maintenance and iteration of work we've done together to ensure sustained value over time

Content Strategy, Design, and Engineering

Content strategy—which for me includes content design and hands-on content engineering—focuses on creating content systems and workflows that produce flexible, reusable content collections. Well-designed and developed content works across contexts and use cases, allowing your intellectual property to create more value over a longer lifespan.

My skillset encompasses a full spectrum of content research, design, and development capabilities. I help my clients prudently integrate design and technology solutions and purposefully orchestrate them with the people and processes needed to create sustainable, goal-oriented content ecosystems.

Common content strategy activities include:

• Production workflow process diagnosis, modeling, and improvement
• Full stack content modeling and development, from conceptual design through model implementation and CMS integration
• Content store and CMS customization, including schema authoring and custom plugin design and development
• Collaborative formulation of content design principles and voice, tone, and style guidelines
• Coaching internal teams on methods to improve the processes and technologies supporting content workflow and operations

Strategic Advising

Never before have there been so many tools, services, channels, and strategies for creating and distributing digital content. In recent years, we've seen an even faster explosion of creative and analytic tools—some of them truly game changers, some of them merely shiny baubles better suited to distraction than disruption.

I help my clients cut through the marketing noise and develop feasible approaches for building effective content ecosystems that last. In my experience, there's no such thing as "one size fits all," but balanced and informed design and technology choices can help you find the "size" that fits you best—and leaves you the right amount of room to grow.

If any of these solutions speak to problems you have in communicating clearly and purposefully to your target audiences online, reach out today and let's set up a time to talk.