Last week, I saw this great tweet by the University of Kentucky’s Jeana Clark: @markgr IA = the building/rooms/floorplan. UX = Hospitality in the building. — jeana (@jeana_with_a_j) May 2, 2012 So, if UX is hospitality, how do we express that hospitality? In a hotel, hospitality may be conveyed in part through tone of voice, manner, the questions we ask and answer—in short, content. Ginny Redish, author of the essential [...]
Update Your Style Guide to Keep It Useful
By on May 4, 2012 • Leave a Comment
Are you ready to get pumped about editorial style guide updates?!! (Would it help if I added a third exclamation point?) If you have a hard time keeping your editorial style guides current, you’re not alone. Even the best of us need to work at keeping our style guides updated and useful. Angie Halama of Brain Traffic shares a great style guide pep talk to raise our spirits (or "spirts" [...]
Nimble Content Development
By on May 3, 2012 • Leave a Comment
Much content development in higher ed happens in giant leaps — major news channel launches, 18-month website redesigns, expansive social media campaigns, you name it. A big rollout can mean big impact, but it also means big resources and, potentially, big failure if we haven’t done our due diligence. In the field of software development, there is an increasingly popular school of thought around agile development, which entails iterative changes [...]
Be Interesting, Please
By on May 2, 2012 • Leave a Comment
It’s fast and easy to create and publish content, right? Maybe, but not if you intend for your content to rise above the onslaught of emails, tweets, blogs posts and ads people are hit with every day. Crosby Noricks of Fast Company makes the case to "think like a publisher" by referencing an Instagram photo that reads, "I’ll be interested, if you’ll be interesting." That’s the voice of our readers [...]
Instant Karma
By on April 23, 2012 • Leave a Comment
Earlier this year, we wrote about the value of building a community around photo content with Instagram. Since then, a lot has happened, including Instagram’s availability on the Android platform and a small chunk of change from a guy named Mark. But the promise of Instagram as a tool for creating a sense community through shared visual experiences remains. Nick DeNardis recently wrote about how his institution, Wayne State University, [...]