Building Bendable Content

Responsive. Adaptive. Mobile first. Cross-channel. We all want a future that’s flexible, fluid, and unfixed from the desktop, right?

Great. Then it’s time to get to the core of the matter: the content.

Fixed firmly to inflexible pages, today’s content is too often stuck in meaningless blobs—blobs that break under the weight of responsive designs, mobile sites, and cross-channel distribution.

Which elements are most important? What’s primary and what’s corollary? What’s related or interdependent? What stays, what goes, and what gets truncated on small screens?

When we can answer these questions—and structure our content accordingly—we’ll replace those messy blobs with content that bends, shifting and reshaping to fit varied displays and devices.

To accomplish this, we need to bring our skills in organizing and architecting information to a micro level, breaking content down and lending it the structure it needs to maintain its meaning in an increasingly unfixed web.

After all, we can't keep creating more content for every new device and channel—our writers and content wranglers will never keep up. But with IA skills applied to this new challenge, we can stop asking for more content and start asking our content to do more.

This session will help UXers advocate for and architect content that goes further by discussing:

Why adding structure actually makes content more flexible
What we can learn about structure from technical and CMS folks
How to analyze content and understand its meaningful elements
How IA skills apply to this new challenge—and also how they’ll need to change