The real problem in most organisations is that they are dealing with busy developers and a marketing team that are finding it too complex to design, develop and deliver experiences that look and feel great.
It doesn’t help that the content management systems of the past have not really been designed for content collaboration, so you need to look elsewhere to sort out that problem. Also, while headless CMS has become the defacto standard, it further complicates the picture with more pieces in the puzzle.
Untangling this complexity and addressing the big challenges faced by large, complex organisations, is what Kontent.ai is focused on. They call their next level CMS a modular content platform.
Read moreHow are those who are leading digital thinking differently? From speaking to our community members in Europe and North America, it’s not the size of the technology stack, and it’s not about build vs. buy. It’s more about content, tech and people.
When asked about the key digital trends, it used to be easy to answer by just citing analysts, who would usually all point in more or less the same direction. The direction of travel so to speak would be the same across most analyst reports.
Times have changed, the future is now, and today we see a totally chaotic vendor marketplace, new categories coming up for software vendors and if you read updates from the analysts, it points in quite different directions. What does that mean to you as a customer?
Read moreFirst came the Web CMS, then came Headless, and now it’s time for composable
When Sana Remekie talks about the need for marketing to lead the Web or how to navigate the seemingly never ending vendor chaos when building your digital platform, she does so from a strong foundation of understanding how enterprises approach digital and how digital have evolved in the past twenty years.
Sana is the co-founder of Conscia, a Toronto-based enterprise software-as-a-service company that empowers marketers to activate personalized experiences on every channel. They refer to it as connecting the dots with the digital experience graph or to put it another way: Connecting the dots between customer and content in every context.
She’s also recognised as among Canada’s Top 10 Influential Women in Tech and recently became a MACH Ambassador. Sana is our expert of the month.
Read moreWhen you feel included and engaged, do you do a better job? Do you think teams that in which people work well together produce much better results? Have you noticed the best ideas often come from unexpected sources? Do you want to work at the top of your intelligence and give the same opportunity to others?
These good questions set the stage for the popular book 'The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation' which came out in 2014 and has since changed how we collaborate and innovate.
Carsten G. Lützen works as a playful agile coach at the LEGO Group and has been working on liberating structures for the last few years and also recently created a collection of liberating structures agenda items which you can pick and choose from
Read moreReducing and mitigating the impact of climate change is the key challenge of our time and designers have a vital role to play in reducing emissions and mitigating their impact. According to the UK Design Council around 80% of the environmental impact of today’s products, services and infrastructures are determined at the design stage.
In a recent member call, Val Mitchell introduced the work of the Thriving Planet team at Snook and how they are beginning to use the principles and practice of Service Design to consider the needs of our planet alongside the needs of organisations and users.
Read moreAs designers, our purpose should be to design easy-to-use solutions, that don’t require expert users
When I talked to Anja Saabye, she brought up how everyone is busy these days and how time is the limited resource required to move things forward. This calls for solutions that require less effort and ideally no training.
In her view, we can’t expect that customers know everything, yet as she said, too many people who work with user experience forget this great responsibility and place a great burden on their users.
Anja is Head of UX and Product Design, Senior Manager at Universal Robots, where she has been a part of growing the design team. She’s been there for almost 2 years following an extensive agency background and lives privately in Odense, Denmark.
Read moreHow we build digital solutions has fundamentally changed in the past few years and this also has huge implications for marketing. To just mention a few of the new arrivals impacting marketing, there’s citizen developers, jamstack, no-code tools and then there’s the headless trend enabling faster and more secure websites while also separating content from presentation.
While many IT analysts, vendors, agencies and also quite a few IT departments have jumped on these emerging trends, marketing has been left catching up while looking at an overcrowded and confusing list of MarTech vendors.
Read more“The most important thing in diversity & inclusion is to speak less and do more”
It is hard to disagree with the impactful opening line by Chris Hovde in our recent member call, but how do you actually take diversity and inclusion to the next level?
Chris is a diversity lead at the award-winning Swedish multinational telecommunications company Telia. They have been crowned as the most family-friendly workplace and as a rainbow hero. It’s been a multi-year journey and as Chris said, they are not done yet.
Read moreUsing the presentation title “Strategic creativity in a chaotic world” Hannah Gutkauf travelled to the famous tech fest SXSW in Austin, Texas back in March and gave a talk framed around the Metaverse, but really about all emerging technology at the moment, be it AI, XR or data science.
Working with strategy creativity in a chaotic world is also a fitting title for Hannah’s job as Global Partner & Head of Emerging Tech at the Copenhagen offices of design services firm Manyone.
Hannah is originally from Vienna, studied at the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology and before joining the agency world, she worked in luxury fashion and also studied tech at the IT University of Copenhagen. Hannah is a self-proclaimed creative digital technologist and also our expert of the month.
Read moreAs the Head of Design at telecommunications conglomerate Verizon in New York City, Richard Dalton leads a sizable team of 600 designers working at the forefront of Verizon's digital transformation. They aim to create exquisite experiences for their customers, but how do they do it?
In a recent member call, Richard offered a brief and informal Q&A session, where he covered DesignOps, strengthening the design muscle and some of the recent design trends.
Read moreHow do we create web pages from the lens of sustainability and how do we measure the carbon footprint of our digital presence?
At UK-based website governance vendor Little Forest, Managing Director Gavin Colborne and his team are working on a new open source project which will introduce a "Sustainability Score" for websites.
As he said in our recent member call:
“Similar to Google Lighthouse scores for accessibility, SEO and performance, the time has come to also be serious about sustainability as a digital leader.”
Read moreIn his 2020 book 'World Wide Waste', Gerry McGovern shares how to achieve digital growth in environmentally friendly ways.
Gerry McGovern built his career on helping large organisations deliver a better digital customer experience. When reviewing his career, Gerry realised that his obsession with simplification could also benefit the environment, which led him to write World Wide Waste, a book about how digital is killing our planet and what we can do about it.
Read moreHow do you identify and remove the barriers to strong, effective content work?
This is the focus of Rachel McConnell’s recent book 'Leading Content Design', which shares how to create common standards, improve collaboration, iron out wrinkles in the design process, and build advocacy—so you can lead your team with impact.
Rachel works as Head of UX content at Flo, a women’s health app and was previously in various content roles at BT. In a recent member call, she shared her thinking behind the work and introduced us to her work on content operations.
Read moreAmazon has been changing how we shop online for years and every move of the online marketplace giant seems to have everyone’s attention. But why is that? And what is it that makes Amazon special?
In a recent member conference call, Jeppe Hamming, Head of Marketplaces, Amazon specialist and Partner in the Danish agency, Nørgård Mikkelsen dived into how Amazon does business and what that means for businesses looking to sell their goods via the platform. He also shared key insights into how you succeed on Amazon based on his vast experience onboarding and optimising the Amazon presence of multiple large enterprises.
Read moreIf you want to validate an idea or wondering how something works, it is almost always a good idea to ask the customer, but response rates are generally down on all surveys. Bad surveys can both stress your customers and alienate them.
In her recent book 'Surveys That Work', UK-based forms expert Caroline Jarrett explains a seven-step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no-nonsense style with plenty of examples about real-world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology.
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