Ellen de Vries
Content Strategist at Clearleft
Clearleft Says
Ellen De Vries is our wonderful wordsmith and content strategist. We’ve been on the receiving end of many of her excellent workshops at Clearleft. Not wanting to be selfish, we thought it was about time we shared her talents with the rest of the UX world. If you’ve ever struggled to define a value proposition, craft effective micro-copy or develop a consistent tone of voice, this session is for you.
Three tools from a content strategist’s toolkit
The best UX designers are strategists, they know how important it is to nail the concept down in the early stages of a project. A Content Strategist’s job is to care a great deal about how you communicate those messages throughout the design and build phases, and way beyond launch. These messages form a benchmark for decision-making, a metric for audits, and infiltrate the project at every level, from the IA, to the metadata, to the tiniest bit of micro-copy. They make for a consistent and coherent experience of the brand.
This workshop gives you access to three of the most versatile powertools in a Content Strategist's toolkit. Once we’re done, you’ll feel equipped to go forth and carefully define your 'thing’ with your team or your clients, whatever the size of your company, for projects large and small.
By the end of this workshop you will:
- Be able to define product or service in a clear and inspiring way
- Know how to define a set of characteristics for your product or service
- Have a set of useful methods that define how your product or service differentiates from others
- Understand how the messaging toolkit helps your team and your clients rally around a central organising concept
About Ellen de Vries
Ellen is a Content Strategist at Clearleft.
At age 12 Ellen re-wrote her grandma’s washing machine manual to make it more user-friendly, then she went on to restructure the manual for the CD player. 25 (or so) years later, she’s still rearranging content to rid the world of unnecessary complexity. Before joining Clearleft as their first content strategist, she worked as a freelance brand language specialist and ran her own content agency. During that time she worked with major international brands and UK household names such as English Heritage, and UNISON. Over the past 6 months she’s been working in close collaboration with the UX team on governance for a major publisher and brand messaging for a charity promoting human rights for children.