Skills training and development for UX content professionals
Our 2024 course and workshop calendar runs May through November. Dates are announced on a rolling basis. Join the waitlist to be notified when new courses are listed.
All members of Content Career Accelerator can enroll in courses and workshops at a significant discount. Members on our Guided plan can enroll in any one course or workshop at no cost. All 2024 courses and workshops are led personally by our Director, Scott Kubie.
Professional Development Courses
The Practice of Content Strategy
Principles, Tools, and Methods
Fill gaps in your self-education, get fully-oriented to the world of UX content, and gain hands-on experience using the fundamental tools and methods of content strategy, a planning discipline for all kinds of digital content.
Content strategy is not the same thing as UX writing, content design, or content marketing. Content strategy is its own unique discipline with a deep well of principles, tools, and methods. Learn what you’ve been missing and move forward confidently as a practitioner of content strategy.
Leading Digital Strategy
The Art and Science of Creating Clarity
Learn the skills and methods you’ll need to lead your organization’s next big digital strategy initiative. If you’re eager — or overwhelmed — at the prospect of leading a website migration or redesign, launching a new employee tool, “appifying” a product or service, managing a rebrand across digital channels, or simply starting the conversation about digital transformation, this course is for you.
Leading Digital Strategy is primarily about facilitation. It’s about how to be the person at the front of the room, holding the whiteboard marker, helping people make decisions and get things done.
This course is for new leaders or those looking to grow their skills, but it is not introductory. Senior-level, minimum, or broad experience consulting or freelancing. It does not teach a neutral, hands-off, “let’s all play with sticky notes” version of facilitation. It’s about being a leader, honing your consulting instincts, and learning the tricks of the trade that create alignment and build momentum.
Content Ecosystem Mapping
A Model-Based Approach to IA & Product Strategy
“What is the website even for? Why are we always fighting about the homepage? How many sites and channels do we even have? Who owns all this content? Who are our real audiences? Why does this keep happening?“
If any of that sounds like your company or clients, you are experiencing content chaos. Content Ecosystem Mapping is the antidote. It’s a facilitation process that helps teams understand each other, align on strategy, and make decisions about what to do next. It does this through the facilitated co-creation of a content ecosystem map, a robust visualization of how your digital strategy and business strategy interact, and how you are or aren’t meeting business needs and user needs with your content and online services.
This course will teach you how to use ecosystem mapping to verify (or bust) assumptions, imagine new possibilities, scope projects, document vocabulary, and coordinate understanding between stakeholders. The map-making process can reveal where people have different ideas about reality, giving you a chance to work out these differences before they derail your projects.
This course helped me level up my skills in making sense of complexity. It’s a valuable skill and applicable in all kinds of content chaos scenarios.
Kailey, Content Strategist
UX Writing for Digital Experiences
Learn a more thoughtful, elevated approach to UX writing informed by 15+ years of hands-on experience + business lessons going back to the turn of 20th Century.
This course is Scott Kubie’s approach to writing interfaces. It is friendly to beginners, inspiring to experienced UX writers, and not for the faint of heart. If you’ve been learning on your own, God bless you, but this is what you’ve been missing. This course goes way beyond the junk you find on Medium — copy-pasted “UX writing checklists”, copywriters repackaging old advice for marketers, and hamfisted AI-assisted summaries of the books you’d have been better off reading instead.
The specific structure of this course has been developed and refined over two semesters in the Interaction Design MFA program at School of Visual Arts. It’s also been inspired by the hundreds (thousands?) of people who claim to “not be a writer” that have taken one of Scott’s conference workshops or in-house trainings over the last 15 years.
Skills Training Workshops
Change is a Feature
Communicating Product & Service Changes to Users
Stop us if you’ve heard this one:
Q: What did the engineer say to the customer in the release notes?
A: Minor bug fixes and enhancements.
Oops, sorry, that’s not a joke. But it is unfortunately common. Far too often, changes to our products are communicated to customers with a cavalier attitude — if it all. Which is a shame, as change is the most common, unifying feature across modern software. You know, software? That stuff that all businesses are now made of?
Web and mobile apps, informational websites, and other digital experiences are constantly being updated and changed, often rapidly and invisibly, in ways that can cause confusion, frustration, increased support costs and, yes, even churn.
Enough is enough. It’s time to embrace change as the core feature that it is. In this workshop, you’ll learn:
- A whiteboard-friendly framework for planning change communications
- Common and effective patterns for communicating change within the product experience itself
- Ways of identifying which changes — like new or deprecated features, bug fixes, UI tweaks, policy updates, and more — are worth emphasizing, and to what degree
- Advanced strategies to manage massive changes to an experience (like a whole new interface)
- Common anti-patterns that can cause frustration, backlash, and even user revolt (and how to avoid them)
Who should attend: Anyone who works on a digital product that might, conceivably, undergo change. (Psst, that’s everyone.)
Map Your Content Ecosystem (Crash Course)
Learn the basics of ecosystem mapping and dive straight in in this hands-on training workshop focused on getting you to a complete first draft of a content ecosystem map for your website, app, product, or service.
The workshop will require some pre-reads, including a video lecture, to be sure you’re up to speed before we start. Great for core website teams of 2-4 people or client/consultant pairings to join together.
User-Centered Content Strategy
Journeys, Stories, Maps, & More
Don’t spend months on a big plan to fix everything at once. Start being more user-centered right now.
You’ll learn how to take apart popular tools for describing users and understanding their journeys into common patterns and components. See the method behind the UX magic and leave equipped to choose, adapt, remix, and/or invent just the right tool for focusing your experiences on the people who really matter—your users!
Great for: intranet/content/knowledge management teams, marketing/copywriters trying to be more “UX-y”, product marketers, junior & mid-level content designers and UX writers, UX designers and researchers looking for a fresh framework or tired of overly-complicated, multi-month UX deliverables
Topics: facilitating user-centered design and content planning, what it takes to become a user-centered organization, design processes, editorial processes, storytelling and storymapping, journey mapping, strategy and content gap analysis
How to Get the Writing Done
More Effective Workflows for UX, Product, & the Web
Learn a proven, repeatable framework for getting the writing done for websites, apps, and digital products.
This is a foundational training on workflow-based writing as part of a larger design, UX, or content project. It’s for all kinds of writing, including marketing, support content, app and interface content, B2B and B2C website content, and more. You could even use the lessons and methods to improve your approach to writing project briefs or memos.
This is not about the “rules” of writing — if there are any. We’ll be focused less on the mechanics of writing well and more on what it’s like to deal with content and interface copy as part of your larger design and content processes. That means this workshop is a great fit for anyone dealing with product, website, and UX content, whether or not they feel like a “writer”.
Writing as Rewriting
Editing Lenses for Business & UX Writing
A writing workshop that is not-so-secretly about editing and revision, the most important phase of writing — especially in the era of ChatGPT and AI-generated content that’s not quite up to snuff.
Participants will gain familiarity and practice with a set of “editing lenses” that can be applied to improve the clarity, impact, and thoughtfulness of nearly any piece of writing (and also catch silly mistakes).
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