Last week’s LavaCon conference in Portland, OR was the highest attended ever. And with good reason; the program was very compelling. Regardless of session focuses (web copy, chatbots, virtual reality, and more), nearly every session echoed the same themes: change is constant, collaboration is critical, find your tribe.
Design and automation are often positioned as mutually exclusive–you have to choose one or the other. But in fact, it’s possible to deliver content in an automated workflow that uses a stellar design. To succeed, you need a designer who can work with styles, templates, and other building blocks instead of ad hoc formatting.
More content across more devices requires scalability–and that means more automation. A strategic approach to content needs to incorporate both design and automation as constraints and find the right balance between the two.
The content lifecycle can involve many needlessly tedious tasks. Perhaps the most tedious of tasks is review tracking. There are many ways to send content out for review. Some people prefer using a manual process, others prefer automated workflows. Whatever approach you use is fine, provided one critical detail: that the reviewer actually read the material.
To date there is no sure-fire way to ensure that reviewers read the material assigned to them. No matter how many alerts they receive, and no matter how many times you bug them, there is no systematic way to ensure that reviewers read and comment on the material in a timely manner.
But what if there was?
