Corey Vilhauer

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    Corey Vilhauer is User Experience Strategist at Blend Interactive, a small shop in the heart of the Midwest, where he specialises in content strategy, information architecture, and editor/end user quality assurance.

    Corey is a recovering advertising copywriter and productivity junkie. Despite these hardships, he still likes to write; he has been published by A List Apart (“Audiences, Outcomes, and Determining User Needs”) and Contents Magazine (“A Content Methodology Primer”). He also writes about content strategy at Eating Elephant, and about things that aren’t content strategy at Black Marks on Wood Pulp.

    He’s on Twitter (@mrvilhauer), where he’s cut back on fart jokes considerably.

     

     

    About Corey’s session

     

    Empathy: Content Strategy’s Hidden Deliverable

    As content strategists, we provide content audits, strategic content plans, editorial calendars, and content templates. We provide guidance and structure, and push for better editorial and better navigation. In doing this, we’re putting the tools in place for content to live on without us.

    But not all of our clients are writers. And not all of our client organisations are large enough to handle an editorial staff. Not all of our clients can sell what we do up the chain – in fact, not all of our clients even know what it is we’re doing WHILE WE’RE DOING IT.

    In other words: we can talk about structured content all we want. But we cannot assume all of our clients, co-workers or bosses understand that. We must have patience. We must be teachers. We must work with empathy.

    What you will learn:

    - Why it’s important to have empathy for our users
    - Why it’s important to have empathy for our clients
    - What we can do to be more empathetic toward those we work for – and with