Learning & Development Document
Content Strategy Intern at Clearlink
Creating a document that teaches the content strategy team important strategies and principles about the user experience.
Timeframe
July-August 2021 (2 weeks)​
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Challenge
The content strategy team regularly holds workshops to learn more about important strategies for creating a good user experience. The director of content strategy at Clearlink asked me to make a document that the content strategists can reference for help and to generate ideas for future learning and development workshops for the team.
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Key Takeaways
It is important to stay up to date on best UX practices. It is also important to recognize that there is always something new to learn.
Clarifying the Problem
I met with a senior content strategist on the team and my mentor and we had a meeting about what the team wanted to learn, what they had gone over in the past, and the structure of workshops. In this meeting, I was able to learn what I should be looking for, and what kind of workshops I should be suggesting for the team.
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Initial Research
I began my research by searching through resources I had from my classes. I was able to find a good deal of resources about accessibility, surveys, and user interviews through this method. Next, I continued my research by visiting common UX websites like Nielson Norman Group, UXmatters, and UX Planet. I searched for the themes that the content strategy team was interested in learning more about.
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Putting it Together
I created a spreadsheet with the different areas of focus as pages. Each page had the resource, a link to the page where I found it, and a short description. There also is a column for workshop ideas in the future. I organized the spreadsheet like this so it is as easy as possible for someone to find a subject they want to learn more about. The topics are clear, and they are easily accessible through links in the spreadsheet.
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Road Blocks
One of the main roadblocks was finding recent and relevant articles on what the content strategy team wanted to learn. Sometimes I would find an article that seems like it could help, but it was written before 2010 rendering it outdated. I overcame this roadblock by thoroughly searching through multiple credible websites to find recent articles.
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Another roadblock was finding data visualization help resources for the team. It was specifically mentioned that the team needs help with this, so I knew it was important to find credible and recent articles on data visualization/analysis methods. I overcame this roadblock by moving on from articles to seminars/courses that teach people how to visualize data. From there, I found a valuable course offered by LinkedIn about data visualization tips and tricks.