Well, I was told I was supposed to start at 2.15. So even though there's still some people filtering in, which I do see that there's some empty seats up here if you're looking and can't find a seat. But I think I'm going to go ahead and try to get started here so that we don't run out of time. I also tend to move when I talk, but I'm going to try to stay next to this microphone because I'm told it's the only way that you're going to hear me. So just holler at me if you're having trouble hearing me and I'll try to stay closer. Is it still not loud enough? Good. Everybody OK? Cool. I'll do my best. So my name is Jared Ponchott. I'm the design director at a company called Lullabot. We're one of the sponsors here at DrupalCon. Actually, we have a booth down there. We're actually throwing a party Wednesday night. So if you want to talk more, because this talk is going to kind of fly through some ideas about the content strategy and what it is, and then get into quickly into some specifics. But if you want to talk more, come to our party Wednesday night. It's at a place called the Handle Bar. And we're also hiring all the time. And right now, we happen to be hiring. So if you're interested in working with Lullabot, be sure to check out our website, lullabot.com slash jobs. But anyway, I've been a designer for probably since before I even know what that meant. I went to college for design. I'm not a content strategist. Just this is full disclosure upfront. So this talk is sort of going to talk about things that I've been learning and that have been really fascinating, helpful for me. But I'm a designer. And quite a lot of the time that I've spent designing over the last decade and a half has been actually focused on the web and what I like to call rich content models, like designing with really rich content models. And much of that time was spent not really knowing, I don't know, trying to think of how many years ago it was when I started hearing the term content strategy. There's a long time in my design career where I didn't even know there was something called content strategy. Once I started to hear about this thing, I assumed that it meant being strategic with content. But I didn't really know if I were to hire a content strategist, what would this person do in my projects? Like, what are the things that they would make? You know, I know what designers make. I knew what the developers did in our projects and I knew what the project managers do. But content strategy always felt a little nebulous to me when it first started becoming talked about a lot. So what I want to bring to you guys today is just some really practical knowledge about what content strategy is, sort of a way to think about it, especially if you're designers, hopefully this will be helpful and if content strategy maybe is a little new to you. And especially kind of why it can be really, really helpful in the design process, sort of how it dovetails with design. And then hopefully some also some just really simple practical ways you could as a designer, whether you're project manager or whatever, you could start actually doing some content strategy work in your projects, even if you don't have the flexibility of just hiring a content strategist to add to the project. So first, let's define a little bit about what content strategy is. And like I said, I'm not an expert on content strategy so I'm gonna kinda lean on some experts that are out there in the field for how they describe it. One of the things I've continued to learn over the course of my career is how important role clarity is. And this is whether you're working with a team or even when you're freelancing. Role clarity is really important. It can be easy to understand its importance on larger teams, with larger projects where it just makes sense. Like we need role clarity so that we have efficiency and that everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing and whatnot. But even when you're working in small teams, it can be really, really important. Let's say you have just a PM and a front-end developer and a designer working together on a project. That does not mean that those are the only roles or disciplines that need to be brought to bear in the project. So having an understanding sort of broadly of what different roles care about, what they're there to protect and what they're doing can be hugely helpful, especially in those situations where you're sort of the lone wolf. And so hopefully I can kind of arm you with a few things about what the role of a content strategist is, what they care about in ways that maybe you could try to care about those things in your design process. Okay, so what is content strategy? I saw this talk that Shelly Bowen gave about a year or so ago and I think it's on Vimeo or yeah. And in this talk she had a slide that described like what she thought content strategy was and the slide said it takes the business objectives and the audience objectives and aligns them across all platforms and channels. So it takes the business objectives and the audience objectives and then aligns them across all the platforms and channels. And I remember seeing this slide when I was seeing the talk and thinking, okay, yeah, I think I understand what that means. And then the more I started thinking about it, I was like, wait a minute, that's what I do. That's like what a designer does. How is that, I don't, okay, now I don't understand what a content strategist does. And the more I've looked into sort of the ways people define it, like a lot of the ways people define content strategy, it sounds a lot like design when you look at it in that way. I think Christina Halverson has what many consider to be sort of the classic definition of what content strategy is. And it's a little more helpful, I think. She says, it's planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. And so that planning work for that creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. That feels a little bit more discreet to me. I like that. I think that it's, you might think of design as planning for and implementing the interactive experience of usable content. And so they dovetail nicely, but that way of thinking about it felt more discreet to me anyways. Again, like over and over, when I look at the way people describe it though, it sounds like design. Kevin Nichols from Sapient Nitro says we, we being his team at Sapient Nitro, he says we define content strategy as getting the right content to the right user at the right time. And again, I think most great designers, like that's what they're all about. They want to get the right content, the right user at the right time, and do it efficiently and effectively. So one of the ways that I often try to understand roles and disciplines is like I said, to figure out like what does each role care about? What are they there to protect? And so I came up a list of what I think a content strategist cares about, kind of what they're there to protect in a project. And again, this one's one I made up. So if any of you are content strategists, I'm J-Punch on Twitter, tell me the things that I'm missing later or talk to me afterwards because I love learning about this stuff. And I'm very much in process learning this stuff. But here's, here's the stuff that I've kind of come up with that I think content strategists care about. They care about business goals, like what does an organization need? How does, how does the content itself keep the lights on? They care about audience needs. Who are they? What are the scenarios that describe what they're looking for in the content? And when they interact with it and what they're after, message and meaning, things like voice and tone very much in the purview of a content strategist. Relevance, like how relevant is this to those audiences that we've described? The delivery channels, what are the different ways this content is getting out there? Editorial process, how is it made? What's that process look like? And lastly, just sustainability and governance. So who will maintain the content over time and how will it be maintained? Will it be maintained? These are all things that a content strategist cares about. And I realize that many of these things, again, they sound like things a designer should care about too and they should. They're very important things. In the age of device proliferation, the age of responsive design and all the different things that we're trying to design for and take into account in our processes, I think design's being pulled out of being thought of in this like very focused aesthetic kind of a thing. And getting back to the fundamentals of what design is about and it's really about these kinds of things. I've been describing design for a while now as being about purpose and not preference, about priority and not placement, and about systems and not pages. And content strategy is actually a wonderful discipline, an actual discipline to bring into your design process to help keep things focused on those things. Again, like a world where not everything even can exist on the same place on every device through which they're gonna be consuming the content. It's so important to find ways for your process to get centered around what the priority of each thing is as opposed to getting really nitpicky detailed into the placement of everything and getting hyper visual right out of the gate. Now, I rarely do a talk on design where I don't end up using this. This is my way of defining design, my favorite definition of design, which is design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order. Victor Popinac said that. And inherent in that definition is this idea of design is about priority, it's about helping people see what's important. So, suffice it to say, that's sort of like the, we'll move on from the what is it thing, but I think design and content strategy can sound really similar when you hear people talking about the high level of like, what are they? They're not the same, they're not twins, but they make really good stepbrothers, they work really well together and they can be a lot of fun together. Okay, so one final way of looking at the distinction is that a content strategist in my mind at least isn't distracted with presentation. And bringing content strategy into your design process can be a way to provide that helpful focus to actually not get too quickly, too distracted with presentation, but actually understand the content that's underneath everything. So while the content strategist looking at business goals and audience needs and focusing on things like message and voice and governance related to the content itself, the designer is then focused on how to visually represent that same message and voice and how to create a sustainable design system for all of it to live in. Again, they just dovetail so nicely. Okay, so enough definitions. So let's talk a little bit about what makes it great, what makes it great for the design process. I think there are sort of three fundamental things, three fundamental ways that you can see content strategies being really hugely helpful within your design process and actually even within your development process if you're more in that camp. So the first is that it can act as a force multiplier. The second is that it can act as a silo buster. And thirdly, and maybe the most important for me lately, is that it can fill in really important details that you just would have missed if you hadn't done the disciplined work of content strategy within your process. So I'm gonna define those a little bit more. So the first, content strategy is a force multiplier. I'm guessing that many of you have worked on projects where your team either feels smaller than the task at hand or especially where the timeline feels way too tight. How many of you have worked on projects where you've sensed a great deal of pressure for design to get to a particular place of approval so that development could actually do all of its work? This is a really, really common pain point within the process. And content strategy actually produces some things that are, whether you call them deliverables or not, produces some tools that can create communication and actually help speed that along, help act as that force multiplier. When that's happening, whether you have a huge team, like with lots of resources to throw at something or small, like even with the huge teams, you run into Brooks law, right? Like nine women can't make a baby in one month. No, there's, you reach a point where you just cannot sort of do any more in parallel. And again, what I've been finding, what we've been finding at Lullabot is some of the basics of content strategy actually give the clarity that the design team and the development team needs to actually begin work in tandem way more easily. So content strategy as a silo buster, this is really noticeable, I think, when you work on larger projects with larger, sometimes multiple teams working in tandem, at Lullabot, we've had the privilege of working on a lot of really large projects. And one of the things that you'll see, the larger the organization, the larger the teams, is the siloing of disciplines. In fact, in many cases, maybe you've found this as well, like often you'll find that separate vendors are being looked to for each discipline. So they're not just different teams, they're different companies coming in with different goals and different requirements lists and everything. And that siloing of disciplines can actually cause a lot of pain in the design process and in the development process. Content strategy can actually provide you with some tools to actually at least bridge the gaps between the silos, if not break them down. It's not a panacea, but it's very helpful in those situations. And the last thing, content strategy can provide designers with details. Like, this is a big one. This is why I think that designers should be taking part in some of the content strategy work. Even if you have a content strategist on your team, I feel like designers actually can get a whole lot out of being a part of producing some of the tools that content strategists produce to help them understand what's underneath anything. In the end, it's the things you learn in the creation of the spreadsheets and the documents that are more valuable than those things themselves often. It's like Winston Churchill famously said, plans are of little importance, but planning is essential. And so much of the work of content strategy, I feel like is this way. Even if the larger team doesn't use the tool a whole lot later down the road, the people who are involved in creating it have an understanding that provides glue within a project. Or another way to think about this is the way Donald Rumsfeld famously put it so eloquently when he said, as we know, there are no knowns. There are things that we know we know. There are also unknown unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things that we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know, we don't know. And to me, that's actually one of the biggest thing that content strategy gives you within a design process is it gives you a disciplined approach and way to begin uncovering the things that you didn't know you didn't know. And it's hugely helpful. Because, I mean, let's face it, as designers, we're a group of people who likes to think that we can look at something and at first blush, actually pretty quickly figure out a way to make it better. We're problem solvers and the more you do it, the better you get it or at least feeling like you can kinda quickly assess what's going on. And this is a discipline where you have all these people that are doing these unsolicited redesigns. Like the whole idea of this the culture of design is like, I can make that better. I don't need to know very many details at all about this thing. I know how to make that interface better. So if you're a designer, especially if you spend any time in design school, you may be familiar with the Gestalt Principles of the Gestalt Laws. How many of you have at least heard of these? I've actually done other talks where I've spent a whole bunch of time going through these and explaining them. That's not what this talk is gonna do. But these are things like similarity, proximity, closure and so on. These are classic design fundamentals that get taught in design school but they come out of something known as Gestalt Psychology. And Gestalt Psychology is based on this idea, this observation that we often experience things that aren't part of our simple sensations. So like the brain makes stuff up and all of a sudden you're seeing something that's not actually there and your brain kind of put it together. So it came out of, there was this guy by the name of Max Wertheimer. He was on vacation back in 1910. He was on a train ride and it stopped in a little town and he got off to kill some time and went shopping. And he bought a little toy stroboscope in a toy store kind of a place. And a stroboscope was essentially a really primitive movie machine. It was like an advanced flip book. It had a drum that had pictures inside of it like linear pictures that would spin and you would look through and like basically the pictures would end up like creating something kind of like a video experience. And what Max Wertheimer noticed was that his brain was convinced that it was seeing complete movement. Like that it was seeing all the details in between even though they didn't actually exist in there. And he was fascinated with this and it led him into a whole school of psychology that he started and Gestalt Psychology came out of it. But the long and short of it again is that we experience things that aren't part of our simple sensations. The human brain has this innate ability and desire to sort of make things whole. The brain also has this propensity to do this based on our previous experiences. In design that's also known as isomorphism which is this fancy math word but in design it simply means that our brain has a knack and wants to like put things together based on what it's experienced in the past. Now these assumptions and expectations can really cause problems sometimes. You have expectations for what's where and as designers like I said like the more projects we work on the more things that we do the more sites we try to figure out what's going on here. The more users you know personas that we put together the more we can get this sense that we just like we can quickly do this. In fact the drive within business if you're doing this as a client service is to be able to do this faster and faster more efficiently and more efficiently and it can be very easy to begin following patterns and assumptions without the details. So ultimately a discipline like content strategy is just so valuable because it humbles us. The work of a content strategist and I frankly I think the work of a great designer assumes that we don't know everything. That there's a lot more going on than what we could pick up from cursory inspection and the diving into the details is actually really really valuable. So you want a great example of the power of patterns and assumptions and how much we as humans are have this propensity to perceive our reality based on it. Fast forward about 20 years from Max Wertheimer's trip on the vacation train ride to the late 1930s United States. Now this was nearly 10 years after the economic collapse of the Great Depression. There was the stock market crash and then massive layoffs and then there were bank failures by the hundreds. Like this was way more than what we experienced in the mid to late 2000. Like this was intense and Americans were largely very very afraid people. So much so that like you remember FDR's famous inaugural address which happened during this time in which he said the famous line the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Like even the president of the United States coming in was like the main thing that he wanted to speak to was this palpable fear that was there that gripped people all the time. You have to remember that Americans at this time had been listening to a steady drumbeat of war in Europe. Like as Hitler's army was on the move for 18 days straight in September of 1938 Americans had listened to the radio and got regular updates on the Munich crisis. And again like there was just building a sense like we're not gonna get out of this thing. We're gonna get sucked into this war. And this was also a time when there was a radio in about 80% of American households. And for years now they'd listened to firsthand accounts of disaster after disaster. Everything from the Great Depression and all the bank failures and all those layoffs and stuff like that to like there was actually a huge series through the 1930s of natural disasters. There was everything going on with the war in Europe that they would get daily updates on when they would listen to the radio.  But the radio was also their primary daily entertainment. It was in people's houses and it was their escape at the same time as it was their news outlet. So on October 30th, 1938, Orson Welles and his radio theater group wanted to find a way to adapt H.G. Welles famous War of the World's book for radio theater. And so they wrote like a theatrical version of it that read like a play. And they went into like the day before for recording it and read it as a team and Orson Welles was like, this is crap. Like nobody is gonna be into this because nobody is gonna buy the premise that Martians are attacking. And if you can't feel that premise like this is just not going to be that engaging is radio. So he was like, we have to start over. This was a day before they went on the air. So he had this clever idea to make it feel more real and believable by following the patterns that people were used to in news bulletin updates. And so literally hours before the airing he and his team rewrote the entire play and they turned it instead into a choppy series of segments that sounded just like news bulletins complete with screaming people and all kinds of like live sounding stuff. And the actor who played the reporter in it actually spent those hours down in like an archive room listening over and over and over to live radio reports of the Hindenburg disaster to prepare himself for this. Well, many said the most terrifying moment was this point where there was lots of action happening.  People freaked out. Like there's debate now years later about like whether the press way blew it out of proportion like how much because there was like these reports of millions displaced and stuff but people who had flipped stations and who had missed the intro especially because there was this other apparently the most popular thing on that night was this ventriloquist act, which blows it's like ventriloquism on the radio. This is bizarre, but apparently people love that stuff. And so a lot of people had been listening to that and like flipped over to this and they flip stations and they hear these news bulletins. And whoa, man, God, that was, mood. Okay, well, I'm gonna do my best to keep you awake now. So anyways, people like, there was things like people would be looking out their windows and if they saw cars on the road, they would assume everybody's getting out of town and they would get in their car and try to get out of town or they would look out their windows and if they saw no cars on the road, they assumed everybody got out of town and so they would get in their cars and they would get out of town. There was literally mass exodus from many U.S. cities going on. People, a lot of people thought that Orson Welles was gonna go to jail for it, but he's good and he somehow avoided that after a press conference. But anyways, suffice it to say, this is a long story for like patterns are really powerful in the way we think and the ideas that we bring to things. And so let's get practical now and we're gonna talk about how content strategy can help you avoid looking like fools who believe Martians were invading. So how's that for a segue? I'm gonna quickly walk you through some really basics for how you as a designer, or maybe you're not a designer, but how you and your project can begin doing things like content inventories, content audits, content modeling, and then something that we've, at Lullaby we've been calling intent mapping. And if I have time I may touch on two other things so we'll see. So first content inventories. And again, the stuff that I'm about to talk about, really simple stuff. There's none of this that would not be difficult for you to just say, I'm gonna go ahead and start trying that next time. But if you happen to know a content strategist or have interest or ability to like pull one in, do it and work with them and learn from it. But so a content inventory, so way back in 2002, Jeff Veen wrote this article on Adaptive Path. Jeff Veen's now Adobe Creative Suite guy or whatever, but back then he was at Adaptive Path and he wrote this article about the process they were using at the time to redesign websites when they were getting client projects at Adaptive Path. And this article has like a downloadable template spreadsheet in it and it describes the kinds of things that they would capture, that they would inventory when they would start a design process. And they would inventory all the content. Now this was a time when, in the article he talks about how like a back then, like a lot of the sites they were doing this for, like they were redesigning, didn't have a content management system. These were like directories full of HTML files and stuff and so it's an interesting read. It's still very relevant today. If you have not done a content inventory before and you're like, let's try it on our next project, let's start inventorying content, see what we learn and you want just a starting point, like look up this article, very helpful. But the long and short of it is that all that a content inventory is, is a spreadsheet or some other form of documentation that captures the details about each piece of content that makes up a site. And the basics of what a content inventory should capture included in this template spreadsheet, there's like all kinds of other things that you can include but the real basic stuff is in there and it's things like an item ID. This is because like there would be lots of duplicate content that they would end up finding and they would find that things look the same and so if they don't like make, like in many cases they were like making up an ID number for each thing. They would like, this looks like there's 3,000 pieces of content in this site so we better come up with a numerical structure that'll have enough IDs but they would come up with an ID for every piece of content so that later on when they're auditing the content they have a way to tell like these things all actually are duplicates. Item titles, again those can get duplicated but you get a capture at URLs, content type, attributes or metadata, the things that seem to be making up that kind of a content, like these kinds of content seems to have all this author information and this other associated stuff. Who owns it or maintains it? Something that he calls rot in this which I think is sort of getting a little bit more into the auditing side but it's marking content as either redundant, outdated or trivial. And then just other notes like they would do like back then they weren't doing this but now like something you might capture is this piece of content seems to have flash embedded thing in it or capturing things that could end up posing real challenges for a responsive redesign or a great thing to add to your content inventory document. Now in the article, excuse me, Jeff Bean mentions that the larger the site the more they would try to have programmers like automate some of the initial creation of these things but he says that the content inventory is a decidedly human task. Now audits especially are decidedly human but even the inventory it's back to that church hill like plans are of little importance but planning is essential and just the act of actually looking over reviewing, reading real pieces of content figuring out where the discrepancies are what seems to have a completely different voice than a different section of the content can be really helpful. And a lot of cases I realize like you might not be able to spend four days going through all of the pieces of content in a site that you're redesigning. If you can't there are tools now like there's a company called Content Insight that has a tool called cat C-A-T that you can look up that it will automate the initial creation of a spreadsheet like this it'll basically crawl sites and create a spreadsheet capturing these kinds of things. It can at least be a great starting point if you have a giant project where it's just too large you're just not gonna be able to do it or you need to try to divvy it up. Tools like that can give you can create a good like initial like document that captures everything and then what you can do is actually just pick random sample sets and say I'm gonna have a person just go through all these pieces and see what we learn. We can't do everything but we're gonna do some. You know, like at Lullabot we worked on marthasteward.com and I remember that was, there was like over a million recipe nodes and stuff. There's just no way you're gonna like have eight person go through and read every single one of them. But you can do sample sets. It's still a great, great exercise. One point that I wanna mention is to remember that if you're for example redesigning a website don't just inventory the content that's in the site currently that you're being asked to redesign. Ask about all the other channels through which they distribute content. You know, ask about their email newsletters. Ask about their microsites that they have that were set up for particular campaigns or tentpole events or these kinds of things. A lot of these things can actually be really helpful and sometimes you can find a lot of value actually in things that they weren't even thinking as part of their site but maybe actually way more relevant to the users that you're designing for. This sounds again like mind numbingly detailed and tedious as Jeff Veen's article title suggested but what does it get you? Let's talk about that. It gets you two things I think aside from the sense of satisfaction from knowing that you actually have a clear picture of all the content that an organization is currently producing. It gets you ready for a content audit and I'll talk in a minute about what those are and it gets you ready for content modeling and I'll also explain what that is. And just as an added bonus you may discover amazing content that's not currently really being leveraged by a site. Now this is a true story like there's a project I was working on where through asking questions about the other content that this organization produces we discovered a couple abandoned microsites that had HD videos of celebrities like Jamie Foxx and Woody Allen talking about the amazing impact of this organization. Now the site we were being asked to design completely existed to communicate the impact of the organization. It was like, how is this stuff not even a part of the current site? So I'm not gonna try to sell you like that every time you do a content inventory you're gonna discover those kinds of gems but it can happen like it's worth asking about where else are you producing content and what kind of content is it and where is it living now? You can find gems sometimes. Okay so a content inventory gets you ready for content audit. What is that? What's the difference between an inventory and an audit? I get asked that a lot. The simple way to look at it is that an inventory is quantitative and an audit is qualitative. So meaning an inventory will tell you things like how many of a particular type of content you have to work with. While an audit is there it's where you begin to evaluate all that content and assess the value or quality of it in various ways. So there are lots of ways that you can audit content. My co-worker Jeff Eaton who I pretty, he always seems to be speaking at DrupalCon and all kinds of things. Pretty sure he's speaking here I don't know if he's already spoken but he hosts a podcast and it's called Insert Content Here. If you go to lullabot.com slash blog click on podcast you'll find it. There is an episode of his podcast where he interviews Misty Weaver and it's all about content inventories and audits mostly about audits. And Misty Weaver has awesome insights into just really practical and useful ways that you can audit content in your process. I highly encourage you to go listen to that because I'm not gonna have time to go on into all the ideas that she has in that hour long podcast. But check that out. Again the podcast is called Insert Content Here. But some really basic things that you can always audit content for like once you have an inventory of content it is going through these pieces of content asking things like does it support a business goal? Does it aid a user need? Does it inspire action? Does it pose a technical challenge for a responsive redesign for example? Finding that content that does those first three really well highlights the content that you wanna really celebrate in your design process. Okay so lastly the content inventory gets you ready for content modeling. How many of you have ever like produced a content model document of some sort in your design process? Okay I find when I've given this talk at a couple design conferences and it feels like in Drupal we actually understand a content model in a different ways. One of the really wonderful things about Drupal historically is for years it's actually approached content as modeled content and understood the idea of related types of content. So in the content model we basically are capturing the following things. We're capturing the types of content your project needs. We're capturing the discrete attributes that make up each content type and then the relationships between them. There may be more things than that that you wanna capture but it's core like if you've captured those things you're producing a content model. And the content inventory again gives us the raw materials to do this. We can basically take a content inventory and begin looking for and identifying patterns. What are, to find out what are the truly unique types of content. When you have a whole array of content that seems to have the exact same attributes list all these pieces of content you may have stumbled onto a unique type of content and begin to use that information that's there in your content inventory. A lot of times when you do design projects on Drupal sites like the temptation is well it's a Drupal site. We can just go in and look at the content types that are set up and see what fields are on them and stuff and we know the content model. But in a lot of cases the way things get technically implemented isn't always the best way to model content. And a lot of times I've worked on projects you know, redesigned kinds of projects where if you purely begin thinking about your content only by the way the data model was set up in Drupal for example, you may miss actually some of the insights that you get if you kind of like divorce yourself from that for a little bit and start looking more at a content inventory and figuring out okay what are the actual natural ways that this content should get broken down into types and what are the relationships. One of the things that we found at Lullabot that can be really helpful as you model the content for a site is to not just identify the types of content but to identify the types of types. And there's sort of, there's a handful that we've used but there's sort of three that seem to always be there in terms of the types of types of content that we identify when we're modeling. And those are assets, structure and presentation types. Now assets are things like articles on a news site or recipes on marthastewart.com and they're the premium stuff that might get distributed through apps or other places outside the website. They're often like the core business product of the site that you're working on. And they're things like editorial or user content that should be usable across all platforms and devices when they have little or no presentational content or markup that's a part of them. They're usually pretty pure. Structural content types are used to basically group and organize assets to retrieve collections of assets for other platforms or for devices. Organize things like MSNBC.com, I remember that had this topics content type that was actually sort of actually a content type because it had some curation, had content that got written about the topic but it really broadly existed to serve the purpose of providing a collection for the content assets that were made up that topic. And so that's basically the idea of structural types. And then presentational content types, they exist purely to serve a current design or presentational need. So we've all worked on projects where people are like, we want a big homepage hero carousel and we wanna be able to promote all the things and promote all kinds of things. And it's like, well, is it gonna be pulling this kind of content in? It's like, well, it's not pulling in exactly what we capture in that kind of content. And it's not pulling in exactly, well, sometimes it will be but sometimes it's this and they want lots of control. And what can happen, especially on Drupal projects is like, well, we'll just add another field to these content types and we'll make it all work. And like, oh, we'll add this other field in case they wanna format it this way on some of the promos and this way on the other promos. And in the end, you can actually end up with these premium assets getting really crafty over time. And then you also have a situation where like you end up with a redesign and it's like, we don't even actually want to do that kind of a promotional thing anymore. And it's like, well, now we've got all these fields all over these assets that are like, should we just dump all this content? So just from a development side, that's sort of a picture of how helpful it can be to begin thinking about presentational content types from a design standpoint, even if you have no control over that side of things, it can be helpful to identify where that's happening because usually when you have presentational content, like purely presentational content types, you have opportunities for asking how well is this serving the need. It's sort of fair game for real radical rethinking and redesign processes and things like that. So again, the reason why it can be really helpful to understand the types of types is both for the development team and for the design team to both understand sort of, what's the core business units? What's the real content here? What exists purely because of the way they've been presenting their content? What exists purely to serve like the IA and the structure and those kinds of things and sort of have that clarity of mind going into a design process? Now, one of the neat things is with all of these content strategy deliverable, I don't know if you would call any of these, like the deliverable's the website. That's what we make for people, we make websites. Like any of these things are more like process updates or communication tools, but whatever you wanna call these things that a content strategist would make for you, they're really lightweight tools or things that are very easy to iterate on and work together on as a team. In many cases, like things like the content model at Lullaby, like they start out at least just as like I use IA writer a lot, just to mark down files, just bulleted lists and things like that. But even if it's a spreadsheet, like in Google Spreadsheets or something like that, it's just really easy things to start out on and you don't have to get it right right out of the gate. They're great things to produce something and say, what do you guys think about this? And they can create a conversation point between the development team and the design team together. And like I said, one of the neat things about the content model is if the developers and the designers work on it together and you can have a client and a developer and a designer who are all on the same page about this thing, there's a lot of development work that can actually start and work off of the content model and actually designers can work off the content model as well. The content model also provides an awesome opportunity to begin discovering and assigning priority. I found it really helpful to have clients help prioritize both the types of content and all the attributes that make up each and those can usually lead to really interesting conversations. You can do something as simple as taking your content model and putting all the types onto an index card and putting all the attributes onto an index card and just as a team, like start card sorting, start making people put them in order, top down. It can be really insightful, the things you learn about what's really important, what's not. In the end, if you're producing a responsive design, understanding that priority is gonna lead to understanding the priority within the components that make up the site, that make up every single screen that you're designing and it's extremely helpful. It provides you the designer with that freedom to then translate that hierarchy visually and not be just dictated to all the time about placement. You're there to actually see if you're actually achieving priority and you've all agreed on the priority that you're trying to achieve. Now, if you have multiple personas that you've created, that describe the audiences maybe that you're designing for, you can use those same index cards and sort them again for each persona. Like bring that as the metric for how you're measuring what's important and what's not. And this is something that we've been calling intent mapping where we basically take one of the scenarios that a persona would have and for that persona, sort of map the importance of each type of content or each attribute for the types of content that we're saying is for that persona. What are they really caring about? It can be a really helpful exercise. So quickly here, I'm gonna try to talk about two other things. These are a little bit less content strategy, classic kind of deliverables. Maybe a little bit more on the design, IA side, but sort of having a content inventory, having audited content, having produced a content model, you have the ability to produce a similar thing that we've been calling a presentation model that begins to break down your design process actually into the things that you're actually gonna be designing for. So a presentation model, what it captures is the unique page types that are gonna make up the site, and the content model can be really helpful for beginning to identify that, sort of look at all the discrete content type, the asset sets and figure out, are there any of these that like, a piece of that content would exist and it wouldn't have its own URL? Which are the, like what are the components that would make up that page type? And then do that across all the different things that you see within the content model. Look at the structural types, ask which ones are gonna have listings, which ones would have a structural landing pages, that kind of thing. And start just documenting, simple text documents like, what are the components we think would make up that kind of a page type? Look, and just like you can look at the inventory to produce the content type, or the content model by looking for the patterns, like start looking at the patterns you're seeing. You can begin to identify the really truly unique page types that you need to design for and avoid situations where you're doing like, designing for five different screens that are all essentially the same list of components, the same things. And again, the components that you, the list of components that you have for each page type within a presentation model, hugely, hugely helpful to have the client, have the whole team work together to prioritize the component list. Before you're actually doing like visually, wireframing, drawing pictures of what this stuff would look like, where the components would go on different screen sizes, have people have already agreed upon what the ordered list is of importance, most important to least important of every component that's gonna be on the screen. If you have that tool in your toolbox as a designer in a responsive design process, it can be enormously helpful because you can get to where it's really about purpose and not preference and about priority and not placement. Your discussions with your clients, with your stakeholders can be around, are we actually achieving the order we said? Or if you're asking me to move this up there and over there, like, is that because the order that we'd agreed on isn't actually the order?  It doesn't make the documents, the presentation model or that kind of stuff unvaluable. It actually makes it a great tool because you can have those discussions of, why did we think that was more important or why do we think it's better now that it's over here? Is it moving it up in the hierarchy? Those kinds of things. And lastly, one of my coworkers, Jared Bittner, recently wrote this article on littlebot.com called Building a Development Matrix. He's one of our project managers. And our project managers have started creating this thing that when they first told me about it, I was like, wait, that's a presentation model in the form of a spreadsheet.  It's basically takes that exact same approach and says, like, what are all the components that have to go into all the unique page types that are gonna be a part of this design system? And let's figure out where are the overlaps and just so we have a listing of all the actual components that have to be built in a project. And then they can basically track the progress of a project. Like how far are we from being done with development by what are the components that are already done? What are the components that aren't done? Like, we're so far away from this particular template or screen being done and that's because this whole set of components is not yet done and this is the problems that we're seeing and this is why that throws off our timeline. It's been a really helpful thing for our project managers. So the presentation model actually can serve as a great starting point for building that development matrix because at least like the quick capturing before you even have visual designs lets them start to break down what are these things? What are they made up of? What are the functionality that's gonna be required to produce these components? And again, development can begin work without even having an actual visual design artifact of any kind. So it can be really helpful stuff. Okay, so I've walked you through the basics of creating a content inventory of some audits. Again, listen to that podcast because there's some awesome ideas for ways to audit content in that. How to model content, how to do intent mapping with that and even how to do presentation models out of that to sort of start the actual design work. I just wanna say again, there are a lot of amazing content strategists out there. Hopefully if any of this stuff feels really new to you, like just start following some great content strategists and learning from them or hire one to get them to be part of your project. I hope this wets your appetite a little bit. If you already know a bunch of content strategy, I don't know why in the world you were in this room but hopefully I didn't just bore you entirely. So thanks a lot. I'll be here. I think I have time for a couple questions but I'll be here the rest of DrupalCon too. So find me or come to the Lullabot Party Wednesday night and ask questions too. Thanks. I'm not sure.


I cannot believe this article. Someone ranked the DCEU movies and had the audacity to put the Joss Heathen cut on the list. Joss Heathen, yeah. Joss Whedon, aka Joss Heathen, aka Jossed Headdumb. Big stretch on that last one. Every true fan out there knows that Whedon's Justice League is not canon anymore. Yes it is. Yeah, for the studios maybe. You love the studios. They pay you to like their movies. Yes true, but in this instance they don't even seem to care about this butchering of Zack Snyder's masterpiece. A four hour tour day force featuring rich visuals, beautiful slow motion, and a powerful score, all presented in luscious four by three aspect ratio. Luscious, I'm sorry, did you enjoy the fugly 16 by nine widescreen abortion? They shout out to movie theaters? Oh, you mean the format that 99.9% of movies use now? Because they lack vision. Snack Snyder birthed out of his vaginal canal a dream and nursed it into reality. Gross. Then Warner Brothers came in and turned this precious newborn into a hellish parademon. Only this is one mother box the studio is unable to close. Stick with one visual, you're so helter-skelter. Helter-skelter? Helter-no. Helter-no. Helter-no indeed. Shit. Terry. I rarely agree with Khaleesi Grimes 82 over here but this soy-tard is absolutely right. Everybody demands a continuation of the Snyderverse. And by everyone, you mean the loud obnoxious fanboys on Twitter, right? That spam out bot accounts daily on the platform. I mean real people.  Calm down. I'll calm down when Lord Snyder is able to continue his master stroke. Instead of letting WB stroke it to Patty Jenkins or whatever other woke leftist agenda DCU wants to push. Amazing.  How do we fix this, tear-bear? For starters, we give Zack Strider 100% creative control over the DCPU. He will then restore the House of Snyder back to its former glory. Where was that former glory exactly? Somewhere between Batman v Superman and the Suicide Squad. Oh, okay, let me guess.  All the yes, really. James Gunn, more like James Dumb. The dude so far left, he would outlaw his own last name if given the opportunity. Can you just leave? James Gunn did the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, which I love, which are great, which I love, which are great. Lame, comedy garbage. What about Slyther is super? What about your mom and my balls? He also wrote the Scooby-Doo movies. Oh, now those I like. So freakin' good. Velma was hot.


p Obviously Jeff Grubb wasn't right the entire time last year So a lot of people owe him an apology For saying that it never existed Clearly it existed I'll say this I mean one I never doubted it It was always just a matter of time And I'll also say For the doubters But this supports that F-Zero Is also coming soon too Because all this comes from the same sources Like Nate the Hates at F-Zero said Metroid Prime It's These people aren't wrong They're just When it comes to talking about things that haven't been announced yet Time is always gonna be weird We don't know And Emily Rogers was the very first person To ever say anything about Metroid So here's what's clear And specifically to say Metroid Prime 1 Not the trilogy as well Emily Rogers, Nate the Hate And Jeff Grubb clearly have sources I don't think there's any doubts anymore If people doubt it because they've got a few things wrong It happens But I mean It's the timing that's wrong Not the content The only thing you can say Even for Nate the Hate is Oh because he's the one who said Switch Pro was imminent That one E3 Okay cool because that's probably what he Is But you know It never came out Nintendo decided not to do it So it's It's just guys You gotta pay attention to the overall track records Like when I use Nate the Hate and Jeff Grubb to say Definitively there was a direct this week It was like check their track records Every time they say a week a direct is coming It's happened Every time Like they've never been wrong on it Like whoever they have for a source that tells them when the direct is coming They're right Yeah so For me the reason I was able to predict Exactly when the direct was gonna happen Was because I knew it was either me the 8th or the 15th Based off the direct pattern But I wasn't sure which one But once Nate the Hate and Jeff Grubb said Hey we're hearing about a direct this week Alright well if it's one of these two And considering the advanced war pre-order thing And then also the tears of the king And then on spawncast Nate the Hate was like No there's a direct this week And he doesn't have to It's February It's a general direct In fairness to that though There has been conflation Or not conflation but confusion about that Because sometimes it's like oh it's a direct and it turns out to be a partner Like that has happened in the past But given the timing There needed to be a general direct Like last June He said there will be a direct but when he talked about There will be a direct he said but I don't know if it's a general And then as He said it's going to be towards the end of the month And then he said the exact week and then he said by the way Like two days beforehand this is going to be a partner showcase So like he didn't know exactly What it was going to be until it was really close to it What he knew there was one coming And he's always very easy Nate the Hate really does clarify When he just knows it's a direct but not what kind Yeah And he literally had a He already had as an example His predictions episode that went up The day the direct was announced He recorded that Three days earlier he already knew Exactly when it was going to happen He already had the podcast ready to go for it So yeah I'm going to go ahead and have a Advocate here and say that Nope I'm going to stick to my 15th It's on the 15th Okay DK You might have some too many bananas on the brain buddy What are the T's of the K even direct on the 15th No that would be crazy You were right after all My heart couldn't take it No I know part way through the direct Actually most of the way through the direct Was sitting there looking at the clock going Man it's been 35 Almost 40 minutes I know they They go a little bit long They do sometimes go a little bit longer Than the 40 Right And I was like watch them just Drop a date for Zelda Direct and that's it One more thing No I was waiting for it Just because of the timing I knew they were going to go to 43 minutes or so Once I saw the sizzle reel and it was at 40 There's always one more thing they're going to 43 It's never exact They always overdo it a little bit Yeah it's Roughly about Around Here's the Zelda marketing timeline We got the initial media blowout today There will be Twitter updates Moving throughout all the way until release Next month they'll announce the old lid And then April They'll have the depth of Zelda Direct And then the next month the game comes out And then in June they announce the DLC I don't think they're going to do Zelda Direct I don't want them to honestly They can tell me everything I don't care I'll consume all of it No matter what they show it's only going to end up being like 2% of the game I don't care If you think about a game like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 That's a game that needed a general director Because of how complicated a game it is to play No offense to the Xenoblade fans But that's not something you can just jump into You have to commit to that game And learn the hell out of it Because its systems are so complicated From a gameplay standpoint As Zelda does not really have that issue A trailer is more than sufficient You don't need to explain to people Welcome to the Legend of Zelda game You're going to play Link You're going to encounter these enemies You can travel this way They don't need to do that They can just show a trailer Are you guys prepared to not learn If about the dungeons or shrine replacements Until we get reviews I'm fine with that I've already said it though It's already done It's just acceptance It made sense to market Breath of the Wild That way because for Zelda It was a huge change Dedicating a whole E3 There was a presentation to it That made sense because they have to sell people On the fact that this is the new Zelda This is different than anything you know Before You had never seen anything like this before And we hadn't You were there, Nate, I wasn't I played that demo a lot Yes On that note Something that Nate said earlier Because I played Legend of Zelda on NES That was my exposure to Zelda And I played it called Zelda here and there I wasn't a real fan Guess what, I'm a baby fan Call myself a baby fan Zelda until it got Breath of the Wild One of the things that Nate said When they first revealed Breath of the Wild Was the feeling that he got When he first saw This brand new open world This brand new concept Well, and then nothing will replicate That feeling Now the question for the entire Panel Is did this Do it for you When it comes to that feeling You had at the beginning Of seeing Breath of the Wild for the first time To this or Is it a type of feeling Just different So That giant flaming Glyok That gives me Kind of like the So in Breath of the Wild There were like these moments where What is that That looks strong and really interesting I want to check it out Or that looks really dangerous I shouldn't check that out but I'm going to anyway So it is kind of inspiring A little bit of that fear Anxiety element that Breath of the Wild had Because of the threats and how weak you were at the beginning So it's kind of giving me that Then there is also the curiosity of Okay, there's weird things going on here Why is that there Then it makes me kind of want to go in Different directions to check it out So it is kind of giving me some of the same feelings I have with Breath of the Wild I would say it's like a different kind of hype For me because Breath of the Wild was like Wow, this is like a big change This is not as much like a big change But it's like it looks So detailed and exciting And it looks like bigger So it's not like A culture shock almost Breath of the Wild almost was This is like a culture shock It's such a shake up But it's exciting in a different way Because it seems like it's iterating On what became Very quickly became my favorite game ever It's iterating on that and improving on it So that's naturally super enticing But sorry That's all I'm going to say Nate, you were about to The feeling I got all throughout playing Breath of the Wild is back And it was introduced with Breath of the Wild So it's hard to give this game credit for But the feeling is my favorite part Of Breath of the Wild and how I spent a thousand hours Was exploration exploration exploration exploration And Even though like The concerns that some people have like Oh, it's the same high rules Those concerns are gone for me There is so much change So much new and that's what we were sort of missing Oh, here's a couple new ideas But we don't really see what's actually Really changed And now we've seen a heck of a lot more In this one, they spliced more changes And more new into this trailer Than they have any of the prior trailers And so that idea that I want to explore I want to see like oh It doesn't look like there's much going on on them I bet you there is And I bet you I need to explore it to find out And I'm going to keep exploring and keep exploring And what's up with these vehicles I want to find out it looks like there's might Might potentially be parts of them sitting around the world I want to go find all those parts I want to collect things I want to figure this out And that is a feeling that Technically Breath of the Wild introduced to me That this game is just Expounding upon and reminding me That This is what you loved in the first place And we are just ramping this up to a degree That Breath of the Wild couldn't do And The idea of the wow factor Which I think most people got with that Opening shot when you walk out in the world You know showing to you I don't know that that's replicatable Because we've already had that They've tried it already in a trailer When we go up to the sky And go through the bottom and Know they pan out It looks cool but no one was really getting that same feeling Because it's like we've done that We've done this Breath of the Wild style trailer You're not going to impress us again But This thing this time around They put a bit more story into this trailer Obviously the first time we've heard voice acting at all We haven't heard voice acting in any of the prior trailers Besides whatever weird voice You know is in the background of those tracks And stuff And so It's interesting to me that I don't know that this game Can give me the wow factor Of That moment Where you just look at the world But I don't think that's the way this game is going to deliver it This game is going to take what already Worked in Breath of the Wild And just ramp it to a degree That instead of it being like this Where you're standing there looking at the game and going wow It's going to be moments in the gameplay Where you're just like This is so much better And I am so impressed In this exact moment Like the one shot where they show You're fighting the robot looking I'm sitting there and I'm like Looks like one of those moments that I'm going to go This ain't Breath of the Wild anymore Man This is what I want This is bigger and better And I think that's all they really needed to do The fear is That the game couldn't be bigger It couldn't be better Or if it's bigger it's artificial Because it's still mostly the same high This proved to me there's so much going on That I'm okay Obviously anyone who ever thought the game was being delayed again Was wrong the whole time anyways Now there's no fear of that, reiterated it And Look, say what you want They're charging 70 bucks And I don't think they're going to get away with that If this game ain't just a significant step Above Breath of the Wild And I think it is Based on what we've seen so far Granted we have to play it, we have to reserve judgment See more of it, yada yada So nothing's finalized until I play it But just from these trailers It's like I already know what Breath of the Wild set up This looks like it still has that And then it's doing a whole bunch of crazy crap We've never been able to do, oh and by the way It just happens to look significantly better While you're doing it You know, just a point Just to kind of further support what you just said How it's like bigger and better The, it goes back to what I was saying Early about the Gliok The three-headed flaming dragon It's so big and huge On that bridge we still explore So it's kind of like It's taking up the whole bridge So you know how like you might find an enemy on a bridge Like say like a Lionel But no, now it's just a giant three-headed flaming dragon It's way bigger than anything else in Breath of the Wild What happened to the Lionels? I don't know Did they just level up to the next level too? I don't know, let's find out They were too weak, we get harder enemies now Two weeks later There'll be something even stronger We get double-headed Lionels But So about you Wes, did it create The same exact feeling? Yeah, what I'm thinking is like We got that Progression between Awkra and a Time to Majora's Mask We got that evolution And we're seeing that in the trailer The biggest thing is that we all didn't like About Breath of the Wild, enemy variety Weapon variety The regions, everything kind of looked the same We got all of that in this trailer Dungeons, lore, new stuff to think about The trailer was perfect Was the director the best? I don't know if the director was the best But it was a good direct If there's one thing that could drop If there are actual dungeons in this game Okay, a trailer that just Closer to launch Oh, there are dungeons, and it just blows your mind with one of them And you're just like, okay, they could do that Because that's one thing that Senatorly not confirms there's any sort of dungeons Or any sort of shrines or anything You know, like So that's one thing that I think they're holding close to that That could be something that they do unveil In a dedicated direct on the launch Even if they don't, like just being able to Like come across your first dungeon, like It would be wild If they never show it And then it happens to be this big theme in the game And we don't even know until the release drops So Jessica They're definitely holding back How much did Breath of the Wild cost in Canada? There was 80, Doc 80, Doc 70, 99 79, 99 Yeah, Canadian And now we have 89, 99 for Canada Sounds right Sounds alright Sounds alright Now go look up the price in Over in Australia Yeah, so anybody Who have said about that I mean, I just I mean, you must note Money isn't quite worth the same as the USD But still Canadian prices are Wild like during the whole GPU thing, it's like, oh yeah, you got to go to eBay for $3,000 or $380 Yeah, in Canada it's like Now look at how much a condo costs In my city Then you'll really be saying wow So if What you're saying is true that they're actually Paying more You know what I mean The tech for they were paying Like Second I just had it If I type in 80 Canadian dollars $59.54 Technically If I go up to 90 If I go up to 90 it's $66.98 So if we all send you money Like, you know Oh man You know Then You're gonna save your like $.50 on $5 commission But Apparently Apparently the special edition went on sale For a little bit on Best Buy With $129 bucks and it's already got Gone. Come on That sounds right It wasn't refreshing enough Oh man Alright, well I think that's gonna wrap it up For this episode I hope you guys all had fun including Our newest guest, Wes Nemo We'll have to get you on a future episode Maybe we're not gushing just straight up about Zelda non-stop I mean it's Zelda Okay, I'm sorry Oh man, Zelda's great Oh yes, yes, yes So You guys should go check out their channels I got everything linked down in the description So you want to tell them what you're doing And where they can find you So on just restart You'll just find me on YouTube What am I doing? I don't know I'm really tired but I want to make like 20 videos This is one of those things that you're probably like We just need to sleep on it And then we can grind it Like, I don't know It's hard to stop thinking Too many ideas There's too many ideas I want to get to immediately And I don't want someone else to beat me to the chase Dude, I've given up on the chase The chase I don't worry about people beating me to it I worry about doing it the right way now Right, so maybe with that in mind I'll just kind of I was thinking that maybe I'll just push things up a little bit So there will be a trailer Announcement of the Kingdom coming out tomorrow Maybe I'll just focus the day on that There's already analysis out there So it's like don't even It's not about doing it first Yeah, and I'll probably save the graphics analysis Graphics analysis for Metroid Prime for Friday And then My Xenoblade and Pikmin analysis Will come out on the weekend Striking Zelda while it's hot is probably a good idea But anyways, yes So there is a Zelda analysis coming There is a Metroid Prime graphics analysis coming Pikmin and Xenoblade will be analyzed by the weekend as well I'm trying I said I was going to stream Metroid Prime But I also want to do like a Like a live discussion again Tomorrow as I usually do, so I'm trying to figure it out But yes, we're going to be talking about a lot of Nintendo Everyday Multiple times for a long time So, yeah Yes All right, Wes, you want to tell me what you got going on And where are you going to find you? Yeah, I make gaming videos on YouTube Talk about the latest and greatest games and stuff You guys can catch me over on my channel If not, it's all good But yeah dude, like I cover pretty much everything Everything new Legend of Zelda coming out We just covered some Hogwarts legacy We got all the projects and stuff Yeah, yeah He's killing it over there He's about to crush 100k subs Any day now When I met Wes I think I was like 2,000 subscribers, he was like at 15,000 And this was like a year and a half ago So a year later 100k The algorithm give us The algorithm give us quite a bit To your channel lately You have unlocked the algorithm Variety as well Which is nice I've been stuck on certain games But it's nice to be able to just talk about Whatever the hell I want to The algorithm is currently giving us But it'll probably take it eventually And by the way, publicly I would like to give Wes some Credit Because he basically gave me some advice behind the scenes That contribute To the success of The current channel right now We just hit 23,000 today 7,000 subscribers Since the year started 10 years on YouTube for you guys Multiple channels Alright, Wes I'm going to need some of this advice I'm going to get the scoop from Wes I really could use A scoop here because I can't rely on shorts anymore They're just YouTube decided no more shorts For you man We'll talk about that later Here we go The price over there We'll talk about it in the scenes Alright, Cap, what do you got going on? The burger Especially now that we have Zelda You got stuff coming I already had a video ready for this Friday And now I'm debating if I should delay it It's going to get overshadowed By all of this Tears of the Kingdom stuff I'm probably going to make Some Tears of the Kingdom content Maybe Just to 100% I'm giving the whole video on redead There's a redead and I'm doing it Cap's channel is dead Crazy redeads I'm going to go against the entire Tide, I'm going to make a video On Minus Cap Like the entire just There you go You're 50 views, it's cool Or it'll get like a million views Like it'll be the only one Everyone's looking for Minus Cap They're probably looking for Minus Cap walkthroughs At the moment But I do make Zelda videos I currently run a series called Dungeon Design in Zelda In which I am running through And analyzing all of the Dungeons and their design in Zelda As they implies, pretty on the nose Not very creative name, sorry But the videos are good and I've got some link to the past Dungeon videos coming up very soon Because we already finished Zelda 1 and 2 So, fun stuff Fun stuff Alright, and then Mike, Odyssey Fantastic goal, anyway You guys see already a little glimpse of what's going to happen The entire week So maybe fully close For the videos, right? You don't have to wear it for hours on it Dude, the thing is that the outfit is so hot man Yes, they always are They always are I can't believe you wore it as long as you did on your I did, dude An hour and a half But yeah, it's an authentic Nintendo Donkey Kong costume Huge one with Really feathery All the stuff You look like a good beefcake today, buddy But anyway First you have to be wearing that the entire week If you want to check it out Go ahead and check that out On the Friday news Working on bringing back The podcast a little by little But I have to put it on hold because of But I'm good now I'm 100% good Got that going on I have something else going on I completely forgot about it On the 18th Of February We have our 20K That sounds horrible to say now 20K, Mike Mastos 20K by then 20K Milestone It might be a 20 and 30K Milestone stream It's a Mario Kart Tournament And it's a Fall Guys Tournament together And then during that Tournament I'll have a link down below So you guys can sign up and give all the information And then announce the Switch OLED And I have another Switch OLED I got two more Switch OLEDs For a 30K That might be a double upstream by then Yeah, so I mean That's what I'm going to have gone on so far I also have a I'm working behind the scenes with A story that I wrote Based on Mario Like a fan fiction story It's called The Story of Princess Peach It gives Princess Peach like a little background With her parents And how the Mushroom Kingdom came to be And this is called Fan Fiction But we wrote it and then I have a person who is Illustrating it And animating it so that we can have it on the channel One day It's a pretty cool story And it's coming soon To a theater near you To a theater near you Alright, awesome My God, I see what My God, I see what My God, I see what MrIvt, Instagram, Mike submission Twitter My own YouTube My God I think we have a chat command One of our mods can throw up for you To help you out Alright guys, well, I'm obviously a Dvarian You know what's up? This is the Dvarian podcast I'm assuming that you know I'm here If you don't and you're listening to our music You caught us on Spotify And a billion other places that we are You heard, if you're listening to the audio version or saw the video version, I am experimenting and trying to make these podcasts even better as we go. Obviously, this is the first podcast I even attempted to show video clips and or images of the things we're talking about might try to do that more in the future as well when we're talking about specific games might just play some trailers and stuff for people at times. So it's not just always our giant mugs you're getting you're getting some context for the conversation visually at the same time, a little visual enhancement. Unfortunately, audio listeners, they haven't invented the ability to shoot waves into your brains audio wise to create images yet. I'm sorry. Maybe that'll be a tech that exists someday. That'd be interesting. Doesn't exist now. So cyberpunk TLC. There's cyberpunk TLC. That's what it is. That's what cyberpunk exists for all along. That's why it was so buggy at lunch. Um, anyways, you guys know where to find me. Nintendo Prime everywhere. Just type Nintendo Prime in that literally into Google search or any sort of search. Actually, I don't really know. Bing is experimenting now with chat GPT. I don't know if I'm in the chat GPT database. I have no I have no idea. So maybe maybe you can't find me in Bing, but you'll find me everywhere. Who uses Bing? Who uses Bing? And if you find me, just type Nintendo Prime. It's probably me. So thank you guys for tuning in. I really appreciate it. We have had two straight episodes across 4,000 views. We haven't had a single episode in season two.  And we every single episode in season two, this is our seventh episode has crossed 3000 views. These are literally nonstop records all the time. You guys are loving the podcast. We're gonna keep finding ways to improve it. Keep bringing new guests on. And also, while this isn't new next week, just just a little tease. It is the OG six back back again from episode one. Thank you. Never give up journey on, dude. Never give up journey on and party on Wayne. Oh boy. Just for my age. So am I. Oh boy. If you don't get that reference, I'm too old for you. All right. All right, everyone. Have a good rest of your evening. Later. Take care. Bye. Goodbye.


Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Welcome back to Orlando at Enterprise Connect 2019. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. It may sound like we're at a party. This is the buzz of the event. This is day one and we have had a great day so far of talking with lots of guests. We're welcoming back to theCUBE an alumni, Jim Lundy. See, applause for you, Jim, CEO of Aragon Research. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to be here. That was cute, by the way. So I hope we get some credit for that. Yeah, yeah, very cute. So Jim, you have been coming to Enterprise Connect since before it was even branded Enterprise Connect back when it was VoiceCon. Tell us a little bit about your observations about the evolution, not only of the event, but also of all of the collaboration and communication tools that consumers now are expecting and demanding of businesses. So I think my first event was called VoiceCon in 07 and then it was all about phones. There was no software here. There was no video. There was no messaging. There was certainly no AI. And there were a lot of the players were not here. They were not in business then. So if you actually look at some of the bigger players here today, they did not exist in 2007. So when you look at the advent of cloud, that's powered a whole new generation of services and opportunities. And it's great for buyers because there's so much more choice. So I mean, VoiceCon almost died and they rebranded it, but they've had to expand their focus. There's still a lot of voice focused stuff. But as you can see, it's really shifted. We think it's shifting to communications and collaboration. We think Contact Center, particularly cloud is hot. We've got their overall TAM for communication, collaboration, contact center by 2024, about $120 billion, which makes it bigger than enterprise security. Yeah, we just had a great segment with Blair Pleasant and said, you know, Omni-Channel absolutely is where it is, but Voice is still the number one preferred channel. When you talk about Contact Center, there's lots of ways you can get in touch, but when something's wrong, I want to pick up my device and talk to a human eventually. So yeah, cloud and AI and everything else, but there's still people in the center of everything going on here. Well, and I think one of the things for Contact Center, particularly you mentioned is the power of cloud. So when you look at some of the players here, like we're in the five nine booth, they've grown because of their cloud focus and cloud is a lot of what's powering everybody here and buyers want flexibility. So I think that's one of the big things that's changed is there's still a lot of on premise and hybrid cloud, but the power and the demand for, I want to deploy something fast and maybe I'm not even that big of a shop, but cloud gives me that flexibility. So when I look at the market as a whole, there's all those arguments about, it's private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, but if we think of cloud as an operational model and not a place, I want speed, I want to be able to update to my latest thing, whether that's for security or the cool new feature and if I'm not cloud or cloud-like, then I probably install something and what I do now and what I do a few years from now looks pretty close to what I did when I installed it. No, I mean, does that resonate in this space? Yeah, yeah, and I think, well, I think there's a couple of things also, there's the operational nature of, do I want to be in the server update business? Some people do because of the nature of their business, but a lot of people don't. So then I can focus on the client experience in providing better journeys and I think that's up the game. I think there's an awful lot of competition in this market because really because of cloud, but on-premise or private cloud is not a bad word and like I said, I think the bigger play is to be able to do a combination of things and meet the needs of the customer. And I think the only thing I would say about the show is there's a lot of feature wars at this show and needs to be maybe a little more focused on what the customer needs versus, hey, my box is better than your box. On that front, in terms of focusing on the customer experience, we talk a lot about that. It's a lot of the messaging and branding around the shows you were just pointing out, but something that is always interesting is where does a company balance the customer experience with the agent experience because the customer experience is directly related to the agent being empowered? Well, I mean, you've got to really do both and do both well. If the agent can't do their job, then the customer's not going to have a good experience. So, and I do think that overall, there's been a pretty good focus on the agent because that's where it kind of all started. And if you really look at Contact Center, it's really a heavy duty application. And so you've got to be able to do all those things to service the inbound calls or inbound messages. And you're right, there is a lot of focus on the customer because in some cases, there was so much focus on the agent. Well, like we took the calls, even though a lot of the calls, 10% might have gone to voicemail for some reason. Yeah, well, we serviced it. So, I mean, a little unknown fact is in a lot of enterprises, marketing and the Contact Center group never talk. Interesting opportunity. Yeah, you know, Jim, it's interesting. You talked about in tech, we often get to that feature battle. It's, you know, battle by PowerPoint or by product spec and like, oh, I've got 147 features and they only have 125 features when you look at most customers, they only know how to use three of the features that you've got on there. So what differentiates from a customer standpoint? How do they choose? How do they make sure that they get something that is going to help their overall customer experience and help their products and their marketing? Well, I mean, a couple of things.  They want to know, can the provider take care of me if I buy from them? Are they reputable? Do other people? Are they happy with the service? You know, I mean, so we do a lot of vendor evaluations, we call them Aragon Research Globes and we usually spend six months working on understanding where the vendor is this year and we talk to references and things like that. So I think that sometimes, you know, when you, you know, they read a report and they get some insight, they still want to talk to somebody versus just reading a peer review on somebody's consumer website. And really get that insight. And so I think that's one lens. And I think the other lens is that the smarter players are doing those things where they can provide really high touch support. I'd probably say five, nine is pretty good at that because, you know, contact center is really, really complicated. You just don't turn them on sometimes. Like there's things you have to do to make them work. And I think overall in this space, I mean, there's some products you can buy, maybe not contact center where you can spin them up and turn them on, configure phones and go. I've actually deployed some of them.  So I think it really varies again. And again, sometimes that doesn't always come out with an online review. And again, sometimes the buyer, still buyer beware in a lot of cases. Some of the things you read online are not true. One of the things we were chatting with a number of the five nine execs about today is they have a five billion recorded customer conversations. Tremendous potential there to really glean actionable insights about retaining that customer, increasing their COV. But there's also the concern of data privacy and security and sharing. When you're talking with customers that might have this massive pool of data from which they can really expand their business and become competitive, where is the security and the privacy concerns there? It's a good question. I mean, you know, there's a lot of focus on GDPR in Europe. There's a lot of focus in California on that, even though that's not been talked about in California. And the rest of the US is kind of behind a little bit what Europe has done. But here's the thing. I mean, they've got ways to mass sensitive data in a recording like credit card data. That's pretty standard stuff. The big thing is data residency. I want my data in a certain country. Canadians do not want their data resident in the United States. Europeans don't either. Germans don't want their data resident in Belgium. So there's a big sensitivity in Europe about that. And even in fact, Microsoft's even gotten in trouble in Germany over that last year because they eliminated a relationship with Deutsche Telekom. And so sometimes you can kind of go overboard on that. But however, what I would say though is some of the big cloud companies have done this, brought this problem onto themselves where they have not respected data privacy. There's even a bill now on facial recognition because of some of the things they've gone on like IBM disclosed that they're doing something. So it is still an issue. It's always going to be an issue. I do think that there needs to be more productivity. Here's the question, who owns your data? Who owns your face or my face? I don't think that because I upload a photo that I should give my rights away. So I think we're going to catch up on that. I do think for the B2B though, a lot of these companies, first of all, they are certified, they have cloud certifications, they have to do certain things relative to privacy. And so they have to pass a lot of tests that are certified by an auditor. So I think there's a lot of things that most of the B2B buyers are not going to have to worry about with a lot of the people here. It's more about the personal side of things, personal cloud like Facebook, but usually not the kind of stuff you're dealing with here. So Jim, when I look at the overall contact center market, the cloud portion of that is still relatively small. If I saw right somewhere 10, 15%, but it's been growing at a steady clip. Where are we in their adoption? Is there a plateau that it will hit that? Is it take a third of a market, half the market? What do you see happening? I would say that, we're on a journey and you're right, there is still a small part which means a large addressable market, not that much different than unified communications where it's mainly on-premise going cloud. But we've got contact center going at about 24 billion and we think a lot of that will be eventually converted to a cloud except for maybe the ultra-large call centers. And I think just like email migration 10 years, I've covered that, 10 years ago, it was all on-premise. Today it's the opposite, it's like 90, 10. So I think that eventually is going to start to happen. It's interesting, I mean a lot of that was Microsoft really turned the lever. It's, you know, Microsoft on email and Microsoft is like, we're going SaaS. You are going SaaS. If you use Office, you are going Office 365. So I'm curious, is there a lever like that in from a licensing standpoint or from a vendor standpoint that would push contact center? Well, if you look at the contact center market, you've got it, I think it was growth rates around 9% overall but then you've got people like 5.9 are growing 31%. All right, so I think when you start looking at that, why is a cloud company growing that much when the overall market, well, because there's demand. So they want the flexibility of cloud. They don't want to run the servers and upgrade the servers. And I think that they've learned lessons from that and you're right, Microsoft did do that but Google forced them to do that. So I think that is fast growing companies like 5.9 forcing some of the bigger players to go more cloud. And I can say absolutely yes, that a lot of the bigger players are looking over their shoulders saying, again, they bought cloud contact center players so they can keep up with some of the young startups and 5.9 is not young, but they would still be considered young in the relative terms of this event. So- So I'm curious, Jim, when you were talking with vendors and the Aragon research that you do, companies of different sizes, whether they're born in the cloud or they're legacy companies, where does cultural transformation come into this conversation about evolving a contact center such that an agent is empowered with the right content to deliver it through the right channel to make a decision that really positively impacts the customer. I can imagine multiple generations, multiple countries. Cultural transformation is hard. Yeah, it is a big issue. I think there's more awareness on both the culture of the agent and the culture of the buyer. And I think there's more stuff going on relative to sentiment analysis. So I do think that that's a bigger issue. I think there's more time being spent on training. The better digital companies are investing tons of money in training. And so I think there's more awareness relative to cultural differences, cultural nuances and being more sensitive to maybe things that they would say, sorry, can't help you with that. Where they would, since they've been trained to be maybe more sensitive, they're going to be more understanding when they're actually on a call. So Jim, in your research, where's the white space? Where's the real opportunity for growth and transformation? We've had some discussions here. It's early days in AI, is it AI or is it not the technology? Is it the cultural changes that Lisa brings up? Where are some of the impediments in room for growth of the industry? So we do think that the enterprise will become more intelligent and that the providers were going to lead that charge where instead of, you say the AI, we call it intelligent contact center. And we think that there's going to be more of a demand for automation and that there will be more assistance that might take care of a customer's problem before it ever gets to a human. So I do think that we're not going to, that's going to be something that's never going to go away. It's just that they're going to get smarter and more supportive. We have helped clients deploy chatbots for help desk internally, for customer-facing help desk. I think it's still early here that people have them, but they're more rules-based than AI-based. AI is coming in the next two years, but there's no doubt that is going to be one of the drivers. And by the way, sometimes people are like, is this the problem we were having? Is this the question you have? Yes, here's this answer. And it's the right answer to the correct answer. That's what people really want. They want the instant gratification. We all kind of grew up. We're used to that with our phone. I need the answer. And I do think that I would probably say that the demand for cloud is going to outstrip everything. And so if somebody that's a non-premise provider doesn't have a cloud option, then I would be worried about that. But I do think AI is not going to go away. We don't think it's going to be an AI or nothing. It's going to be basically intelligent digital systems that can answer questions in telegy and have a conversation with you. There's some tools that do that today, but most of them are very basic question and answer. They're not high-end. It can't be like Jarvis on Iron Man, where yes, yes, Mr. Spark, I will do that for you. They're not quite there yet, but the movies, you know, glamified that whole thing. So people expect, well, why doesn't it talk back to me? Any last question, Jim, are there any industries that you see as going to be early adopters to start creating and actually deploying the Intelligent Contact Center? Well, you know, let's put it this way, the every client we've talked to and in survey work, it said we wish we had more intelligence in our contact center. I think they're a little scared that they want to make sure they do it right. But if you do it and deploy it and test it, you'd be amazed it's for some of the basic Q&A, how rockstar stuff that is, but sometimes people rush too quickly and deploy it when it's not quite ready. And I think a lot of the providers here, including 5.9, are going to try to do AI the right way and not kind of try to rush it. But I would also say this, there's an awful lot of fun here about AI and most of it's not true. All right, Lisa, final, final question for Jim here. This is John Furrier's not here to ask it. 5.9 has gone through a lot of changes here, brought in some pretty high profile executives. Any commentary on our hosts here? Well, look, I know new Rowan and Jonathan Rosenberg at Cisco, they had a rockstar team there. They've even, since they've joined here, brought more talent in. And so, I mean, the 5.9 people I knew have been blown away by the level of talent that has come in. And I think that's just going to help them continue to grow. The question is, when do they declare how big they're going to be? And that's what we're looking for them to do. To be continued. Jim, thanks so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon. Thank you very much. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.