Pamela Kostur, Interactive Media Management program coordinator, brought a piece of Centennial to Germany this past November when she presented at the tcworld conference, the world’s largest international conference in technical communication.
One of the insightful presentations Pamela gave was titled, Content as Conversation: Connecting Content to the User Experience. The way content is presented on a platform has a huge impact on the way it is consumed. Pamela says, “The way that I teach and the way that I think about content and user experience is that I imagine that every interaction that a user has with any type of platform, is a conversation and we need to plan and present the content as a conversation. You as the user choose to start the conversation the minute you engage with the app or the website and the conversation is only able to continue if it progresses in a way that you expect it to progress”. Pamela stresses that the “content is critical” and that it is “one of the hearts of the user experience but it’s often overlooked.”
Using the example of going online, Pamela says, “When you go online and you open an app and see words that don’t help you to navigate to the next screen or that are not immediately actionable, then you as a user are left to guess on what to do.” To counter this, she says, “People need to start thinking of content as a conversation, as many just put together content without really thinking about it. We tend to forget that in the digital interactive world, it’s the role of the platform to carry out the conversation, so we have to plan for it to happen.”
Pamela was able to take her experience at Centennial and utilize it within her presentation. She says, “What I presented was my method of teaching Content and Conversation. I wanted to take it to a broader audience and really start encouraging people in the industry to start thinking of content in a different way so that we can think of raising the bar with content in an interactive experience”.
@IMMCentennial students - wish you could all be here with me this week, at tcworld in Stuttgart. #tcworld #tekom pic.twitter.com/a09RErm3QF
— Pamela Kostur (@Pamela_Kostur) November 12, 2019
Pamela also made a presentation in honour of World Usability Day. Her presentation of The Ethics of UX touched on the ethics associated with user experience design. The topics she presented included, design and intent, misleading content, healthy engagement, persuasive design, privacy, and content as UX. One takeaway from her presentation is that “ethics are a gray area…we don’t have all the ‘right’ answers, but we are trying to ask the right questions, and focusing our intent in the right direction.”
We want to congratulate Pamela for sharing her knowledge on such a large platform. Pamela has many more speaking opportunities in the works and we can’t wait to follow along.
To learn more about what Pamela teaches and coordinates here at Centennial, check out the Interactive Media Management graduate certificate program.
By Alexandra Few, Communications - Professional Writing student