I joined the annual Boye & Co end-of-winter meeting to share and discuss issues and trends in digital leadership and content management with other professionals from digital industries. I shared our work experimenting with AI in Drupal and learned about opportunities and challenges in the digital sector.

Janus Boye from Boye & Co and Simon Jones from Studio 24 ran a great event with multiple thought-provoking sessions over two days, bringing together professionals from a worldwide digital network for exchange of knowledge and insight. I was pleased to attend the event on behalf of the University and have summarised my takeaways below.

Social media trends indicate shifts in the ways people are making and using digital content

When designing content for University digital systems products and services and developing a wider content strategy, it is important to think beyond individual pages and sites and to consider the broader ways our audiences consume and interact with digital content. It was therefore interesting to hear an analysis of the state of social media from Andrew Jenkins from Volterra, a social media specialist agency in Toronto. Several insights relating to the production and usage of digital content on social media platforms and channels stood out for me.

Bluesky had gained popularity as an alternative to X (formerly Twitter), but its currently limited analytics tracking functionality made it unappealing as a channel for targeted, conversion-focused campaigns. Compared to last year, there had been growth in engagement with short-form videos on platforms like TikTok, both for fun and also to learn how to do things. It was interesting to learn of the increased demand for long-form blog posts, especially for knowledge-sharing within particular industries, and the rise in popularity of newsletter subscriptions on specialist topics. Repurposing content for different channels and associated audiences was prevalent, with AI increasingly enlisted to achieve this – for example making videos from text-based articles.  LinkedIn was noted as a platform worthy of social media spend, however, companies were noticing more value from authentic posts published by their individual employees (for example, conveying advocacy and thought leadership) rather than by their organisational LinkedIn accounts. This presented an opportunity for organisations to attain social media return-on-investment by equipping and motivating their staff to post on LinkedIn.

De-risking CMS investment – a CMS can’t solve the problem of unmodelled, fragmented content

Paola Roccuzzo, from digital agency Foolproof, presented the group with food for thought related to choosing a content management system (CMS) before properly understanding the content landscape from service design and operational viewpoints. Highlighting disparities between content management system descriptors like ‘composable’ and ‘headless’, she shared a ‘conversation starter’ map that set out different sorts of asks from a CMS including productivity tools like publishing calendars, design tools like templates and components, and broader fields of functionality like governance and workflow definition, tagging and classification and digital asset management.

Her talk resonated with me for several reasons. Firstly, it highlighted the ease with which content can be created, shaped and managed in varied ways, multiple places, and by different teams using various tools, and the associated difficulties with auditing and keeping track of what is ‘out there’ in order to develop content models and associated strategies to avoid incongruence and duplication. For me, this reinforced the importance of properly understanding the ‘current state’ before implementing content solutions,  an important step in any UX design process, but often difficult to achieve when projects are time-sensitive. Secondly, discussions around confusing and conflicting terms in CMS solutions reaffirmed the importance of a joined-up approach to terminology, relating to an initiative I am leading in the Drupal open-source content management system community. I supported Paola’s suggestion for those making CMS decisions (including agencies, vendors and end-users) to document examples of successfully implemented content management solutions with full descriptions of how the technology had been applied and operated.

See Paola’s conversation starter map and read more in her blog post:

What you’re probably not doing to de-risk your CMS investment by Paola Roccuzzo on Foolproof blog

Read more about our previous work defining a UXD process ahead of the web publishing platform project:

Defining the UXD process to support a user-centred web publishing platform

Read about my work defining a controlled vocabulary for Drupal:

De-jargoning Drupal – working with the community to open up Drupal’s terminology

Fresh perspectives on improving search with AI

At the meet-up I took the chance to share what we’d learned from our experiments with Drupal AI search approaches to seek feedback and thoughts from the group. I explained one of our recognised challenges: to match queries written in visitors’ natural language with relevant web content written using University conventions. During our Drupal AI explorations, we observed problems with searches for ‘courses’ not retrieving content about University degrees and programmes due to a mismatch of terminology. Olivier Dobberkau (Founder and CEO of dkd Internet Service GmbH and President of the TYPO3 Association) presented a helpful paradigm to adopt to consider how to make use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for search: Think of ways LLMs can be applied to align users’ language (for example in search terms), language in-the-world (for example, linguistic trends like word-clipping) and University language (for example set out in our style guide). Paola Roccuzzo suggested sources for further reading on areas like semantics, ontologies and knowledge graphs to help me unpick the components behind successful search experiences, understand the connections between them and then recognise opportunities to apply AI for the best chance of success.

Read more about our experiments with AI and search in my blog post:

Can AI help or hinder search? Trials with Drupal AI-boosted search and AI Assistants

More ideas for using AI assistants and agents

Continuing the AI theme, myself and Ben Lee from Bidwells shared our respective work experimenting with AI Assistants and agents. Ben shared different tools and approaches he had used to investigate automation of some internal processes and procedures to save staff time and effort. I demonstrated the AI Assistants in the Drupal editorial interface I had previously tested with University staff, to share the findings from my research and seek feedback and input from the group. From Ben’s demonstrations I noted some new tools to experiment with, and hearing from the CMS experts in the group, the potential of these assistants was reaffirmed, seeding ideas for ways the assistants could be fine-tuned on specific content management tasks either as individual agents, as a chain operating sequentially or as an orchestration completing tasks in a simultaneous, synchronised way. From the discussions, I recognised the need to identify common content management tasks and to understand the steps to complete these to identify potential opportunities for automation with AI.

Read more about my UX research of Drupal AI Assistants in my blog post:

Making AI useful and usable – consolidated learnings from UX research of Drupal AI Assistants

Preview of a new book about content authoring experience

In 2022, I presented at an online Boye & Co event about my work researching how staff used the EdWeb editorial interface, and as a result was fortunate to meet Greg Dunlap who was writing a book about content authoring experiences. The book had been delayed because of the demise of the intended publisher (A Book Apart), therefore Greg had begun a kickstarter campaign. At the meet-up Simon Jones shared a preview copy of the book as well as Greg’s website to learn more.  From first glance the book seems like a good acquisition for the WAC team library.

Read more about the book ‘Designing Content Authoring Experiences’ on Greg Dunlap’s website