Gladys Diandoki: Content Design Leadership Built on Strategy and Research – Episode 183

Content Strategy Insights

Gladys Diandoki Gladys Diandoki brings a strong research mindset and a consistent focus on strategy to her content work. Her approach yields both solid design results and an increased appreciation for content design among her colleagues and clients. It's not only her clients who benefit from her work. Gladys is also an active leader in the field, speaking regularly at conferences, writing, and hosting gatherings like the "Beyond The Cover" book club. We talked about: her content design work with the French government and her teaching at the Gobelins design school and Sorbonne University her early career in broadcast and magazine journalism and how lessons learned then manifest in her content design work her transition from the media world to UX design how content strategy work is integrated into her content design work her approach for getting stakeholders to see the real problems they are facing the content design book she wrote for the French market her designer-first professional identity the importance of framing and reframing her work in ways that illustrate the true benefits of her contributions the crucial role of information architecture and content structure in her way of working the importance of research and testing in the way she approaches her work and how they contribute to her consistent focus on strategy Gladys's bio Gladys Diandoki is a self-employed Content Designer who is based in Paris, France. She has worked with prominent companies such as Le Monde, the French government, Renault, Dailymotion, and Ornikar, among others. She is the author of a book titled "UX Writing, quand le contenu transforme l’expérience" (published by French editor Eyrolles) and is also a lecturer on topics like Content Design, Inclusion, and Accessibility at Les Gobelins and La Sorbonne. Prior to her work as a Content Designer, she worked in media relations for over ten years. During this time, she represented various well-known brands such as HP, Bose, Google, Box, Samsung, and Kickstarter. Connect with Gladys online Beyond The Cover book club GladysDiandoki.com LinkedIn Instagram Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/j1kLZKuCmik Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 183. It's an unfortunate truism that content designers spend an inordinate amount of their professional energy helping their colleagues and stakeholders understand the full range of benefits that they bring to product and design work. Few content professionals are as persuasive and authoritative in this work as Gladys Diandoki. Her constant focus on strategy and her ability to reframe design problems in pragmatic, user-focused ways lifts up the whole profession. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 183 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really delighted today to welcome to the show, Gladys Diandoki. Gladys is an independent content designer based in Paris, working mostly with the French government now, but she's done a lot of other stuff as well. Welcome to the show, Gladys. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're working on these days. Gladys: Hey, Larry. Well, thanks for having me in the podcast. So today, like you just mentioned, I'm working with the French government since a few months now, and that's really fun, to be honest. And I'm also teaching in Gobelins, which is a famous design school and Sorbonne as well. I'm teaching inclusion content design and with someone else, I'm also having a new class about accessibility for designers. Larry: Nice. So you're a real designer, but you come from, like many of us in this profession, from journalism, and I love how you talk about how that came to be because I think as we talked before we went on the air, it became, I think, clear to me that your core competency is curiosity.