County Web Author Training Series
Lead UX content strategist and trainer @ Anthro-Tech
Multco.us serves over 700,000 residents in Multnomah County, Oregon — and over 130 subject matter experts across the agency who contribute to the website’s content. The website’s managers needed help scaling their efforts to make the website more accessible and useful. They came to our team to design a series of custom workshops for their web contributors to content strategy basics and best practices.
Project highlights:
Co-designed and developed three virtual workshops featuring real-life examples from Multco.us webpages.
Facilitated interactive working sessions following each webinar presentation to help authors apply concepts through group activities.
Designed and distributed custom resources to workshop attendees that reinforced key concepts discussed during training.
The challenge
Support a busy, distributed team of content contributors and subject matter experts who are less familiar with content and accessibility best practices.
How might we…
… help content contributors understand and apply content and accessibility best practices in a consistent, scalable and sustainable way?
Process snapshot
1. Discovery
Project kickoff and goal analysis - First, we guided a kickoff discussion about the team’s biggest challenges and goals — and examples of content they struggled with the most. From there, I gathered the most relevant guidance and best practices related to those topics, drawing from our own agency resources alongside other reputable external sources.
2. Definition
Collaborative workshop planning - I then developed high-level training outlines that highlighted key concepts we’d cover along with activities we planned to facilitate for each. We collaborated in Miro, where the client could easily annotate the outline and add their own notes as they reviewed the outlines with other internal stakeholders.
3. Design
Presentation and activity design - Once we aligned on the final outline and key concepts covered in each training, we began developing presentation slides in PowerPoint. We incorporated real-life examples and screenshots gathered during the discovery phase to augment each concept and added presentation notes about specific agency examples to mention during our live presentation.
4. Delivery
interactive workshop facilitation - Participants joined us during a live presentation of the training featuring the presentation slides we developed. Live attendees then broke into small groups and completed an activity to apply presentation concepts to a real-life example. The session was recorded and later added to the County’s training library along with customized one-sheet resources that highlighted the training’s core concepts.
Outcomes
The training sessions had an average of 80 registrants and 40 live attendees, with hundreds accessing the recorded training and sessions in the weeks following the live sessions. Participants described the training as both “informative” and “engaging” and appreciated the interactive workbook materials that supplemented the presentation.
Artifacts
Interactive workshop facilitation
Collaborative workbooks
Tips and tricks one-sheeters
Pre- and post-event communications
Tools
Powerpoint
Zoom
Google Slides
Miro