Karen McGrane

Without content, my dear designers, there would be no experience.

Karen McGrane, a content strategist and website accessibility advocate, is known for her book “Content Strategy for Mobile.” Content, for varying responsive sizes, should come from a single source of truth. That is, content should be adaptive. Adaptive content is composed of five elements: (1) content that gets created with the goal of making it reusable, (2) structure content that can be combined in different ways for different platforms, (3) presentation-independent content that hasn’t been style and formatted for a single display, (4) metadata will allow platforms to query the content and display the content elements best suited to a particular display, and (5) a CMS user interface that encourages writers to create content elements and variations within a package, instead of tying content to specific pages.

Karen’s design philosophy is "every company is a technology company" and "every business is in the user experience business." McGrane was an early proponent of designing web content for mobile devices and is a frequent keynote speaker at technology conferences.

McGrane has done user experience design work for many major media companies including Condé Nast, Disney, and Citibank. She was the design lead on the New York Times’ 2006 redesign. Prior to that she was Vice President and National Lead for User Experience at Razorfish where she was their first information architect hire in 1998. In August 2020 she co-founded the consultancy Autogram with Ethan Marcotte and Jeff Eaton.

Karen is well known for her writings:

Going Responsive (2015).
Content Strategy for Mobile (2012).

“Let content lead - the rest will follow.” - Paul Ford