Editorial oversight

As a for-profit publication, I worked closely with a small editorial team to source, manage, and develop community contributors as new voices in the many facets of user experience design, from content strategy, to interaction design, to research and more.

Much of our work as editors (during the final few years, there were 3 of us) meant engaging with an active community of UX professionals, whether through our own social channels, or seeking out contributors in the wild. At any given point, each editor was actively working with ~20 contributors, helping them shape their ideas into 800-1200 word articles that provided new value or insights to our readership.

We managed an editorial calendar that mapped out our content months in advance, sticking pretty reliably on a weekly feature, and occasional sponsored content.

The editorial team met monthly with our business-focused founders to ensure our editorial planning matched up nicely with our sponsorships and ad partners (and that we maintained transparency with our readers along the way).

Author development

My primary focus as a senior editor was finding and developing contributors to our magazine. We especially sought diverse and less-outspoken contributors, as the UX community (as many communities) had a tendency at that time to be the same few voices, over and over.

The editorial team maintained a living document with all of our contributors, both active, inactive, and former, and made an ongoing, concerted effort to continue to build relationships with newer voices in the community, in order to add new perspectives to UX-related disciplines.

Every week, I worked with authors of varying experiences levels from ideation to publication. Authors would briefly pitch their ideas, and I would work with them to shape these ideas into concrete articles. When the process was complete and the author’s work went live, I would update our database to make sure the author was paid for their contributions.

Engaging sponsored content

Sponsored content can be such an ugly thing - and for UX Booth, our sponsored content typically wouldn’t perform very well (no big surprises there). As a lover of improv comedy podcasts, I became interested in sponsored content in the last two years of my tenure as an editor at UX Booth. Podcasts handle their ad-reads in different ways, of course, but I noticed one day that I actually listened to some of them, rather than pound that 15 second skip-ahead button a few times. The ad-reads I actually listened to were the ones that put creative effort into the ads; they were still ads and clearly so, but also, they provided me with entertainment.

So I engaged with our business developer to see our sponsorship partners, and began to pitch and then publish sponsored content that still provided either value or commentary to our audience. Nothing necessarily groundbreaking, but still saying something (and of course, clearly labeled as sponsored content), and saying it with my own voice.

These sponsored posts almost universally outperformed older, more traditional and colorless sponsored content, sometimes by as much as 400% (as measured by page views). These posts were not only profitable because of the sponsorship and ad impressions, but also because sometimes, when we were light on full articles by our paid contributors, these sponsored posts could serve as our weekly article in a pinch.

Here are a few examples of my sponsored content on UX Booth.

(NOTE: when I was working for UX Booth and writing these articles, they were much more clearly labeled as sponsored content.)

• When user personas just don’t matter
• Vanity metrics need to die
• Marketing and user experience must work together
• Preparing ecommerce websites for the holidays