Alley Sessions

The Micro Design Studio: Your Secret Weapon for Remote Collaboration

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Design studios bring people with varied skill sets together to solve creative problems such as identifying compelling graphics, homepage layouts, and establishing brand identity systems. Traditional brainstorms can often be ineffective, favoring the loudest or most popular voices in the room. Design studios are structured in a way that encourages the participation and the creativity of your entire group. The emphasis is on finding the best ideas, not offering up the most ideas. In this way, design studios are inclusive of diverse voices and surface promising ideas quickly and effectively.

This session will describe how, even while remote, designers, developers, and writers/editors can still participate together in these studios. The aim is agility, such that creative ideas emerge quickly and are brought to life early, leaving time for iteration or even rapid user testing.

We will discuss when a micro design studio is in order, how to plan a session from start to finish, and which tools and platforms work well for facilitation.

  • Christa Field

    Creative Director
    Alley
    Christa is the Creative Director at Alley, specializing in brand development and user-centered design methodologies. She brings a deep understanding of design systems and has crafted solutions for a variety of organizations including The Brookings Institution, The Dallas Morning News, and most recently Defector. Christa is based in the New York City area.

  • Susan Finkelpearl

    Vice President of User Experience
    Alley
    Susan joined Alley in 2014 to build a fully integrated UX and design practice. Her team provides clients with a full suite of services spanning product strategy, visual design, formative research, information architecture, content planning and writing, and user testing. Susan has brought these services to clients including The Kaiser Family Foundation, The Brookings Institution, Science News, and Colorado Public Radio.

Webinars webinars

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Choose your own adventure : an overview of decoupled solutions in WordPress.

Decoupled WordPress may sound like a buzzword, but this architectural pattern has become increasingly popular over the last few years. Determining whether it’s the right choice can be a challenge, though, even for seasoned technologists and product managers.  In this Alley Session, we’ll examine the growing landscape of decoupled WordPress strategies, focusing on how each

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A new model for membership-driven media: A conversation with the team at Defector

The changing landscape of news media has sparked innovations in platform development, subscription models, community engagement strategies and more. The pioneers of this movement are reporters and ambitious teams of talented writers who are ready to jump out from under legacy media limits and experiment in new ways with subscriptions and relationships with their readers.

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Tracking Success: Defining Key Metrics to Help Reach Your Goals

All organizations strive to reach their target audiences and create an impact. But how do you know if your organization is succeeding? If pageviews go up but time-on-page goes down, does that count as success or not? Should your strategy be focused more on social media, getting new newsletter subscribers, increasing recirculation, or simply improving

Latest News latest news

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Rejecting Master for Main

We all know that words carry power. A person’s word choice can make or break a conversation, a motto, or even a simple salutation. Seeing GitHub taking action with word choice, I decided to replace the default branch of this website’s repo from master to main.

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Audience Revenue, Social Networks, and Disinformation

In 2017, after the dust had settled on Trump’s election, I started a project to try to understand the cause and effect of the decline of local news. What resulted was a very long essay. Some parts of it hold up in my own thinking better than others; billionaires are not the best answer to this problem, reader revenue probably is an important part of any answer, but I no longer believe that there’s an economy of scale in employing journalists. Lede, Alley’s platform for journalism startups, is our answer to scaling the technology needed by news organizations.