Hi, I'm TJ Gunther.
My two favorite things are discovery and problem solving.
I love when you turn a corner to find something new, walk outside the airport in a new city and soak in the signs, and when you first hear a new song you know you'll be listening to another 100 times.
I seek out the satisfaction of watching a solution click into place, the gasp as I realize the incoming twist in a movie, or the early stages of fact-finding when you just need to define the edges of a rather complicated issue. In my career as a content strategist, I seek to understand my clients, discover their inner workings, and uncover how we can solve their problems with thoughtful architecture, structured content, and strategic writing. I love hard questions, and I enjoy mining the analytics and user research to provide satisfying answers.
I want to know at least a little bit about everything, because knowledge allows me to connect different ideas and unlock novel ways to view problems. It also will hopefully help me get on Jeopardy one day. I'm also an inherent listener, comfortable taking in information and taking a minute to synthesize it before moving forward in a conversation.
What I do
I'm a systems thinker trying to reflect the real-world properties of organizations in their digital presences. Over 14 years of consulting at Digital Wave, I've never settled into one silo. I love to bridge content and technical work, and explore the ways both improve the experience for users. I'm drawn to the content challenges that arise on the fringes of design but have an outsized impact on user experience.
Systems that hold up
At Thomas Jefferson University, prospective students were having trouble finding programs they cared about. We reworked the program metadata and program finder experience, and our testing showed students finding the programs they searched for. I designed a metadata structure that encompassed edge cases and established a system flexible enough to handle future changes without having to rework the data structures.
Platforms people can actually use
I worked closely with a designer and developer to design and implement a custom Drupal platform tailored toward higher ed institutions with smaller budgets. As the content lead, I created copy that matched their language, making it easy to work in the CMS, and provided content strategy guidelines for extending their voice and adapting it to work within the new framework.
I onboarded each client, conducted discovery, and presented a new strategy. I gave them training and consulted with them through the life of their project and afterwards as questions and new requests came up. When these teams ran into issues using the platform, I fielded the questions, tracked the changes, and worked with a developer to implement updates to make the experience better for content editors.
What's next
I am fascinated by the evolution of user experiences to be more conversational and personal. I want to explore how to apply more traditional content strategy and UX principles to more reactive AI interfaces, where the outputs aren't always predetermined.
I have worked with a developer to build AI-powered tools that scraped content and applied website updates from an outside content system. I served as the representative for my team on Antech Systems' AI working group, and regularly worked with people to implement new processes and explore possibilities for AI integration that never lost the human influence.