Principal Consultant
Content Strategist & Accessibility Advocate
Alison has spent 18+ years making sure that end users can use the technology created for them. She is a staunch advocate for usability and accessibility best practices, and as a freelance content strategist, she continues to prescribe user-focused solutions. Her specialties include user research, requirements gathering, content strategy, content modeling, and website migrations for colleges and universities including MIT and Harvard Law School.
After leaving the corporate world for academia, Alison took on multiple leadership roles at MIT where she strove to make convoluted systems intuitive—no training necessary. She was instrumental in migrating the IT department’s archaic, file server-based website to an open-source content management system with a killer responsive design, coordinating with multiple outside agencies and providing hands-on content strategy. Alison managed the content creation process for the new website and defined the requirements for the IT service catalog, the software catalog, and the IT knowledge base. Across all of these projects, Alison engineered and promoted content strategies and governance models focused on the user experience and user needs. Most recently, Alison has put these skills to use for Harvard Law School where she provides content strategy and user research on projects very similar to those described above.
Alison kicked off her career writing technical documentation and designed training for corporate and government classrooms and eLearning programs at Deloitte Consulting. Her focus was to translate the inner workings of complex enterprise systems to answer the question, How do I do my job? She continued to apply her tech-translating skills at Bose Corporation, where she led the start-up of a new eLearning program for systems and business process training.
Alison has a BA in French Literature from Cornell University, and an MA in International Relations from Boston University.
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