IA Summit 2007 Pre-Conference Program
Social Information Architecture Workshop
Gene Smith, Rashmi Sinha and Thomas Vander Wal
22/03/2007 (Thursday). Full day.
The rise of social media and sharing sites—like YouTube, Digg and Flickr—has meant new challenges for information architects. Such sites demonstrate how the information discovery experience is enriched by the addition of a social dimension. IAs working on findability for all sorts of sites must consider adding a social dimension to the information sharing and discovery experience. In addition to their usual bag of tricks, they can
- incorporate new classification techniques like tagging,
- anticipate social uses of information and design for sharability,
- create architectures for user-created content, and
- design feedback loops that change their architecture in response to user input.
This workshop will collect the latest research, techniques and case studies into a one-day session for intermediate and advanced IAs. By the end of the session participants will learn
- social software fundamentals,
- the secrets of successful tagging applications,
- how to design for sharing,
- how to incorporate real-time feedback into their architectures,
- navigation design for social media,
- social IA for intranets, portals and collaborative sites.
This workshop will mix theory with hands-on activities and real-world examples and case studies.
UX Management: developing and growing yourself and a team of user experience professionals
22/03/2007 (Thursday). Full day.
Janice Fraser the ex-CEO of Adaptive Path in a recent podcast describes management and leadership as having two parts
- Creating favourable circumstances where managers can do things like providing buildings and offices, and organising and structuring a workplace
- Activating or enabling people by providing them with the confidence and know-how and trust that they can do the work required
Many people who move into this role within a User Experience (UX) or Information Architecture group are left to work out by themselves ways to lead, manage and develop both their team and their practice. We are not given the guidance on how to create those favourable circumstances that Janice describes or shown how to “enable” our staff to design and develop the web site or products that we are tasked to create.
This course helps provide managers, at whatever stage of their career, the ability to put in place procedures and environments for development. The course will also help managers to work out Personal Development Plans with team members; identify the correct skills mix for a team; talk through common problems as a group and remember that they need to take time for themselves and their development.
The workshop is made up of four parts; three focusing on the development of the team, the individual and the manager and the last focusing on the development and leadership of the UX practice.
The course will be taught as a combination of lecture, exercises and discussion.
A number of “management challenges” will be explored, from non-performing staff to allocation; from dealing with becoming a manager - not a practitioner, to realising that the organisation cannot provide senior practitioners with a continued development path. In this course, a number of case studies based on those challenges will be provided that the participants will firstly discuss in small groups and then discuss as a whole group identifying ways to address the problems.
As well as questions being taken throughout the workshop, there will also be question times at the end of each session. This gives participants a chance to write down their burning questions throughout the course, which can be reviewed and answered at the end of the day.
There will also provide as a supplement to the core notes for the course
- A list of links to key management books for UX professionals
- A list of web sites and discussion groups for UX management issues
- Documents that can be used as templates for development like Personal Development Plans, Skills audits and Interview questions and exercises
Intranets as a business tool
22/03/2007 (Thursday). Full day.
The corporate intranet must be more than just a “dumping ground for second hand documents”. Instead, it should be a valuable business tool that delivers tangible and visible benefits for the organisation as a whole.
The growing recognition of ‘enterprise 2.0’ and rich internet applications is further putting pressure on intranet teams to move the site to become a more interactive environment. The challenge is how to deliver this additional functionality when resources (and other constraints) are so tight.
This workshop provides practical approaches for managing and growing intranets. Central to this is the new ‘6x2 methodology’, which offers a rigorous framework for intranet planning. This unique approach focuses on carefully scoping the next six months of work, to ensure that what is planned is not just achievable, but is also worth doing.
Taking this step-by-step approaches provides a strong basis for positioning the intranet as a ‘business tool’, one that delivers tangible and visible benefits to both staff and the organisation as a whole.
Topics covered during the workshop include:
- Evolution of intranets
- Practical ‘needs analysis’ techniques
- Creating an intranet ‘sales pitch’
- 6x2 methodology for planning intranets
- Role of the intranet team
- Role of collaboration tools and portals
Introduction to Internet Business Strategy
22/03/2007 (Thursday). Half day (am)
You can barely eavesdrop on a conversation about the Internet these days without hearing the word strategy. And yet, true business strategy creation that looks ahead 5-10 years and factors in social, economic, and technological dimensions is not that common. While a deep understanding of Internet business innovations would require in-depth study, we can quickly learn and start to use the fundamental ideas.
Internet practitioners and managers will benefit from understanding strategy when designing and selling their work. For example, we can justify major recommendations by going beyond user, market, and technology research to also align with business strategy, striving to be cost effective and creating a competitive advantage.
This workshop will introduce the topic of business strategy, illustrate through case studies how Internet strategy is practiced by online and traditional companies, and enable you to generate strategic ideas of your own that align with organizational goals. Here are some of the questions that we will address:
- What is business strategy? How does it differ from a business model, a value proposition, or operational effectiveness?
- What are the most popular strategic models and what language is used to describe them?
- How does IA/UX contribute to my organization’s business strategy?
- How do I combine business strategy with user research and IA/UX research?
Building Taxonomies: Methodology and Analysis Techniques
22/03/2007 (Thursday). Half day (am)
Good taxonomies can significantly improve user access to information when used as navigation systems, for content tagging or for search engine enhancement. In addition, proper taxonomy development is vital when implementing a content management or knowledge management system.
In this workshop, we offer participants a hands-on opportunity to practice a complete user-centric methodology for developing taxonomies, including techniques for analyzing user testing results. Participants will practice each of the basic taxonomy methodology and analysis techniques by creating a sample navigation taxonomy for the Changi (Singapore) Airport website (http://www.changiairport.com/changi/en/index.html).
Handouts will include samples of interview and testing scripts, as well as data collection and analysis spreadsheets.
Participants will gain knowledge necessary to create better taxonomies on their own or to more effectively supervise the creation of taxonomies by others. This workshop assumes basic knowledge of the uses and organization of taxonomies and other controlled vocabularies.
So You Want To Be A Product Manager...
22/03/2007 (Thursday). Half day (pm)
When wandering the hallowed halls of Information Architecture conferences, at local User Experience group meetings, and in design firm lofts, one often hears lamentation about how Information Architecture and User Experience practitioners are not asked to participate in the larger strategic conversation and help guide and (re)form organizations.
Even when we are offered the opportunity to step into management or take on another role with more visibility, many IAs hesitate to give up their schematics and task flows. Yet, we yearn to contribute at this higher level, to demonstrate the amazing insights that our work avails upon us.
We can influence or even own the architecture, just likely not as the IA or CXO. One path of influence is as Product Manager. The IA as PM is still doing similar work, just at a larger scale with a different title.
This half-day pre-conference workshop is designed for IAs who are interested in moving into product management as well as practitioners who want to understand how to work better with product managers. It will help IA practitioners utilize their existing IA knowledge and techniques as a bridge to becoming Product Managers, providing a better opportunity to directly influence the direction of the organization.
The session will consist of a series of brief presentations, followed by an exercise to demonstrate how IA practice fits into the PM role.
Preliminary topics covered:
- Differences Between IA and PM
- Requirements vs. Specifications: Strategic Direction vs. Screen-Level Detail
- Research: Overlap of Equals
- Living the Business Context
- Shifting IA Deliverables to Serve as PM Artifacts
- Common mistakes Product Managers make
After the session, you'll have a hands-on appreciation for the benefits of being a Product Manager:
- Focus product strategy on customer and end user needs
- Help ensure user focus throughout entire product – not just the design, but communications, policies – the entire “customer experience”
- Work with marketing, sales, and other stakeholders to effectively communicate unique benefits of your product
- Provide input on strategies for other products within the organization
By letting the UX organization do the detailed design, IAs start influencing the larger picture. Product Managers don't stop doing IA – they stop doing schematics and content audits. Come work with us on how to show the IA world that the transition is not as wrenching as it may initially seem.
Communicating Design: Making Your IA Documentation Clear and Actionable
22/03/2007 (Thursday). Half day (pm)
Like a biological process, every design process has inputs and outputs. In a design process, inputs and outputs are documents, and they carry ideas from one part of the process to another. These ideas fuel the process, and allow participants to collaborate with each other effectively. Poor documentation usually leads to inefficient processes: When ideas are not communicated effectively, process participants may need to spend more time re-hashing the same old thing.
This workshop looks at what makes documents effective, how to tailor them to different audiences, and how to use them appropriately in design methodologies. Designed to be hands-on, this workshop gives participants time to explore two different essential information architecture documents in detail: wireframes and flowcharts.
This half-day workshop will focus on two key documents—wireframes and flowcharts. For each document, we will analyze the components and discuss strategies for improving them. Participants will work on hands-on exercises to take basic versions of the documents and enhance them. They will practice presenting the documents to each other.
Web Design Foundations
23/03/2007 (Friday). Full day.
In this in-depth program, Jared Spool will share the results of years of research examining how the best sites navigate users to their content. In just one day, you'll see the design techniques behind successful designs including Lands' End, A.G. Edwards, Staples.com, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, CNN.com, and the BBC. Here’s a summary of the topics we’ll cover:
Designing for the Scent of Information: Pulling Users to their Content
If your users can’t find the content they are seeking, your site will fail. One of the biggest secrets of successful web sites is that they design for Scent.
In recent research, we've uncovered that users know when they are on the right track to finding their content—they follow the Scent of Information. With the right scent, we’ve seen users confidently work their way through web sites to find what they’re seeking.
Scent explains why users consistently fail to find their desired content. If your site’s content doesn’t have good scent, everything you're doing could be at great risk. By understanding how users pick up and keep the scent, you can design more usable web sites.
We'll demonstrate how the successful sites provide a strong scent and what happens when they don't. Using the results from hundreds of usability tests, we’ll show you how users follow a scent trail and the different ways your design could be blocking scent. We’ll also discuss how the quality of links, page length, page density, and graphics affect whether users find the content they’re looking for.
The Scent of a Web Page: Five Types of Navigation Pages
You work hard providing top-notch content on your site. Will your users find it? If they don't find it, all that effort is for nothing. What can you do to guarantee that users find the content they've come looking for? You’ll come away with the most up-to-the-minute research on how users actually navigate sites.
As users traverse through a web site, they encounter different types of pages, each with unique functions. The designers of the best sites understand the special functions of each type of page on a web site, and design the pages individually based on their specific purpose.
Our research has uncovered three ways to predict when users will fail finding the content they desire. We’ll show you what these three predictors are and how to counter the effects in your design.
We will share the secrets behind successful designs including Lands' End, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, CNN, and the BBC. You’ll learn why trigger words are critical to users successfully finding their content, why the best sites prevent users from using Search, how exposing a site's hierarchy can increase the success of the user, how designing longer pages helps users find what they seek, and how to best use lateral links and breadcrumbs.
Unpacking the Usability Toolbox
Design teams have many tools in their usability toolbox, each designed to help them create usable sites: usability testing, personas, focus groups, surveys, web log analysis, and field studies, to just name a few. Unfortunately, these same teams have limited resources. You can’t use every tool in every project. Sometimes, the most important thing you can know is how to pick the right tool for your current situation.
Successfully incorporating these techniques into the development process requires that teams know each tool’s benefits and appropriateness for every design scenario. Choosing the wrong tool for the wrong job will waste precious resources and produce results that can set your efforts back.
Over the years, UIE has studied how the most successful organizations move their designs from concept to launch. We’ve analyzed how they choose the right technique from their toolbox and how they use each one. For the first time, you’ll have an opportunity to learn the strategies of these successful organizations.
You’ll learn when cheap-and-dirty usability testing will work just fine and when you need to stick to a rigorous scientific methodology, collecting precise data for meticulous analysis and reporting. You’ll hear how to use 5-second tests, inherent value tests, surrogate tests, and field studies to fill in the gaps in your knowledge of your users.
Effective Dissemination: Best Techniques for Getting Teams Onboard
Usability testing, field studies, and other techniques produce massive amounts of information. The design team needs this information to make the right decisions. Disseminating the information teams collect is one of the biggest problems they face today.
Over the last few years, UIE has been interviewing teams about their techniques for ensuring everyone on the design team has the necessary information. Our studies show reports are still the most common result from usability testing. While they can be useful for communicating an immediate list of recommendations or priorities from a specific study, they often fail to help teams gain insights useful in future design efforts.
Do you create a large report or a small one? A written document or a PowerPoint presentation? How do you back up your recommendations? What’s the best way to prioritize the findings? You’ll see how different teams approached each of these problems and learn what is most effective for your situation.
Personas are becoming a popular amongst many teams. Recent research shows there are a variety of approaches to creating and using persona information in the design process, from very formal to very informal. You’ll learn the pros and cons of each approach.
UIE’s research shows many teams have tried style guides, templates, and design guidelines, but have rarely achieved their objective of creating uniform designs. We’ll discuss the common failure points of these techniques and explore a new technique we see gaining traction: design pattern libraries. You’ll see the experience organizations are having with design patterns and learn strategies for introducing them into your design process. Plus, a detailed seminar booklet!
Listening to Jared is exciting and entertaining. But, you'll need something to take back with you. We've compiled all of the presentation slides and a bundle of useful articles into a handy little booklet that you'll find yourself referring to time and time again.
Creating Conceptual Comics
Kevin Cheng, Jane Jao and Mark Wehner
23/03/2007 (Friday). Full day.
Following the popularity of the Communicating Concepts Through Comics presentations throughout IASummit, UXWeek, SHiFT and various other venues, we are offering the chance not just to hear about the use of comics to convey concepts but to actually do it in an interactive workshop.
During the early periods of product development, a number of tools are typically employed to assist in defining and communicating the product vision. At Yahoo!, we’ve used a combination of tools such as requirements documents, personas, user scenarios and storyboards with varying degrees of success. For example, requirements and personas were rarely consumed or were interpreted differently between individuals. Traditional storyboards detailing screen by screen progressions created a focus on the interface, rather than the concept.
Learning Objectives
In one of our upcoming products, we explored a new method of testing and communicating product concepts through the use of comics. Comics are a unique medium between video and static sketches and provide versatility beyond either of the mediums if applied correctly. Using comics, we were able to create an easily digestible deliverable which focused on communicating and refining the concepts and ideas behind a feature instead of the details of an interface. The objective of this workshop will be to teach attendees the considerations and skills necessary to duplicate this methodology. The focus will be on involving participants to try the technique out on real problems and receive feedback and suggestions on the exercises while covering some additional examples of the usage of comics as a language.
Also augmenting the workshop session will be a case study and instructions on how to expand the usage of these storyboards beyond internal communication and use comics for user research purposes. We will present a technique of walking real users through comics and giving them the ability to add their own notes and thoughts directly onto the comics. Through these processes, we were able to help discover product implications, user needs, and feedback as to what makes concepts most appealing and useful.
Participants will learn:
- when comic storyboards are useful
- how to use panel structures, sizes and frequency to imply time
- the value of communicating through iconography instead of words to leave room for interpretation
- the level of detail in interfaces to show, if any interface element is shown at all
- creative ways to imply interaction/information architecture elements of a concept
- methods of creating comic storyboards without being an illustrator
- how to conduct user research on concept storyboards to inform product design
- some alternative concept communication methodologies such as video and photographic storyboards with examples
Accelerator Workshops: How Rapid Facilitation Gets Things Done In Days Instead of Weeks
23/03/2007 (Friday). Full day.
Accelerator workshops compress work that could take weeks or even months into a matter of days. Using rapid facilitation techniques, practitioners can tackle common problems that haunt projects that lack buy-in and vision. Those problems challenge both consultants and internal teams. Some of the tougher problems we face include aligning large teams, reaching consensus, being able to envision a solution, understanding business drivers, or simply agreeing on a set of features. Often, even after a solution has been reached and well documented, team members flip-flop or back track, fuelling uncertainty within the project and causing stress to the entire team. This frustrating cycle often iterates a number of times before agreement is reached – a process that often takes weeks and sometimes months.
In this full day session, we will introduce the idea of Accelerator Workshops, see why rapid facilitation works, and learn how to plan and conduct workshops that can condense months of work into a matter of days. We will also discuss, and work through the following topics:
- Increase intensity, productivity, and maximize team participation and buy-in
- Differentiating from project meetings (having the right people, right methods, and establishing a high level of commitment)
- Creative workshop activities, like design games, that build project touchstones
- Deep Listening, Live Captures, Predictive PowerPoint, and other rapid facilitation methods
- Importance of Feedback
- Post-Workshop Deliverables: be able to deliver on the day-after the Workshop! (without pulling an all-nighter)
To practice our workshop skills, we will focus on workshop activities such as:
- Breakouts and Merges
- Backcasting: Predict the project’s Press Release and other methods
- Role-play scenarios
- Draft scenario flows
- Examine secondary research to draft requirements
- Use empathy tools to write user requirements
After this session, practitioners will have the knowledge, tools, and practice to sell, plan, and run workshops that dazzle clients and teams. More importantly, this session will help practitioners at all levels be more effective at arriving at a shared vision, reaching solutions, and producing useful and usable team documents and artifacts.
Designing with Structured Data
Karen Loasby, Margaret Hanley, John Allsopp, Thomas Vander Wal
23/03/2007 (Friday). Full day.
As Web 2.0 becomes more than a buzzword, many information architects are being asked to not just organise the broad structure of the site and design page layouts. Increasingly, information architects are being asked to, and are getting interested in:
- Designing the detailed structure of content for content management systems
- Re-using content at different levels of detail and on different devices
- Syndicating data via RSS and other feed mechanisms
- Designing data to be shared using APIs and microformats
- Designing sites and services using other people’s structured data
- Designing rich, flexible interfaces to complex data
This type of work requires a different set of information architecture skills. It requires deeper content analysis, more data modelling and a better understanding of relevant technologies. It also needs a different way of communicating with stakeholders and team members.
This workshop provides IAs with the basis of understanding for designing and developing with structured data. It has four related modules across a full day:
- Analysis and design for good structures
This module covers establishing a brief, content analysis, spotting patterns, identifying important content types, modelling them, techniques for collaborative design and how to get meaningful buy-in and sign-off. - Developing and creating feeds for interaction
This module covers an introduction to data feeds, where they fit with the rest of Web 2.0 and examples of feeds of data. It also examines a number of real APIs and how they are presented in interfaces. - APIs and microformats
Microformats is a set of HTML based formats for commonly used types of information on the web (e.g. hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hListing, hResume). APIs allow designers to share and use each other’s data. This module covers how they work, the benefits of using them and how to design for them. - Putting it all together and breaking away from the web
This module pulls the other elements together, showing how feeds, APIs, microformats and other structured data allow web pages (or parts of web pages) to be picked up and easily moved out to other devices and applications. It also examines the role of structured data as a key to developing flexible, device-independent solutions.
This Information Architecture Institute workshop will provide a blend of lecture, discussion and plenty of activity.
Karen Loasby
Karen will start the day with the foundation information needed to design with structured data and will include short exercises throughout.
Her session will cover the process of identifying structures in your content and ensuring you end up with an effective structure that is usable by your business.
- establishing a brief
- content analysis & spotting patterns - different techniques for different IAs (getting away from just spreadsheets)
- how to identify the most important content types for your business and focusing on modelling them
- techniques for collaborative design (with editorial staff, visual designers & beyond) - making it fun for everyone
- ways to get meaningful buy-in and sign-off (not showing everyone a data model)
- short exercises throughout
Margaret Hanley
Margaret’s session will focus on developing and creating feeds for interaction with an exercise that get people to think back and forth between the details of the data and the interaction with the interface presentation
- Introduction to data feeds and why we should care
- Where it belongs with the rest of Web 2.0 and the development of web sites
- Example from her work
- Example of feeds of data - real information from APIs and how they are presented in interfaces
- Exercise to create a feed out information that exists in an organisation; brainstorming all the different things you could do with the data; structuring the data; then combining it with another two feeds; designing the interfaces from the combination.
John Allsopp
Microformats is a project, and set of (ever growing) HTML based formats for commonly used types of information on the web. You can think of them as design patterns, in particular focussed on data. So for example, there is a microformat for contact details, hCard, which is the vCard schema, in HTML. There are microformats for events and calendaring (hCalendar) for reviews (hReview), classified listing (hListing), resumes (hResume).
This part of the workshop will:
- Discuss the benefits of using microformats
- Show how existing microformats are being used
- Explain how you can get in on the microformats game
- Give you a chance to brainstorm and invent your own microformat
Thomas Vander Wal
Thomas will wrap up the workshop, highlighting two key aspects:
- Moving beyond just the web, using microformats, APIs, scrapable pages with consistent structure – these contain pieces that can be easily moved out to other devices and applications.
- Search engine optimization has an extremely large focus on proper semantic structure. Building in the semantic structure from the beginning makes SEO much easier for others working on the site.
Thomas will highlight that getting to this point requires understanding one's own content and how people want and need to use it, bringing in the other side of IA – a deep understanding of users and their needs.
Thomas will lead a wrap-up activity to help you bring together the learnings from the workshop into a plan for your work.
Navigation Magic: Mixing Root Tasks into a Recipe for Top-Level Application Structure
23/03/2007 (Friday). Full day.
Making the leap from user research into the design process is widely regarded as the step where 'magic' comes into play. This full-day workshop presents one method to make the magic a little more systematic. A mental model of potential users’ behaviors and motivations beyond the computer screen, matched against potential tools and content for an online experience, create a startlingly clear picture of how to go forward with your design. The qualitative research process coupled with a study of product goals makes this technique especially appealing to the smart folks who run profit and non-profit organizations.
Top level navigation can be derived from the mental spaces within a model. The model gives the team a very clear picture of what the user is trying to accomplish, so the product can be structured accordingly. This structure addresses product organization and the very highest levels of content organization. This technique is not meant to replace library science, but work as the highest level. Most leaf-level content organization is derived through more traditional IA approaches. The two approaches work hand-in-hand quite smoothly.
Analysis of the gaps in the aligned diagram can lead to new perspectives on business decisions. Teams who have used this technique regularly check the diagram to validate the direction of current tool or content ideas. These diagrams have a lifespan of many years.
Putting Mental Models Into Practice
The workshop will cover:
- Audience segmentation by task rather than preference or demographic
- Non-directed interview techniques (a review)
- How to recognize tasks and implied tasks in transcripts
- How to let tasks build themselves into patterns
- How to draw a mental model diagram
- Content alignment with task groups
- Definition and prioritization of what to design
- Derivation of top-level product/site structure from the aligned diagram
The objective of this workshop is to allow attendees to return home with a set of skills they can put to use immediately on their current projects. Exercises, examples, and demonstrations are included. Audience questions about how to use the technique under special circumstances will be answered as they come up. There will be a site, hosted by the publisher of the mental model book, where attendees can ask questions, share examples, and stay up to date with improvements in the process.
Pre-Requisite Skills
Participants are most likely folks who have been asked to design an online product, corporate website, intranet, or a B-to-C or B-to-B site with extensive content. Participants will have familiarity with information architecture and product design. Participants may have problems with internal politics, power over the design, or may simply want a more robust, verifiable method to design solutions. This course is also appropriate for participants at the managerial or director level who are interested in running more reliable projects.
Designing for Accessibility: Beyond the Basics
23/03/2007 (Friday). Half day (am)
Information Architects are well-positioned to be involved in nearly every aspect of web site and application design and development. This requires knowledge in areas beyond that which might be familiar to most IAs. In this workshop we’ll look at the latest in Web Accessibility to get "beyond the basics" with which most people will be familiar.
Throughout this half-day workshop we’ll examine components from real web sites and applications to see where they’ve gone wrong, where they’ve gone right, and learn strategies for improvement that demonstrate core aspects of accessibility and usability for people with disabilities. The session includes both demonstrations of assistive technology, and highlights relevant code snippets in a simplified form. We’ll look at more accessible forms, more accessible and usable search interfaces, Ajax-enhanced interaction, and designing navigation.
IxDA presents Designing RIAs: A workshop on IxD theory and practice
23/03/2007 (Friday). Half day (am)
This year the IxD Symposium by IxDA is taking a different tact in helping people learn and engage in dialog and practice about Interaction Design (IxD). This year, we are going to take a practical approach to our coursework by offering a workshop on Interaction Design of Rich Internet Applications.
David Malouf of Motorola (VP of IxDA) will teach core principles of interaction design practice by working with participants through theory and exercises related to the designing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).
The workshop will
- The beginning part of the workshop will focus on defining what is an RIA why RIAs are useful, based on core design concepts.
- The next section will explore the concept of interaction design patterns. The patterns will be used to illustrate eight key design principles that are important when designing rich interactions on the web. While many of the examples focus on web sites and web applications, the principles are applicable across the whole of the application space.
- The 2nd half of the workshop will shift to focus on the design process: sketching, framework and language development and prototyping. There are many challenges in communicating designs as the level of interactivity increases. This portion of the workshop will survey various techniques for documenting and communicating rich web design.
- Then we bring it all together for a hands-on collaborative design workshop where participants will design an application and learn from each other and the presenters about process and solutions that use richness appropriately.
Core concepts of IxD that are explored in this workshop include:
- Design Patterns & Design Principles
- Design Processes
- Sketching
- Creating design languages
- Context-based design
Anyone interested in learning and discussing IxD or RIAs would gain value from attending this pre-conference workshop: Designers, IAs, IxDs, Managers, etc.
Introduction to IA
23/03/2007 (Friday). Half day (am)
This half-day pre-conference workshop will provide participants with an introduction to information architecture. As a stand-alone workshop it provides a high level understanding of information architecture, outlining the fundamentals and some of the current information architecture issues and challenges. As an accompanying workshop for the main conference, it will also allow participants to get more out of the conference sessions, having learned the fundamentals.
This workshop will cover:
- What is information architecture, and how does it relate to other user experience disciplines
- Core IA techniques – analysing content, conducting user research, card sorting and more
- What is metadata and how do I use it?
- IA structures – hierarchies, database structures & topic maps
- Putting it together in an IA project – designing structure and navigation
- Current issues in IA
Topics will be at the level of an ‘advanced intro’ – they will cover the basics and also explore key challenges and issues. The format will be a combination of short lectures, group discussion and hands-on activities. As there is a lot to cover in a half day, most topics will not be covered in depth, but resources will be provided for further personal exploration. At the beginning of the workshop, we will discuss which topics are of most interest to participants and will cover these in as much depth as time allows.
At the end of the workshop, we will spend some time looking through the Summit timetable. The types of sessions that participants may not have encountered (5-minute madness, IA Slam etc) will be explained and participants will be able to find out what sessions (and social events) will be of most use for their areas of interest.
This workshop has been presented at the last 2 IA Summits and is continually improved based on attendee feedback from it and other workshops.
Information Architecture 3.0
23/03/2007 (Friday). Half day (pm)
As we venture beyond Web 2.0 and the undisciplined, unbalanced quest for sexy Ajaxian interaction at the expense of usability, findability, and accessibility, how do we reconcile the timeless principles of design and organization with new transmedia models of interaction, co-creation, tagging, and user participation?
In this advanced seminar, Peter Morville draws upon stories, examples, case studies, and discussions to explore the future present of information architecture.
Topics include:
- Integrating product development, information architecture, and interaction design to create good experiences and sustainable value (real Web 2.0 case studies that take the discussion beyond de.licio.us and Flickr platitudes).
- Designing next-generation enterprise search systems that combine best practices in taxonomies and tagging with search analytics, guided navigation, thesauri, clustering algorithms, and rich result interfaces.
- Evaluating the multi-channel challenges and real-world opportunities presented by ambient findability and the emerging Internet of objects.
Participants should be familiar with basic concepts of information architecture, interaction design, and user experience.
Audience Level: Intermediate and Advanced
Prototyping RIAs In Axure (Registration closed: Workshop full)
23/03/2007 (Friday). Half day (pm)
As rich interactions become more common on the Web, it is becoming more and more important for IAs to get these interactions in front of users before development begins. Traditionally, this has been accomplished through paper prototyping. While this technique is great for simple interactions, it can’t give an accurate picture of how people interact with modern rich Web applications.
As a result, interest in creating interactive prototypes has grown in the IA community. The results of Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s recent series of surveys indicate that interest in specific tools such as Axure and iRise is very high. Both of these tools compress the wireframing and prototyping processes into one step, which makes prototyping more achievable and explains the level of interest.
I have been working with Axure for the last year and a half, and have completed six projects using this tool (and am working on a seventh). Four of those projects involved prototyping rich Web applications. In that time, I have learned how and how not to develop and document prototypes in Axure. Participants in this workshop will benefit from my experiences and will learn how to quickly and easily create highly effective prototypes in Axure.
I learned by trial and error, but participants in this workshop will get to skip the error altogether. This will be an interactive workshop in which techniques are demonstrated and participants complete mini-tasks using those techniques. Toward the end of the workshop, participants will combine all the techniques they’ve learned and create a richly interactive prototype of their own.
Participants will learn:
- The basics of working with Axure
- Details about the various dynamic widgets in Axure that allow for rich interaction
- How to combine dynamic widgets to prototype sophisticated interactions
- How to work around Axure’s limitations and idiosyncrasies
- How to structure prototypes to get the best results from user testing
- How to fake content efficiently
- Communicating the limitations of the prototype (common comments I’ve heard users make when working with Axure prototypes)
- Techniques for getting the prototype to communicate the effects of a user action when those effects cannot be prototyped (getting it to communicate its own limitations in context)
- How to make the wireframe-to-prototype process efficient (Axure offers myriad opportunities for inefficiencies)
- Putting all this together… How to prototype an RIA in Axure from start to finish
After completing this workshop, participants will be well-equipped to jump into a prototyping project of their own.
Participants will need to bring:
- A laptop with Windows XP and the free demo of Axure installed. (Intel Macs running Windows through Boot Camp or Parallels work fine. The free demo can be downloaded at http://www.axure.com )
- AC adaptor and mouse. There will be lots of dragging & dropping.
- An idea for a site you’d like to try to prototype.
I will have a limited number of CDs of the Axure demo on hand for those who are unable to pre-install the program.
Improving the design of search
23/03/2007 (Friday). Half day (pm)
Organisations are now recognising that search is a critical business tool, on their intranet as well as on their websites. More than just a way to find documents or pages, search can directly support users completing their common tasks.
Fundamentally, however, this is not a technology problem. Modern search engines have more than enough functionality to deliver a workable search solution.
In practice, there is a key piece of design that must be done to create effective user interfaces, as well as to tune the search engine behind the scenes.
This workshop will explore in-depth how to improve the design and effectiveness of search, providing best (and worst) practice examples throughout. Key information architecture principles will be explored, including how ‘information scent’ can be used to guide the design of search results pages.
Topics covered during the workshop include:
- Key principles of effective search
- Nine step methodology for improving search
- Developing search personas
- Improving the search interface for general and specialist users
- Enhancing search results
- Search usage reports
- Search engine synonyms and ‘best bets’
