IAC23 Workshops

This immersive workshop provides practical tactics for designing, building, maintaining, and governing taxonomies and ontologies. Based on hard-won lessons learned from work with everything from large fortune-50 enterprises to small ecommerce sites. The workshop provides: Taxonomy/Ontology basics: a foundation to start creating a consistent vocabulary within your organization. We also call out the unique needs of building a taxonomy to serve the needs of large enterprises.A framework for shifting to…

As Information Architects, we get called into projects to structure, organize, and optimize complex information systems to meet business and user goals. All too often, however, these systems are plagued by unwritten assumptions and tacit rules. Domain Modeling is an activity designed to uncover and create a shared vision of the conceptual information space—the ""Domain”—in which an organization and its users operate. This full day, hands-on workshop will situate domain…

Are you creating products that respect the needs and autonomy of your users? Are you concerned about how GDPR, CPRA and the proposed ADPPA data privacy regulations might affect your digital product? Would you like to learn how to evaluate your digital products for safe technology behavior? It's possible to measure ethical behavior of technology, and Information Architecture heuristics provide a useful testing framework. Building on the Safe Tech Audit…

Diagrams have been helping people for thousands of years across industries, fields and cultures. It seems like diagrams are everywhere if you are paying attention. But when were we taught to diagram? And were we ever taught how to know if a diagram is any good? For too many people, the answers are never and no. In this half-day workshop you will learn the purpose, process and craft of diagramming…

Join Dan Klyn for one or both of these half-day workshops, which are designed to equip participants with the BASIC framework for looking at the architectures of complex systems.   Attendees will get out of the conference hotel and into the streets of downtown New Orleans in a facilitated exploration of the myriad ways that features in the built environment are configured by people to store, distribute, and reify different kinds…

Information architecture and UX are practiced as forms of design—the design of products, systems, and desired futures to satisfy human needs and values. In practice, we use models of ""the design process” that are over 20 years old, if not a half century old. Our field is rapidly changing, and we know that the Double Diamond doesn't tell the full story of how we work. Are existing models of the…

Extended Reality (VR, AR, MR, collectively XR) promises to change, or possibly replace, the world around us, immersing us in a different ""here and now”, be it a company-controlled Metaverse, a remote location on Earth, a fictional world, or a different, augmented version of our home or of familiar places such as our workplace or our favorite supermarket. But XR "elsewheres” are unique blends of digital and physical that introduce…

So you work with information, but do you know what it is?Is this sentence information? What about the letter S? Is a tooth information?A chair? Are the responses to your survey information? Is the data in your spreadsheet? That email you sent? Is your website information? All of it? Are you sure? In this workshop we will do a series of activities and exercises designed to teach information theory in…

Are you new to information architecture? This workshop teaches you the basic things you need to design digital places where information is easier to find and understand.

During times of significant change, organizational challenges abound — from employee resistance, to lack of investment in training and coaching, from awkward ‘new ways of working' implementations to lack of organization, the risk to further unsettle an already fragile environment is high. However, a thoughtful and considered approach, that includes letting go of control, opening up and creating transparency, can help us overcome challenges and embrace the opportunities inherent in…

Navigating your everyday work-life where the only constant is change feels stressful and you haven't really found the magical recipe to deal with it? Do you feel you can benefit from: A safe space to express your frustration about organizational change?A way to get this frustration out while positive & constructive?New, practical strategies in order to tackle change efficiently in real life? By tweaking a card game you will understand…

Use design for good—create consentful tech for people, mitigate hate & bring ethics to the forefront. This workshop will give you the questions to ask & the tactics for creating new ways to engage with your users/customers without creating harm.

Ever wondered how the information presented in strategic service or system-level discovery research is different than product or feature level research? In this workshop, you'll learn about the taxonomy of a strategic discovery research report including the structure of pre-study parameters (research objectives, research topics, perceived gaps and assumptions) and post-study reporting and classification dimensions (findings vs insights, importance, confidence level, estimated resolution timeline, supportive data descriptors, etc), and how…

A well-designed workshop is an excellent way to get things done. And as UXers, our skills uniquely position us to help clients and teams explore options and come to consensus, both in person and online. But successful workshops don't happen by accident. And workshop design and facilitation aren't really taught in school or on the job. Workshop 101 gives participants a flexible workshop-building framework. Participants will explore workshop activities, tools,…

This workshop provides a framework to address scale in enterprise information environments, so you can create information architectures that are more coherent across systems and platforms, more resilient to organizational evolution, and more sustainable and useful over time as the organization changes. Workshop activities focus on practical, real-world examples with common enterprise systems like SharePoint, ServiceNow, Workday, SAP, OneDrive, Box, Slack, Teams, and low-code application environments like Appian and Power…

Come learn how to define and apply Archetypes, a new method for modeling users that supports the design of resilient information structures by focusing people’s intent and the jobs they want to do. A resilient structure is one that understands and accommodates the forces present in its environment. In the digital environment there are many forces at play–business needs, market trends, implementation technology, and the nature of the information–and the…

We all face difficult conversations at work - with our bosses, with clients, with stakeholders, and with colleagues. Often these can feel frustrating or deflating. ‘We don’t think your team has a strategic role.’‘I don’t want to work with your team.’‘Thanks but I’m going to do it my own way.’‘We don’t have time to try something new.’‘We’ve got more important priorities than that.’ This workshop will give you practical tools…

Join Dan Klyn for one or both of these half-day workshops, which are designed to equip participants with the BASIC framework for looking at the architectures of complex systems.   Attendees will get out of the conference hotel and into the streets of downtown New Orleans in a facilitated exploration of the myriad ways that features in the built environment are configured by people to store, distribute, and reify different kinds…

Heard about Card Sorting and Tree Testing but not sure where to start? Ready for some hands-on fun with these techniques? This workshop explores the who, what, when, where, why, and how of Card Sorting and Tree Testing. Great for novices and for intermediate practitioners looking to refine this skillset.