Friday, March 31, 2023

Connecting the Past to our Future: The Call for Resilience and Inclusivity in our Information Structures As the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States, which catalogs and manages over 179 petabytes of our cultural data, it is essential that the Library of Congress adapt, innovate, and continuously improve. Much resilience is needed to preserve the past and meet the needs of the present, let alone plan for the…

Non-information. Dark UI patterns. Misinformation. Unclear terms of use. Misuse of personal data. Our sources of information have shifted from editor-supervised to algorithm-derived, and expanded. Published in 1989 and 2001, Information Anxiety and Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Saul Wurman spoke of the deluge of "bits” and proposed solutions including the importance of a questioning and curious human perspective and the need for human control of the bits. Controlling the…

We've all seen the cute dog with the fire raging all around, proclaiming "this is fine" when things are anything but. We've often *been* that cute dog: stuck in situations that are a bit out of hand but that we have no choice but to get through. When things feel like they're being enveloped in flames, people have the tendency to look to their leaders — not just for answers, but…

Expanding Information Access: Conceptualizing Conversational Dialogues with Black Older Adults

Complex applications that support experts' specialized work with large amounts of content and data like cloud computing, user analytics, or catalogs depend on good information architecture to make them usable. Come hear an overview of the best UI patterns for handling complexity and density and how to grow them over time because, yes, that complicated thing you're managing is only going to become more so.

How do we stay resilient in a fast changing, media and tech infused world? It’s easy to get overwhelmed juggling our many responsibilities, info sources & notifications, or the many ways we might pivot our company’s strategy. We’ll talk a bit about brain chemistry & structure, this fast changing world, and then a few tools to stay resilient. With mental fitness, we know we can’t avoid the surprises, but we…

I'm living in this liminal space. I'm in a transition, but to what, I don't know. For 10 years, I saw working in our field not only as my career, but as my home. And then, at the beginning of 2021, I left. At first, I believed what I told others. I had left in order to become a writer. I set up a Substack, and I sent 500-1000 word…

"Headless” CMS tools, in which the structure of content is decoupled from its presentation as "pages” on the front end, have seen rapid and growing adoption over the last several years. This is with good reason: decoupled approaches to content are unrivaled in their support for creating flexible, reusable omnichannel and personalization-ready content. In practice, however, many organizations struggle with adopting a "decoupled” mindset: when our familiar "page-focused” shortcuts for…

This case study reviews the successes from a recent knowledge management implementation that used new ways to harvest knowledge from the minds of scientists and engineers at a small tech company near Seattle, while providing a systematic way to enhance internal search and content management systems. Implementing a knowledge management framework has been (and still is) a mystery to many knowledge workers. These examples will help you understand more about…

Spaghetti Diagrams, Lasagna Models. As IAs we look at our projects and at the world through different levels of abstraction. When faced with complicated systems we can make sense of them by documenting the minutiae, or sometimes by simplifying things into tidy relationships. Join Mike for a fresh roll through the messy and organized ways we visualize things. Spoiler warning: it's okay to order spaghetti and lasagna.

For Information Architecture to become embedded in the product development process, we must use the language of product: What user problems does IA solve and what are the commercial/organizational benefits of IA? The methods of IA can be explained later once you have buy-in. In this talk I will share ideas and approaches: A better way to explain IA to product people/stakeholdersShow the impact of IA through identifying the targeted…

IA, as "design for understanding," is needed in many places in our digitalized society. However, IA is recognized as required as a specification of a created artifact. However, when IA is viewed not only as a deliverable but also as a process to be considered, the process in which teams collaborate toward the deliverable to be created can find its value. In this session, using the concept of boundary objects…

Are accessibility and inclusion part of an information architect's responsibilities? We maintain that they are not just a part but an important part of doing great IA work. In this fast-paced session, we will discuss the reasons why and share several examples of inclusive and exclusive IA. Attendees will leave with a renewed sense of purpose and a job aid to keep and share with their teams to help keep…

Information architecture is broken or missing in too many UX settings. Let's talk about fixing that, especially in the enterprise world. Let's dismantle the Dribbleization of design and focus on intentional architecture.

As an information architect or UX content strategist working on enterprise systems, large, significant changes are often the outcome of the work. We are change management professionals in disguise, and this presentation will detail the skills the presenter learned while failing as a young Peace Corps volunteer, and how she applies them to a holistic information architecture practice.

In this talk I would like to share with you a successful story about a project that made a difference in my career and made me a UX advocate. This project showed the value of UX and how using the right methods at the right time can bring a project to a higher level. One day, I overheard my manager talking about a tool called bridal configurator. By conducting a…

Join Noreen as she shares how being curious and exploring the edges of our discipline can help us stay resilient in times of uncertainty. As the job market shifts, it's natural to feel apprehensive, but by feeling our way to the places where IA connects with other disciplines, we can discover fresh ideas, emerging trends, and untapped opportunities. Noreen will map out a path to help you focus your curiosity…

Driving human-centered change requires resilience, efficiency, energy. In this talk, senior UX research leader, Alesha Arp, will share how to maintain resilience, employ effective collaboration techniques, and recharge your energy to catalyze change.

This talk explores the power of long-form narratives as a way to improve organizational velocity and avoid the trap of business-as-usual. As companies struggle to effectively address their future, narratives serve as a way to explore change and support resilience. While a chaotic present can rob us of clear vision, long-form narratives can help increase organizational velocity while avoiding the traps of business-as-usual. Amazon had famously banned PowerPoint presentations in…

When the pandemic caused the Washington Metro to make an abrupt shift to remote work, the focus of a project to eliminate legacy paper records and relocate to much smaller office buildings shifted to helping a bureaucracy which had no culture of remote work be able to work remotely, literally overnight. This presentation discusses what we learned about taxonomy while working on the railroad, and how we helped Metro begin…

Enlightenment means many things. A state of wisdom, a well informed understanding, an elevation of knowledge. Enlightenment often includes mindfulness, the practice of being present and focused in the moment. Design can sometimes feel nearly opposite, out of the box, haphazard, abstract, and creative, pulling inspiration from a variety of sources and situations and thrown on the wall like spaghetti to see if it sticks. How can we enlighten our…

Whether we're talking about design, content, search, or engineering, we all need an information model that captures what the user needs and cares about. But we don't all need the same parts, or even start in the same place. I'll look at information modeling approaches I've encountered across programming, design, content architecture, and SEO teams, and the priorities they serve. Then I'll share how we can integrate these approaches to…

The first generation of IAs are still out there, many of us now in leadership roles, often on product teams, or coaching up-and-coming professionals. In this panel, three veterans will reflect on what happens once you've "made it" and whether it's possible to find purposeful satisfying stable work without an overhanging sense that just one more raise, promotion, or opportunity will finally get us "there."