IAC 2020

Content is the whole point of the digital products we create. It needs to be omni-channel, ready for AI and machine learning, and easily maintained. It needs to be connected explicitly so computers can extract meaning and deliver it in a meaningful way to the intended audience. Information architects, content strategists, and product managers are responsible for creating the foundation on which to build information spaces. Since Designing Connected Content…

In modern digital publishing projects, content modeling can feel like a high wire act, balancing an organization’s big communication dreams against the ugly realities of design, technology, and legacy content constraints. Tilt too far in either direction, and the project falls. Fortunately, there’s good news! By approaching content modeling as a communications challenge rather than One More Deliverable, it’s possible to design better, more accurate models in less time than…

Flexibility within project dynamics is a key to success – be it adapting to project dynamics, client needs, or interpersonal relationships. Improvisational theater offers many constructs to “go with the flow” and build on our teammates ideas, successes, and even where we stumble. This workshop teaches the foundations of improv and provides direct correlations to UX research, design, and collaboration. Practitioners of all skill levels are welcome, and no previous…

This immersive workshop provides practical tactics for designing, building and maintaining 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…

Like any other designed outcome, good conversational experiences don’t happen by accident. Whether you’e augmenting your skills or shifting your career toward voice apps and chatbots, you’ll need additional tools, abilities, and product methods. Come dive deep into the new world. Conversational interfaces are powered and constrained by hard- wired psychological, linguistic, and environmental boundaries that make even state-of-the-art conversational technologies a challenge to implement successfully. Mapping out and structuring…

More of our transactions and social interactions are moving online every day. People access these digital products and services using a growing variety of devices: notebook computers, mobile phones, wearables, voice-driven smart assistants, and more. Good experience requires that these systems be coherent and understandable. As a result, information architecture (IA) is more important today than ever before. This full-day workshop is an introduction to information architecture by one of…

Government websites don’t have a reputation for CX excellence. Often, that’s because – like most large, institutional sites – they bring with them many unique challenges: Architectures driven by org-charts, out-of-date content, complicated polyhierarchies for wide-ranging services. Sometimes, customers just need simple answers to simple questions, like: who do I contact to report a dead horse? We’ll take a look at the practical methods we employed in our award-winning redesign…

As information architects, we deal in categorising information and using language to give meaning to the categories we create. This shapes the world around us. The categories we create determine what is deemed possible/impossible, real/unreal, natural/unnatural. Our work is hence not only a matter of sense-making but also of meaning-making: it normalises certain ways of living while obscuring or even invalidating others. Inspired by critical discourse studies, a discipline that…

Learn about a proven framework for structuring your next IA project. This talk will discuss a framework for structuring IA projects that has been successfully used for projects ranging from small targeted interventions to site redesigns to large scale restructuring of multi-site ecosystems. The framework was developed by a team of IAs and has been refined over the course of a hundred+ projects. The whole framework will be discussed, but…

Indeed’s mission is to help people get jobs, and we constantly strive to provide the best search experience. This presentation focuses on job seekers in the healthcare industry and describes how an agile collaboration among UX, Product, and Taxonomy enabled us to make sense of our users’ feedback and incorporate their mental models into the back-end. Our journey started with the realization that, as Margaret Kelsey from InVision noted, “Design…

In 2012, President Barack Obama introduced his Digital Government Strategy (DGS) attempting to create citizen-centric Federal Government websites and requiring that they include Voice Of the Citizen/Consumer (VOC) feedback mechanisms. This gave rise to a new breed of US Government websites and helped usher in an era of digital citizen engagement, including the development of a Federal Government-centric approach to usability testing activities. This presentation provides a brief overview of…

Overwhelmed trying to uncover something meaningful from messy enterprise data? Today’s decision-makers are deluged with data, which is likely structured inconsistently and pulled from multiple functional teams or problem spaces. Questions are constantly evolving, and the boundaries between projects may be indistinct. Hone your skills as a Synthesis Savant to succeed amidst the chaos. Join us to learn effective techniques for finding insights within the complexity and creating compelling stories…

360-video storytelling has the potential to upend the audience experience from that of looking into a framed scene to free exploring an active space. This immersive experience not only expands the canvas of the creator but offers the audience free choice in navigation that offers an experience that is more akin to video-game than traditional video. Beyond the gee whiz factor of the medium, there is a key shift in…

Using the correct terminology and not offending people feels like it’s getting harder and harder, even when you have the best of intentions! You want your product or website to be inclusive, but you didn’t get the memo when LGBT became LGBTQ+ or LGBTQIA… In 7 minutes, we’ll explore reputable, up-to-date sources of inclusive language and other ways to know who to listen to when it comes to the “right”…