Online
Sense and Sensemaking
This year we want to celebrate the science of making sense and and the art of making mischief. We want to talk about how, when and why we encode, transmit, receive and interpret information. We’ll discuss what we can perceive and make available to the senses, the intelligence we use to interpret and understand things and the intentional actions that result when things make sense. In New Orleans we’ll explore sense-making (with a dose of serendipity) to see how we make sense of the world and the futures we face.
Co-Chairs
Keynote Speakers
Preconference Workshops
May 13, 2020
4:00 PM to 8:00 PM CT
$149
Applied Designing Connected Content
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…
April 10, 2020
CT
$149
Building Up, Building Down: Content Modeling For Projects That Have To Ship
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…
May 14, 2020
4:00 PM to 8:00 PM CT
$149
Collaborative Improv: Building Better Products Through Improvisation
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…
May 12, 2020
4:00 PM to 8:00 PM CT
$149
Designing and Building Taxonomies for the Enterprise
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…
May 14, 2020
4:00 PM to 8:00 PM CT
$149
Effective Human-Machine Conversation
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…
April 10, 2020
CT
$149
Information Architecture Essentials
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…
Main Sessions
April 10, 2020
CT
A Different Animal: .govs and Designing for a Dead Horse
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…
April 10, 2020
CT
A hard look in the mirror: language, structure, and privilege in IA
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…
April 10, 2020
CT
A Sensible Framework for Information Architecture Projects
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…
April 10, 2020
CT
Adventures in User-centric Taxonomy: Getting Job Seeker Feedback into the Back-end
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…
April 10, 2020
CT
All Sorts Great and Small: Reflections on Card Sorts, Citizen Engagement, and Creating Better Federal Government Website IAs
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…
April 10, 2020
CT
Become a Synthesis Savant – From Messy Data to Meaningful Insights
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…
May 7, 2020
CT
Being is Believing: Engaging a sense of space with 360-video storytelling
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…
April 10, 2020
CT
Beyond “Politically Correct”: How to stay up-to-date on correct inclusive terminology
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”…
Posters
7th Academics and Practitioners IA Roundtable and Make-a-Thon
Presenter(s): Dan Zollman, Sarah Rice, and Andrea Resmini
CO-oPS: Community Oversight for Privacy and Security
Presenter(s): Christy LaPerriere and Zaina Aljallad