IAC20 Conference Sessions

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like most large, institutional sites – they bring with them many unique challenges: Architectures driven by org-charts, out-of-date content, complicated polyhierarchies for wide-ranging services.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”…

The rise and proliferation of voice interaction capabilities like voice-based virtual assistants and smart speakers are helping users to meet their needs more effectively. Voice interactions are inherently more natural and conversational for a user with lesser learning curve. With voice, the conventional ecommerce funnel can be overturned. This opens an opportunity for e-commerce providing a channel through which the users can purchase items intuitively and efficiently. This talk will…

We use the word “conversational” to characterize virtual agent interfaces, but are we really having a conversation with the agents behind them? Not quite, but these interactions can feel enough like a conversation that our expectations are engaged in ways that they wouldn’t be if we were navigating a menu. In this talk, I’ll cover a variety of challenges to assessing the effectiveness and usability of virtual agent systems. I’ll…