IAC 2021

If you’re reading this, you’re likely part of the estimated 70% of people who’ve dealt with imposter syndrome at some point in their professional careers. Imposter syndrome is the psychological pattern where one doubts their skills and persistently fears being exposed as a “fraud”. It knows no limits to who it affects, and designers Madeline Packard and Shara Rosenbalm are no exception. These designers explore design methods and offer a…

This workshop is sold out. Taxonomies have evolved from classification systems to adaptable interactive tools to link users to desired content on websites, intranets, and web applications. Taxonomies are not the same as a website’s navigation and can do a lot more. Taxonomies can provide guiding categories of topics, suggested search terms, aspects for faceted search, or topics for sorting and filtering results. To be truly helpful, however, taxonomies need…

This workshop is sold out 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…

Now more than ever, we are seeing how the systems underlying society affect the people living within them. As designers, we have an opportunity to impact positive change. Learn to see the big picture and tackle big, messy problems by cultivating a systems thinking lens into your UX and IA practices. What is systems thinking? Why is it important? Engage in practical hands-on activities that you can bring back to…

When we design our IA and other key design elements guided by a Usage Maturity Matrix we ease users into, and draw users deeper into, our design ecosystem. We intentionally emerge richer information, features and functions as our users are ready to experience them. In this workshop, participants will learn what a Usage Maturity Matrix is, will then breakout into an exploratory exercise using a UMM on their own digital…

No one’s story will begin, or end, with your product. In order to create useful, impactful and delightful designs, we need to consider the entire end to end user journey, from recognizing a need to meeting a goal, and determine how (or if) your product fits into the customer’s experience. Join Associate UX Director Chelsea Watson to explore how the established design thinking processes of creating user journeys, story maps…

It is ultimately the time to talk about and bring home the truths about the tech industry. We venerate the new and young all the time – not the lessons learnt, the wisdom, methods and the approaches that have worked previously. So what happens if you are in the industry over 20 years and the focus on developing tactical solutions to digital problems isn’t what you want to do, and…

This year has accelerated the pace at which critical infrastructure has had to move to digital primary. Where these platforms had often been designed and tested for the primary user groups, they must now consider the needs of a much more representative set of audiences. Some of these audiences have mitigating issues that the IA needs to consider: a reluctance to use the platform; misinformation; or are facing a range…

This session will share a project done in collaboration with the Anti Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society to visualize this ecosystem in a series of models and to discuss the questions we looked at, the questions we still have, the continued investigation and how we are using these models to stimulate conversations about policy, product design and moderation with industry, academia, law enforcement and civil society organizations. DQoJCQkJPGgzPkFkZGl0aW9uYWwgc2Vzc2lvbnM8L2gzPg0KCQkJCXtAYWRkaXRpb25hbF90aW1lc30NCgkJCSAg[/pod_if_field]

Cynicism is easy. Hope takes work. Trust bridges the distance between them, and it’s under attack. Our users suffer from a crisis of confidence in services, brands, interfaces—and in themselves, when they need to assess information or make decisions. Years of gaslighting cause sales cycles to slow and people to question the goods, services, and science that could benefit them. But through choices of design and content, we can empower…

The Japanese Wikipedia is the most visited language in Wikipedia after the English Wikipedia. Increasingly, it’s contributing to the rise of historical revisionism in the country. On the pages of particularly sensitive historical topics, Japanese Wikipedia tends to exclude important information inconvenient to the Japanese public and/or include inaccurate and biased information. In recent years content from Wikipedia has been used as a source in historical revisionist books, such as…

Curious about emerging IA and higher education together? Come and listen to the journey at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Get playful with our IA approaches, and hear our story to turn a learning management system into a virtual collaborative workspace.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging in every industry and as it does, members of our practice may respond with mixtures of awe, confusion, concern and inspiration. In our work, we seek to expand collaboration between the human and machine, placing the machine in a role of enabling human outcomes and understanding. While sometimes we hear people describe AI as an “emerging intelligence” it is, in truth, the emergent collaboration with…

When cities locked down as COVID-19 gripped the world, instructions about what to do were locked down themselves. Trapped in pages and pages of dense legalese public health guidance. In PDFs. Having Google trawl through it was not enough to provide understanding. As businesses began to reopen, confusion became a matter of life and death. But in public health, clarity and trust are the levers we have to wield. In…