IAC21 Sessions

The use of complex words can make your users feel confused, frustrated, or offended – potentially so much so that they give up on a page or process. When we use words that are familiar and make people feel welcome, we are making that content usable by anyone!

So, let’s spend more time thinking about how others will be affected by the words we use! We’ll examine several examples of complicated or complex words and share how to develop the best solutions, breaking down examples of difficult phrases and how they can be simplified to feel more welcoming and accessible.

One of the most common ways to solve a design problem is to create personas based on ‘average’ users, and use a human-centred process targeted to these groups of similar users. Designers often learn to ignore anything outside of these personas, avoiding the “edge cases” that are seen as too much work to deliver business value.

In effect, intersectionality negates the average myth. Behaviour, belief, and a confluence of difference means the average is, in fact, a series of unique individuals. Therefore, designing for the average can be unintentionally alienating.

When we design for the “average,” we are designing for a blend of average characteristics that are rarely in one individual. This means that a design we intended “for everyone,” meets the needs of no one.

Making strategy, design, and information architecture decisions with intersectionality at the forefront will guide your team in identifying genuinely user-centric design requirements. Once you establish these requirements, your product or service will be able to meet the goals and expectations of your users across different circumstances, contexts, and environments, and to embrace their unique identity.

This talk will explore the challenges, opportunities, and methods of bringing intersectional thinking to your work, including reaching a broader market, reducing costs and effort by considering other interaction models by default, and reducing risk that comes from alienating parts of your market.

This session will be in the Lounge

When you've got tens of millions of pages, stored in dozens of CMSs, managed by hundreds of organizations with no single oversight board, and you know the experience is broken...

How do you fix it? Where do you even begin? How do you reconcile the conflicting goals of multiple business units, of multiple kinds, with multiple disciplines and departments supporting different stages of the customer journey? How can they all act as a single company in service to the customer's needs, instead of a patchwork of competing org charts?

I'm happy to share my ludicrously ambitious work in progress - a topic-oriented information architecture based on data, managed with metadata, and scaled with AI to reorganize ibm.com around customer interests.

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When you've got tens of millions of pages, stored in dozens of CMSs, managed by hundreds of organizations with no single oversight board, and you know the experience is broken...

How do you fix it? Where do you even begin? How do you reconcile the conflicting goals of multiple business units, of multiple kinds, with multiple disciplines and departments supporting different stages of the customer journey? How can they all act as a single company in service to the customer's needs, instead of a patchwork of competing org charts?

I'm happy to share my ludicrously ambitious work in progress - a topic-oriented information architecture based on data, managed with metadata, and scaled with AI to reorganize ibm.com around customer interests.

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You’ve protested. You’ve made public statements to do better. After nearly a year, are you still asking, “What now?” Learn how companies can start to fulfill their promises today to create social changes and a more diverse UX design workforce.

As UX practitioners we pride ourselves on human-centered design, but do we really practice what we preach when statistics continually reflect a staggering lack of diversity? And, does our work reflect biases that exist in ourselves and our companies? If so, how to we move toward positive changes?

The information presented here will be a conversation starter to help you start, if conversations and actions have stalled. It will also provide observations and checklists to help you iterate toward making a difference.