Main Conference Talk

Topic-Oriented IA for the Enterprise

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.

Disinformation: How Wikipedia is contributing to historical revisionism in Japan

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 “History of Japan,” a best selling book by Naoki Hyakuta, a nationalist writer known for denying Japanese war crimes during WWII.

A similar trend exists in other languages, such as Croatian Wikipedia. It has received attention from international media for promoting a fascist worldview and historical revisionism.

Studying the accuracy of Wikipedia is difficult, and the findings are mixed. And what’s often missed is the fact that the level of reliability may be different depending on the language. Non-English Wikipedia communities such as a Japanese and Croatian tend to be much more isolated and likely have inherent bias on certain topics.

Users visit Wikipedia pages to be informed about certain topics. When they see so much biased content without knowing it, it’s not meeting the needs of the users. I’ve tried to inform Wikipedia about this problem and suggested a design change, but after a month of trying I couldn’t even talk to the right person.

The focus of this talk is the process of creating a global website such as Wikipedia in the first place. English speaking designers and developers may not realize the implications of how their product gets used in other countries with different languages and cultural backgrounds. When creating a product, we must be aware of cultural bias that exists in the nations and communities where the product is used.

Sight & Foresight: Organizing Spatial Information for Predictive Visualization in Augmented Reality

The era of spatial computing is here. Augmented and virtual reality is more accessible to creators, designers, and end users than ever before bringing new opportunities for applications and digital experiences that enhance the world as we know it. This is especially true of mobile computing with over 75% of Android users and 94% of iOS users having a device capable of accessing augmented reality easily over the web without the need to download an app. With advanced spatial awareness capabilities like LIDAR on the most recent smartphone models, spatial computing represents a paradigm shift similar to what we saw when the original iPhone changed the way we think of mobile design and development. In this talk we’ll explore how IA and UX practitioners can get started in spatial computing through the lens of a real-world augmented reality case study.

Recently our team of designers and data engineers worked on a challenge to create an augmented reality interface for first responders, leveraging IoT sensor data to improve communications and make critical decisions faster in a disaster response. Our first step was to identify and organize the universe of data relevant to the disaster scenario, a flood emergency. Through early collaboration with our data team to organize and map the information to real world use cases, we identified an opportunity to develop a predictive model that could help first responders in the field visualize critical data in the context of the physical world and the areas of most critical risk and need.

Addressing the need to quickly make decisions and take action, we were further able to leverage augmented reality to visualize predictive models created by our data team, enabling the ability to visualize not only conditions in the present but also where the most likely areas of critical need would be in the future. This presented the opportunity to accelerate the time to proactively make critical decisions about things like road closures, business & residential notification, and deployment of personnel with the potential to operate more efficiently and most importantly safe lives.

While the project represents an early proof of concept, the importance of information architecture and collaboration early in the design process had strong benefits for helping those new to working with new technology become familiar with the opportunity for and challenges of spatial computing and immersive experiences.

To conclude, we’ll review and discuss how to apply these familiar IA and UX practices and techniques and combine them with new ones for working in 3D to a broad range of applications for augmented and virtual reality applications like education, training, immersive storytelling, and more.

The Remote Leader – Distant but Not Removed

If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that the way we think about, well… everything has to change, including the way we think about work and leadership.

In this session, we will explore the differences between remote and in-person leadership, challenges and opportunities created by physical distance, and how to prevent it from also becoming emotional and intellectual distance.

We start from a set of questions we’ve asked ourselves both in the past and more recently:

How do you create and maintain connection and trust when you cannot look someone in the eye or walk by their desk?
How do you oversee work, advice, mentor and help people grow at a distance?
How does a team that can’t get together, stay together?
What kind of additional or different support does your team (and you) need?
And more…

The Art and Science of Asking Questions

Everybody does it. Information architects do it. UX designers do it. Product managers do it. Even content strategists do it. They all ask questions. It’s part of the work. You’re asking users about how they accomplish tasks. You’re asking clients about business needs. You’re asking developers about technical constraints. Not a day – or hour! – goes by without you asking someone a question. I believe, to paraphrase Erika Hall, the question is the most important tool in our toolbox.

Have you ever thought about how you ask question? I mean, really thought about it? We use them all the time, and yet we don’t have much guidance on how to form them, how to tinker with them, or even how to critique them. In this talk, Dan will draw on decades of experience to reflect on the questions we use day-in and day-out to get input from users, gather domain knowledge, solicit feedback from colleagues, and run brainstorming sessions. Our questions have a purpose — the type of information they will bring into focus. They have an intent — a desired effect on the relationship between asker and answerer. And they may be tweaked and adjusted — the framing of the question itself to meet both purpose and intent. By the end, you’ll have a greater appreciation for the question, the most important tool in our toolbox.