Session type: 45 minute talk

How do we design an Augmented Reality experience when we’ve never designed for AR before? Worse yet, when most people have never designed for AR before. (Cue the scary music!) The simple answer is to overcome the fear and just start learning as much and as fast as we can, but that’s easier said than done. It would be nice if we had an example or two… a “How to Design for AR” handbook, or maybe some tactical steps to utilize when the paralyzing moment arrives? This presentation will deep dive into the journey of a Senior Product Designer at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Digital who faced the challenge of designing an AR experience for Disney Cruise Line with no prior knowledge of how to do it. (No, not scary at all!) Formatted as a comprehensive AR design case study and wrapped in a relatable personal story, this talk covers:

• AR design process along with discussion of practical considerations, such as the importance of being present in or simulating the physical environment where your AR experience takes place.
• Practical explanations of how AR technology works, it's inherent challenges and tips for making intelligent design and storytelling choices.
• How Disney Parks and Resorts Digital utilized AR to enhance the storytelling and magic of an existing physical space, improve guest satisfaction, and increase the impact of previously non-digital experiences.

Additionally, Whitney will share a list of resources from her own research on AR (a la “How to Design for AR” handbook) as well as a set of simple steps for coping with your own scary, something-you’ve-never-done-before moments.

We know that user research is important, but many of us work in organizations that don’t. Personas can be really great tools, but they don’t always fit our needs and often seem to be tools just for us (UXers). We (two speakers) work in different organizations within the same large research university. While working on separate projects to help others in our organization start to think about our users in more user centered way, we found that standard personas just couldn’t do what we needed in terms of sharing our research with our organizations. This session will feature two parallel case studies and a discussion of how we tailored our methods to match our goals and contexts. We’ll share our processes, our challenges, our successes, and how we ultimately achieved our goals by creating very different artifacts, that met our colleagues where they were, and were tailored to our individual organizational cultures.

Whether you are building a team, managing experience practitioners or navigating career changers, managing a team of creative and analytical IA practitioners can be challenging. The welcome change towards diverse and inclusive hiring practices can add even more challenges. Learn how an experienced manager navigated through painful challenges and wonderful successes while managing large and small design departments in organizations with employees around the world.

We often think of navigation as a list of what users can find on a website or app. But what navigation really is, is a map of what’s possible. By only using navigation as a categorized list of screens, we information architects are limiting our own potential, as well as the potential of our users. When the product in question is a government website, these constraints can be to the detriment of society itself. In this session, I propose thinking outside the box when coming up with your navigation. By imagining the futures of our users and their world, and what our ideal relationship with them would look like, we can craft a navigation that can take us all further than what we all believe is possible.

“The Spatial Turn” is a term used to describe an intellectual movement that emphasises place and space in social science and the humanities. It is closely linked with quantitative and geo-spatial analyses of history, literature, cartography, and the communication arts. In this talk, the presenters take turns mapping the evolution of thinking in the community of IA practice along the lines of this Spatial Turn in adjacent fields, and advocate for a substantive revision to the standard Ontology / Taxonomy / Choreography model for explaining information architecture in light of what our colleagues already know and benefit from knowing.