Session type: Main Conference Talk

When you structure your content well, legacy content becomes a strength rather than a challenge. Once upon a time, our team built content for social media using beautiful imagery and engaging messaging, but even the best content was forgotten once it fell off people’s timelines. After more than five years on Facebook, we restructured our website to bring in this high-performing content. Two years after that, that structure was able to drive an API to use that content in a chatbot. This is the story of the National Cancer Institute’s Smokefree Chatbot, and how one team used structured content across the years. Learn how planning ahead by structuring your content is one of the best gifts you can give your future self.

“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” --Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO As information architects and designers, privacy is part of the legacy we will pass down to future generations through the systems we build today. We influence social norms on what personal information can be (or should be) shared by whom, when, how, and for what purpose. Therefore, we have an ethical responsibility to make these privacy design decisions purposefully and based on evidence. In our talk, we will build the case for why we need a gateway that deliberately bridges the gap between academic research and design practice as it relates to end user privacy in social technologies. Dr. Jen Romano Bergstrom, President of UXPA and Director of User Experience at Bridgewater Associates, will give an industry-based perspective of the importance of privacy to the fields of information architecture and design based on her own experience and on recent news media events (e.g., Cambridge Analytica, 23andMe, GDPR). Drs. Xinru Page and Pamela Wisniewski, two privacy researchers from the Human-Computer Interaction academic community, will present an overview of relevant research from their field that connect to these recent events. They will engage with the audience on how we might work together to create this gateway in a collective effort to respect end users’ privacy and promote a sense of joint social responsibility across industry and academia.

As waves of new technology continue to roll in, it’s critical now more than ever that we spend time and resources to understand the humans involved and their unique paths in life. However, the process of performing qualitative research to understand the essential “why,” is incredibly challenging. Successfully moving from research insights to action within the organization is even more difficult, but is the key to helping build a more human-centered world. In this session, you will learn:

• The causes of vapor research and how to avoid it
• The keys to a successful user research process and effective deliverables
• A framework for building an effective user research practice in your organization

Who should attend? Managers, researchers, designers, product owners, and other IA practitioners looking to understand or improve their qualitative research process and practice.

“Diversity is going to the party. Inclusion is being on the party-planning committee.” [Verna Meyers] Diversity and inclusion are imperative for anyone practicing information architecture. Categories, labels, and complex information spaces being built today will inherit value judgments by those who create them, impacting anyone else coming into contact with the frameworks that are built. On top of that, our society is changing as digital natives approach classification and naming differently from those who came before them. Join in learning what was discovered and built by a dynamic collection of adventurers, thought leaders, teachers, researchers, and other curious folks who explored how Information Architecture should foster diversity and inclusion in complex information spaces. This session is sponsored by the 7th annual Academics and Practitioners Roundtable.