Session type: 20 minute talk

User experience professionals want to be part of the product, business and experience conversation early and often. How can we truly collaborate to solve more than just design problems and make an impact? Stop being Designers and start collaborating like comic book creators. We need to connect with our partners as co-creators and treating collaborators like users. In this session, we will apply the lessons of comic book creation to the practice of user experience, information architecture and product design, including:

• Inspiring your fellow collaborators before ever reaching an end user
• Improving collaboration with techniques like the Marvel Method
• Using story to put our collaborators principles in the center of the experience
• Creating a shared language that our collaborators understand

Your host is a Sr Manager of Product Design at Disney with over 20 years experience in design and a life long comics fan.

Single-source content — write once, publish anywhere! — is the dream of many digital publishing teams. It's particularly challenging on ""archipelago"" projects where different departments, business units, agencies, or teams each own intertwingled portions of an organization's content. As part a the replatforming project for the State of Georgia's 85 agencies, we had to tackle the problem head on and developed several novel approaches for shared and interdependent content that's owned by one team but needed by others. In this talk, we'll cover the unique needs that made shared content challenging for Georgia's state agencies, the approaches we considered, the one we finally selected, and how we'll take what we learned to future projects.

Much of what information architecture practice is expected to figure out is “the navigation.” But what if we’ve been oversimplifying the way we discuss, design, and deliver navigation — and what if that’s been the source of later pain for users and organizations for a really long time? This short talk makes the case that we’ve been conflating too many things into the rubric of “navigation”, explains how this bad habit has come to pass, and the challenges that have resulted. But fear not! We’ll also look at practical ways to overcome the problem in our own day to day work, as well as with stakeholders and team members.

Taxonomies are almost always built for specific domains. Can a taxonomy built for a particular market in one language be transposed onto another and retain its value? This presentation will consider the intricacies of translating an occupational taxonomy into different markets and different languages. Is the Spanish job title chofer the same thing as the English driver? How do we handle the fact that an American registrar is an administrative role while an Australian registrar is a trainee doctor? In this presentation we will give insights into how to deal with intercultural connotations and the cultural differences among and between languages. How do you create gateways in a global taxonomy that are useful for numerous markets and languages, while keeping it sustainable in the future? What about "global" concepts such as marketing or information architecture? What does the use of these English terms in non-English markets tell us? Attendees will receive an overview of how to take the abstract concept of translation and meaning-making and apply it to specific use cases, in this case occupations at Indeed. More specifically, this presentation will discuss the nuances of cultural underpinnings for taxonomy creation and explore the tensions between global strategy and local implementations.

There is a lot to think about when redesigning any application, but what if your application was a 30-year-old project to transcribe over a hundred years worth of art sales receipts? What if you want to connect these receipts to the people, places, and objects they describe? How do you present this messy event-based data that has gaps and overlaps in time? What if your users have been using this application for decades? Won’t someone think of the users?! This is the task the Getty is currently undertaking with their remodel of the Getty Provenance Index, bringing together 6 databases and 1.7 million records from auction catalogs and art dealer inventories into a single, modern interface using linked data. UX designer Kristen Carter is going boldly forward where not many have gone before: designing a usable interface for a network of information about art, people, documents, and events. Turning a massive, tangled, network graph into a familiar and friendly UI was no easy task. But over the course of 3 years of sifting through user research, trial and error, and a gross amount of coffee, the answer slowly presented itself: the compromise between data that wants to be Facebook and users who want a card catalog. In this session you will learn:

• How to design a UI for event-based data when everything is an event
• What works and what doesn’t when displaying user-friendly Linked Open Data
• Tools and methodologies for designing a UI when you can’t crib off other people