Sessions

2023 IA Conference

March 29, 2023

Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced

Use design for good—create consentful tech for people, mitigate hate & bring ethics to the forefront. This workshop will give you the questions to ask & the tactics for creating new ways to engage with your users/customers without creating harm.

Sessions

2021 IA Conference

April 19, 2021

Beginner

This workshop is sold out.

More of our lives are happening online every day. We interact and transact through digital systems on a growing variety of devices. More understandable and coherent systems = better experiences. As a result, information architecture (IA) is more important than ever.

In this fast-paced workshop, you will:

  • Understand the primary goals of information architecture
  • Learn how people find and understand information
  • Learn to define conceptual models
  • Master necessary IA components
  • Identify essential IA collaboration skills
  • Learn how to communicate IA concepts
  • Discover how architectures evolve over time

Structure

This workshop has been a staple of the IA Conference for the past three years. Now, it's been wholly restructured for effective remote instruction.

The online workshop consists of three components:

  • Pre-recorded video lectures, which you can view on your own before real-time group activities
  • Real-time hands-on group exercises via Zoom
  • Asynchronous Q&A sessions via Discord

Lectures consist of our parts:

  1. Introduction to information architecture
  2. Conceptual modeling
  3. Basic IA components
  4. Basic IA skills

This new structure maximizes learning by making the most of our time together and makes it easier for distributed teams with busy schedules to participate.


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Sessions

2021 IA Conference

April 22, 2021

Intermediate

As a digital designer, you must think beyond the user interface to the underlying structures that give your systems coherence. These structures should serve the needs of your users, your organization, and society. To do so, you must understand your organization's strategic directions. This fast-paced workshop introduces strategic thinking for designers.


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Sessions

2021 IA Conference

April 19, 2021

Intermediate, Advanced

How do we design for divergence when our tools value convergence? How can we design for complexity and emergence when our workshops simplify and normalise? Unlearning Design Thinking is a workshop to identify what is wrong and to experiment with new ways of working together. With three themes, Direction, Divergence and Dissent, spend time with other people understanding how many alternative methods exist and learning which ones are relevant to your contexts and your personal skill set. With two workshops and three encounters, plus podcast-style learning packages, you will discover how to work with tools that invert established design thinking ideals to help you and your colleagues work creatively with emergent design.

Come along and unlearn some ideas to enable new ideas of supporting creative thinking, divergence and dissent.

Sessions will be recorded and made available to registered attendees.



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Day 1

https://vimeo.com/539142903
Day 1 Workshop recording

Day 2

https://vimeo.com/539499324
Day 2 Workshop Recording

Day 3

https://vimeo.com/539974580
Day 3 Workshop Recording

Day 4

https://vimeo.com/540227193
Day 4 Workshop Recording

Day 5

https://vimeo.com/541050764
Day 5 Workshop Recording

Sessions

2021 IA Conference

April 21, 2021

Beginner

This workshop is sold out.

Taxonomies have evolved from classification systems to adaptable interactive tools to link users to desired content on websites, intranets, and web applications. Taxonomies are not the same as a website’s navigation and can do a lot more. Taxonomies can provide guiding categories of topics, suggested search terms, aspects for faceted search, or topics for sorting and filtering results. To be truly helpful, however, taxonomies need to be well designed to suit the users and use cases, be customized to the content, and conform to taxonomy best practices and standards so that they are easy and intuitive to use.

This workshop teaches taxonomy creation principles and addresses the issues of designing a taxonomy to serve users. It presents best practices in designing taxonomies, including the principles of wording of terms, incorporating synonyms, creating relationships between terms, and designing hierarchies and facets. Other topics include taxonomy project planning, sources for terms, and taxonomy testing. The workshop will also include practical exercises and access to taxonomy management software.