Information architecture is more important than ever. Learn the basics of IA in this fast-paced workshop from one of the co-authors of the fourth edition of the polar bear book.
Single Session Workshop (Virtual)
From Strategy to Structure (and Back Again)
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.
Designing for a New World Using Systems Thinking
Now more than ever, we are seeing how the systems underlying society affect the people living within them. As designers, we have an opportunity to impact positive change. Learn to see the big picture and tackle big, messy problems by cultivating a systems thinking lens into your UX and IA practices. What is systems thinking? Why is it important? Engage in practical hands-on activities that you can bring back to your projects and learn how to create change through design by uncovering relevant relationships beyond what is on the surface.
Hear from and share with colleagues barriers, opportunities, and ideas for activating change.
Introduction to Ontology Concepts and Modeling
Are you interested in learning more about ontologies but don’t know where to begin?
Our “Introduction to Ontology Concepts and Modeling” workshop comprises a three-hour introduction aimed at IAs who are interested in ontologies and would like to learn the basics, including:
Complex knowledge organization schemes and concept structures
Basics of ontological relationships
Information on existing ontologies for re-use
The difference between upper and lower ontologies
Basic ontology concepts like RDF and semantic triples
Software systems and components
Ontology modeling exercises
Product Management for Information Architects
IA experience is wonderful preparation for product management, but the role of a product manager involves mastering additional skills related to software development, engineering, technical architecture, finding product-market fit, going to market, funnel optimization, revenue modeling, experimenting with hypotheses, managing products through lifecycles, sunsetting features, saying no to stakeholders, getting teams into alignment, and more.
In this workshop, Christian will explain how IA skills provide a great foundation for product management work, and then provide the basics and pointers for how to develop the complementary skills (such as those mentioned above) to qualify for product leadership roles.
Sense-Making, Search Systems & Site Optimization
When people want to locate and discover information, they can simply type keywords into a search engine (not only Google) and select items from the first page of search results, right? This is the current mental model of how search/retrieval works for most users of all ages.
Sense-making is a searcher behavior that information architects, user experience (UX) and usability pros should not ignore. Search listings not only should make sense to individuals, they should also make sense to groups of people.
This workshop will answer the following questions:
- Which parts of a search listing must make sense to people before they will click (or tap) on a link?
- Where does sense-making occur during different parts of a search task?
- What do common search systems use for display in search listings?
- Does the type of search query affect the type of information that must make sense in search listings? (Short answer: yes!)
- Do document owners have complete or limited control over how search listings appear?
- How can we architect search listings so that they make sense for multiple target audiences?
Designing and Building Taxonomies for the Enterprise
This immersive workshop provides practical tactics for designing, building and maintaining taxonomies and ontologies. Based on hard-won lessons learned from work with everything from large fortune-50 enterprises to small ecommerce sites.
The workshop provides:
- Taxonomy/Ontology basics: a foundation to start creating a consistent vocabulary within your organization. We also call out the unique needs of building a taxonomy to serve the needs of large enterprises.
- A framework for shifting to an enterprise taxonomy model that meets the needs of your enterprise and the individual business units, systems, user profiles, and interfaces.
- Discussion of the impacts of a taxonomy project on technology, governance, workflows, marketing, analytics, search, compliance, and the interaction with master data management
- Practical tips for providing stakeholders with resources to navigate internal tensions around implementation
- Examples and case studies of large scale enterprise taxonomy projects.
Emerge User Needs in Your Information Architecture with a Usage Maturity Matrix
When we design our IA and other key design elements guided by a Usage Maturity Matrix we ease users into, and draw users deeper into, our design ecosystem. We intentionally emerge richer information, features and functions as our users are ready to experience them. In this workshop, participants will learn what a Usage Maturity Matrix is, will then breakout into an exploratory exercise using a UMM on their own digital spaces (or samples provided.)
Architecting Your Future: Conquering Imposter Syndrome with the 5-year resume
If you’re reading this, you’re likely part of the estimated 70% of people who’ve dealt with imposter syndrome at some point in their professional careers. Imposter syndrome is the psychological pattern where one doubts their skills and persistently fears being exposed as a “fraud”. It knows no limits to who it affects, and designers Madeline Packard and Shara Rosenbalm are no exception. These designers explore design methods and offer a few tools to battle imposter syndrome and subdue your inner fraud.
Finding the Happily Ever After – A Workshop Exploring a Narrative Approach to Product Design
No one’s story will begin, or end, with your product. In order to create useful, impactful and delightful designs, we need to consider the entire end to end user journey, from recognizing a need to meeting a goal, and determine how (or if) your product fits into the customer’s experience. Join Associate UX Director Chelsea Watson to explore how the established design thinking processes of creating user journeys, story maps and customer personas can come together in a narrative approach to IA and content strategy through storytelling. Together we’ll create proto-personas to help establish empathy for users, and craft a story of our persona’s end to end journey, ultimately allowing us to translate key narrative moments into content, IA and design requirements. Chelsea’s ran collaborative workshops using this process on a number of projects including a digital vision for Metrolinx (Ontario’s regional transit provider), a cross-platform client management tool for Royal Bank of Canada, and for other projects for clients including Freedom Mobile and Walmart.