Time(s)
Description
Can you compare the information architecture of your favorite app to your favorite restaurant? How are they different? How are they the same? Is your IA better? In this presentation, learn a new, critical language for discussing and evaluating information architecture.
You will learn how to evaluate information architecture and identify specific areas of improvement, as well as how to throw serious nerd shade and talk serious nerd smack about the information architecture of other attendees.
Key takeaways from the session:
Attendees will learn a flexible language they can use to describe information architecture and its outcomes for different types of systems and environments.
This language includes a model for different types of systems, qualities for describing and how information architectures differ, and a way to define the different experiences people have within an information architecture.
As part of the presentation, we’ll see examples and practice describing the information architectures of common experiences.
At the end, I propose a definition for “good” information architecture that differs from common definitions of “good” in the hopes it gives us seething useful to talk and think and disagree about.
About the speakers
Though he wanted to write cyberpunk novels, Austin Govella helps the world’s largest organizations transform how they connect with employees and customers. Since 1998, Austin has explored marketing, knowledge management, entertainment, ecommerce, non-profits, and product development. Today, Austin leads Experience Design for Avanade’s Houston studio.
Austin wrote ‘Collaborative Product Design’, a book mostly about how monkeys buy and sell coffee, and co-authored the second edition of ‘Information Architecture: Blueprints for the web’ with Christina Wodtke, the Patti Smith of IA. Austin’s next 5-minutes of IA fame came when Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville included one of his user flows in the third edition of the Polar Bear book.
Austin chats on Twitter @austingovella and writes at https://agux.co.