Online workshop

Like any other designed outcome, good conversational experiences don’t happen by accident. Whether you’e augmenting your skills or shifting your career toward voice apps and chatbots, you’ll need additional tools, abilities, and product methods. Come dive deep into the new world. Conversational interfaces are powered and constrained by hard- wired psychological, linguistic, and environmental boundaries […]

In response to a manager’s query about how to plan products, Alan Kay famously remarked “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” His answer invokes a paradox at the heart of design: we can’t know the future, yet it’s what we design for. If we hope to practice design successfully in […]

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, […]

IAs, content strategists, and UXers responsible for designing the digital experiences that support large content collections have long used spreadsheets to understand, refine, and revise content data. Most of us, however, have never had any formal training in how to effectively use spreadsheets as content analysis tools. This workshop helps participants move beyond using spreadsheets […]

As designers and researchers, we spend much of our time facilitating conversations – articulating design decisions, getting alignment from stakeholders, interviewing customers, and any number of other activities centered around communicating with people and actually hearing them. It comes as no surprise that to become good at this, you must actually practice the art of […]

In this workshop, we will introduce our Data Analysis Cookbooks, a set of open-source Jupyter Notebooks that can be used for qualitative and quantitative data analysis without an extensive knowledge of programming. Cookbooks provide low-code, templated building blocks for assessing and addressing data quality issues, performing simple statistical analyses, identifying correlations, and visualizing data. Our […]

Flexibility within project dynamics is a key to success – be it adapting to project dynamics, client needs, or interpersonal relationships. Improvisational theater offers many constructs to “go with the flow” and build on our teammates ideas, successes, and even where we stumble. This workshop teaches the foundations of improv and provides direct correlations to […]

As knowledge graphs bubble up into popular and business consciousness (lots of chatter on social media, recent articles in Forbes and the WSJ) it seems fitting to ask how this technology is relevant to the IA community (it is!) and provide an introduction to graph-curious IAs. This half-day workshop will cover: 1) An introduction and […]

Does information architecture have core values? Should it? What would those values be? In recent years, ethics, inclusivity, and social responsibility have come to the fore as key issues in the information architecture, UX, and design fields. As practitioners, we want to uphold our ideals while balancing the demands of industry and the needs of […]

More of our transactions and social interactions are moving online every day. People access these digital products and services using a growing variety of devices: notebook computers, mobile phones, wearables, voice-driven smart assistants, and more. Good experience requires that these systems be coherent and understandable. As a result, information architecture (IA) is more important today […]

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 […]

Workshops are an excellent, people-centered way to get work done. From a participatory session that replaces a standard meeting, to a full-blown, multi-day experience, workshops get teams and clients to explore options, analyze alternatives, and come to consensus. But successful workshops don’t happen by accident. They’re time- and resource-intensive to plan and deliver, and require […]

Content is the whole point of the digital products we create. It needs to be omni-channel, ready for AI and machine learning, and easily maintained. It needs to be connected explicitly so computers can extract meaning and deliver it in a meaningful way to the intended audience. Information architects, content strategists, and product managers are […]

In modern digital publishing projects, content modeling can feel like a high wire act, balancing an organization’s big communication dreams against the ugly realities of design, technology, and legacy content constraints. Tilt too far in either direction, and the project falls. Fortunately, there’s good news! By approaching content modeling as a communications challenge rather than […]