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 that make even state-of-the-art conversational technologies a challenge to implement successfully. Mapping out and structuring language- mediated interactions and creating meaningful intents and system responses require unique approaches to solving customer problems. Whether happening in voice or text, through a smart speaker or SMS, conversational interaction is rich and complex.

We will cover :
* The differences in language-driven software, with a focus on AI systems, from web and mobile
* The current limits of these systems and platforms and how they shape design
* What conversation and multimodality mean within digital products, and how small changes in affordances change a design
* The impact of human psycholinguistic limitations on digital design and language processing
* How customer behavioral insights and cultural norms shape conversation design decisions
* The roles of interaction design, information architecture, and what good experience feels like
* Strategy pitfalls, and the right kinds of problems to solve with language-first
* Guidelines for creating effective intents, avoiding interaction pitfalls, and handing the complexities of language
* Tools, methods, and perspectives to take away and apply
* Practical, fun, and creative team exercises to envision, design, prototype, and polish a fictional conversational app

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!)

How can we architect search listings so that they make sense for multiple target audiences?

During this workshop you’ll learn how to implement sense-making and search into personas, using a base template. Each attendee can tailor his or her persona based on what they learn in the tutorial. Based on both free and paid tools, you’ll learn where and how to implement different approaches and how to use search metrics to measure on an ongoing basis.

Finally, we’ll cover how to architect and optimize different types of search listings… because searchers exhibit multiple behaviors based on partially known and unknown item searching.

NOTE: This isn’t just a search engine optimization (SEO) workshop. Sense-making is at the core of this tutorial.

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 merely as glorified tables and gives them the tools they need to use them as the powerful and ubiquitous data manipulation engines they are.

Workshop Outline

• Introduction: Understanding content as data
• Content Data Grooming & Hygiene: Healthy data is useful data
• Content Inventories: Introduction and basic technique
• Content Audits: Introduction and basic technique
• Advanced Analysis with Pivot Tables: Introduction to pivot concept, learn to “pivot” data at key points in Inventory and Audit examples to generate new insight.
• Putting It All Together: Problem solving strategies for applying core data principles everywhere