IA Summit 09 - Day 1
by Jeff Parks on 2009/04/09 | [0 Comments]
IA Summit 2009 Podcasts
The IA Summit was held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22. Boxes and Arrows captured many of the main conference sessions (see schedule).
| Preview | Keynote | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Closing Plenary |
iTunes 
Del.icio.us IA Summit theme music created and provided by BumperTunes™Main Conference Sessions, Day 1 – Friday, March 20
These sessions were recorded on the first day of the conference. Download them individually here, or get them all with the Boxes and Arrows iTunes feed.
Links to the presentations and slidecasts will be updated continuously. See the Slideshare IA Summit 2009 page for up-to-the-minute lists of available presentations.
Thanks to the speakers for their hard work and for sharing their knowledge with the community.
You are (Mostly) Here: Digital Space and The Context Problem – Andrew Hinton
Lead Information Architect in Vanguard’s User Experience Group, Andrew Hinton provides engaging examples (including Mr. Spock, a speeding trolley, and a Dada urinal), illustrating how language powerfully affects context, and vice-versa.
Andrew connects this understanding with real-life IA design issues such as Twitter’s syntax or Facebook’s Beacon and challenges us to think more carefully about how we shape context in the digital dimension.
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Portable Research: Observing Users on the Go – Nate Bolt
As technology becomes increasingly portable, mobile, and ubiquitous, new challenges to traditional ethnographic user research arise. Bolt|Peters CEO Nate Bolt discusses these challenges and how to use new technologies pragmatically to document, broadcast, and involve stakeholders in mobile research process.
Additionally, Nate identifies the key considerations when designing a mobile ethnographic study, indicating how technological developments in the future might be used to improve upon current methods.
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Designing For, With, and Around Advertising – Karen McGrane
User experience designers often express a desire to play more of a strategic role in guiding business decisions. Yet UX designers don’t always seek to understand the advertising business model so they can maximize revenue. Instead, they often treat advertising as “clutter” — to be ignored at best and actively disliked at worst.
Senior partner at Bond Art & Science, and former VP and National Lead for User Experience at Avenue A/Razorfish, Karen McGrane teaches us ways to help advertising-supported sites be more successful. She presents case studies of several publishing sites from her body of work and explores the business decisions behind them.
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Creating Magic Kingdoms: User Experience Lessons from Disney’s Imagineers – Mike Atherton
Ever been in love? We can all recall user experiences we admire. But do we love them?
Emotional engagement is an enormously powerful driver in ensuring product success. One group of UX designers, Disney’s Imagineers, uses this approach to build experiences that people not only engage with, but truly love.
Mike Atherton aims to reconnect us to the passions that brought us to the IA Summit with his lighthearted and inspirational presentation. We love the work we do. Let’s make sure our users love it too.
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A Fundamental Disruption: Moving Information Architecture into the Hands of Individual Consumers – Peter Sweeney & Robert Barlow-Busch
A fundamental assumption in information architecture is that producers need to organize their content before consumers can access it effectively.
But what if content didn’t have to be organized in advance of its access, or even organized by producers at all? What if each consumer’s individual perspective could direct the organization of content, independent of the actions of other consumers?
Primal Fusion’s Peter Sweeney, Founder and CTO, and Robert Barlow-Busch, Director of Product Design, demonstrate existing technologies that are already moving the Web towards more consumer-directed forms of information architecture.
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ROI: Speaking the Language of Business – Eric Reiss
What is the business value of Information Architecture? Eric Reiss, co-founder of FatDUX, a user-experience design company headquartered in Copenhagen, reviews our current approaches, including limited use of the bean-counter acronyms, and explains why these arguments are usually not compelling for business executives.
With an uncertain economy and tight budgets, we need to convince them that what we do will help their business and why. Our responsibility, Eric argues, is to focus on giving our clients viable choices rather than “it depends.”
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The Semantic Web: What IAs Need to Know About Web 3.0 – Chiara Fox
Information architects have been singing the praises of metadata, thesauri, and controlled vocabularies for years. But there is a new game in town: the Semantic Web.
Chiara Fox, Senior Information Architect at Adaptive Path, answers the questions “What exactly is the Semantic Web?” and “Why should I care?” She provides greater context in how ontologies are similar and different from thesauri and taxonomies, provides examples of how this technology is being used in the marketplace, and looks at how these concepts can be incorporated into the information architecture work that we do today.
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Designing Rules: The Engine of User Experience – Dan Brown
Rules provide an underlying structure that governs the experience: what is displayed, when it’s displayed, and how it responds to user actions.
The depth of systems means that information architects no longer design structures with specific pieces of content in mind, but instead have to design structures around classifications, categories, and abstractions. Information architects must consider the rules that govern these objects and their appearance, display, and response to users.
Co-founder and principal at EightShapes, Dan Brown lays the groundwork for how we think and talk about this aspect of our work and provides a rationale for why thinking about rules is important. He distinguishes good rules from bad and offers a framework for designing and documenting them.
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A Real Nowhere Man: Managing Remote Teams Remotely – Joe Sokohl
Not only do we work with people across the hall, across town, and across the country, but we also work with people we never meet from countries we know about only through Wikipedia or the Travel Channel.
UX Lead for PracticeWorks, Joe Sokohl discusses principles to live by when managing teams remotely including: communication, flexibility, sensitivity, courage, and the best tool of all, empathy.
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Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design – Cindy Chastain
In the context of design, experience themes can be used as a conceptual framework that unifies the form, shape and quality of interactions. They expand our approach to user-centered design by reminding us to step back and consider the aesthetic and semantic experience of a product.
In this presentation, User Experience designer and screenwriter, Cindy Chastain looks at what makes experience themes unique and important, using examples from other crafts to illustrate her points. She also discusses how themes can be used in the design process and demonstrates her approach with a project she has recently completed.
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Design Games for IA – Donna Spencer
Would you like your design team to collaborate better? Are you looking to gather more valuable insights from your focus groups and interviews?
Freelance Information Architect and Interaction Designer, Donna Spencer, describes design games as a fun, technology-neutral way of gathering design insights for your projects. In this presentation she focuses on games and tips most applicable to IA projects, for all types of projects and people, including:
- Freelisting;
- Design the Home page and Divide-the-Dollar;
- Reverse-it and Idea cards
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Site Redesign: When Hell Freezes Over Use A Blowtorch – Melissa Matross
Head of the user experience discipline for Hotwire, an Expedia-owned discount travel website, Melissa Matross shares lessons from successes, failures, and pain at Hotwire to help guide those embarking on a large-scale UX project.
Based on her experience driving the first successful Site Redesign at Hotwire, Melissa discusses strategies and tactics to:
- Sell your large-scale UX project, gaining support and approval to augment UX and Engineering staff to resource the effort.
- Make your project happen by distributing the work while showcasing UX leadership and maintaining momentum toward completion.
- Demonstrate UX successes and build equity within the organization for future work.
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Motivating Teams: Inspiring People To Do Great Work – Dorelle Rabinowitz
How does a manager deal with an inherited team, rather than a team she hand-picked? Sometimes a manager has to motivate someone who applied for that manager’s job – and is extremely resentful. What about the differences between innies and outies?
Dorelle Rabinowitz, lead of the Design Systems Group at eBay, shares stories from both managers and individual contributors about how they either inspired their teams to do great things or how things fell apart.
Dorelle also talks about communication styles, team exercises like design sessions and reviews, sharing work, mentoring, and ways to foster a sense of community – all through real-life examples.
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IA Spy School – Joe Dyer
Fact: The greatest Information Architect in the world may never get his or her work implemented without the ability to influence decision makers.
Senior Information Architect at Travelocity, Joe Dyer runs the IA Spy School, outlining simple techniques and methods for working IAs to gather, share, and exploit data to gain influence over decision makers, including areas of:
- Intelligence Gathering
- The Power of sharing intelligence and building a repository
- Five methods used to gain influence with any decision maker
- Ethical considerations when collecting and sharing intelligence.
Download Evolve or Die: the Future of IA examined – Christina Wodtke, Gene Smith, Russ Unger, Joshua Porter
For Information Architecture to stay relevant in this world of highly dynamic social websites, it must adopt new bodies of learning and new strategies.
This panel, consisting of Christina Wodtke, Gene Smith, Russ Unger, and Joshua Porter use scenario planning to look at four futures of IA exploring ways IA can evolve, including one dystopia in which IA does not. Four senior practitioners will outline each scenario, then invite dialog from the audience.
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The Adoption of Web Standards into Web Design and Development: A Report on a Large Survey – David Robbins
David Robins, Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Program in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management at Kent State University, shares preliminary results from a survey developed in partnership with colleague Sanda Katila to explore how web designers and developers are adopting web standards into their work processes.. The survey was administered to 128 people from 12 countries.
The preliminary results cover:- The level of commitment to web standards by designers, developers and organizations.
- What forces drive the adoption of web standards.
- The extent to which web standards have influenced work processes.
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Using Enterprise IA to Support Business Strategy: Driving Revenue and Brand Health with Better Information Management – – Samantha Starmer & Gary Carlson
Samantha Starmer, Senior manager at REI.com, and Gary Carlson, a senior consultant, share a case study where they identified a business case and ROI for an enterprise information architecture project that led to significant money and resource commitments.
Samantha and Gary explain how they were able to evangelize horizontally and vertically, present their case to executives, and bring a true business perspective to the project. In the end, these approaches enabled wide cross-divisional support.
Download These podcasts are sponsored by:
The American Society of Information Science & Technology: Since 1937, ASIS&T has been THE society for information professionals leading the search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve access to information.
The IA Summit: the premier gathering place for information architects and other user experience professionals.
The theme of the event this year, Expanding Our Horizons, inspired peers and industry experts to come together to speak about a wide range of topics. This included information as wide ranging as practical techniques & tools to evolving practices to create better user experiences.
Boxes & Arrows: Since 2001, Boxes & Arrows has been a peer-written journal promoting contributors who want to provoke thinking, push limits, and teach a few things along the way.
Contribute as an editor or author, and get your ideas out there. boxesandarrows.com/about/participate
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