IA Summit 2006: Pre-Conference details
| Thursday March 23rd |
Go to Friday March 24 |
Interaction Design Symposium (IxDA)
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Thursday, March 23, 8:30 - 6:00
David Heller, Luke Wroblewski, Kim Goodwin, Frank Ramirez |
| The Interaction Design (IxD) symposium is a one-day pre-conference event that focuses on the IxD discipline and its relationships with IA. The two disciplines are closely connected, and many individual practitioners have an overlapping set of skills and job roles. Whether IAs are already doing IxD as part of their job, working alongside Interaction Designers or simply want to learn more about the sister discipline, they will be able to extend their IxD knowledge and make it relevant to their IA practice. Six sessions throughout the day describe the unique characteristics of the discipline and show where IxD and IA interrelate within a complete user experience. The participants get a chance to familiarize themselves with core IxD theories and foundational methods. The symposium is highly interactive and offers a variety of session formats, such as presentations, seminars and panels. The sessions include:
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Enhancing Your Strategic Influence: Understanding and Responding to Complex Business Problems
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Thursday, March 23, 8:30 - 6:00
Victor Lombardi, John Zapolski, Scott Hirsch, Harry Max, Mark McCormick |
| While the skill level of the average information architect has increased dramatically over the last several years, many IAs still lack the tools necessary to understand and articulate the broader implications of their work within a complex and dynamic business environment. The most successful information architects are better at recognizing the roots of strategic change and opportunity, assessing the potential impacts on their organization, and determining what to do and who to involve in getting it done. This workshop introduces participants to a new way of thinking about cause and effect in complex organizations - within functional groups, across departments, beyond business units, and across industries. Participants come away with a set of tools to identify social, cultural, economic, and technological change, match products to emerging and changing markets, develop strategies to capture market value, and change organizational capabilities to reflect changing market and technological dynamics. Special attention is given to learning how to create and maintain a workplace and culture that facilitate and sustains innovation and change. Here are some of the basic questions that we will help participants answer, both in general and in the context of their companies:
Types of attendees most likely to find this workshop compelling include:
Audience: All Levels |
The Secret Design Strategies for Highly Successful Web Sites
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Thursday, March 23, 8:30 - 6:00
Jared M. Spool |
| No one has watched as many people use as many web sites as the researchers at [our company]. Using our in-depth findings, we've discovered incredible secrets showing how the best sites continually create designs that get users to their desired content. In this in-depth program, [we] will share the results of years of research examining how the best sites navigate users to their content. In just one day, you'll see the secrets behind successful designs including Lands' End, A.G. Edwards, Staples.com, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, CNN.com, and the BBC. You'll come away with the practical insights that will change your perspectives on web design forever. You will learn about:
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Writing Business Requirements for Information Architects
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Thursday, March 23, 8:30 - 12:30
Karyn Zuidinga, Sinisa Nojkovic |
| Ever had a project run amok? Ever heard the complaint from the business (internal or external client) but this isn't what I wanted! Ever been given a set of business requirements that weren't? IAs are often faced with the uncomfortable situation of working on a project without proper business requirements or are being asked to expand their roles to include this function. The difficulty is that we're often not sure how to proceed and the training available out there isn't really designed for us. In this fun, interactive workshop designed by and for information architects you will finally be able to learn how to kiss that scope creep goodbye. This workshop will:
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| Friday March 24th |
Go to Thursday March 23 |
Information Architecture & Findability
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Friday, March 24, 9:00 - 4:30
Peter Morville |
| Interface stands on the shoulders of infrastructure. User experience relies on the foundation systems of information architecture. And, the biggest problem on today's web sites and intranets is findability.
This all-day seminar from Peter Morville covers information architecture from top to bottom, explaining how search and navigation systems can be designed to support and shape user behavior. Topics include:
Benefits
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Advanced IA Topics - Next Horizons for Information Architecture (IAI)
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Friday, March 24, 8:30 - 5:00
Dan Brown, Harry Max, Aradhana Goel, Paul Gould |
| What will the practice of IA look like in the coming years? What will we need to know or more to the point, how will we need to think - to continue to fully participate? IA's development relies on cross-disciplinary innovation and a commitment to expanding the boundaries of IA application. The New Horizons workshop focuses on three areas of innovation as examples of theoretical AND practical IA thinking the kinds of thinking that make an IA's work endlessly fascinating and exciting.
The workshop combines presentation, discussion, and group activities. Afterwards participants will be able to:
Analyzing Content Management Concepts using Cognitive Linguistics (Dan Brown) The conclusion of Dan's analysis won't be surprising to those who have worked on deploying content management systems. That organizations struggle with making off-the-shelf CM systems flexible enough to meet their needs has been the lament of our industry for years. What's been missing, however, is a unified explanation, an understanding of why organizations consistently stumble over CMS implementations. Fortunately, cognitive linguistics offers a set of tools with which to re-frame the problems of content management. With these new analytic tools, the issues of content management become abundantly clear, and indeed run deeper that mere software implementations. When IAs turn to other disciplines, they can shed light on their own work in new ways. Information Architecture was founded on a variety of fields (library science, anthropology, psychology, you've heard them all before) but with new challenges emerging at the speed of technical change, new fields and new approaches are the only way to address them. In this session you will follow Dan's linguistic analysis of content management issues and discuss the implications for designing and deploying business software in your own projects. IAs in Sheep's Clothing (Harry Max) The field of Information Architecture is maturing. Government agencies, NGOs, businesses, and educational institutions regularly hire and rely on Information Architects to solve unwieldy problems and create compelling solutions. Today, people who think of themselves as Information Architects are waking up as "change agents" in positions ranging from Product Managers to Trusted Advisors to Communication Strategists to CIOs. But the talents, skills, and knowledge required to succeed in these new arenas are as elusive to this new breed of IAs as faceted classification, controlled vocabularies, and wayfinding navigation design were to the first generation of IAs. Information Architects must learn how to communicate more effectively up, down, and across organizational hierarchies and invisible boundaries. They must learn how to increase their ability to influence others, speak the language of business, employ precision inquiry techniques, use reality-based conversational models, and actively listen with their hearts as well as with their heads. This section of the workshop will combine presentation, discussion, and activities to address these new opportunities for growth and learning. Cross-Interface Architecture (Aradhana Goel and Paul Gould) Information Architecture principles and practices have transformed products and user experiences in many domains. Such transformations are usually narrowly focused on single products or services, however, or they've been limited to human/computer interactions. But humans are surrounded by information, not just plopped in front of it. All kinds of information-laden interactions take place through "interfaces" that have nothing to do with a computer. For example, a customer of The Home Depot might check product availability or costs on a Web site, visit a retail store to investigate a product in person, chat with a salesperson, and use a self-checkout machine to purchase the product. In this case, the customer has interacted with four distinct types of interfaces: web, retail (physical), human, and machine. Customers have troublesome experiences (and the product/service providers lose customers) if they encounter inconsistencies that disrupt their traversal of these interfaces. A Cross-Interface Architecture (some might call it a cross-channel architecture) provides a consistent, coherent framework for bridging these isolated, yet connected points of interaction. In this workshop you'll learn more about the thinking behind cross-interface architecture and how it has been used in real-world applications. We will also do some exercises to start transforming your brain so that it begins looking at the world this way, too. |
Crafting Understanding-based Structures: Creating Usable Content
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Friday, March 24, 8:30 - 6:00
Thom Haller |
| User-focused process can guide us as we craft online communication products. But how do we combine the literature of the field in such a way that we can explain to our bosses and colleagues how our work support improvements in user and organizational performance? How can we synthesize our user-focus with complementary structures for crafting content that supports others? In this day-long, fast-paced, information-rich session, youll have the opportunity to look at product development through different lenses. Specifically, you will accomplish the following objectives:
Can we accomplish all this in a day without becoming brain dead? Sure. You'll laugh. You'll play. Lots of learning. Lots of fun. Who said structure had to be dull? Audience: All Levels |
Creating Conceptual Comics: Storytelling and Techniques
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Friday, March 24, 8:30 - 6:00
Kevin Cheng, Jane Jao, Mark Wehner |
| Problem During the early periods of product development, a number of tools are typically employed to assist in defining and communicating the product vision. At Yahoo!, we've used a combination of tools such as requirements documents, personas, user scenarios and storyboards with varying degrees of success. For example, requirements and personas were rarely consumed or were interpreted differently between individuals. Traditional storyboards detailing screen by screen progressions created a focus on the interface, rather than the concept. Learning Objectives In one of our upcoming products, we explored a new method of testing and communicating product concepts through the use of comics. Comics are a unique medium between video and static sketches and provide versatility beyond either of the mediums if applied correctly. Using comics, we were able to create an easily digestible deliverable which focused on communicating and refining the concepts and ideas behind a feature instead of the details of an interface. The objective of this workshop will be to teach attendees the considerations and skills necessary to duplicate this methodology. This workshop will focus on the "how" of our process much more than the "what" which is discussed in the regular session presentation. While some of the materials presented will be similar to the regular session presentation, the workshop focuses on involving participants to try the technique out on real problems and receive feedback and suggestions on the exercises while covering some additional examples of the usage of comics as a language. Also augmenting the workshop session will be a case study and instructions on how to expand the usage of these storyboards beyond internal communication and use comics for user research purposes. We will present a technique of walking real users through comics and giving them the ability to add their own notes and thoughts directly onto the comics. Through these processes, we were able to help discover product implications, user needs, and feedback as to what makes concepts most appealing and useful. Participants will learn:
The workshop will be a combination of presentation and participation. Basic introduction of the methodology as used by Yahoo! will be described prior to a series of small hands on exercises to help participants understand the medium and its effective use. For example, participants may be asked to illustrate, through rudimentary sketches, a passage of time - the results of which will be used to illustrate the various techniques that can be employed. Following the exercises, the workshop will detail the methods used to solicit user feedback on the comic medium by using the examples the participants created. Takes Aways & Handouts Participants will be given copies of:
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From Research to Design: A Hands-On How-To
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Friday, March 24, 8:30 - 12:30
Donna Maurer |
| This half-day pre-conference workshop will provide participants with practical skills in one of the most mysterious and difficult aspects of design - taking the leap from research to a first conceptual design. It is easy to learn how to conduct user research, identify business goals, take content inventories, make paper prototypes and conduct usability tests. It is much harder to figure out what to do with the research you have collected, the personas you have created and the scenarios you have written. Experienced designers often just do it without knowing how. Methodologies abound, but many are overly complicated and involve a frightening amount of modelling and documentation. In this workshop, I can help you learn how to tackle the design step by:
Most importantly, this will be a practical and creative workshop. We'll get out of our chairs, use coloured markers and paper, draw, talk about our work and share experiences. Audience: Beginning |
Strategic Intranet Planning
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Friday, March 24, 8:30 - 12:30
James Robertson |
| The myriad of day-to-day tasks involved in maintaining an intranet often make it hard to find time to step back and assess where the intranet is going, and how well it is proceeding. This intranet planning workshop is designed to give an opportunity to focus on overall intranet strategy. Current directions will be challenged, and new approaches explored. This workshop challenges intranets to move beyond a "dumping ground for second-hand documents", to become a core business tool that supports daily staff activities. This workshop is targeted at intranet managers and team members who have experienced the full difficulties of maintaining and growing an intranet. It draws upon common experiences across all organisations, and presents a new model of intranet evolution, designed to give a clear direction for future improvements. This workshop is both challenging and inspiring, giving an entirely new perspective on the organisational changes and strategic planning that underpins a truly successful intranet. Audience: Intermediate |
Introduction to Information Architecture
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Friday, March 24, 2:00 - 6:00
Donna Maurer |
| This half-day pre-conference workshop will provide participants with an introduction to information architecture. As a stand-alone workshop it provides a high level understanding of information architecture, outlining the fundamentals and some of the current information architecture issues and challenges. As an accompanying workshop for the main conference, it will also allow participants to get more out of the conference sessions, having learned the fundamentals. This workshop will cover:
At the end of the workshop, we will spend some time looking through the Summit timetable. The types of sessions that participants may not have encountered (BOF sessions, 5-minute madness, IA Slam etc) will be explained and participants will be able to find out what sessions (and social events) will be of most use for their areas of interest. Audience: Beginning |
Paper Prototyping 2
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Friday, March 24, 2:00 - 6:00
Todd Warfel |
| Mistakes and oversights during the design and development phases can be costly, if not detrimental to a business. Catch them before you launch with paper prototyping. If you feel like you already know "paper prototyping, then you should still attend. We'll have a brief introduction to paper prototyping so that we're all on the same page, but the rest of this very hands on workshop will focus on paper prototyping techniques, creating an actual design using paper prototypes, and then testing that design.
At the close of the workshop, you'll see the real world design we've created using these techniques for a next generation VoIP product for a national telecom. We'll discuss the techniques we used and show you how we used paper prototyping and testing to create a design with a measurable improvement over the original design. Audience: All Levels |