Donna Spencer
Abstract
This full day workshop will provide you with a thorough overview and understanding of information architecture theory & practice. It will cover a wide range of IA issues, including an understanding of how it fits into a project, fundamental skills & knowledge required for IA work and current IA issues. It will be theoretical and practical and allow you to immediately apply ideas to your projects.
This workshop will cover:
- What information architecture is and how it relates to other user experience disciplines
- Core IA techniques - analyzing content, conducting user research, card sorting and more
- Core IA theories - classification, categorization, metadata & labeling
- IA structures - hierarchies, database and other structures
- Designing navigation & page layouts
- Putting it together in an IA project
- Current issues in IA
The workshop will be at the level of an ‘advanced intro’, covering the basics and also allowing exploration of key challenges and issues. The format is a combination of short lectures, group discussion and hands-on activities. Extensive notes and resources will be provided for further personal exploration.
Workshop Details
Learning objectives
- After the workshop, the participants will have:
- An understanding of fundamental IA concepts and issues
- An understanding of processes and techniques often used in an IA project
- Hands-on experience with key techniques
- Shared skills with other practitioners
Core IA-related issues
A small number of attendees at the IA Summit are new to IA, particularly people attending from the local area. An introductory workshop can cater for this group and ensure they get the most from the main conference by allowing it to build on a foundation. This workshop covers a range of core IA skills.
Target audience
- Beginners to IA
- People working in related roles who need to know about IA
- Intermediate IAs who have never had formal introduction to the fundamentals.
Where & when the session has been previously presented
This workshop has been presented at the last 4 IA Summits. It has always been well-attended and gets great feedback. It has also been presented at a range of other conferences, public workshops and in-house for clients.
Comments from last year’s workshop included:
Great review of the practical activities involved in effective IA
I don’t think I realized how much I knew about this topic. Donna made it accessible and interesting.
I loved Donna’s confidence with the subject & presentation. The information she presented seemed trustworthy & accurate
The activities were helpful and the presentation was good.
Great activities; structure of course, instructor were all excellent. Well laid out & taught course
Very informative – good overview of a very large topic
As a newbie to IA this class was very helpful in simply understanding ia and what an IA does. Great knowledge of the subject. Great real-world examples
Very comfortable fielding questions of all kinds, with thoughtful answers
Seminar agenda / time-line of the session
The structure of the workshop is a series of modules/topics. For each, I outline the principles, provide examples from real projects and take participants questions. Participants then put the principles into practice with a group activity.
The group activity I usually run is to design a tourism & promotional website for a local wine region – this topic is fun, easy for participants to understand without detailed knowledge of the domain, and has enough complexity to discuss detailed IA issues.
The structure and activities are as outlined below:
Start to morning tea
- Introductions
- Identifying business goals
- Small group activity: brainstorm the potential goals of the client. Report back some key goals.
- User research principles
- Activity in pairs: interview your neighbour about how they planned their most recent holiday. Report back one surprising thing you learned
Morning tea to lunch
- Content analysis
- Classification Principles
- Small group activity: Brainstorm potential list of content for the website. Report back key content
- Whole room activity: Identify which are structured and unstructured pieces of content
- Classification principles
- Whole room activity at the beginning: How do you organize your bookshelf?
- Whole room activity during the talk: What types of content do various classification types work well for?
Lunch to afternoon tea
- Activity: Card sorting
- Card sorting principles
- IA structures and metadata
- IA process
- Small group activity: Create a draft IA for the website
Afternoon tea to close
- Navigation and page layout design principles
- Small group activity: Create navigation and page layouts
- Remaining time (if any): Group therapy – project-based questions for me or other people in the group
Speaker Details
Donna Spencer is a freelance information architect and interaction designer, a mentor, writer and trainer. She has 8 years experience working in-house and as a consultant doing both strategic and tactical design. She has designed large intranets & websites, e-commerce & search systems, complex business applications, a set of design patterns and a content management system.
She believes deeply in the value of user-centred design and uses a range of user-centred approaches on her projects – from quick analysis of existing research to deep ethnography. She also believes deeply in team-based and iterative design – continually surprising her colleagues by talking to people rather than computers and designing the old-fashioned way with pencil, sticky notes and much coloured paper.
Donna is an experienced speaker who has taught full-day workshops and presented sessions at many local and international conferences, on the topics of information architecture, interaction design and whatever else crosses her mind. She spends her remaining spare time weaving, gardening, working on IAI projects and writing a book on card sorting to be published soon by Rosenfeld Media.