Friday, 11:30am, Continental Ballroom
Starting in Montreal, there have been sessions at each Summit that addressed the
“business value of IA.” But very few of these presentations have actually been held by business people.
I’d like to rectify this situation.
We keep hearing about the virtues of:
- Experience design
- Interaction design
- User-centered design
- Information architecture
- Content management
- Knowledge management
- Personas
- Scenaria
- Thesauri
- Mental models
- Sensemaking
- Storytelling
- Usability
- Accessibility
- Credibility
- Brandability
- Searchability
- Findability
- Some-other-damned-ability
Just to make sure our message comes through crystal clear, we use abbreviations like IA, UX, IX, UCD, CM, DM, KM etc. Except no
one’s actually asking for IA or UX. And business types are not looking to learn our slang. Not surprisingly, the sales process is often uphill.
What clients really want is a better website - and we are doing everything we can to make that simple request seems absolutely unattainable.
“What’s the return on investment?” cry the powers that be (Nielsen and Spool). But what our clients are really begging us is,
“Reassure us that whatever you’re going to do is actually going to
help.”
This presentation with review the current bean-counter acronyms, including ROI (two definitions), TCO, PP, and VaB. It will also show why these are usually surprisingly uncompelling arguments to business executives
- the folks who sign the checks. With an uncertain economy and tight money, our ability to survive
- and indeed prosper - depends on much more than “it depends”. Our responsibility is to give our clients viable choices, not hedge our bets.
I’d like to show my professional colleagues how.
INSTRUCTOR
Eric Reiss
Eric Reiss has been actively involved in the creation of menu-based programs, hypertext games, multimedia, and web projects for almost 30 years. In 2006, he co-founded FatDUX, a user-experience design company headquartered in Copenhagen with subsidiaries in Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
In November, 2000, his book, Practical Information Architecture was published by Addison-Wesley. In 2002, it became available in Japanese and Korean. He is also the author of Web Dogma, co-instigator of the original IA Slam, and a popular speaker at conferences and educational institutions throughout Europe and North America.
Eric recently completed his second term as president of the Information Architecture Institute. Since then, he has lectured at Instituto de Empresa Business School in Madrid, Spain as Associate Professor of Usability and
Design - in addition to his ongoing duties as Senior Content Strategist at FatDUX Copenhagen, CEO of the FatDUX Group, and Chair of the EuroIA Summit.