Topic: Information Architecture

Object-oriented UX: The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up Your UX Process

What You’ll Learn

• Get started with OOUX
• Avoid these four common UX fails
• Examine the four steps of the ORCA process

Information Architecture for All the Senses

What You’ll Learn

• Consider whether or not designers will exist in the future
• Understand why exploring complex problems trumps adopting best practices
• Discover how designers engage with problems and issues around them

IA Lenses - Helpful Perspectives for Information Architects

What You’ll Learn

• Discover what IA Lenses Are and How they Work
• Apply IA Lenses to a Case Study with the World Bank
• Explore ways that you can apply IA lenses to your work

How To Make Sense of Any Mess

What You’ll Learn

• Illustrate problems and solutions with diagrams that go beyond wireframes and sitemaps
• Find the best taxonomy for your users through testing and iterating on your taxonomic choices
• Choose the best tools and processes that help you make sense of complex subjects and situations
• Communicate with your users consistently through controlled vocabularies

Collaborative Information Architecture

What You’ll Learn

• Practice information architecture collaboratively
• Learn collaborative facilitation techniques
• Build your UX toolbox with new diagrams and techniques

Timeless Interaction Patterns

What You’ll Learn

• Why Interaction Matters
• Fundamentals of Filtering Information

The Secrets of Great UX Documentation

What You’ll Learn

• Level-up your current documentation to tell more effective stories
• Make the content of your documents actionable, so they don’t just sit on a shelf
• Balance formal documentation without other documentation activities
• Compose documents that people want to read

Managing Content Sprawl

What You’ll Learn

• Identify how taxonomy can change your UX
• Apply taxonomy-driven design in your organization
• Deliver content through taxonomy-driven structures
• Capitalize on the unique aspects of dynamic content

Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content

What You’ll Learn

• Using structured or adaptive content to get all of your content on mobile
• Separating content and form (instead of repurposing designs from other platforms)
• Writing content that’s flexible, reusable, and marked up with metadata
• Evolving your CMS and editorial processes to support multi-channel publishing

Designing Stellar Meetings

What You’ll Learn

• Good meeting design fundamentals, tools, and exercises
• Minimize pain points and maximize feelings of empowerment
• The importance of role neutrality in meetings versus the overall design process
• Facilitating movement, ideation, and healthy conversations

SharePoint and the User Experience

What You’ll Learn

• Apply UX processes and tools to SharePoint elements
• Approach content types with confidence
• Translate SharePoint concepts to traditional UX
• Address pain points in a rigorous design process

Bringing Order to Your Intranet

What You’ll Learn

• Understand the 5 purposes of intranets
• Find the right intranet mix for your organization
• Apply field-research techniques to understand staff needs
• Design intranets that are both usable and useful for Your Organization

The Enterprise Mobility Revolution

What You’ll Learn

• Ways to take advantage of four types of enterprise mobility
• The trap of creating a mobile version of your intranet
• How to identify the top things staff need from their mobile device
• Where to start when creating a next-generation enterprise mobility strategy

8 Better Practices for Great Information Architecture: Closing the Findability Gap

What You’ll Learn

• Diagnose the important problems
• Balance your evidence
• Advocate for the long term
• Measure engagement
• Support contextual navigation
• Improve search across silos
• Combine design approaches effectively
• Tune your designs over time

Search as a Multi-channel Experience

What You’ll Learn

• Understand how each channel brings its own expectations to search
• Know where search plays its role in your users behavior, from fact finding to discovery
• Understand why context of channel, or how your users choose to interact with you, plays a role in the experience
• Know what you need to think about in this emerging discipline, and where best practices will arise
• See how Facebook is rapidly rising as a new channel

5 Simple Principles to Improve Your Information Architecture

What You’ll Learn

• Take information architecture beyond hierarchical site maps and explore some of the real challenges facing sites today.
• Consider navigation menus more rigorously, without them turning into the junk drawer of your web site.
• Establish ground rules for creating gallery or index pages that point to content to avoid clutter.
• Understand what techniques most effectively explain the site's underlying structure to visitors.

Organization Schemes for Web Content

What You’ll Learn

• Determine when to use schemes from the exact category
• Determine when to use schemes from the ambiguous category
• Use combinations of schemes to further organize your content
• Decide which organizational scheme or schemes you should use

Site Search Analytics

What You’ll Learn

• Evaluate your users' intent quantitatively.
• Do a pattern analysis to select and prioritize both metadata attributes and content types.
• Uncover patterns to predict and plan for the future of your site's content.
• Put tools in play, like Google Analytics (it's free!) as one example, to handle your site search analytics.
• Set up and run simple reports and queries to get you started towards better dialogue with your customers.

Tagging with Folksonomies in a Taxonomy World

What You’ll Learn

• Expose tags through effective approaches such as tag clouds, faceted tags, and clustering
• Encourage your users to create helpful tags using automatic suggestion or type-ahead features
• Explore the good and bad from popular folksonomy implementations, like LibraryThing, Buzzillions, SharePoint, and Amazon
• Develop proven strategies for implementing tagging inside of enterprise systems, such as a recent project from Raytheon systems

Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences

Search & Discovery Patterns
Almost every site has a search function. But, do they all work as well as they could? More importantly, how is your site's search doing? Are users abandoning the site in frustration, because they can't find what they want?
The abundance and variation of search implementations out there present a challenge to designers: how do we leverage the behaviors our users are developing to ensure they find the content they're seeking? By understanding how people interact with search implementations, we can create effective designs that deliver great experiences for both searching and discovering.

We couldn't have timed this seminar better. In just a few weeks, Peter Morville will put his new book, Search Patterns, to press. And Mark Burrell and his team at Endeca have been working hard to release their new UI Design Pattern Library for Search & Discovery. So, this is the perfect time to talk about how to leverage patterns for better search designs.

In this seminar, Peter shares his new material and shows us the typical user behaviors that emerge when users face a search box or a page of results. For example, you'll see how many users cleverly reduce the number of results to improve the relevance of each one (a behavior Peter calls Narrowing). You'll also see how some users will take a result they believe is relevant and authoritative—a "pearl" as it were—and use that result to search for other relevant and authoritative materials.

Understanding these user behaviors help us craft better search interfaces. Peter will reach into his huge collection of search implementations to show us perfect matches for the typical user behaviors.

He'll walk through a pattern he calls "Best First", where you'll see how to leverage the power of having almost perfect results appear at the top of the list. He'll discuss the "Auto-complete" pattern, where the search box makes suggestions from the first few letters typed, showing you how it helps get to a result faster while helping users see the breadth of information available. And he'll talk about the "Faceted Search" pattern, demonstrating how filtering with dynamic databases can provide a powerful and quick way to hone in on the user's target.

We'll wrap the seminar up with Mark showing you how to adapt search patterns to your own site. Using a specific challenge as an example—presenting results where the items are different types—Mark will walk you through Endeca's UI Design Pattern Library for Search & Discovery, using the same methodology his own design team employs. You'll see how patterns get you quickly to high-quality solutions.

This seminar is perfect for you, if you're working on providing the best experience with your site's search implementation. Bring your entire team and schedule extra time to talk about what you've learned—you'll be wanting to implement Peter and Mark's ideas right away.

Faceted Search: Designing Your Content, Navigation, and User Interface

What You’ll Learn

• Leverage the basic rules of facet analysis to categorize your content
• Effectively work with both structured content, such as catalogs, and unstructured content, such as documents
• Design for complex interaction models, such as multi-selects using AND, OR, or even negation
• Avoid “gotchas” for category counts or search wildcards, so your design meets your users' expectations

New Ways to Think about Taxonomy:
The Role of Taxonomies in Your Organization

What You’ll Learn

• Use multiple taxonomies to describe aspects for a piece of information
• Leverage your taxonomy when implementing your wayfinding solutions
• Improve search applicability and improve both precision and recall
• Create a unified search approach for known and discovered content

The Road to Informed Decisions

What You’ll Learn

• Tailor specialized research techniques, such as Five-Second Tests and Inherent-Value Tests
• Build out your analysis toolbox, with easy-to-execute techniques, such as conducting a pair-wise comparison or building a weighted decision matrix
• Bring your entire team to consensus on the most important design issues in under an hour
• Compare multiple design alternatives using solid user research quickly and cost effectively

The Analysis Toolbox: Making Sense of Usability Test and Field Study Data

Are you overwhelmed by the incredible amounts of data you're left with after performing a field study or usability test? Can you effectively analyze the data you've collected, and use your findings to successfully guide your product development process?

Field studies and usability tests produce a vast amount of quality data. However, these techniques produce a vast, often overwhelming, amount of quality data. Interacting with users provides great insights, but making sense of what you've learned is often a huge challenge that many teams find difficult to overcome.

Part of the secret to good data analysis is preparing properly *before* the study begins. Preparing a good set of focus questions, putting together data collection worksheets, and carefully studying participant recruitment will simplify the post-observation analysis. This in turn will help you understand how to spend your observation time more productively. In the first part of this presentation, Jared will walk through these techniques, providing examples as we prepare for a real study.

Once you've collected your observational data, the next challenge is to turn it into information the team can act on. In the second part of our seminar, Jared will explain some classic techniques for turning qualitative observations into quantitative analysis. He'll demonstrate participant pairing to extract attributes, attribute ratings, Pugh diagrams, and the K-J Analysis technique. All of these are essential tools for any team's analysis toolbox.

The User is Always Right:
Making Personas Work for Your Website

What You’ll Learn

• See the benefits of personas
• Create robust personas to direct overall business strategy
• Make personas real
• Use personas repeatedly to ensure your product meets the needs of your users