Past

This full-day workshop teaches a set of fundamental principles about humans, useful for all types of design work – information architecture, interaction design, visual design and even industrial design.

In the workshop we’ll look at:

• How our visual system works
• Visual and cognitive attention, and how to grab them
• Limitations of memory and how it affects our designs
• Types of errors that people will make, why they make them, and how we can design for them
• How people make decisions, and how we can design for more informed decisions
• Socialness and how to design social interfaces
• Learning about people via user research
• Checking what we’ve designed to make sure it works (usability testing)

This will be a very practical workshop. To learn about the human attributes we’ll play games, look at fun examples of human behaviour, discuss the implications for design and sketch example interfaces. For user research and usability testing, we’ll discuss the principles and run a mini research session and usability test. You’ll leave with tons of practical skills to use on your next project.

You’ll also leave with a detailed workshop booklet, containing slides, additional explanation and follow-up reading.

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 – analysing content, conducting user research, card sorting and more
• Core IA theories – classification, categorisation, metadata & labelling
• IA patterns – structures for different types of sites
• 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.

This half-day workshop will cover the essential aspects of Information Architecture. No filler, no fluff, just pure IA:

• How classification and categorisation work in our brain, and why it matters
• How to identify potential organisation methods for your content
• When organisation schemes such as geography, task, audience and subject work best (and tricks to make them work)
• How to design an organisation scheme that works for your users
• The best navigation approach for your content

This won’t be a dry, theoretical workshop. We’ll talk and play some games. You’ll go away with a better understanding of the essentials of information architecture, techniques to use on your next project and a comprehensive list of resources for follow-up reading.

We have patterns for buildings, patterns for interaction design, and patterns for software development. But are there patterns for information architecture?

Of course there are – patterns emerge from use, and there certainly are enough information architectures around to identify a set of patterns.

This presentation will describe a wide range of commonly-used information architecture patterns, including hierarchies small and large, different types of database structure, hypertext, subsite models, sites with multiple entry points and ways of combining these (and more that I discover before April).

For each I will describe the core elements of the pattern, discuss the most appropriate uses and show real-world examples.

Understanding the different patterns will help attendees to select the most appropriate structures for their content.

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 – analysing content, conducting user research, card sorting and more
• Core IA theories – classification, categorization, metadata & labeling
• IA patterns – structures for different types of sites
• 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.

Finding information is not the user’s goal. It’s a means to an end. You need to look at what they desire.

Maybe they desire to locate a fact to prove a point. Perhaps buy a product based on important criterion, or locate the best deal. Maybe they desire to compare features before they make a decision, or keep an eye on current events. Or, maybe they just desire to re-read something they saw on an earlier visit.

Each of these information-seeking desires demands a very different approach to the information architecture, the information design, and the page layout. Donna Spencer will show you the key features of each behavior and what you need to include in the design, with both good and bad examples of each. You’ll go away with skills that take your users beyond just finding the information, helping them to use the information to achieve their goals.

Few things are more difficult than trying to organize thousands (or millions) of your web site or intranet’s pages. How do you know where to put things? How will your users find the content they’re seeking?

Different users need different things. Some of your users need details while other need a big-picture overview. Some want to look things up by their role, while others want to find things by the topic. Some want to click through a logical category list, while others want to enter their keywords into a search box.

Bringing the chaos of thousands of individual pages into an organized, logical order is the purview of the Information Architect. That’s why you want to meet Donna Spencer. Coming all the way from Australia, Donna’s one of the world’s premier information architects and she’ll be bringing back last year’s most popular workshop.

Under Donna’s expert guidance, you’ll practice important organization techniques, such as card sorting and content analysis, ready to apply these on your own site as soon as you return to your office. You’ll learn how to organize critical content using proven navigation and page layout principles.

Donna will introduce you to a variety of techniques to solve hard IA problems, such as choosing good labels and matching the right organization scheme for your audiences. Once you’ve mastered the essentials of information architecture, you’ll turn the disarray of site content into a tour de force of organization and categorization. And your users will exclaim how easy it is to find things on your site.

This half-day workshop teaches a set of fundamental principles that are useful for all types of design work – information architecture, interaction design, visual design and even industrial design.

In the workshop we’ll look at:

• How our visual system works.
• Visual and cognitive attention, and how to grab them.
• The limitations of memory and how that affects our design.
• The types of errors that our users are always going to make.
• How to design intuitive interfaces.

For each of these aspects, we’ll talk about the principles, demonstrate how they work, and discuss the implications for design. You’ll go away with a better understanding of people which will help you make better design decisions.

This half-day workshop will cover the essential aspects of Information Architecture. No filler, no fluff, just pure IA:

• How classification and categorisation work in our brain, and why it matters.
• How to identify potential organisation methods for your content.
• When organisation schemes such as geography, task, audience and subject work best (and tricks to make them work).
• How to design an organisation scheme that works for your users.
• The best navigation approach for your content.

This won’t be a dry, theoretical workshop. We’ll talk and play some games. You’ll go away with a better understanding of the essentials of information architecture, techniques to use on your next project and a comprehensive list of resources for follow-up reading.

This masterclass will cover a wide range of interaction design skills, including how humans think (and why we need to know that); key interaction design processes and skills like sketching. It will be theoretical and practical and allow you to immediately apply ideas to your projects.

This masterclass will cover:

• Human attributes – vision, visual attention, memory, error, intuition & habit
• Design process – conducting user research, developing personas, writing scenarios
• Designing – sketching, iterating and prototyping
• Interface flow & layout – posture, structure & flow; components & patterns
• Communicating design

The format of the workshop combines short lectures, group discussion and hands‐on activities. Extensive notes and resources will be provided for further personal exploration.