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Information architecture: Theory and practice

donna — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 04:54:30 +0000

Information architecture is all about organising information and providing methods for people to find and use it, usually via navigation. It relates primarily to websites, web applications, intranets, file and document management systems.

The workshop

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.

During the workshop, you’ll learn:

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

At the end of the workshop, you will understand:

How to design sites that help users find what they want
What organisational scheme or schemes are best for your content
How to conduct user research that helps develop your information architecture
How to conduct a card sorting exercise
How core IA theories, such as metadata, classification, and categorisation affect your site’s success
How to conduct a content analysis and develop a solid IA structure
How to design effective navigation and page layouts

The workshop will combine discussion, questions and hands-on activities. Extensive notes and resources will be provided for further personal exploration.

User experience design

donna — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 04:46:37 +0000

This full day workshop will provide you with a thorough overview and understanding of user experience design. It will cover a range of fundamental UX skills that can be applied to all types of project – websites, web applications, traditional applications and mobile. It will be theoretical and practical and allow you to immediately apply ideas to your projects.

This workshop will cover:

What user experience design is and why it is important to do it in a deliberate way (i.e. people will have an experience no matter what – you want them to have a particular type of experience)
Understanding people: conducting user research and usability testing
Communicating about people (personas and other methods)
Deciding what to design (scenarios, business needs, mental modelling)
Sketching and iterative design
Creating prototypes to communicate design
Making sure what gets built is right

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.

Learning objectives

After the workshop, the participants will have:

An understanding of how to learn about people and communicate about them to others
Core design principles that can be used for any project and any technology
Understanding of how to apply principles to a real project
Hands‐on experience with key techniques
Shared skills with other practitioners

Information architecture

donna — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:43:36 +0000

The workshop

During the workshop, you’ll learn:

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

At the end of the workshop, you will understand:

how to design sites that help users find what they want
what organisational scheme or schemes are best for your content
how to conduct user research that helps develop your information architecture
how to conduct a card sorting exercise
how core IA theories, such as metadata, classification, and categorisation affect your site’s success
how to conduct a content analysis and develop a solid IA structure
how to design effective navigation and page layouts

The workshop will combine discussion, questions and hands-on activities. Extensive notes and resources will be provided for further personal exploration.

Information architecture

donna — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:03:50 +0000

The workshop

During the workshop, you’ll learn:

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

At the end of the workshop, you will understand:

how to design sites that help users find what they want
what organisational scheme or schemes are best for your content
how to conduct user research that helps develop your information architecture
how to conduct a card sorting exercise
how core IA theories, such as metadata, classification, and categorisation affect your site’s success
how to conduct a content analysis and develop a solid IA structure
how to design effective navigation and page layouts

The workshop will combine discussion, questions and hands-on activities. Extensive notes and resources will be provided for further personal exploration.

Information architecture

donna — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 02:37:59 +0000

The workshop

During the workshop, you’ll learn:

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

At the end of the workshop, you will understand:

how to design sites that help users find what they want
what organisational scheme or schemes are best for your content
how to conduct user research that helps develop your information architecture
how to conduct a card sorting exercise
how core IA theories, such as metadata, classification, and categorisation affect your site’s success
how to conduct a content analysis and develop a solid IA structure
how to design effective navigation and page layouts

The workshop will combine discussion, questions and hands-on activities. Extensive notes and resources will be provided for further personal exploration.

Who’s this workshop for?

This workshop is most suited to people who have responsibility for large web sites, including information architects, product managers, website producers, communication managers, marketing managers, business analysts and graphic designers. It is also suited to people who are new to the field and would like to know more about information architecture work.

This workshop is taught will be at the level of an ‘advanced intro’, covering the basics and also allowing exploration of key challenges and issues.

Introduction to information architecture

donna — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:54:29 +0000

This was a virtual seminar I presented for ASIS&T in January 2011. There were some great questions, and I answered some on the IA book website.

In this virtual seminar, you’ll learn all about information architecture – what it is, why it’s so important to do well and the major things to do and not to do.

We’ll discuss:

how people look for information and what they need to do with it when they find it
different ways you can organize information and when they are suitable
exactly how (processes) you can figure out the best ways to organize your content
the tricky issue of what to call things
other key IA tips

It’s all based on Donna’s experience designing information architecture, navigation and content for a wide range of information systems (usually big ones) such as government and corporate websites, intranets and document management systems.

Information architecture

donna — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 09:26:09 +0000

The workshop

During the workshop, you’ll learn:

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

At the end of the workshop, you will understand:

how to design sites that help users find what they want
what organisational scheme or schemes are best for your content
how to conduct user research that helps develop your information architecture
how to conduct a card sorting exercise
how core IA theories, such as metadata, classification, and categorisation affect your site’s success
how to conduct a content analysis and develop a solid IA structure
how to design effective navigation and page layouts

The workshop will combine discussion, questions and hands-on activities. Extensive notes and resources will be provided for further personal exploration.

Who’s this workshop for?

This workshop is taught will be at the level of an ‘advanced intro’, covering the basics and also allowing exploration of key challenges and issues.

When & where

This workshop will be presented in three locations:

22 November 2010: Canberra, Hotel Realm
23 November 2010: Sydney, The Portside Centre
25 November 2010: Brisbane, The Sebel Suites Brisbane

All workshops run 9am-5.30pm.

Keeping your content alive from cradle to grave

donna — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:29:09 +0000

By now we all know that the web is not a publication — that it’s a living, evolving thing. But a lot of content I see still appears to be ‘published’ once and then left alone.

This talk is about what happens after content is published. We’ll talk about how to:

decide what to create in the first place (and what the best format is)
identify which content types need to be left alone, and which need to be looked after
revive existing content and give it a second wind
check your content is still working for its readers
put it to sleep when it is time
put a process in place so you can do this yourself and with distributed content creators

We’ll also discuss how this varies depending on your industry, size of site and type of content.

Organisation schemes for web content

donna — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 07:03:25 +0000

This is a preview for a virtual seminar I presented for UIE on organisation schemes for web content. It’s only about 5 minutes, and has slides and audio.

Designing for people

donna — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:11:22 +0000

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.