Workshop description

This two-day interactive workshop will provide a thorough overview and understanding about how to effectively use information architecture to make your intranet or website as effective as possible. It will cover a wide range of information architecture issues such as the following:

• What information architecture is and how it can facilitate user experience
• Analysing and sorting content
• Carrying out user research: surveys, focus groups and card sorting
• Classifying, sorting and labelling within your information system
• Using wireframes and site maps: the ‘bread and butter’ tools of IA
• Navigating, indexing and designing page layouts
• Effectively carrying out your IA project: tips, tools, techniques and processes

Dates

Sydney - 7-8 August

Register

More information and registration here: http://www.arkgroupaustralia.com.au/events-c046IAandCollaborativeDesign.htm

Workshop description

A hands-on workshop with user experience expert, Donna Maurer, and CSS
expert, Russ Weakley.

Over two full days you will build detailed websites layouts from the ground up - starting with page layout, navigation and form design; and ending with clean markup and elegant styling using XHTML/CSS.

Day 1: Planning and designing the user experience - Donna Maurer

On day one you will plan and design a website - focusing on the user experience: designing the navigation, page layout and forms.

You will:

• learn techniques to understand your users, and prepare user scenarios
• understand your content with content analysis methods
• create an effective and usable site structure (information architecture)
• design a range of navigation methods
• create page layouts for content, home, index and special pages
• design simple forms

For each step, Donna will outline the fundamentals and show examples from small and large website projects. But most of the time will be hands-on -you work on your own project, ask questions and discuss with the group.

Day 2: Building beautiful sites using CSS - Russ Weakley

On day two you will build your website from the ground up - starting with structural markup, adding accessible markup and then styling your layout using CSS.

You will learn:

• how to create well structured, accessible markup
• the basics of CSS including rule sets, selectors, shorthand rules, inheritance and the cascade.
• how to structure efficient CSS files
• how to create a full CSS layout from a flat graphic mockup
• how to deal with browser issues including specific browsers such as IE5,IE6 and IE7.
• how to create a resolution dependent layout
• how to create CSS for printing and hand held devices

Dates

Canberra - Monday 31 March and Tuesday 1 April

Melbourne - Thursday 3 April and Friday 4 April

Sydney - Monday 28 April and Tuesday 29 April

Brisbane - Thursday 1 May and Friday 2 May

Register

More information and registration here: http://maxdesign.com.au/workshop2008/

This full day workshop provides a thorough overview and understanding of information architecture theory & practice. It covers a wide range of information architecture issues, including an understanding of how it fits into a project, fundamental skills & knowledge required for information architecture work and current information architecture issues. It is theoretical and practical and allow you to immediately apply ideas to your projects.

This workshop covers:

• 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 & 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 is presented 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.

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

Workshop length

This workshop is best suited to a full day, but can be taught as a half day if needed.

Schedule

This workshop will next be taught at the User Interface 13 Conference (Cambridge, MA, October 2008).

This (and all) workshops can be taught in-house. Contact me for details.

Testimonials

Feedback from participants from the 2008 IA Summit:

• “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 & presentatuion. 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.”

It is going to take me a few weeks to get some case studies together - I have to figure out which of my projects to highlight, write compelling copy, get some testimonials and ask my lovely clients for approval.

Then you’ll really know how great I am

This workshop provides attendees with an understanding of user-centred design and improved interaction design skills via a combination of theory and engaging activities. Real world examples and practical activities are used to reinforce theory.

Attendees will work throughout the day on a group design project. After discussing user research principles, they will choose appropriate methods for their project, undertake some user research and prepare scenarios. We will discuss fundamental interaction design priniciples using examples and group critiques; and will discuss the value and practice of prototyping. Attendees will then design a detailed paper prototype of a small system.

Schedule

This workshop is not currently scheduled. I can present it at conferences and in-house.

This workshop provides attendees with a thorough understanding and practical experience in:

• translating offline content to high quality website content
• writing good website content
• general writing skills

Topics included in the workshop are:

• How reading on screen is different to reading on paper
• The writing process
• Structuring your writing - structures and techniques
• Making pages scannable
• Writing in plain English
• Editing your writing
• Use of PDFs
• Writing for accessibility

This workshop can be presented as a short module, half or full-day workshop.

Schedule

This workshop is not currently scheduled. I can present it at conferences and in-house.

It is easy to learn how to conduct user research, identify business goals, take content inventories, make paper prototypes and conduct usability tests. It is much harder to figure out what to do with the research you have collected, the personas you have created and the scenarios you have written. Experienced designers often just do it without knowing how. Methodologies abound, but many are overly complicated and involve a frightening amount of modelling and documentation.

In this workshop, I can help you learn how to tackle the design step by:

• Considering the social nature of design
• Identifying the key learnings from your research
• Developing personas and scenarios that provide real value for the project, not just for putting on the wall
• Identifying key content and functional requirements
• Focusing on the core structure or interaction style
• Identifying content elements required for an interface
• Modelling content relationships
• Using design sketches to brainstorm interface ideas
• Creating high-level and detailed interface sketches that put you on the right path

These approaches differ depending on whether you are designing a content-rich site (information architecture) or a functionally rich site (interaction design). The workshop will look at both, and will examine the similarities and differences.

Most importantly, this will be a practical and creative workshop. We’ll get out of our chairs, use coloured markers and paper, draw, talk about our work and share experiences.

Schedule

This workshop is not currently scheduled for the public. I can present it at conferences and in-house.

Have you ever spent time and effort organising content, and people still say they can’t find anything? Have you struggled to decide whether it would be best to organise by task, audience or subject? Have you wondered whether you should just follow the latest tagging trend and get users to do the work for you?

If so, this workshop is for you.

In this half-day worskhop we will learn all about organising content in a digital world. We’ll discuss:

• How does classification and categorisation work in our brain, and why does it matter
• How can you identify potential organisation methods for your content
• When do organisation schemes such as geography, task, audience and subject work best
• When to use and not to use tagging
• How to design an organisation scheme that suits your users.

This won’t be a dry, theoretical workshop. We’ll talk to each other, play some games and practice techniques.

You’ll go away with a better understanding of the fundamental principles of organisation and categorisation, a set of techniques to use on your next project and a detailed list of resources for follow-up reading.

Schedule

This workshop is not currently scheduled. I can present it at conferences and in-house.

For thousands of years humans have been organizing information in hierarchies - we start doing it early in life and continue through our careers. So it’s not surprising that it is our dominant method for organizing content for websites and intranets.

But there are alternatives, and they can be much more effective. In this presentation we’ll discuss when hierarchies are most useful and when an alternative approach is better. We’ll look at deliberate approaches such as metadata-driven databases and faceted classifications; and emergent approaches such as organic structures and tagging. We’ll examine good examples of each and learn what to consider for our own projects.

Information architecture affects people - there’s no doubt about that. And in any practice that affects people, a range of ethical issues come into play. Each and every decision we make can help or hurt many - our users, clients, peers and even our profession as a whole.

This presentation will examine some of the ethical issues that we face as information architects, including:

• The myriad of effects of our design decisions on users
• Working with clients and peers
• The consequences of creating categories and classifying objects
• What inclusive design really means
• Personal beliefs and their role in projects
• How can we design for sustainability

I’m not a philosopher, so this presentation will be very much from a practitioner’s perspective. It may even be funny!

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