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.

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.”

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.

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.

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!

George Lakoff’s book ’Women, Fire and Dangerous Things’ is a fundamental work on categorization theory, explaining categorization from a linguistic and cognitive perspective. Many IA’s (myself included) have had a paradigm shifting moment on reading it.

But it is 583 pages long, weighs a kilo, and is a very, very hard read. Let’s take a short cut – let me do the hard work.

In this presentation, I’ll examine the fundamentals of Lakoff’s theories and those scholars from which his theories draw. I’ll explain prototype theory and basic level categories and will discuss classical categorisation theory and how it fails to describe the real world we live in.

More importantly, I’ll discuss how these relate to everyday IA – particularly how we can use basic level categories and prototype theory to create more intuitive structures. I’ll even explain how folksonomies/tagging are a natural outcome of the failure of classical categorisation theory.

There are 2 aspects to making IA work in a project – an understanding of the key principles of information architecture and a knowledge of activities to put them into practice. This presentation will examine the “how to’s” of information architecture. We’ll look at how to take a content inventory, analyse content, conduct card sorting, analyse user research, choose the right structure, create an information architecture and test it. These activities drive an informed design process so you can be confident in your decisions and communicate them to other people.

This half-day workshop provides participants with practical skills in one of the most mysterious and difficult aspects of design – taking the leap from research to a first conceptual design.

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.

There is a creative step that occurs between research activities and a draft design. During this step we combine what we have learned during research with our professional experience to create a new design (such as an information architecture or a page layout). For newer designers, this step is a mystery – a magical process in which research goes in and a design emerges. In attempting to break it down to make the process more approachable, it sometimes appears that particular activities (for example a card sort) lead directly to design outputs (an information architecture). In practice, this is not the case – a wide range of activities provide input for each element of the design.In this presentation, I will show a number of completed site designs that I have been involved in during the past year. For each, I will ‘deconstruct’ each design – pull it apart to show how various inputs (such as research, activities, politics, guidelines, previous experiences) informed the design. The presentation will highlight that each design element is informed by more than one input; and that each input contributes to more than one part of the design. It will also show how important it is to undertake a range of research activities and not rely on just one or two inputs.