This presentation was about information architecture is, and how it has changed from how it is described in most IA books.
Category: Information architecture
Donna Spencer: Information Architecture Educator and Author – Episode 112
In this episode with Donna Spencer, an independent design consultant, we talk about presenting your work, how to encourage people to give you concrete feedback, how to better approach meetings, and some tips on presentation delivery.
A Lens A Day #2 – Serendipity – Donna Spencer
In this episode with Donna Spencer, an independent design consultant, we talk about presenting your work, how to encourage people to give you concrete feedback, how to better approach meetings, and some tips on presentation delivery.
How to design navigation for large and small screens
I recently completed a set of instructional videos for Balsamiq for a free course called How to design navigation for large and small screens. The set of 8 videos cover: horizontal and vertical menu bars, tabs, dropdowns, buttons, mega-menus, links, carousels, cards,...
Free book: A practical guide to information architecture
With my distributor decommissioning my book with no notice, I am in the position where I need to scramble to figure out how to keep the book available. Until then, you may have it for free (PDF version only): Free book: A practical guide to information architecture
UX radio: Where did IA go?
In this episode, we talk to Donna Spencer to answer the question, “Where did IA (Information Architecture) go?” We talk about defining IA, is IA still relevant, the importance of understanding and representing the abstraction layer, and how to present design. Donna is...
Keynote: Where did the IA go?
Keynote presentation for the Italian IA Summit, December 2020: https://architecta.it/summit/
Brave UX: An interview with Donna Spencer
How can we present our work more effectively? Why is it important to think critically about categories? And how does a lack of diversity lead to poor design decisions? Donna Spencer sheds light on those questions (and many more) in this fun yet serious dive into UX,...
Jumping into the world of Information Architecture: This is HCD
Podcast description: I am delighted to welcome Melbournian, Donna Spencer, a name that should be familiar to many Information Architects around the world. Donna has over 20-years experience, and has lived and breathed the full lifecycle and has seen strategic design...
Best of…information architecture
(note - this is a work in progress) Content modelling In government, content modelling always needs content design, Angus Gordon, Gather Content Your company's next top model: Your ontology, Ahren Lehnert, Synaptica Knowledge graphs Knowledge graphs - 10 week course...
Card sorting Q&A video (World IA Day Dallas)
This video was taken during World IA Day, where I got up early, video-called to Dallas Texas and chatted with the group - they'd just finished running a card sort and had some great questions.
Information Architecture Expert Panel – Part One
I recently spoke with Boxes and Arrows ahead of World IA Day on the topic of IA, where it is now and where it is going; as did many IA professionals. Here is the first of three articles that came out of that conversation:...
Card sorting for WIAD Dallas
I talked to Jen Blatz, ahead of World IA Day Dallas, where I got up very early to chat to folks about card sorting.
A re-introduction to information architecture
This half-day workshop is a (re)introduction to information architecture. It is for people who haven’t done information architecture work for a while; and people with experience in UX who feel like they have a gap in their IA skill set. As a more advanced workshop,...
The ultimate IA reading list
Within the UX industry, there are myriad terms and concepts you’ll need to understand in order to get your job done. One of the most common you’ll come across is information architecture (IA). What is it? How do you find it? How do you research it? And how do you...
A re-introduction to information architecture
This half day workshop is a (re)introduction to information architecture. It is for people who haven’t done information architecture work for a while; and people with experience in user experience work who feel like they have a...
Reintroduction to Information Architecture with Donna Spencer
Podcast description: We get a reintroduction to information architecture with Donna Spencer. Donna shares with us some of the methods and tools she teaches as part of her workshops as well as look at some of the challenges that information projects can throw at you....
Introduction to information architecture
From categorisation to content modelling, this four hour workshop will cover the fundamentals of information architecture. Using lots of real world examples, you will leave with an understanding of both the theory, along with the...
Lumping, splitting; us and them: How not to be evil with categories
As embodied humans we spend an incredible amount of brain power categorising everything we come into contact with - it's our way of dealing with huge amounts of detail. As designers, we take this into our work - using categories to make shortcuts and help get our...
Classification, cognition and the future of UX work
Come and learn about how categories, concepts and language work in our brains. An understanding of this is fundamentally important in any UX work that involves categorising, grouping and describing ideas with language. It’s only...
Introduction to information architecture: The workshop
From categorisation to content modelling, this four hour workshop will cover the fundamentals of information architecture. Using lots of real world examples, you will leave with an understanding of both the theory, along with the...
Introduction to information architecture
This full day workshop is the ideal introduction to information architecture. Suitable for brand newbies, to those with some IA or UX experience, it covers core concepts and practices that are fundamental to any kind of...
A UX Picnic with Donna Spencer: The FAQ of information architecture
As an information architect, Donna Spencer often gets asks a million and one questions about what she does and how she does it. Through the years, some of the same questions kept popping up over and over again, and they’re what...
Advanced card sorting: What do you need to know?
I recently completed a video for Optimal Workshop, outlining the basics of card sorting. I covered: what a card sort is and why you'd run it how to choose the right method choosing cards setting up the activity getting ready for analysis basic analysis Now it's time...
Intro to information architecture
This full day workshop is the ideal introduction to information architecture. Suitable for brand newbies, to those with some IA or UX experience, it covers core concepts and practices that are fundamental to any kind of...
Card sorting basics (video)
IA keynote
Keynote presentation, World IA Day Singapore.
Information architecture: Just the essentials
Cover the essential aspects of Information Architecture and how classification and categorization work in our brain and why it matters.
The FAQ of IA
In this presentation, Donna will talk about the questions that she's been asked over and over again in her 15 years of information architecture work. And she won’t only talk about the questions...she'll answer them too! Information architecture work is full of...
Search behaviours for government services
Donna recently undertook a crazy task – analysing 13,000 inward search terms to key government websites – just to see if there was anything interesting in the way people look for government services and information. Join her to learn what she found.
Intro to information architecture
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...
How to Conduct A Content Audit
If you’re working on any kind of redesign project involving a large amount of content, such as that of a website, intranet or mobile site, one of the first tasks you’ll need to perform is a content audit. I say need, not want—a content audit isn’t something you’re...
Intro to information architecture
This was a half day introduction to IA workshop, held at EuroIA in Brussels, Belgium.
How to Test an Information Architecture
So, you’re over the main hump of your Information Architecture (IA) design process. You’re happy with the IA you’ve come up with, it fits your content, and should work well for the users. Before you continue, it’s a great...
The materials of design
There are a wide range of design disciplines, all with surprising similarity in how they are practiced. But with such similarity, why is it almost impossible for us to move from one to another - why can't a digital designer move to architecture or a print designer to...
Renewing your information architecture for the real world
The information architecture of a website, intranet or application is not a static thing. Additions and changes to content and features put pressure on the information architecture. Changes in user needs and expectations also can...
Navigating large sites on small screens
This presentation will explore the navigation challenge for large sites being used on small screens. It will go back to first principles and look at the purpose of various navigation types then explore ways of achieving the same goal via a small space.
IA workshop at IA Summit 2013
I just found out that I'll be teaching my 'Intro to IA' workshop at the 2013 Information Architecture Summit. I've been teaching this workshop for a very long time now (maybe 12 years…) and at the IA Summit since 2005. So this...
How to test an information architecture
Learn when & why to test, how to set up online and offline testing, how to run the test, how to interpret the outcomes and figure out what to do with what you learned. Find out more at UX Wellington Meetup.
Information architecture: Theory and practice
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...
Introduction to information architecture
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.
Information architecture 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).
Information architecture
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...
Information architecture
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...
Information architecture
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...
Information architecture
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...
Information seeking behaviours: And how to design for them
When people use websites and intranets they are doing more than just ‘finding’ information. They may be looking for something they know about or exploring something brand new; filtering through large volumes then comparing results; getting an overview of a topic or...
Organisation schemes for web content
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.
How I Draft an Information Architecture
When I teach information architecture, the most common questions aren’t about the principles, but about the process. Just how do you decide on a particular method, how do you choose categories, how do you know what you’ve come up with is right? As a teacher...
Designing for people
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...
Information architecture: Theory & practice
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...
Information architecture: Just the essentials
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...
Information architecture: Theory & practice
This full day workshop will provide you with a thorough overview and understanding of information architecture theory & practice. It will cover a range of IA issues, including an understanding of how it fits into a project, fundamental skills & knowledge required for information architecture work and current information architecture issues.
Design games for information architecture
Would you like your design team to collaborate better? Are you looking to gather more valuable insights from your focus groups and interviews? Design games are a fun, technology-neutral way of gathering design insights for your projects. In this presentation, I will...
Designing to delight the information seeker
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...
Information architecture essentials: Best practices for organizing your site’s content
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...
Four Essential Skills for Information Architects: An Interview with Donna Spencer
Jared M. Spool recently had the opportunity to talk with Donna about the specific skills that separate the best information architects from the rest. Here are the highlights of that conversation. Donna Spencer is a recognized expert in the area of...
Information architecture: Just the essentials
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...
Information Architecture: Just the Essentials
This half-day workshop will cover the essential aspects of Information Architecture. No filler, no fluff, just pure IA
What makes a great information architect (interview)
From the original article: This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Donna (Maurer) Spencer, a world-renowned information architect and owner of the freelance agency MaadMob, based in Canberra, Australia. For nearly 10 years, Donna has been a prominent player in...
Information Architecture: Just the Essentials
This half-day workshop will cover the essential aspects of IA. No filler, no fluff, just pure IA
Advanced IA – Principles & Practices
This full day workshop extends your understanding of information architecture. It will cover advanced principles and explore ways of being more effective at information architecture.
Information architecture: Theory & practice
This full day workshop will provide you with a thorough overview and understanding of information architecture theory & practice. It will cover a range of IA issues, including an understanding of how it fits into a project, fundamental skills & knowledge required for information architecture work and current information architecture issues.
Information architecture: Theory and practice
This IA Summit 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.
Wireframes for the Wicked
In this panel, three experienced designers will share their tried and true tips for making wireframes really work. We’ll talk about how to sketch a wireframe on the fly to demonstrate an idea and how to create a standalone wireframe deliverable; when to show a concept and when to describe nitty-gritty detail; how to make a narrative wireframe and how to make a specification wireframe
Information architecture: Just the essentials
This half-day workshop will cover the essential aspects of IA. No filler, no fluff, just pure IA.
Writing for the web
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
Information Architecture Essentials: Best Practices for Organizing Your Site’s Content
Is your web site chaos, completely without organization or structure? Do users get lost finding the content they’re looking for? Are you having difficulty deciding where to put hard-to-classify content?
Information architecture: Beyond the hierarchy
n 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.
Ethical issues and information architecture
This presentation examines 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
Information architecture: Theory and practice
This full day workshop will provide you with a thorough overview and understanding of information architecture theory & practice.
Information architecture: Theory and practice
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 information architecture issues, including an understanding of how it fits into a project, fundamental...
Information architecture and collaborative design
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.
Information architecture: Theory and practice
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.
Information architecture: Beyond the hierarchy
This presentation describes different structures available for information architecture. It examines hierarchies; database structures such as metadata-driven databases and faceted classifications; and emergent approaches such as organic structures and tagging. It examines good examples of each and what to consider for our own projects.
How to (un)organise just about anything
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
Lakoff’s Women, Fire & Dangerous Things – What every IA should know
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.
Introduction to IA
This half-day pre-conference workshop will provide participants with an introduction to information architecture. As a stand-alone workshop it provides a high level understanding of information architecture, outlining the fundamentals and some of the current...
Four modes of seeking information and how to design for them
This article examines four types of information-seeking behaviour, describes them and offers tips on how to design for them:
- known item
- exploratory
- don’t-know-what-you-need-to-know
- refinding
Taking a content inventory
(this article was originally published on my blog, in 2006. I've re-published it here as there are still a lot of links to it) Taking a content inventory I’ve spent much of the past 2 weeks working on a content inventory. As a technique, it is pretty straightforward...
Information architecture: Theory and practice
This half-day pre-conference tutorial will provide participants with a thorough overview and understanding of information architecture theory and practice. As a short tutorial it provides a high level understanding of information architecture, outlines the...
Information architecture: A how-to
This one-hour presentation covers all the ‘how to’s’ of information architecture: 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.
Information architecture: Beyond the hierarchy
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...
Introduction to IA
This half-day pre-conference workshop will provide participants with an introduction to information architecture. As a stand-alone workshop it provides a high level understanding of information architecture, outlining the fundamentals and some of the current information architecture issues and challenges.
Lakoff’s Women, Fire & Dangerous Things – What every IA should know
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...
Deconstructing design: How did we get from there to here
In this presentation, I showed a number of completed site designs that I had been involved in. For each ‘deconstructed’ each design – pulled it apart to show how various inputs (such as research, activities, politics, guidelines, previous experiences) informed the design. The presentation highlighted that each design element is informed by more than one input; and that each input contributed to more than one part of the design. It also showed how important it is to undertake a range of research activities and not rely on just one or two inputs.
User-centred redesign of the FaCS intranet
This article documents the usability and information architecture activities conducted as part of the intranet redesign for the Family and Community Services intranet. Published by Step Two Designs: User-centred redesign of the FaCS intranet
Card sorting – A definitive guide
Card sorting is a technique that many information architects (and related professionals.) use as an input to the structure of a site or product. This article provides a detailed description of the basic technique, with some focus on using the technique for more...
Introduction to IA
This half day workshop provides a great introduction to information architecture. You will learn the fundamental principles of information architecture, as well as practical techniques that can be used on a wide range of projects.
From research to design
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.
Escaping the organisation chart on your intranet
This article outlines practical ways to move from an intranet based on the organisation chart to one that is more intuitive and allows people to complete their tasks more easily. It does not describe a full intranet redesign process, but focuses on those issues that...
Card-based classification evaluation
Card-based classification evaluation is a technique for assessing the usability of a hierarchical classification or a set of categories.Originally published on Boxes and Arrows: Card-based classification evaluation