IA Summit 2017: Full Schedule

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Pre-conference Workshops: Wednesday, March 22 & Thursday, March 23, 2017
Main Conference: Friday, March 24 - Sunday, March 26, 2017

7:30am PDT

Registration Opens

The registration desk will be open throughout the day to register attendees, answer questions, and provide assistance.

Wednesday March 22, 2017 7:30am - 7:45am PDT
Regency Foyer

8:30am PDT

The Visual Display of Information ($350)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $350. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:

WHY
We routinely create visual artifacts to make sense of complicated information. Think Gantt charts. Experience maps. Sticky notes on walls. Data visualizations. We create all kinds of visual models to organize our understanding. And in team settings, these models allow us to communicate and collaborate; maybe you’ve seen the power of someone distilling a really complex idea into a clear concept model, and wished you could bring the same clarity to your work. This workshop can make this dream a reality.

WHAT
For as long as we’ve organized things into stacks (“my pile, your pile”) or arranged things into some continuum (letterforms carved into a clay tablet, sorting kids by height), we’ve used the spatial arrangement of things to assign meaning. Whether we're aware of it or not, we're tapping into a powerful visual language to help us and others understand difficult concepts. But, what is this language we're using? And can it be taught?

In this workshop, Stephen P. Anderson will reveal the basic elements that make up every visual representation ever created. Much like there’s a grammar behind the written word, there’s is a similar grammar behind the visual display of information, that once understood enables you to create clear and concise visual representations of thought. Rather than fall back on the playbook of existing models, you can learn how to create your own visual models.

Best of all, this same approach can be extended into other kinds of external representations, such as creating custom data visualizations or designing novel UIs. And, as we move into a connected world, where information is distributed into the physical environments around us, we can prepare now by having a fundamental vocabulary to describe this spatial arrangement of information.

Together, we’ll explore a disciplined way to think about visual representations, exploring patterns of use and intentional ways to render meaning. Through a series of fun activities, we’ll explore:

• How to effectively choose the right visual encodings (color, shape, iconography, line thickness, transformation) to convey quantity, sequence, or category
• How to convey meaning through the use of arrangement, sequence, shape, boundaries, relationships and various attributes
• How to bring these skills together to create concept models and similar artifacts

Whether on the page, on a screen, or in the immediate space around us, understanding how to derive (and convey) meaning through the arrangement of information is and will become an essential skill for anyone designing information.

WHO
• UX Designers, and product managers
• Anyone who wants to get better at communicating ideas.

At the end of this workshop, you will…
• be able to translate thoughts and ideas into visual representations
• understand the language of visual thinking

Speakers

Stephen Anderson

Chief Experience Officer, BloomBoard

Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He created the Mental Notes card deck, a tool that's widely used by product teams to apply psychology to interaction design. He’s also of the author of the book Seductive... Read More →

Wednesday March 22, 2017 8:30am - 12:30pm PDT
Cypress

Fundamentals of IA

Audience All levels

8:30am PDT

Collaborative Information Architecture ($350)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $350. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
You’ve worked hard on the information architecture models you’ve created but haven’t been able to sell them to the client, or your co-workers. Maybe the conversation around the IA has broken down into an unhealthy debate over semantics. In another scenario, you are tasked with creating a controlled vocabulary for a large organization that has a silo mentality and a lot of legacy content. Where to begin?
These scenarios will sound familiar to most IA professionals.

In this workshop, Abby will share her techniques for getting an organization that may have different ideas about how to organize and name content to agree upon a controlled vocabulary.

Abby will share specific tools in the form of diagrams, beyond the ubiquitous sitemap and wireframe, which communicate complex ideas. And she’ll share techniques for practicing information architecture with clients collaboratively.

I want to focus on the soft skills that make someone good at IA. So the lessons here are really about leveling up in skill set. Including:

- Conflict Resolution in IA
- Selling IA to others in your organization
- Improving stakeholder interviews
- Facilitating Low Fidelity Conversation about language
- Visualizing language with simple pictures to get clarity

Speakers

Abby Covert

Information Architect, Abby the IA

Abby Covert is an independent information architect. She specializes in delivering a collaborative information architecture process and teaching those that she works with along the way. She speaks and writes under the pseudonym Abby the IA, focusing on sharing information architecture... Read More →

Wednesday March 22, 2017 8:30am - 12:30pm PDT
Stanley

Strategy & Collaboration

Audience Advanced

9:00am PDT

Introduction to Information Architecture ($650)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $650. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
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 information architecture work.

The theories and concepts the workshop will cover:

- categorisation theory and how categories work in our brains
- types of classification and when they work or don't
- content modelling
- IA design patterns

The work practices it will include are:

- taking an inventory of your content
- analysing content and learning how different types of content relate to each other
- understanding users and incorporating user research findings in the IA
- card sorting
- actually drafting an information architecture
- testing an IA and labelling

This workshop is technology-neutral. The concepts are applicable to large screen, small screen and everything in between. They aren't just about websites, but anything that involves content, categorisation, labelling and structure.

Takeaways:
Super-practical work practices and experiences to take right back to work

Speakers

Donna Spencer

Maadmob

As a user experience consultant, Donna designs websites, web applications and mobile apps. She has worked with a wide range of client types, including government, telecommunications, insurance, retail, not-for-profit, higher education and many more. In a UX career of over 18 years... Read More →

Wednesday March 22, 2017 9:00am - 5:00pm PDT
Tennyson

Fundamentals of IA

Audience Beginner

9:00am PDT

Mapping the Domain: The 5th Academics’ and Practitioners’ Roundtable ($200)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $200. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Over the past several years it’s become increasingly clear that the IA community needs to move beyond being a practice and figure out how to become a discipline.

To explore what this entails, and begin to craft a way forward, we’ve convened a series of Academics’ and Practitioners’ roundtables at IA Summits past. In the 5th year of this community event we will draw together highlights, discoveries, and open questions. Participants will present, discuss, learn, and work collaboratively to generate a capstone that reflects the corpus of work done to date. As a core exercise we will map the different and complementary roles and artifacts that practice and academia bring to the “discipline-ification” of information architecture.

This Domain Map is intended to provide a practical, comprehensible chart of a complex territory. Using processes to include a summary briefing of past Academics’ and Practitioners’ roundtables, lightning talks from roundtable participants, and structured exercises, the group will diagram a crosswalk between the landscape of applied work and the theories and models that are the realm of academics and scientists. The strawman Domain Map will capture the participants’ perspectives on these areas, show connections and gaps, and spark deeper conversations within and outside of the roundtable setting, which will help reveal opportunities to bring information architecture forward as it matures into a discipline.

The purpose of the roundtable is to build channels for dialogue and mutual influence between practitioners and academics – between the work of making and the world of ontology for information architecture.

Learn more about the Academics' and Practitioners' Roundtable at http://reframe-ia.org/index.html.

Speakers

Keith Instone

Consultant, Toledo Region Experience Planning

Bern Irizarry

Andrea Resmini

Jönköping University

Andrea Resmini is a senior lecturer at Jönköping University, in Jönköping, Sweden. Architect, information architect, compulsive reader, pensive writer, videogamer, piano player, Andrea is the author of Pervasive Information Architecture and Reframing Information Architecture... Read More →

Sarah Rice

Information Architect, Seneb Consulting

Sarah A. Rice is an information architect with almost two decades of strategy and consulting experience, designing and executing excellent user experiences for a long list of promonent companies.

Stacy Surla

Fellow, ICF

Wednesday March 22, 2017 9:00am - 5:00pm PDT
Plaza A

Future of IA

Audience Advanced

9:00am PDT

Deep Text: Using Text Analytics to Create New Ways to Structure and Access Information ($650)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $650. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
Deep Text is a multidimensional approach to text analytics that opens up new ways of organizing and utilizing information. So called unstructured text is actually poly-structured text and Deep Text can discover and create structures that range from traditional taxonomic structures to dynamic clusters of co-occurring terms to views of dynamically defined “sections” of documents. It is an approach that can open up new opportunities for information architecture by providing a rich set of tools.

This workshop will take attendees through the entire process of creating a text analytics platform from how to select the right software for your organization, what resources you will need, how to make the business case, how to develop taxonomies and categorization catalogs or adapt existing information structure resources.

It will also cover a basic iterative development process and a range of types of applications that can be built on this platform. The applications include search, eDiscovery, Business Intelligence, Social Media and Sentiment Analysis and such advanced applications such as Fraud Detection (documents with lies tend to have different word patterns) and distinguishing customers likely to cancel from those merely threatening. We will include multiple case studies of the most exciting new applications and approaches.

Participants will get two major sets of hands-on exercises: developing categorization rules with both pre-selected content and content that they bring to the workshop. The second set of exercises will consist of mapping the techniques covered in the workshop to potential applications that reflect their current needs.

This workshop is based on the recently published book, Deep Text: Using Text Analytics to Overcome Information Overload, Get Real Business Value from Social Media, and Add Big(ger) Text to Big Data

Takeaways:

Deep understanding of full range of text analytics software, development, and applications - what works and what does not work.

How text analytics can enrich information architecture and how information architecture can lead to new types of applications that utilize text.

Speakers

Tom Reamy

Founder, KAPS Group

Tom Reamy is the founder of KAPS Group, a group of text analytics and taxonomy consultants and has 20 years of experience in information projects of various kinds. He has published a number of articles in a variety of journals, and is a frequent speaker at knowledge management... Read More →

Wednesday March 22, 2017 9:00am - 5:00pm PDT
Dover

Taxonomy & Organizing Technologies

Audience All levels

9:00am PDT

Do No Harm: People First Design for Humane Products ($650)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $650. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
Our lives are increasingly shaped by the technology we use, but people are not a first priority in product design. Other concerns take precedence, and we end up with designs that will yield the highest conversion rate, or interactions that will provide the best usage data. We even have design dark patterns that exploit people for other gains, like the unclosable advertisement, the pre-checked “sign me up” option, the camouflaged unsubscribe link.

Somewhere along the way we stopped prioritizing people in product design. We need to reset, and make caring for people our first principle.

The evolution of technology and design best practices has seen several attempts to reset first principles. Content First is a response to products that are rich in features but lacking in substance. Mobile First is a way to ensure essential content and features work well on mobile devices. In Design for Real Life, Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher encourage us to focus on edge cases rather than avoid them, and by doing so, build better products.

With People First, we look at what might be considered “edge cases” in standard product design. Instead of moving more singular needs and contexts to the margins of our thinking, planning, and decision-making, we focus on them to learn what is most important for everyone. In this way, we move people front-and-center in our design process, gathering insights and understanding that will help us produce products that are powerful and humane.

In this workshop we will present a People First design methodology. Drawing on insights from our work as accessibility consultants, we will teach how to use inclusive user research and accessible user experience to focus product design on people.

What will attendees gain?
• An appreciation of the benefits of focusing on people in product design
• An understanding of the potential harm that can be inflicted by design that does not prioritize people
• The ability to differentiate reasoning based on “People First” thinking
• Practical experience with a range of people-focused research methods
• Practice turning research insights into design decisions that benefit everyone

Wednesday March 22, 2017 9:00am - 5:00pm PDT
Room 3

Techniques & Methods

Audience Intermediate

12:30pm PDT

Lunch for Full Day Workshops

Lunch break for workshops.

Full-day workshops will have lunch served in the hotel as part of the workshop.

Half-day workshops will break for lunch. Workshop participants are free to get lunch in the hotel or at a nearby restaurant.

Local volunteers have complied a list of restaurants and cafés:
Places Near the Hotel: http://www.iasummit.org/venue/
Restaurants: http://www.iasummit.org/venue/food-in-vancouver/
Bars & Cafés: http://www.iasummit.org/venue/drinks-in-vancouver/

Wednesday March 22, 2017 12:30pm - 1:30pm PDT
Turner

Socials & Networking

1:30pm PDT

Interface Patterns for Filtering Information ($350)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $350. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
Search often reveals too much information. Filtering is a way to rapidly narrow a large information space. It is also a way to reveal important patterns, focus on specific details, and reduce visual noise. This workshop will teach you how design a filtering interface, including choosing filter controls, mapping metadata to these controls, patterns for representing filtered information, and a framework for approaching filtering problems on desktop, mobile, and other technologies.

Takeaways:
A framework for approaching information problems in terms of filtering. A structured process for mapping information to filter controls. A conceptual model for all major elements of a filtering interface: controls, substrate, and objects. A vocabulary of interactions people use to understand information. How interaction can be used to tackle understanding problems with existing technology, as well as how it might be applied to emerging technology such as augmented reality.

Speakers

Karl Fast

Director of Information Architecture, Normative

Karl Fast is the Director of Information Architecture at Normative, a software design studio in Toronto. He is formerly a professor of user experience design at Kent State University. His work focuses on designing for a world with abundant information. Karl is a founding member of... Read More →

Wednesday March 22, 2017 1:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
Stanley

Fundamentals of IA

Audience Intermediate

7:30am PDT

Registration Opens

The registration desk will be open throughout the day to register attendees, answer questions, and provide assistance.

Thursday March 23, 2017 7:30am - 7:45am PDT
Regency Foyer

8:30am PDT

From Strategy to Structure (and Back Again) ($350)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $350. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
The products and services you design should address the needs of your organization — and of society as a whole. As a designer of information environments, you need to think beyond the user interface to the underlying structures that bring order and coherence to the artifacts people interact with.

This hands-on workshop re-casts the fundamentals of information architecture in light of our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. We will explore the space that exists between purpose and form, using tools that can help you make better design decisions.

The workshop is structured in three parts divided by two brief hands-on exercises. However, this is not a rigid structure: The workshop is set up to be a conversation focused the attendees' interests. There are no slides; instead, I will lead participants through a series of ideas and concepts by drawing diagrams live using an iPad Pro. This format is more engaging and interactive than traditional slides.

Takeaways:
- You'll learn how to bridge that strategy to semantic structures that inform coherent UIs
- You'll learn how pace layering can help you create information environments that better stand the test of time
- You'll get a refresher on the essentials of conceptual modeling

Speakers

Jorge Arango

Partner, Futuredraft

Jorge Arango is an information architect with over 20 years of experience designing digital products and services. He is a partner in Futuredraft, the experience design consultancy that solves complex problems using co-creation throughout the design process. He is based in the San... Read More →

Thursday March 23, 2017 8:30am - 12:30pm PDT
Plaza C

Strategy & Collaboration

Audience Intermediate

8:30am PDT

Designing and Building Taxonomies ($350)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $350. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
A good taxonomy is one that meets the needs of its users. A great taxonomy is one that also anticipates the future needs of its users and the long-term goals of the organization for which it is being designed. There are a lot of considerations that go into designing a successful taxonomy, such as the business goals of the organization, the needs of end users, the needs of internal stakeholders, the technical systems at play, government or financial compliance issues, budget cycles, marketing goals, and more! This is true for e-commerce, government, portal, and other information-rich projects.

This workshop will cover the basics of designing and building successful taxonomies. The content is based on hard-won lessons working with many different taxonomies and organizations.

This workshop will include:

What taxonomies are
A taxonomy taxonomy: An overview of the terms and concepts used in taxonomy and ontology design and building
Taxonomies in the wild: The roles that taxonomies play in real-life scenarios
Where to start and how to execute your taxonomy project: Gathering requirements, how to design your taxonomy, how to build your taxonomy, how to test and measure your taxonomy
The role of governance, training, and maintenance: How to plan for long-term success of the taxonomies.

Takeaways:
Participants will walk away with a rich understanding of taxonomies and the process for designing and building them. This will be a hands-on workshop which will allow participants to experience first hand many of the details that go into the whole process. At the end of this workshop, participants will be more than ready to attend the afternoon’s taxonomy workshop, More Than Words: Enterprise-Level Taxonomy and Content Architecture with Michele Jenkins and Stephanie Lemieux.

Speakers

Gary Carlson

Principal, Factor

Gary Carlson helps companies boost revenue, increase customer satisfaction, and improve efficiency through well-executed information and knowledge management initiatives. With over 20 years of experience as a taxonomist, consultant, and information architect, Gary collaborates closely... Read More →

Rachel Price

Information Architect, Factor

Rachel Price is an information architect and user researcher with a mission to unite the worlds of user experience, taxonomy, and content into one human experience universe. As a partner at Factor, she approaches taxonomy design and enterprise IA with a user researcher’s eye for... Read More →

Thursday March 23, 2017 8:30am - 12:30pm PDT
Plaza B

Taxonomy & Organizing Technologies

Audience All levels

8:30am PDT

Mapping Experiences: From Insight to Action ($350)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $350. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
Products and services are increasingly interconnected. Ecosystems are the new competitive advantage. The winners will be determined by how well their offerings fit with each other and how well they fit into people’s lives.

The use of systematic, visual representations exposes previously unseen opportunities for improvement and for growth. You’ve may have encountered some of the various approaches already in use – customer journey maps, service blueprints, experience maps, and more.

This workshop introduces the concept of “alignment diagrams,” a category of diagram that includes a range of visual tools to inform strategy. You’ll learn fundamental principles of mapping and have the chance to apply them in hands-on exercises.

Takeaways:
• Distinguish between different diagram types and select the most appropriate ones
• Understand how to visualize customer insight effectively
• Lead conversations about creating value and informing strategic decisions

Speakers

Jim Kalbach

Head of Customer Success, Mural.ly

Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in customer experience, design, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Success at MURAL, a leading digital whiteboard. Jim has worked with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, LexisNexis, and Citrix... Read More →

Thursday March 23, 2017 8:30am - 12:30pm PDT
Plaza A

Techniques & Methods

Audience Intermediate

9:00am PDT

Human-Centered Design and IA (Benefiting the Information Architecture Institute) ($650)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $650. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
Design thinking. Service design. UX design. These are all hot topics at the moment and in our workshop we’ll explore what they are and how they come together under the umbrella of Human-Centered Design (HCD). We’ll also explain how IA relates to all these forms of design, why it’s so important to them and provide hands-on practical exercises so you can discover the impact IA can make.

Part 1: Human-centered design

• A new hot topic, but why now?
• HCD: the theory and the practice
• HCD as a design philosophy (The common thread between design thinking, service design and UX)
• At-a-glance: Design thinking, Service design and UX design

Part 2: Complexity

• Systems and ecosystems
• Simplicity and complexity
• Indeterminacy

Part 3: HCD and IA

• IA at-a-glance: Bounded, cross-channel and poetic IA; IA as meaning-making
• Complexity and HCD: A role for IA in HCD
• How can IA help Design thinking, Service design and UX design?

Part 4: HCD ethics

• Recap: HCD…why now?
• Ontological ethics (the designer in the design)
• How can IA help: visibility, traceability, accountability, and sustainability

This workshop is brought to you by the Information Architecture Institute. All proceeds, after cost, from this workshop will go towards supporting the Information Architecture Institute. What you’ll get:

• A solid introduction to IA, HCD, Design thinking, Service design and UX design
• A strong conceptual framework for tackling complex problems
• Exposure to some of the leading thinking on IA
• An understanding of both why and how to design for people- and society-first
• Hands-on, practical experience
• …and a really fun day

Take aways:

• All presentations in .pdf format
• Further self-study reading lists
• Directions to free tools kits, techniques and theory
• Templates to assist with design research, strategy, crafting and critique

Speakers

Terence Fenn

Firma

Terence lectures undergraduate and post-graduate courses in HCD, Design Thinking and UX at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He has a Masters in Design Education and for his sins, a second one in Information Technology, and, over 15 years’ experience in tertiary design... Read More →

Jason Hobbs

Firma

Jason is the co-director of Firma, an HCD design consultancy based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He lectures at the University of Johannesburg and publishes his research through the same organization. He’s been practicing IA and design in many forms for the past 18 years and frequently... Read More →

Dan Klyn

Information Architect, The Understanding Group (TUG)

Dan Klyn is an information architect from the United States, and co-founder of The Understanding Group (TUG).

Thursday March 23, 2017 9:00am - 5:00pm PDT
Brighton

Human-Centered Design

Audience All levels

9:00am PDT

Design Teams Are a Design Exercise: How to Build, Inspire, and Keep Design Teams (Happy) ($650)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $650. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
We believe that bringing design attention to the context of design teams and design leadership is critical for the success and sustainability of our practice and industry. At a time when our ways of working, our design remit and materials change, we need to pay attention to supporting and growing our teams to successfully embrace these new challenges. As organisations continue to value the importance of design, more and more companies act on the need to establish a design team. These teams have specific needs to thrive in an organisation and to create value for the business and users as well as happy designers.

In this workshop, open to everybody, but aimed primarily at senior practitioners, team leaders, new managers and managers new to design, we will share our learnings and the techniques we have developed over the years.

The workshop is structured as a series of short lecture-type modules on:
- leadership styles
- building vs inheriting a team
- hiring
- culture and fit
- team structure
- motivation
- retention
- conflict resolution
- skills assessment
- skills development
- mentoring/coaching
- letting go (post exit-interview)

Modules will be interspersed with practical exercises, to reinforce the notions demonstrated — attendees will start collaborating from the get-go, with groups forming fictional organizations that will be the backbone of the exercises they will participate in.

Takeaways:
- Understand the traits of an effective design team
- Learn about different leadership styles and management strategies
- Learn how to hire, motivate and keep design teams happy
- Take-away methods to assess team members' skill sets and structure

Speakers

Martina Hodges-Schell

Associate Director, Pivotal Labs

Martina setup and leads the product design and product management practices at Pivotal Labs, London. She helps start-ups and enterprises establish more user-centred, lean and agile design practices and product innovation skills. In her practice she focuses on bringing together a balanced... Read More →

Alberta Soranzo

End-to-End Service Design Director, Lloyds Banking Group

Alberta is an incorrigible nomad — born and raised in Italy, she has lived in California and now works in London, as Director of End-to-End Service Design at Lloyds Banking Group. With her team of systems thinkers and service designers, she's looking at shaping the future of financial services and supporting meaningful financial outcomes. Alberta sketchnotes the meetings she attends (and there are many), is a resolute ice hockey player and cares deeply about... Read More →

Thursday March 23, 2017 9:00am - 5:00pm PDT
Kensington

Strategy & Collaboration

Audience Advanced

9:00am PDT

Participatory Service Design: Stop Designing for People and Start Designing with Them ($650)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $650. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:

When we design user experiences, it’s common to work directly with users during early user research and later to evaluate designs through usability testing. All too often, the design work in between– generating ideas and exploring solutions– is conducted in isolation from our users. In these cases, we lose the opportunity to discover the most valuable solutions, and more importantly, the ability to ensure that our users are truly empowered by our designs!

Participatory & service design methods bring users into the heart of the design process-- empowering them to be active participants in the creation of products, services, and experiences for themselves. When we move beyond the practice of designing for people and instead design with them, the outcomes are more innovative, human centered, and meaningful.

Participatory service design methods that we’ll cover in this workshop help designers:

Better understand our users’ unspoken needs, which may go uncovered by other forms of user research
Develop deeper empathy for our users and a richer understanding of their holistic experiences
Bring focus to the pain points that have the greatest impact and generate awareness for the opportunities that might otherwise go undiscovered
Generate a larger, more useful, and more innovative pool of potential solutions than a design team working alone
Reconcile users’ behaviors (what users say they do vs. what they actually do) and the most valuable opportunities (what users say they want vs. what they actually need)

In this workshop, participants will engage in hands activities to learn:

Core concepts in participatory design and service design - and how they intersect
How to use participatory service design methods, including hands-on opportunities to try out fundamental tools and exercises
How to choose activities, frame design prompts, and facilitate participatory service design activities with users to generate the best results
How to use the outputs of these activities to create actionable insights

Thursday March 23, 2017 9:00am - 5:00pm PDT
Room 5

Techniques & Methods

Audience All levels

9:00am PDT

Rapid Cross-Channel Prototyping ($650)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $650. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
In this one-day hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to rapidly prototype products and services as part of a complex cross-channel ecosystem.

Whether you work with websites, apps, wearables, or ambient devices, the workshop provides you with a system-wide, strategic perspective over the role of actors, tasks, channels, and touchpoints in an ecosystem, and introduces you to methods and techniques to quickly identify how to break down wicked problems and nonlinear set of interrelated activities into a cohesive and design-friendly process: how to map an ecosystem, how to elaborate a consistent information architecture, strategize a pervasive approach to serve as the foundation for successful experiences, and how to identify opportunities and challenges to be turned in design interventions.

This is an intermediate-to-advanced workshop that contains little exposition and lots of perspiration: you’ll sketch and diagram your way through a real-world case prepped up to challenge and inspire you, teach you how to reframe traditional design requirements for complex problems, work your way through ecosystems, and produce meaningful artifact-level deliverables.

Take-aways include: an understanding of cross-channel ecosystems and the centrality of actors; methods to quickly identify and map core tasks, touchpoints, seams and channels; a process for transforming system-level information architectures into context- or touchpoint-specific individual artifacts that deliver consistent user experiences. You will also learn how to collect and combine individual actor paths into a coherent ecosystem map, how to turn that map into a design space, and what is the role of channels in making your experiences resilient.

No computers will be harmed in the course of the session: bring your faithful sharpie, we’ll provide markers, paper, bluetack, and all the wall space we need to foster discussion and instigate joy.

Takeaways:
Understand the logic and nature of cross-channel ecosystems
Acquire an actor-centered view of experiences
Learn to identify and map core actors, their tasks and paths, touchpoints, and seams
Learn how to create and use channels for systemic insights
Transform system-level information architecture into context- and touchpoint-specific insights for better user experience

Speakers

Andrea Resmini

Jönköping University

Thursday March 23, 2017 9:00am - 5:00pm PDT
Lord Byron

Techniques & Methods

Audience Intermediate

12:30pm PDT

Lunch for Full Day Workshops

Thursday March 23, 2017 12:30pm - 1:30pm PDT
Turner

Socials & Networking

1:30pm PDT

Planning for Strategic Design (SOLD OUT)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $350. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
In response to a manager’s query about how to plan products, Alan Kay famously remarked “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” His answer invokes a paradox at the heart of design: we can’t know the future, yet it’s what we design for. If we hope to practice information architecture, content strategy, and user experience successfully in an era of rapid change, connected ecosystems, and disruptive innovation, we must get better at planning.

To start, we must let go of “the plan” and embrace a dynamic way of planning that’s social, tangible, agile, and reflective. We must engage our colleagues in business and technology to align use cases, prototypes, and roadmaps with culture, governance, and process. In order to design sustainable products, services, and experiences, we must also design the context.

In this workshop, we’ll mix presentation and conversation with “planning together” exercises that invite us all to share stories, solve problems, and invent better tools for strategic design.

Along the way, we’ll cover:

* The relationship between strategy, architecture, design, and planning.
* Why planning is central to information architecture and content strategy.
* How to integrate planning with Agile, Lean, and Design Thinking practices.
* Tools and methods for individuals, teams, and cross-functional collaborations.
* How to make a business case for planning and strategic design.

As we strive to make sense of self-driving cars, conversational interfaces, machine learning, and the Internet of Things, it’s never been more vital to think expansively about how we might organize the future. Fortunately, since planning is a skill, we can improve. That's the goal of this workshop: to get better at planning and strategic design by making planning visible.

Takeaways:
* The relationship between strategy, architecture, design, and planning.
* Why planning is central to information architecture and content strategy.
* How to integrate planning with Agile, Lean, and Design Thinking practices.
* Tools and methods for individuals, teams, and cross-functional collaborations.
* How to make a business case for planning and strategic design.
* Who (which roles and departments) should be involved in planning.
* How to get better at estimating cost, time, and risk.
* How to plan while simultaneously implementing.
* When you should be willing to change goals, objectives, and metrics.

Speakers

Peter Morville

President, Semantic Studios

Peter Morville is a pioneer of the fields of information architecture and user experience. His bestselling books include Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Intertwingled, Search Patterns, and Ambient Findability. He advises such clients as AT&T, Cisco, Harvard, IBM... Read More →

Kit Seeborg

Kit Seeborg is nationally recognized for her extensive work in digital media, communications, content production, publishing, and distribution. She guides companies and individuals from start to finish in content creation and distribution over multi-channel media platforms: video... Read More →

Thursday March 23, 2017 1:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
Plaza A

Strategy & Collaboration

Audience All levels

1:30pm PDT

More Than Words: Enterprise-level Taxonomy and Content Architecture ($350)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $350. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
Taxonomy is more than navigation labels or list of topics; it is a set of organizing principles that define how content is structured, delivered and measured. Too often, systems are designed in a vacuum, unaware of other sources of content and structures developed elsewhere in the organization, making it difficult to later harmonize content or gather analytics and insights from across the enterprise. As content and channels continue to sprawl, findability and consistency are no longer a nice-to-haves. From product data to digital assets, common structures are waiting to be discovered and exploited by the savvy information architect.

This workshop teaches taxonomy development ideas that consider them not as a standalone structures for a single website or system, but as part of a unified enterprise content architecture. Learn how to harmonize between the needs of data management, marketing, and end users in building vocabularies, as well as what to do when those needs don’t align.

The workshop will cover:

Quick recap of taxonomy fundamentals (for those not in the morning taxonomy workshop)
Different kinds of taxonomies in the enterprise (marketing vs. data)
Enterprise content strategy as the unifying layer for IA
Domain modeling
Enterprise taxonomy methodology
Taxonomy harmonization approaches

You’ll see concrete examples of how 3 different organizations – a greeting card company, a non-profit media company, and a consumer goods manufacturer -- harmonized taxonomy across a number of diverse systems that support multiple functions, from creative to reporting.

Takeaways
Participants will have a better understanding of:

The philosophy of enterprise content architecture
How to turn a siloed taxonomy project into an enterprise taxonomy project
The importance of respecting enterprise data standards in IA design for future interoperability & business intelligence
How & when to use domain models in design
Ways to harmonize different taxonomies together
How taxonomy can tie together content from multiple sources in content delivery

Note: This workshop assumes participants have a basic understanding of taxonomies. Though this is a standalone workshop, for those wanting a fuller education in basic taxonomy design principles we recommend also taking the "Designing & Building Taxonomies" morning workshop.

Speakers

Stephanie Lemieux

President, Dovecot Studio

Stephanie is the president of Dovecot Studio -- a boutique firm specializing in information architecture -- where she helps a wide variety of clients such as Nickelodeon, General Mills and the United Nations find happiness and good user experience through taxonomy. Stephanie has been... Read More →

Thursday March 23, 2017 1:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
Plaza B

Taxonomy & Organizing Technologies

Audience Beginner

1:30pm PDT

Web Analytics for IA and UX Professionals ($350)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $350. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
People responsible for the user experience, information architecture and design of websites increasingly need to find ways to incorporate qualitative data and analytics into their process alongside user research. The great thing is that in today's world even the smallest businesses have a wealth of information readily available to them but much of the information about analytics is intended for marketers and business owners, leaving designers to wonder what part of analytics applies to their work. If you know where to look, analytics tools can help you learn what your users are thinking and expecting from your website. In this four-hour workshop, you will learn what analytics tools to use, what reports to check and when, and how to use this information to improve the user experience of your websites and applications.

Takeaways:
-- Setup tracking code for key tools that can help you track and measure user behavior on websites and applications
-- Know what analytics tool exist, how these tools can be used, what types of information are available, and what questions various tools can help you answer
-- Understand how the tools can help in the areas where design and user experience overlap with development, marketing, product, and more.

Speakers

Matthew Edgar

Technical Marketing and Web Analytics Consultant, Elementive

Matthew Edgar is web consultant at Elementive (www.elementive.com). Since 2001, Matthew has helped hundreds of businesses and non-profits grow through a process of analyzing and improving their website and online presence. He is the author of "Elements of a Successful Website" published... Read More →

Thursday March 23, 2017 1:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
Plaza C

Techniques & Methods

Audience Intermediate

1:30pm PDT

Making Your Work More Human: An Empathetic Research Workshop ($350)

NOTE: This workshop has a FEE of $350. To attend, you must register for the workshop. You can do this when you register for the conference or at a later date.

Workshop Description:
We all want our designs to be more human, but how do you bring a user-centric approach to your IA work?

In this fun, interactive workshop, you’ll understand how to bring an empathetic approach to your projects.

You’ll acquire pragmatic, common-sense tools that anyone can use to learn more about their users and make their designs more human.

In this interactive workshop you will learn:

What is empathy and why it’s important;
A framework for understanding when and under what circumstances to conduct empathetic research and other types of research;
A set of simple tools that anyone can use to become more empathetic, regardless of your background;
Tips for shifting to user-centric thinking;
Structuring your research according to whether you have some budget, a lot of budget, or zero budget, as well as recruiting tips.

By the time the workshop is over, you’ll have conducted a mini research session that helps you gain empathy for others, plus an understanding of how this empathy can improve your designs.

You’ll leave with practical tools you can immediately use in your own work.

Speakers

Krispian Emert

Voracious reader, proud mom, music fanatic, and bass player -- I have many passions -- but above all, I absolutely love working in the field of user experience! I have been crafting user experiences since 1997. I've worked in award-winning agencies, and for some of the world’s... Read More →

Thursday March 23, 2017 1:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
Windsor

User Research

Audience All levels

5:30pm PDT

First-timers Orientation

A brief but informative session that will give you an overview of the IA Summit and offer some tips on making the most of the conference.

Volunteers

Bibiana Nunes

Sr Manger eCommerce, adidas Group

Thursday March 23, 2017 5:30pm - 6:00pm PDT
English Bay

Socials & Networking

6:00pm PDT

Opening Reception

The IA Summit's social calendar kicks off with a casual opening reception high atop the Hyatt Regency. Please join us to network with fellow conference attendees, reconnect with former colleagues and friends, and take in the spectacular view.

Thursday March 23, 2017 6:00pm - 8:00pm PDT
Stanley

Socials & Networking

8:00pm PDT

First-timers Dinners

* Advanced sign-up is required. *

If you are attending the IA Summit for the first time, we invite you to sign up for one of our first-timer dinners. Each dinner is hosted by two well-known members of the community to welcome you. The dinners are a great way to meet other first-timers and hear from some Summit veterans. We've selected a variety of local restaurants, so you're sure to find one to your taste within walking distance.

The reservations are made and all you have to do is cover your food and drinks. But space is limited, so sign up now! https://www.eventbrite.com/o/ia-summit-2017-12973150790

Volunteers

Bibiana Nunes

Sr Manger eCommerce, adidas Group

Thursday March 23, 2017 8:00pm - 10:00pm PDT
Vancouver Restaurants

Socials & Networking

7:30am PDT

Registration Opens

The registration desk will be open throughout the day to register attendees, answer questions, and provide assistance.

Friday March 24, 2017 7:30am - 7:45am PDT
Regency Foyer

8:45am PDT

Welcome to the 2017 IA Summit

Conference introduction and welcome by the IA Summit's three co-chairs.

Captioning provided by Mad*Pow.

Volunteers

Dave Cooksey

saturdave

Co-Chair of IAS17

Susan Mercer

Sr. Manager, Research & Usability, TripAdvisor

Susan has over 20 years of experience in UX, and has worked as a developer, designer, web producer, product manager, and now a user researcher. Until recently, she was a Principal User Researcher at Insulet Corporation, where she works with Type 1 diabetic patients to understand their... Read More →

Marianne Sweeny

Daedalus Information Systems

A deep passion for technology, accompanied by a complete ineptitude at programming, brought Marianne Sweeny to search engine optimization.

Friday March 24, 2017 8:45am - 9:00am PDT
Regency C/D

Plenary Session

9:00am PDT

Opening Keynote: Ranch Stories

What I’ve learned about UX Design from buying a farm.

Five years ago I sold my house in Silicon Valley and moved to an old farm deep in agricultural country. As a city boy, it was all new to me, but I was most surprised to discover how much the new lessons of farming paralleled the important lessons of interaction design. This talk will give you some useful insight into your job by presenting some remarkable insight into the farmer’s job.

Captioning provided by Mad*Pow.

Speakers

Alan Cooper

Co-founder, Cooper

Alan Cooper co-founded Cooper in 1992. He is widely known for his role in humanizing technology through his groundbreaking work in software design. He is also the author of the books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design (editions 1-4) and The Inmates Are Running the A... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 9:00am - 9:45am PDT
Regency C/D

Plenary Session

9:45am PDT

Résumé & Portfolio Review Booth (Sign up required)

This session limited is to 7 participants. You must sign up below to participate.

Would you like to get feedback on your resume and/or portfolio from an actual UX hiring manager or team leader / director? Sign up for a 1-on-1 session to get invaluable insight from someone who actually reviews UX resumes and portfolios for a living.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to get feedback in an environment without the “interviewing pressure.” Only a limited number of sessions are available so sign up quickly!

Sign Up Now: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e0c4dadaf2eaafd0-iasresumeportfoli

Sponsored by Telus.

Volunteers

Kyle Soucy

Founding Principal, Usable Interface, LLC

Kyle Soucy is the Founding Principal of Usable Interface, LLC (www.usableinterface.com), an independent UX consulting company specializing in user research and usability testing. Her industry diverse client list includes Comcast, Hewlett-Packard, Intuit Inc., McGraw-Hill, and Pfizer... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 9:45am - 10:15am PDT
Balmoral

Career Development

9:45am PDT

Morning Coffee

Join us for a morning break featuring coffee and tea plus savory morning snacks—the perfect time to socialize and network.

The registration desk, sponsor tables, jobs board, and portfolio review booth will all be open during the break.

Friday March 24, 2017 9:45am - 10:15am PDT
Regency Foyer

Socials & Networking

10:15am PDT

What's The Point of IA?

What’s the role of the IA in a world that’s seen Brexit, President Trump and an erosion of trust in facts and experts?

IA has always been focused on ‘meaning’ as well as the arrangement of parts to build systems. And meaning has a point of view. When an IA makes a choice we shape the choices available to our audiences. From the “tags” in our controlled vocabulary to the shape of our information architecture, we often decide what’s significant. We can control the visibility of concepts. We can write things in and out of existence. Whether our users are human or digital, we wield power and influence.

That sounds pretty heavy. I’ll lighten things up and make them more memorable with four jokes and a magical experiment.

I’ll share a practical framework for understanding where and how IAs can have an impact. I’ll talk about where and how human curation and information seeking fit in an organisation known worldwide for our impartiality and editorial quality. I’ll talk about the power of language to shape reality.

IA is an expression of values and a coercive activity - we create worlds and force users to adopt certain perspectives. We can empower users or nudge them to adopt new ways of seeing the world. But only if we’re effective. I’ll share how we’ve trying to make sure that information architects are useful.

How do you move IA out of theory or concepts into having the necessary and practical impact on the rest of the user experience it should? How do you design and build information architecture in a world of MVPs and larger, complex interconnected systems? What’s the point of information architecture?

This engaging and thought-provoking talk presents a practical model for evaluating ‘what’s most important’ for the IA and looks at the power we have and the responsibility we inherit because of it.

Speakers

Dan Ramsden

Creative Director for User Experience architecture, BBC

As Creative Director for UX architecture (UXA) at the BBC, Dan leads a team of IA specialists. He’s responsible for defining the professional practice of UXA at the BBC and ensuring that the organisation is creating information architecture that delivers the best possible experiences... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 10:15am - 11:00am PDT
Regency C

Core IA

10:15am PDT

AI for IA's: Machine Learning Demystified

What is machine learning? Is IA relevant in the age of AI? How can I take advantage of cognitive computing? Learn the basics of these concepts and the implications for your work in this session. The speaker will give examples of machine learning use and will discuss the challenges inherent in in AI.

Speakers

Carol Smith

Sr. Research Scientist, Human-Machine Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University SEI

Carol Smith has worked on improving interactions, and integrating ethics for humane experiences with artificially intelligent systems, autonomous vehicles, and other emerging technologies since 2015. She started her UX career over 20 years ago and now supports government and industry... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 10:15am - 11:00am PDT
Regency D

Humans & Machines

10:15am PDT

The State of UX: Industry Trends & Survey Results

What’s the most valuable UX method? What are the best UX tools? What techniques do teams use the most? This presentation covers those topics and more in fresh findings from research with UX practitioners from across the industry. You’ll learn something useful whether you’re a manager, a seasoned pro, a newcomer planning your next career move, or just want a few ideas about new skills to learn. Expect a few surprises and join the discussion.

Speakers

Lyle Kantrovich

Friday March 24, 2017 10:15am - 11:00am PDT
Regency E/F

Techniques & Methods

11:15am PDT

Intentionally Intensional Information Architecture

Information architects know all about categories—but how do categories
get made? How do we decide what to put in them? We have plenty of ways
to make sense of information messes, ways that would be largely
recognizable to thinkers from centuries ago. What methods exist which
are only feasible with the help of a computer? Moreover: why would we
want to use them?

Saving time and manual labour is nice and all, but not nearly as
interesting as an entirely new dimension of capability. That dimension
is intension—yes, with an 's'. Categorization is a form of
extension. Intension is categories turned inside out.

The problem with systems of categories—taxonomies, ontologies,
navigational structures and the like—is that they are often only
tenuously informed by the things they are meant to categorize. This
leads to information resources being shoved into categories which they
barely fit, or worse: the dreaded "Misc." category.

What if, instead, we could begin with an amorphous mass of content,
and then mine it, in bulk, for structure? What if, in successive
operations, we could attach structure to the content, and then
structure to the structure? What if we could then analyze that
structure, not only to show us how well our taxonomies fit, but also
show us ways of partitioning the content that we didn't even think of?

The purpose of this talk is to show you how you just might go about
doing that (hint: semantic web), and what the results are. We'll start
with a content scrape of a real website, and end with a new structure,
showcasing new possibilities for organizing, navigating, and
experiencing content.

Speakers

Dorian Taylor

Maker of toys and diversions

Friday March 24, 2017 11:15am - 12:00pm PDT
Regency C

Core IA

11:15am PDT

Intelligent Guides: Architecting Systems for Context-driven Interactions

Imagine an information system that can support pathways driven entirely by current context. Pathways that are directed by human actors, determined by the arrangement of data and the relationships between objects, and dynamically created at the moment of interaction. A system that creates meaning through the application of acquired knowledge. An intelligent guide.

How might we architect systems that supports this free-roaming? How do we think about transient information architectures and containers for experiences that are only defined in the moment?

Considering informations systems and theory, the worlds we create, inhabit and navigate, and a case study looking at commercial application, this session will explore our interactions within those systems, how we manage transience through data and information architectures and how we might effectively design those systems - to create experiences based on the relationship between context and content.

Speakers

Tim Caynes

Principal Designer, Foolproof

Friday March 24, 2017 11:15am - 12:00pm PDT
Regency D

Future of IA

11:15am PDT

The Future of Voice Design: How You Can Get Started

* This presentation was written up in an article on UX Booth. Check it out here: http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/the-future-of-voice-design/. *

Voice User Interfaces are on the rise. Consumer products like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa are proof that voice is a medium that will be important in our future. Knowing how to design well for this growing medium will be an integral part of the growth of products and applications that will shape the ways we communicate with our devices.

Many of you are already Content Strategists, User Experience Designers/Researchers, and Information Architects - your core design skills are incredibly important to the Voice User Interface design process, and in fact, make you well poised to enter this field as it grows. I’ll cover how designing for voice pulls on the same core skills as other types of UX and Interaction design, as well as key differences to consider and build skills in. After this talk, you can expect to leave with an understanding of what VUI design is, how your skills translate to it, how the VUI design process works, and what you can learn more about to enter the field and design VUIs yourself.

Speakers

Brooke Hawkins

Brooke Hawkins is a Voice User Interface Designer at Emmi, a healthcare technology company based in Chicago. Her work includes designing automated outbound systems to make it easier for patients to take action in their healthcare, like scheduling appointments, learning about their... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 11:15am - 12:00pm PDT
Regency E/F

Humans & Machines

12:00pm PDT

Lunch

Lunch break for all attendees.

A number of tables will have an assigned topic to foster conversation. Look for tabletop signs of the following topics:

First-timers
Independent Practitioners
Agency Practitioners
In-house Practitioners
UX / IA of One
Managers
UX / IA Educators
Mentoring
Diversity & Inclusion

* Note: If you reported a dietary restriction when registering, special meal tickets will be inside your badge. If not, please talk to one of the members of the organizing committee. *

Friday March 24, 2017 12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT
Plaza and Georgia Ballrooms

Socials & Networking

1:15pm PDT

Designing for the 100%

"Designing for everyone means designing for no-one".
"You can't design for more than 4 personas."
"You have to make choices who this is for."
And then I had to make websites for everyone who had an electricity or gas account.
Or ever got sick.
Or had a credit report. Now what?

After three runs on these crazy briefs, I'd like to share my strategies and experiences for what I call 'Designing for the 100%'. What is achievable, what is totally not, some other amazing examples of this out there, and what in the end really matters when taking this on.

Speakers

FJ van Wingerde

Specialist in UX, ShriekShriek LLC

Having started as a software developer of user interfaces, 20 years later I am a User Experience and Product designer, leader, and strategist. I have worked on sites and apps for telecommunications, healthcare, automotive, energy, and most recently in consumer finance. I still... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 1:15pm - 1:35pm PDT
Regency C

Human-Centered Design

1:15pm PDT

Teachers vs Robots: Information Architecture and Assistive Artificial Intelligence

Information workers face being replaced by artificial intelligence just as many types of workers face being replaced by robots. We are told that machines can work faster and better and cheaper than humans, and in some ways they already are: robots are writing simple articles for the Associated Press, for example. There is still time to make the case for humans, however, and information architects are uniquely positioned to lead in the development of ethical technologies that augment and empower us rather than replace us.

This session will illustrate the role information architects can play in advocating for humans by presenting a case study in the development of a learning technology. Writing teachers face a serious threat from machines capable of scanning student essays and giving automated feedback - machines that can seemingly replace them. The speaker will make a case for why these machines can’t effectively replace human teachers and demonstrate how he helped build an app with teachers that actually had the potential to help students improve. He’ll illustrate how information architecture guided that process from requirements gathering to deployment and how understanding teacher data needs made it easier to develop tools to augment their work. With machine assistance and well-designed displays, the app could provide teachers with analytics and insights about where they could make timely, precise, evidence-based interventions that would have the greatest impact for students.

From this case study, the speaker will offer some generalized principles for information architects that can help them study human knowledge work and guide the development of ethical machines to augment that work. Information architects are best qualified for understanding and describing the relationships between humans and information, and if we don’t work toward supporting and augmenting humans, it won’t be long before we’re working for - not with - our robots.

Speakers

Michael McLeod

VP, Design, Development and Support, Eli Review

My background is in education, with degrees in English and in teaching, but I traded a classroom of my own for a career in #edtech and UX that allows me to work with other teachers and design products with them and their students that have the potential to make a real difference... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 1:15pm - 1:35pm PDT
Regency D

Humans & Machines

1:15pm PDT

Scales and Practices of Usability Testing in the Newsroom

Working in the news cycle often leaves little time to design different iterations of story ideas, and even less time to test them with a readership audience. But as the author or designer, and as a media outlet which provides a public service like WNYC at New York Public Radio, there is a responsibility to know how a public audience might understand and engage with our stories. This is a presentation on the design methods used for testing comprehension and clarity of story visuals and interactive projects in the WNYC newsroom. Whether visualizing data that supports a story or building a new tool that will help people be more informed, getting feedback from those not familiar with the content displayed is crucial in understanding how to better our work. The presentation will walk through two scales of testing, the first being a rapid scale of daily news and the second as a larger scale news project. The two scales of projects will show how design research methods in observation, listening, and questioning may be utilized to conduct a usability test, as well as how to see patterns and summarize findings to iterate on visuals produced.

Speakers

Clarisa Diaz

Multimedia Reporter, Quartz

Clarisa Diaz is a multimedia reporter on the Quartz Things Team.

Friday March 24, 2017 1:15pm - 1:35pm PDT
Regency E/F

User Research

1:45pm PDT

Language Arts for the Lizard Brain: Vocabulary Design for the Predictably Irrational

Because we use all use language proficiently every day, we tend to assume we know how it works. Sometimes we’re even right! When designing communication systems for others, however, we frequently run into wild discrepancies between what we expect our users to understand – and what our users actually understand.

One culprit of this understanding gap is the set of assumptions our always-on, automatic cognition systems make about what we see, experience, and read. By understanding how these systems work – and what sometimes makes them work against us – we can learn to make smarter recommendations for user-facing design vocabularies that not only technically “work,” but that also help us better facilitate user, experience, and business goals for our clients.

This talk will draw on recent cognitive sciences research in perception and decision making to unravel the common ways the words we design sometimes work against us. Using examples from my own work and from the web at large, we’ll look at:

- the brain’s two modes of interrogating the world around us
- the role of context in the meaning we assign to words
- the salient thresholds at which the message we’re trying to convey “clicks” … or crumbles
- ways you can leverage this knowledge to make better design decisions in the work you do

Speakers

Andy Fitzgerald

UX Design Consultant, independent

Andy Fitzgerald is an independent digital experience designer with applied expertise in design research, information architecture, interaction design, and prototyping. In his consulting experience with Deloitte Digital and frog design, he has tackled the problem of effective communication... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 1:45pm - 2:05pm PDT
Regency C

Core IA

1:45pm PDT

Make UX for Public Good: Designing for Citizens

The US elections and Brexit showed that many citizens voted in reaction to feeling that their government had failed them. There is a big gap of mistrust between citizens and government, and it gets wider as the private sector rapidly innovates while public services continue to be painful to interact with.

In the US, 94% of large government IT projects that cost more than $10 million are either delivered late, or delivered over budget, or just don’t work. And most of them affect those people who have much more urgent needs and a lot less of a voice than we do. Most of us are lucky that we don’t have to deal with social services, but for people who are poor, who have been in and out of the criminal justice system, whose kids are in public school, who are trying to apply for food stamps, who have to change three buses to get to work, government doesn’t work for them -- even more than we think it doesn’t work for us.

Now, perhaps more than ever, it’s critical for us to get involved, improve government services, and bridge the widening gulf between citizens and government. Civic technology is a relatively new field, but it needs you! Don’t languish your tremendous skills on yet another calendar app. Instead, learn how you can wield your existing skills for powerful social impact and create products for your fellow citizens.

Speakers

Sheba Najmi

Founder & Executive Director | Sr UX Strategist, Code for Pakistan | Exygy

Founder & ED, Code for Pakistan. Sr UX Strategist, Exygy. Fomerly at Yahoo! and Code for America. I create technology and programs for better citizen experiences.

Friday March 24, 2017 1:45pm - 2:05pm PDT
Regency E/F

Human-Centered Design

1:45pm PDT

How We Built a Bot to Answer All My Stupid Questions

Joining a company is an exciting, but overwhelming experience. No matter how good the onboarding experience, there will always be many, many questions left unanswered. Many of them might seem stupid to newcomers, and, although we say there are no stupid questions, they could still be afraid to ask it. In addition, if new employees are asking people on their team for answers, they might end up with incomplete or outdated information.

At Shopify, we have a lot of information locked away in archived recorded presentations. There's a lot of great information in them, but the amount of time to watch them all would mean no one would get any actual work done. And unfortunately not much metadata exists to make searching through them easy. I wanted to figure out a way to extract the goodness from inside these presentations and get them to Shopifolk new and old in an easy way.

Like many tech companies, we use Slack to communicate with one another. We've been playing around with Slackbots and I realized it'd be perfect if one of them could answer these stupid questions. Instead of making Shopifolk hunt for information, we could have the Slackbot bring it to them. The important part is that humans still play a role in determining keywords and potential queries, although as we collect more information we'll potentially start applying machine learning as well.

This presentation will share the experience of bringing the Slackbot to life, including, what went right and what went wrong, lessons learned that other companies could apply, and how we plan on improving it. Making sure all employees are aligned and up-to-date is key for many companies, and I hope the work we did will help others in a similar boat.

Speakers

Jaime Woo

Friday March 24, 2017 1:45pm - 2:05pm PDT
Regency D

Humans & Machines

2:15pm PDT

Privacy by Default: A Concept for Privacy in a World With The Internet of Things

The upcoming world with the internet of things holds a lot of promises and hopes. But we all know, that the internet is broken, already. And it won't get better, when it will be pervasive, omnipresent and truly always on in a myriad of devices.
This talk will show the main challenges, that we need to solve, if we don't want a dystopian future, but one of technological wonders.
The talk will end with the introduction to my concept for privacy in the internet of things, in which I offer a new way of how to interact with computers and other humans. This concept is also a counter-proposal to the usual information privacy or post-privacy debates.

Speakers

Lutz Schmitt

Head of Consulting Unit Interaction, nexum AG

I'm a studied Designer and a self-proclaimed professional dilletante. Let's talk about IA, IoT, invisible design, responsibility, joy, privacy, community, love and changing the world. Of course, we could talk about politics, Europe, Germany and Nazis, but then you pay for the dr... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 2:15pm - 3:00pm PDT
Regency D

Humans & Machines

2:15pm PDT

Taming the Enterprise: Redesigning the Culture of Enterprise Software

Enterprise software is an incredibly massive, increasingly complex beast of a system. There are things enterprise software has historically done very well, particularly on the data side. Storing, tracking, and linking massive amounts of information and transactional data are the bread and butter of these systems. Development teams have spent decades focused on those tasks, and customers have invested millions in the systems.

However, the UX of most enterprise solutions sucks, and now customer expectations are quickly rising. Creating experiences people enjoy, that they want to use over and over again, is hard enough. Creating those experiences in applications they use to be productive in their daily work is even harder. Doing that across multiple technical frameworks, for all kinds of markets, across the expanse of business processes, sometimes feels impossible. Add in all the baggage of a company built by acquisitions and it IS impossible—you have to tackle the internal experience and culture first.

Join me for an exploration of the messes, the frustrations, the disasters, and the many, many mistakes of our team of misfit UX heroes. We’ll discuss all the great best practices that simply didn’t work, all the innovative ideas that completely flopped, the WTF moments, and how we finally turned the user-centered design process in on ourselves in an attempt to slay some dragons and finally tame the enterprise.

Speakers

Karen VanHouten

Senior Principal UX Fellow, Infor

Over a career of almost 20 years in enterprise software, I have had the unique opportunity to make a massive number of mistakes and participate in some epic failures. Luckily, at some point I started to learn from them. I look forward to sharing how to not only recover from mistakes... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 2:15pm - 3:00pm PDT
Regency C

Techniques & Methods

2:15pm PDT

How Do You Make the Good Great? A Case Study on Redesigning the University of Michigan Medical School Website

After a major overhaul three years ago, the University of Michigan Medical School’s flagship website for prospective students was getting glowing feedback. Great news, right? But … now what? What comes after “good”?

This talk presents a case study of how we dug in to a new round of user research to deepen our understanding of the application journey of prospective medical students and present the next iteration of an already successful site.

With the journalist’s question of “what did you know, when?” we mapped the information-seeking behavior of prospective students, and learned how the lens of time could give us new insights into how to organize and present information to users.

This session will cover: how we developed user research questions to align with business goals; how we translated research findings into wireframes; and how we ultimately re-imagined the way information is structured on the site, emphasizing modularity and flexibility.

Speakers

Kelly Davenport

IT Project Manager, University of Michigan

I like to make things with words. I’ve been a print journalist, an information literacy librarian, and a college writing teacher. These days, I architect websites for the University of Michigan by putting users and content first, and by practicing deep listening to clients’ needs... Read More →

Jackie Wolf

Web Project Manager, University of Michigan

Jackie Wolf's interest in User Experience in international settings has led her to work for social enterprises in both Paraguay and India, where she has worked with organizations to develop innovative solutions to poverty and unemployment, as well as maternal child care in rural settings... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 2:15pm - 3:00pm PDT
Regency E/F

User Research

3:00pm PDT

Résumé & Portfolio Review Booth (Sign up required)

This session is limited to 8 participants. You must sign up below to participate.

Would you like to get feedback on your resume and/or portfolio from an actual UX hiring manager or team leader / director? Sign up for a 1-on-1 session to get invaluable insight from someone who actually reviews UX resumes and portfolios for a living.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to get feedback in an environment without the “interviewing pressure.” Only a limited number of sessions are available so sign up quickly!

Sign Up Now: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e0c4dadaf2eaafd0-iasresumeportfoli

Sponsored by Telus.

Volunteers

Kyle Soucy

Founding Principal, Usable Interface, LLC

Friday March 24, 2017 3:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
Balmoral

Career Development

3:00pm PDT

Afternoon Tea

Friday March 24, 2017 3:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
Regency Foyer

Socials & Networking

3:30pm PDT

How the World Health Organization Transformed a 20,000 Term Folksonomy into a Tightly Controlled Vocabulary

A giant folksonomy of 27 000 “keywords” had quietly amassed in the CMS used by the World Health Organization over the course of 15 years. With an imminent migration, it was time to transform this list into something useful, and to take control of how content was being published on the web.

How do you build the business case to tackle such a large list of terms? How do you actually whittle a list that size into something useful? And what insights into taxonomy development were learned on the way?

Learn how the team at WHO transformed a jungle of terms to a small collection of controlled lists, brought in governance, and transformed the way they manage content on the web in the process.

Speakers

Adam Ungstad

World Health Organization

Friday March 24, 2017 3:30pm - 4:15pm PDT
Regency C

Core IA

3:30pm PDT

The Futures We Want: Architecting Reality

We are in the midst of fundamental systemic changes to our society, culture, and civilization.

The signals are all around us: Algorithms, artificial intelligence, data, sensors, autonomous robots, and ubiquitous, immersive computing.

These rapidly advancing fields are already woven into the fabric of our daily lives, from how we work, live, and play, to government systems, and the administration of justice. The challenges they pose to information architects and systems designers present new opportunities, risks, and dangers.

Drawing upon the wisdom and warnings of Buckminster Fuller, Victor Papanek, Neil Postman, Mark Weiser, Marshall McLuhan, Al Jazari the Father of Robotics, and others, this session encourages and provokes us to question our fundamental approach to our work.

We will reflect upon the ideas, values and ethics that underpin the systems that we design, and the real and potential impact of our work as we forge our paths into new domains.

We face a choice: Will the future happen to us or will we create the futures we want?

Speakers

Kaleem Khan

Friday March 24, 2017 3:30pm - 4:15pm PDT
Regency D

Humans & Machines

3:30pm PDT

The Embedded Researcher: Integrating Research into the Design Process

Too often, design teams treat research as an artifact or as an item to check off a to-do list. They dutifully conduct and record interviews, then put the interviews on a shelf and forget about them instead of referring back to the recordings and findings as they design. This inevitably results in finished designs that partly or entirely fail to meet the needs that users expressed in their research sessions.

This oversight isn't usually intentional. It may result from a separation between the researcher and designer, or from a sprint structure that doesn't allow enough time for revisiting research findings, or from stakeholder pressure to discount user feedback. Whatever the reason, though, giving short shrift to the results of user research is a design failure waiting to happen.

In this talk, I'll discuss how Nasdaq's design team has been working to include research throughout the design process. I'll share and demo the tools we use to manage and share findings and suggest a team structure that will help ensure that research is carried through every phase of the design process.

Speakers

Amy Silvers

Friday March 24, 2017 3:30pm - 4:15pm PDT
Regency E/F

User Research

4:30pm PDT

Keynote: From Personal to Person-able

"Since computers are so smart, wouldn't it make more sense to teach computers about people, instead of teaching people about computers?" - Apple Macintosh advertising c.1984

Join Susan Kare, artist and designer, as she discusses the processes and people, past and present, that have influenced and inspired her work in keeping humans at the center of design.

Captioning provided by Mad*Pow.

Speakers

Susan Kare

Susan Kare Design

Susan Kare is an artist and graphic designer who is best known for creating many of the interface elements for the Apple Macintosh in the 1980’s. After graduating from New York University in 1978 with a Ph.D. in fine arts, she took a curatorial job at an art museum and quickly... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 4:30pm - 5:15pm PDT
Regency C/D

Plenary Session

5:15pm PDT

ASIS&T Presents... IA Summit Book Signing (featuring Marcia Bates)

ASIS&T and the IA Summit are proud to host the first-ever all-authors book signing event at the IA Summit with a special Meet & Greet with Marcia Bates.t

Attendees are invited to meet the Summit's impressive lineup of authors and have them sign their books in a casual, low-key environment.

If you are interested in ordering books for the book signing, Please pre-order your books from the ASIS&T bookstore by March 14th. If you want to have your books sent to the venue, please select the shipping option “Pick up in Vancouver (Free)” in the checkout process, Your books will be waiting for you at the book signing event at the Summit.

Only a limited number of copies will be available for purchase on-site. So pre-Order to avoid disappointment.

Speakers

Stephen Anderson

Chief Experience Officer, BloomBoard

Jorge Arango

Partner, Futuredraft

Marcia Bates

Marcia J. Bates is Professor Emerita in the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Information Studies. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she is a leading authority on information search, human-centered design of information... Read More →

Amber Case

Research Director, Calm Technology

Amber Case is the author of Calm Technology. She studies the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way cultures think, act, and understand their worlds.Named one of Inc. Magazine’s 30 under 30 and Fast Company’s Most... Read More →

Elizabeth Churchill

Director of User Experience, Google

Dr. Elizabeth Churchill is a Director of User Experience at Google. Elizabeth’s field of study is Human Computer Interaction, and her current focus is on the design and development of connected devices and of developer tools for device ecosystems. Elizabeth has built research... Read More →

Alan Cooper

Co-founder, Cooper

Abby Covert

Information Architect, Abby the IA

Andrew Hinton

Senior Experience Architect, State Farm

Andrew Hinton is the author of “Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture.” In his day job he works as Senior Digital Experience Architect at State Farm’s UX Center of Excellence in Atlanta, and previously served as a senior consultant at The... Read More →

Martina Hodges-Schell

Associate Director, Pivotal Labs

Jim Kalbach

Head of Customer Success, Mural.ly

Jon Kolko

Founder and Director, Austin Center for Design

Jon is the Founder and Director of Austin Center for Design, and Partner at Modernist Studio. He was previously the Vice President of Design at Blackboard, the largest educational software company in the world. He joined Blackboard with the acquisition of MyEdu, a startup focused... Read More →

Peter Morville

President, Semantic Studios

Whitney Quesenbery

Co-Director, Center for Civic Design

Whitney combines a fascination with people and an obsession to communicate clearly with her goal of bringing user research insights to designing products where people matter. She’s written two books on the subject – A Web for Everyone, Storytelling for User Experience... Read More →

Tom Reamy

Founder, KAPS Group

Andrea Resmini

Jönköping University

Thomas Wendt

Design Strategist and Independent Scholar, Thomas Wendt

Thomas Wendt is an independent design strategist, author, facilitator, activist, educator, and speaker based in New York City. He splits his time between client engagements and independent scholarship. His client work includes building sustainable human-centered design capabilities... Read More →

Friday March 24, 2017 5:15pm - 6:00pm PDT
Regency A/B

Socials & Networking

5:45pm PDT

Group Mentoring

* This session is limited to 40 participants. *

Need some good career advice? Who doesn’t? It’s invaluable to learn from the experiences and mistakes of someone who has been there before and can provide you with insights you might not have gained on your own. That’s why we’re offering TWO group mentoring sessions this year! Whether you’re senior-level or just starting your UX career, you’ll have the opportunity to receive great mentorship from your colleagues.

During each session, there will be 4-5 mentoring tables, each with a different focus. Choose from

New to UX/Career Changers
Consulting/freelancing
UX Career Development

Two mentors will be assigned to each table, but mentees are encouraged to also share their thoughts and experiences with the group so everyone can benefit and take part in peer mentorship. There’s only room for 5-8 mentees per table and it’s on a first-come, first-serve basis, so please show up on time to get mentored!

Volunteers

Kyle Soucy

Founding Principal, Usable Interface, LLC

Friday March 24, 2017 5:45pm - 6:30pm PDT
English Bay

Career Development

6:00pm PDT

Happy Hour & Poster Night

Following Friday afternoon's book signing, attendees are invited to browse the Poster Night exhibits and chat with their creators during a happy hour high atop the Hyatt Regency.

Posters are exhibits that visually communicate a complex idea or concept. Exhibits often include a graphic poster describing an idea, technique, case study, or research. The presenters' imagination are the only limits.

Happy Hour & Poster Night sponsored by Amazon Web Services.

Volunteers

Abby Covert

Information Architect, Abby the IA

Friday March 24, 2017 6:00pm - 8:00pm PDT
34th Floor

Poster Session

9:00pm PDT

Acoustic Jam

If you like playing music and meeting new people, then the IA Summit Acoustic Jam is just for you.

Bring your acoustic instrument of choice to Vancouver, or just sing along! Want to lead a song or two? Be prepared to teach other chords and lyrics. Don't worry if you haven't tried something like this before—everyone’s welcome, including non-musicians. We're all in this together!

Volunteers

Andrea Resmini

Jönköping University

Friday March 24, 2017 9:00pm - 11:00pm PDT
Regency E

Socials & Networking

7:00am PDT

Polar Bear Fun Run 5K

Start your Saturday off right by raising your heart rate with friends and colleagues. Local volunteers have created a 5K morning run through Vancouver just for the IA Summit.

The run will start from the hotel main lobby and will be held come rain or shine.

Volunteers

Peter Morville

President, Semantic Studios

Saturday March 25, 2017 7:00am - 8:00am PDT
Meet in Main Lobby

Socials & Networking

7:15am PDT

Polar Bear Yoga

Limited Capacity filling up

* This session is limited to 50 participants. *

Please join Polar Bear author, Jorge Arango, for an early morning yoga session designed to focus your mind and spirit. The session will be led by a local certified yoga instructor.

Participants will receive complimentary yoga mats. And a light breakfast will be served.

Sponsored by Futuredraft.

Volunteers

Jorge Arango

Partner, Futuredraft

Saturday March 25, 2017 7:15am - 8:15am PDT
Georgia A

Socials & Networking

8:00am PDT

Registration Opens

The registration desk will be open throughout the day to register attendees, answer questions, and provide assistance.

Saturday March 25, 2017 8:00am - 8:15am PDT
Regency Foyer

9:00am PDT

Keynote: People in an AI Mindset

Human beings have long dreamt of mechanical beings with reflective consciousness. Dreams moved closer to reality moved after World War II, with significant advances in computing power and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), defined by pioneer John McCarthy as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines”.

In this talk, following the theme of the summit–Designing for Humans–I will focus on the nature of “human” and “humanity”, and consider the different conceptions of those terms in the evolving agenda of contemporary AI by reference to two sister areas of investigation: augmented intelligence” (also called “intelligence amplification”), and “ambient intelligence”. I will reflect on examples from my own work, and consider the potential impact on information architecture as a discipline and field of expertise.

Captioning provided by Mad*Pow.

Speakers

Elizabeth Churchill

Director of User Experience, Google

Saturday March 25, 2017 9:00am - 9:45am PDT
Regency C/D

Plenary Session

9:45am PDT

Résumé & Portfolio Review Booth (Sign up required)

This session is limited to 7 participants. You must sign up below to participate.

Would you like to get feedback on your resume and/or portfolio from an actual UX hiring manager or team leader / director? Sign up for a 1-on-1 session to get invaluable insight from someone who actually reviews UX resumes and portfolios for a living.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to get feedback in an environment without the “interviewing pressure.” Only a limited number of sessions are available so sign up quickly!

Sign Up Now: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e0c4dadaf2eaafd0-iasresumeportfoli

Sponsored by Telus.

Volunteers

Kyle Soucy

Founding Principal, Usable Interface, LLC

Saturday March 25, 2017 9:45am - 10:15am PDT
Balmoral

Career Development

9:45am PDT

Morning Coffee

Join us for a morning break featuring coffee and tea plus savory morning snacks—the perfect time to socialize and network.

The registration desk, sponsor tables, jobs board, and portfolio review booth will all be open during the break.

Saturday March 25, 2017 9:45am - 10:15am PDT
Regency Foyer

Socials & Networking

10:15am PDT

Designing for Values-based Information Seeking

This session discusses our journey to discover values-based information seeking behavior. We use health care decision-making as the primary example, and identify a set of key design principles for enabling discovery and implementation of values-based user experiences.
Taxonomy Strategies spent almost a year developing a taxonomy to support consumers in making better health care decisions. From an information science perspective, this was an information seeking problem. From a health care perspective, this was a quality of care problem. But research shows that consumers are more interested in patient narratives than quality of care measures. In our project we reviewed query logs from a patient referral and consumer health information websites; we interviewed subject matter experts inside and outside of the government; and we conducted ad hoc interviews with people encountered in our research including health care professionals such as medical social workers, and friends and loved ones to elicit stories related to the health care decisions they help others make, or that they make themselves.
At the end of the project we delivered and validated a consumer-oriented health care taxonomy, but in our project post-mortem we realized that there was something intrinsically missing from the planned website content and design. Life events-based decision-making is made on criteria that are different from what policy makers focus on. For example, policy makers are concerned about delivering good outcomes in the most cost-effective way, while consumers are concerned about affordability—both criteria are related to cost but they are framed very differently. Worse, while people will watch a dozen videos when they are choosing a bicycle bell, following a diagnosis of stage 1 breast cancer they are typically handed one or two referrals to specialists and rarely consult more before getting radiation therapy.

Speakers

Vivian Bliss

Joseph Busch

Principal, Taxonomy Strategies

Susan Golden

Saturday March 25, 2017 10:15am - 11:00am PDT
Regency C

Core IA

10:15am PDT

Decentering Design

Human-centricity is a fundamental assumption of contemporary commercial design. And for good reason: if one is expected to pay (monetarily or otherwise) for a product or service, it should meet a previously unmet or under-met need.

However, the ease with which we—as ego-centric, “rational” beings—conflate lasting human needs with shortsighted, market-driven human wants will only lead us deeper into unsustainable futures. My central thesis for this presentation is that human-centricity promotes an anthropocentric point of view that ultimately leads to a proliferation of status quo capitalist design, unsustainability, and a false sense of politically neutral design.

I argue that while human-centered design is generally a progressive step, it fails to account for (eco)systemic, ethical, moral, and sustainability issues that are integral to design but are often ignored in commercial settings. The very idea of “centricity” forecloses on issues outside that center.

"Human-centered" is quickly and ironically becoming a euphemism for "market-centered."

Put simply, humans need, want, and desire terrible things—from war to cigarettes to factory farms, we can trace back every cultural atrocity to market-driven human wants. So instead of human-centricity, perhaps we should be questioning whether design needs a center at all. Could de-centering design result in more sustainable, system-level design decisions?

Speakers

Thomas Wendt

Design Strategist and Independent Scholar, Thomas Wendt

Saturday March 25, 2017 10:15am - 11:00am PDT
Regency D

Human-Centered Design

10:15am PDT

Getting From Barrier-free to Delightful

Getting from barrier-free to delightful
or
Why can’t we make it easier to be accessible?

Why can’t we aim for great user experiences that are also accessible? Creating accessible technology has to go beyond minimal compliance with standards that meets the law but may not be usable.

We need a bigger goal: creating delight for everyone. We’ll start by exploring what makes a delightful experience and how a good balance small pleasures and anticipated needs supports accessible UX in both big and small ways. Like any UX, this concern for users has to be part of every design decision.

But we also need to think about what it takes to make this happen. It means incorporating a wider range of people into user research and usability testing, and making accessibility a core requirement, not an afterthought. But most of all, it takes tools that are designed to support accessibility. We’ll look at some of the progress… and some of the failures that hold us back.

Hopefully, you will leave inspired to be an accessibility superhero and delight everyone who uses your products.

Speakers

Whitney Quesenbery

Co-Director, Center for Civic Design

Saturday March 25, 2017 10:15am - 11:00am PDT
Regency E/F

Human-Centered Design

11:15am PDT

A Taxonomist, a Software Engineer, and a UX Researcher Walk Into a Bar: Bridging AI and User Experience Methods at Etsy

Etsy is a marketplace where people around the world connect, both online and offline, to make, sell and buy unique goods. Etsy is also a tech company that invests in the craft of coding and data-driven product development as a strategic priority. Etsy has employed AI and machine learning to tackle personalization, recommendations, image understanding, item similarity, search relevance, spelling correction, and many other tasks. We’ll talk through several examples of how Etsy leverages data, where it’s excelled, and where this hammer hasn’t quite hit the nail on the head.

We will be asking ourselves hard questions, recognizing the limitations of decisions driven purely by big data:
- Who are we satisfying? Our customers or our mathematical models?
- Are those models even an accurate reflection of the outcomes we want?
- In a dual marketplace, where complex changes depend on interactions between both sides of the market, can one metric or measure of success tell the full story?
- How do we consider the impact our models are having on our users?
- Are we even addressing real human needs and motivations in the first place?
- How do we inform and enrich AI with expert created & applied taxonomy & metadata?

Speakers

Jenny Benevento

Manager, Taxonomy, Etsy

"A misanthrope who teetered on the edge of buffoonery but never quite fell in, an egotist blind to his own failings, a charming drunk; and a man who hated children, dogs, and women, unless they were the wrong sort of women." Actually, that's WC Fields, but, it's pretty close to... Read More →

Giovanni Fernandez-Kincade

Staff Software Engineer, Etsy

Gio has been working with data, architecting systems, and leading teams of engineers for over a decade. At Etsy he’s a Staff Software Engineer leading the Search Ranking Team. He's focused on Search from the ground up: infrastructure, ranking and machine-learned relevance, diversity... Read More →

Jill Fruchter

Staff Researcher, Etsy

Saturday March 25, 2017 11:15am - 12:00pm PDT
Regency C

Humans & Machines

11:15am PDT

ASIS&T Presents... Can We Create ‘Social’ Machines?

Artificial Intelligence is accelerating at an unprecedented speed, and as such is poised to play an incredibly greater role in our lives over the next few years. Deep neural networks currently achieve state-of-the-art performance on a very wide range of tasks, from speech recognition and machine translation to image detection and visual understanding. With these advances in the background, we are now able to pay more attention to the difficult questions of creating more socially and psychologically sophisticated machines. In this talk, I discuss some of the relevant issues and introduce some of our recent work focused at creating ‘social’ machines.

Speakers

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

University of British Columbia

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed is an is an Assistant Professor of Information Science in the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (iSchool), UBC. Before UBC, Dr. Abdul-Mageed was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University (2015-2016... Read More →

Saturday March 25, 2017 11:15am - 12:00pm PDT
Regency D

Humans & Machines

11:15am PDT

Ethics & AI: Designing for Health

What do we, as designers, strategists, thinkers, think of putting vulnerable moments of human experience - going to the hospital, getting an X-Ray - in the hands of a computer? In a world of increasingly more powerful technology, designers need to think of not just how technology can help, but how it might harm, and how to prevent that. With great cognitive computing, comes great responsibility. In this roundtable experience, we (and that means you, too) will discuss: Opening a dialogue of how bioethical principles might be applied to everyday design practice within healthcare Reviewing examples of: * Psychotherapy & AI * The complications of using common interaction patterns in healthcare * Clinical decision making & AI * Adapting existing design tools to hopefully, prevent long term unintended ethical consequences Please join and lend your voice to this discussion of Ethics+Design+Health+AI. Be a fully participating member using sli.do (http://sli.do / #2375) and of course, your lovely voice (not everything should be done by a machine).

Speakers

Amy Chenault

Design Lead, BD

Astrid Chow

Senior UX Design and Research, Product Lead, IBM Watson Health

Carol Smith

Sr. Research Scientist, Human-Machine Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University SEI

Joel Wu

Senior Fellow, University of Minnesota

Ethics&AI DesigningForHealth pdf

Saturday March 25, 2017 11:15am - 12:00pm PDT
Regency E/F

Humans & Machines

12:00pm PDT

Lunch

Lunch break for all attendees.

A number of tables will have an assigned topic to foster conversation. Look for tabletop signs of the following topics:

First-timers
Enterprise IA
Sketchnoting
Taxonomy
Search / SEO
Agile
AI and IA
Ethics and Technology
Human-centered Design
Machine Learning

* Note: If you reported a dietary restriction when registering, special meal tickets will be inside your badge. If not, please talk to one of the members of the organizing committee. *

Saturday March 25, 2017 12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT
Plaza and Georgia Ballrooms

Socials & Networking

12:15pm PDT

Group Mentoring

New to UX/Career Changers
Consulting/freelancing
UX Career Development

Volunteers

Kyle Soucy

Founding Principal, Usable Interface, LLC

Saturday March 25, 2017 12:15pm - 1:00pm PDT
Georgia A

Career Development

1:00pm PDT

Résumé & Portfolio Review Booth (Sign up required)

This session is limited to 3 participants. You must sign up below to participate.

Would you like to get feedback on your resume and/or portfolio from an actual UX hiring manager or team leader / director? Sign up for a 1-on-1 session to get invaluable insight from someone who actually reviews UX resumes and portfolios for a living.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to get feedback in an environment without the “interviewing pressure.” Only a limited number of sessions are available so sign up quickly!

Sign Up Now: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e0c4dadaf2eaafd0-iasresumeportfoli

Sponsored by Telus.

Volunteers

Kyle Soucy

Founding Principal, Usable Interface, LLC

Saturday March 25, 2017 1:00pm - 1:15pm PDT
Balmoral

Career Development

1:15pm PDT

Structured Data For The Digital Community

As search continues to dominate how users find information, its value as a tool for navigating your website cannot be denied. This means, depending on the website, at least half of your visitors do not start their journey on a website's home page. Rather, the lion's share of these visitors came on site from either a search engine or through a social media link. If we're not considering how our data serves visitors looking for us from these venues, we have not prepared ourselves for the full audience of people who want our content and services.

When I attended IA Summit in 2016, I spoke with dozens of attendees, and was very surprised by how few were aware of the many types of metadata and structured data available to create a superior and more informed experience for web browsers. This data is endorsed and used by search engines and social media sites, and is intended not to bring in more traffic, but in improving the experience of people, thereby helping the right, relevant people find what they're looking for.

My presentation will explain how an IA can use properly formatted schema, structured data, and metadata -- both on- and off-site, to help the people who want or need your content. IA Summit 2016 was fantastic, and I'd like to give back to the community by sharing information from my unique and different knowledge set, where it is valuable and relevant to the IA community.

Speakers

Jacques Bouchard

Dragon360

Saturday March 25, 2017 1:15pm - 2:00pm PDT
Regency C

Core IA

1:15pm PDT

How to Design a Government Website for Kids

At first glance, the phrases “federal website” and “designed for kids” seem diametrically opposed. After all, how could one of the world’s most complicated bureaucracies ever hope to communicate with children? But that’s exactly what the Every Kid in a Park team did. In only a handful of months, a small team of designers designed and launched a coherent, compelling government website— and they did it all at a fourth-grade reading level. From testing to approvals, this talk speaks frankly about challenges faced (and solutions uncovered) throughout the creation of everykidinapark.gov.

Speakers

Emileigh Barnes

Content Designer, 18F

Emileigh Barnes is a content lead at 18F, a digital consultancy within the U.S. government. An advocate of plain language and the Oxford comma, Emileigh headed the content strategy for everykidinapark.gov and beta.fec.gov. She's published in academic journals, literary journals... Read More →

Saturday March 25, 2017 1:15pm - 2:00pm PDT
Regency E/F

Human-Centered Design

1:15pm PDT

Project Do Good: co-designing with community to improve health

In this talk I illustrate how designers are using co-design and community level data collection and analysis to expand our health system’s understanding of “health” beyond the traditional boundaries of hospital walls. I will illustrate these learnings with several case studies from our institutional and personal community volunteer projects. This work will build the case for bringing together multi-sector stakeholders and explore how we can collaboratively design with data for hope, purpose, and the social determinants of health to address the root causes of recurring public health problems.

Speakers

Olga Elizarova

Behavior Change Director, Mad*Pow

Olga is a dentist, behavior change analyst, designer and entrepreneur. So, if you need to understand the behaviors or motivations of particular individuals, or you need a cavity filled, don’t worry, Olga can do either. After obtaining public health degree at Brown University, she... Read More →

Saturday March 25, 2017 1:15pm - 2:00pm PDT
Regency D

Techniques & Methods

2:15pm PDT

ASIS&T Presents... Indigitization: Supporting the Digitization, Preservation, and Management of Indigenous Community Knowledge

Diverse Indigenous cultures thrived in British Columbia until assailed by mechanisms of colonization. One element of Indigenous resilience was embedding precious fragments of Community knowledge in magnetic media. These media are increasingly inaccessible due to the deterioration of their physical format.

Funding programs to digitize analog media often come with inappropriate accessibility requirements and taxing reporting. ll-suited "best practices” concerning information management serve as an extra barrier.

The panelists in this session share an awareness that existing information practices are firmly rooted in Western knowledge systems that are not always appropriate when dealing with Indigenous traditional knowledge. This session will add depth and nuance to issues surrounding the digitization of material related to Indigenous community knowledge and provide examples of ways to do this work while challenging institutional norms.

Moderators

Lisa Nathan

University British Columbia

Dr. Lisa Nathan, Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the First Nations Curriculum Concentration (FNCC) at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool. Lisa and graduate students in the FNCC have worked with Indigitization in a variety of roles.

Speakers

Sarah Dupont (she/her)

Head Librarian, Xwi7xwa Library, University of British Columbia

Sarah Dupont is the Head Librarian of the X̱wi7x̱wa Library at The University of British Columbia (UBC), which is located on the traditional, unceded territory of the Musqueam Indigenous people. Sarah’s family is Métis and settler-Canadian. Her leadership role as Head of Xwi7xwa... Read More →

Alissa Cherry

University of British Columbia

Alissa Cherry, Research Manager at the Audrey & Harry Hawthorn Library & Archives at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Alissa is a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists and holds an MLIS from UBC. Prior to joining MOA in 2014, Alissa... Read More →

Gerry Lawson

University of British Columbia

Gerry Lawson, member of the Heiltsuk First Nation, is the Coordinator for the Oral History and Language Lab, at the UBC Museum of Anthropology and the technology lead for the Indigitization Program.

Saturday March 25, 2017 2:15pm - 3:00pm PDT
Regency D

Human-Centered Design

2:15pm PDT

Unintuitive and Insecure: Fixing the Failures of Authentication UX

“Which username did I use?” “Do they want my email address or my nickname?” “Which password did I use?” “What was my favorite vegetable when I created this account?”

Nothing wrecks a great user experience like a login form. Our password rules make it hard to remember what we’ve used, and stupid security questions lock us out of our accounts. And none of these security gymnastics actually prevent our personal information from leaking into the world. (In fact, we often inadvertently make it easier.) If it’s not usable, it’s not secure.

Unusable authentication systems are a bellwether of poor end-to-end experience. Once you’ve frustrated a user with their account creation or session authentication, it’s extremely hard to win them back. Security isn’t sexy, but when we get it right, we reduce risk and increase user satisfaction. In this entertaining presentation, Jared will explain how to make authentication design a top priority in your experience architecture. He’ll show you where the real risks are and why you shouldn't trust others to handle your design’s security elegantly.

Jared will walk you through:

How to best protect your users without making them frustrated.
How Amazon reduces fraud and makes money with a multi-state security model.
How to keep the Paranoids at bay without degrading the user experience.

Speakers

Jared M. Spool

Founder/CEO, Center Centre - UIE

Jared Spool founded the research company UIE and also founded the UX Design school Center Centre.

Saturday March 25, 2017 2:15pm - 3:00pm PDT
Regency E/F

Human-Centered Design

2:15pm PDT

Taxonomic Irony or: What I Think about When I Think about Taxonomies (Including a Meta-Taxonomy)

When I talk to Information Architects about taxonomies it often seems that we're not talking about the same thing(s)--which, given the goal of vocabulary control, is pretty ironic.

It turns out that organizing pages on a website for navigation and organizing hundreds of thousands of pieces of content for discovery are deeply related but extraordinarily different activities; this suggests that different demands (e.g., construction and design strategies) are required for each.

Increasingly, though, IAs are required/assumed to have competency across the various types of taxonomies, including those (until recently) primarily in the purview of library and information science.

In this high-level talk I suggest that there are, broadly speaking, three types of taxonomies:

-Taxonomies for Website Navigation tend to be small, user-centric, and fairly shallow;

-Taxonomies for E-commerce tend to be larger, feature polyhierarchy and synonymy, and tend towards enabling filtering and recursive search (perhaps thesauri or ontologies);

-Taxonomies to Organize Large Volumes of Content tend to be large-to-enormous in scope, not necessarily organized for browsing, and constructed with an eye towards automatic text categorization (almost certainly thesauri and maybe ontologies);

... each of which come with different strategies for construction, implementation, and user interaction.

Naturally, there is some overlap between categories (otherwise what fun would it be?).

Although conceptual in nature the talk includes practical take-aways for taxonomy construction.

Topics include top-down versus bottom-up approaches, user and/or SME input, options for structural types and term formation, using existing vocabularies to jump-start projects, and automatic text processing techniques.

Speakers

Bob Kasenchak

Director of Business Development, Access Innovations

Bob Kasenchak is the Director of Business Development at Access Innovations -- a boutique metadata shop specializing in bespoke taxonomy construction. Bob has led taxonomy development and other projects for JSTOR, McGraw-Hill, Wolters Kluwer, the American Society for Civil Engineering... Read More →

Saturday March 25, 2017 2:15pm - 3:00pm PDT
Regency C

Taxonomy & Organizing Technologies

3:00pm PDT

Résumé & Portfolio Review Booth (Sign up required)

Volunteers

Kyle Soucy

Founding Principal, Usable Interface, LLC

Saturday March 25, 2017 3:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
Balmoral

Career Development

3:00pm PDT

Afternoon Tea

Saturday March 25, 2017 3:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
Regency Foyer

Socials & Networking

3:30pm PDT

Diversity & Inclusion in Information: A Working Wikipedia Session

Wikipedia is the world's largest encyclopedia; however, fair representation of notable, but underrepresented people and topics remains a major concern. In response, the Wikimedia Foundation has supported many grassroots efforts including Women in Red, Art+Feminism, Wiki Loves Pride, Black Lunch Table and AfroCROWD, among others, to improve discovery of these topics.

Join Noreen Whysel for an overview of current efforts to diversify the information available on Wikipedia. Learn how we can use our Information Architecture skills and Wikimedia tools to improve the findability and representation of valuable, but missing information, and start contributing to the topics you care about. All are welcome.

Visit WikiProject:Information Architecture and join the movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Information_Architecture

Speakers

Noreen Whysel

Head of Validation Research, Me2B Alliance

I am a NYC based UX researcher, entrepreneur and mapping enthusiast. I currently direct operations for a startup, financial application helping people align big life decisions with personal values. I am also exploring the creation of a 9/11 geographic archive with a former DoITT Assistant... Read More →

Saturday March 25, 2017 3:30pm - 4:15pm PDT
Regency E/F

Community Working Session

3:30pm PDT

Designing for Diversity Panel

Ensuring diverse audiences feel included in our organizations, professional communities—even through use of our product—is both good design and good business. But for many practitioners, launching initiatives that authentically serve diverse audiences are often met with many roadblocks and have few rules to guide their efforts.

In this moderated discussion, we want to empower participants to begin—or continue—to create products and programs that place spirit of inclusion at its core. We've asked leaders with diverse perspectives from start-up, consulting, public sector, and non-profit spaces to share their stories on what Designing for Diversity means to them and how they've gone about creating cultures of inclusion in their organizations.

Speakers

Michael Antonio Hardy

Experience Designer, SapientNitro

Michael Hardy, a Supply Chain guru turned UX Designer at SapientNitro, believes that good experiences occur where lifestyle meets logistics. As a graduate student at Indiana University studying Human-Computer Interaction and Design, Michael was sponsored by the American Bar Association... Read More →

Marla Hunter

Head of People Operations, Tradesy

Marla Hunter is the Head of People Operations at Tradesy, Inc., a growing startup in Santa Monica, California. She has over 20 years of experience in management, leadership and organizational development across a wide variety of industries. Previously, Marla held the position of... Read More →

Adrienne Lai

Web UX and Strategy Librarian, University of Victoria Libraries

Adrienne Lai is a librarian, UX designer, project wrangler, and die-hard San Antonio Spurs basketball fan. She is currently the Web User Experience and Strategy Librarian at the University of Victoria. She has over eight years of UX experience in libraries and the public sector, and... Read More →

Elena Yugai

Founder, Olencha Consulting

Elena Yugai is a Co-Founder of Women in Tech (WinTech), a non-profit organization with a mission to inspire and empower women in the tech industry. For the last 8 years Elena worked with a variety of tech companies as a business and people operations consultant and most recently as... Read More →

Saturday March 25, 2017 3:30pm - 4:15pm PDT
Regency C/D

Human-Centered Design

4:30pm PDT

Keynote: Designing Calm Technology

Our world is made of information that competes for our attention. What is needed? What is not? We cannot interact with our everyday life in the same way we interact with a desktop computer. The terms Calm Computing and Calm Technology were coined in 1995 by PARC Researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in reaction to the increasing complexities that information technologies were creating. Calm technology describes a state of technological maturity where a user’s primary task is not computing, but being human. The idea behind Calm Technology is to have smarter people, not things. Technology shouldn’t require all of our attention, just some of it, and only when necessary.

How can our devices take advantage of location, proximity and haptics to help improve our lives instead of get in the way? How can designers can make apps “ambient” while respecting privacy and security? This talk will cover how to use principles of Calm Technology to design the next generation of connected devices. We’ll look at notification styles, compressing information into other senses, and designing for the least amount of cognitive overhead.

Captioning provided by Mad*Pow.

Speakers

Amber Case

Research Director, Calm Technology

Saturday March 25, 2017 4:30pm - 5:15pm PDT
Regency C/D

Plenary Session

5:30pm PDT

Résumé & Portfolio Review Booth (Sign up required)

This session is limited to 5 participants. You must sign up below to participate.

Would you like to get feedback on your resume and/or portfolio from an actual UX hiring manager or team leader / director? Sign up for a 1-on-1 session to get invaluable insight from someone who actually reviews UX resumes and portfolios for a living.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to get feedback in an environment without the “interviewing pressure.” Only a limited number of sessions are available so sign up quickly!

Sign Up Now: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e0c4dadaf2eaafd0-iasresumeportfoli

Sponsored by Telus.

Volunteers

Kyle Soucy

Founding Principal, Usable Interface, LLC

Saturday March 25, 2017 5:30pm - 6:15pm PDT
Balmoral

Career Development

6:00pm PDT

Happy Hour (hosted by the Information Architecture Institute)

Please join the Information Architecture Institute for an informal happy hour at Grain Tasting Bar where they will give away 81 beverage tickets for local craft beers and BC wines in honor of Richard Saul Wurman's 81st birthday.

Both IA Institute members and non-members are welcome.

Saturday March 25, 2017 6:00pm - 7:00pm PDT
Grain Tasting Bar (Lobby Level)

Socials & Networking

8:00pm PDT

Game Night

Come get your game on at Game Night!

Bring your own games or meet up with others to enjoy a casual evening with lots of fun with new acquiantences and old friends, playing everything from Apples to Apples to Zombies!!!

Volunteers

David Fiorito

Saturday March 25, 2017 8:00pm - Sunday March 26, 2017 12:00am PDT
Georgia A

Socials & Networking

8:30pm PDT

Karaoke

Join Keyboard Man (aka Kevin Hoffman) as he sets the stage for what has become a Summit tradition, the Saturday Night karaoke party. All are welcome to grab the mic.

Volunteers

Kevin Hoffman

Saturday March 25, 2017 8:30pm - Sunday March 26, 2017 12:00am PDT
Plaza Ballrooms

Socials & Networking

8:30am PDT

Registration Opens

The registration desk will be open throughout the morning to register attendees, answer questions, and provide assistance.

Sunday March 26, 2017 8:30am - 8:45am PDT
Regency Foyer

9:00am PDT

Acting Naturally with Information

As humans, we are good at engaging different kinds of designs with different kinds of actions. Flexibility is in our nature. Yet, there’s something fundamental about us that makes our experience with a design feel natural, or…distinctly off. This talk draws on ecological psychology to see that natural human behavior is about two things: using information for selecting action, and relying on information for controlling action unfolding over time. Information architecture historically supported selecting, creating an actor-as-conductor of information dynamic. But, IA is increasingly relied on to help control the way action unfolds over time, an actor-as-sculptor of information dynamic. We’ll follow the thread of meaning for both to uncover factors leading to natural vs. unnatural behavior, and what we can do about it. Design examples will come from information environments that vary in how information manifests (from holograms and simulations in mixed reality to smart materials), how the actor engages it (gesture, voice, touch, among other methods), how much agency the system brings (autonomy, to machine learning and shades of intelligence), and how the system manifests to actors (text and visualization).

The information environments we are creating now may be new, but they can still feel natural, provided designers and IAs remember something: at core, we humans are tribal hunter-gatherer poets, and we want to act like it.

Speakers

Marsha Haverty

Experience Architect, Autodesk

As an experience architect at Autodesk, Marsha Haverty focuses on the implications of the rapid evolution of 3D design and engineering practices on how Autodesk products and services are packaged and accessed. She also leads IA modernization efforts at an individual product level... Read More →

Sunday March 26, 2017 9:00am - 9:45am PDT
Regency C

Core IA

9:00am PDT

How Cultural Relativism Influences Design Decisions

Cultural relativism is the understanding that a person’s behaviors and activities should be interpreted in the context of their own culture. We rely heavily on this principle to understand user groups in order to design digital systems for them. Our current models for understanding and quantifying cultural relativism are on the international scale; we see Americans as a group distinct from Japanese, who are again distinct from British. However, this may not be enough. The current socio-political climate in America demonstrates that the cultural influences even within a nation might be misunderstood. This talk will explore some of the current frameworks we have to understand culture, and propose ways to better work them into our design practices.

Speakers

Ramya Mahalingam

UX Architect, Cardinal Solutions

Sunday March 26, 2017 9:00am - 9:45am PDT
Regency D

Human-Centered Design

9:00am PDT

Creative Clarity: Finding Focus in the Midst of Ambiguity

Creativity is the key to addressing ill-formed business threats, for putting shape around poorly defined market opportunities. A creative organization is ready to handle the innovation challenges of greenfield markets, to take on the reimaging challenges of shrinking market share, and to best the misalignment challenges introduced by running fast and loose. But bringing creativity into your company feels like adding to the mess, not fixing it. Creative processes feel wild and unpredictable – and so do the people doing the creative work. We hire creative talent, but we don’t have a lot of well-formed frameworks for managing them or their work.

Design thinking offered us a starting point, as it gave us tools like empathy to help drive innovation. Lean tells us to run really fast and pivot left and right and left and right. But many of us have started realizing the limitations of design thinking and lean, because after doing a lot of thinking and pivoting, we still have to do a lot of doing. We don’t have the skills to bring the mess into focus.

Creative clarity is about four main things. First, it’s about having a vision and choreographing a creative strategy – envisioning a crisp future even among the blurry business landscape. Next, it’s about growing a team that includes those creative unpredictable outcasts, and giving them the space to produce amazing work. Third, planning the work takes process, but not a process characterized by boring stage gates or stale gantt charts. It’s an iterative process of conflict, resolution, and trust. Finally, it’s about actually delivering creative new products and services that bring everything into focus.

Speakers

Jon Kolko

Founder and Director, Austin Center for Design

Sunday March 26, 2017 9:00am - 9:45am PDT
Regency E/F

Strategy & Collaboration

9:45am PDT

Résumé & Portfolio Review Booth (Sign up required)

This session is limited to 2 participants. You must sign up below to participate.

Would you like to get feedback on your resume and/or portfolio from an actual UX hiring manager or team leader / director? Sign up for a 1-on-1 session to get invaluable insight from someone who actually reviews UX resumes and portfolios for a living.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to get feedback in an environment without the “interviewing pressure.” Only a limited number of sessions are available so sign up quickly!

Sign Up Now: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e0c4dadaf2eaafd0-iasresumeportfoli

Sponsored by Telus.

Volunteers

Kyle Soucy

Founding Principal, Usable Interface, LLC

Sunday March 26, 2017 9:45am - 10:15am PDT
Balmoral

Career Development

9:45am PDT

Morning Coffee

Join us for a morning break featuring coffee and tea plus savory morning snacks—the perfect time to socialize and network.

The registration desk, sponsor tables, jobs board, and portfolio review booth will all be open during the break.

Sunday March 26, 2017 9:45am - 10:15am PDT
Regency Foyer

Socials & Networking

10:15am PDT

Presence for Information Architects

How do we provide structure for information so that it is usable in immersive virtual environments? Answering this question requires developing a new vocabulary for information architects. As virtual reality (and augmented/mixed reality) technology becomes ingrained into our work and play, new metaphors need to emerge to handle information in these contexts. This presentation presents presence as a concept on which to build an understanding of information architecture in virtual, augmented, and mixed realities. Through using and refining measures of presence, and developing our own tools to enhance users sense of presence, information architects have a major role to play in developing the future of these virtual and mixed spaces.

As users become more accustomed to these spaces, there will be an increasing demand for information services and products to exist in three-dimensions. This presentation provides tools for testing and thinking about the metaphors, language, and relationship of structures for virtual, augmented and mixed reality spaces. Ideas that will let us follow the wisdom of Wayne Gretzky, and, skate to where the puck is going to be in a world where reality is increasingly less real.

Speakers

Zachary Frazier

University of South Carolina

Sunday March 26, 2017 10:15am - 11:00am PDT
Regency C

Future of IA

10:15am PDT

“Was Nate Silver wrong? Click here for why!” The Crisis of Modeling in an Era of Clickbait, Truthiness, and Fake Content

In 2008, Nate Silver created a model that correctly forecast the outcome of that year's US presidential election. (He was rewarded for this with a Keynote at the 2011 IA Summit!)

But on election night 2016, many of the same people who lionized Nate Silver and the "Data Journalism" movement were cursing his name when the candidate that his model gave less than a 30% chance of winning prevailed.

Why did this happen? Is a pervasive digital erosion of meaning and context to blame? Does this outcome mean the practice of modeling is in crisis? Have the algorithms led us astray?

This talk will present a call to action and a means of advancing the conversation about the role of IA in this emerging environment. The centerpiece of this shift is a framework of understanding — a model of models, if you will, that will allow enterprise-class organizations to make good decisions about what can and should be modeled.

In an algorithm-driven future, Information Architecture can be more valuable than ever. We as IA’s just must shift the way we think and talk about our own practice of modeling. We have not only our careers to save, but maybe even our democracies.

Speakers

Bram Wessel

Principal, Factor

Toiling in obscurity since before the Web, Bram is the co-founder of Factor, a Seattle-based IA firm specializing in modeling information and experience. An avid oenophile and fly angler, Bram is passionate about terroir and tight loops. With stolen time, Bram makes Yakima Valley... Read More →

Sunday March 26, 2017 10:15am - 11:00am PDT
Regency E/F

Future of IA

10:15am PDT

Sustainable UX

* This presentation was written up in an article on UX Booth. Check it out here: http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/sustainable-design/. *

Folks like us who work in the digital realm don’t seem to have the same opportunities to fight climate change as our physically-oriented counterparts. Physical architects get to design LEED-certified green buildings. Industrial designers make appliances energy efficient, while car designers work with increasingly stringent emissions standards. What can your humble UX / IA / web designer do that can compare?

A motivated designer can make (mega)tons of difference. We touch the world both directly in our working practices and indirectly by how we shape behavior.

Firstly, a look at the sexy world of internet infrastructure – it’s a huge energy hog with a carbon footprint comparable to the aviation industry (think: 2.4bn users). How we host our sites has a direct impact on climate change. And switching from a coal-powered datacenter is easier than ever.

Secondly, design craft and kruft. Hefty data-rich sites use more energy, and somehow we’ve let the average web page size balloon to over 2.5MB. Leaner sites are greener sites. And design optimization has business and user experience benefits to boot.

Thirdly, design for intent. Can we help our users identify greener choices and help shift consumer behavior? (Yes, we can).

Lastly, tackling climate change begins in the home and office. Using a simple digital tool, attendees can quickly measure their professional carbon footprint and see opportunities to reduce.

This is a critical time for the climate. It’s more up to individuals than ever before. Come to this talk and get ready to roll up your sleeves.

Speakers

James Christie

Experience Design Director, Mad*Pow

James Christie has been designing for the web for 15 years. With careers in development, design, usability engineering and now user experience, James is well-qualified to talk about design and performance at the intersection of technology, design, and user empowerment. Currently... Read More →

Sunday March 26, 2017 10:15am - 11:00am PDT
Regency D

Human-Centered Design

11:10am PDT

Architecture for Aliens: Using IA for Smarter Things

We’re getting better and better at designing for humans. But what about the millions of artificial “smart things” we’ve released into the wild, that sense and act upon our human world? How do they perceive and understand our needs? And how can information architecture help it all work better?

This short talk will cover:
- Key principles behind how “digital agents” understand and act upon their environments, and practical ways to apply those principles.
- Concrete examples of how information architecture can be a critical bridge between “smart things” and human user experiences.

Speakers

Andrew Hinton

Senior Experience Architect, State Farm

Sunday March 26, 2017 11:10am - 11:30am PDT
Regency C

Humans & Machines

11:10am PDT

Facilitating holistic product decisions with information architecture

Once upon a time, we designed websites that were sitting on a limited stack of technology that you could get your head around easily. In 2017+, we are designing products consisting of increasingly complex, scalable systems.

Architecting those systems are often engineers, using a variety of technologies. As information architects, we face the challenge to take part in this process, to shape these systems, to make sure that technology decisions are driven by product design and user needs.

In this short talk, I will share how you can bridge the gap between UX and system architecture, and what I’ve learned about collaborating effectively with engineers. I’m basing this on my experience as Head of Product at a startup, so expect a case study with take-aways that will be useful for anyone working in a cross-functional team.

Speakers

Johanna Kollmann

Head of Product, Snyk

Sunday March 26, 2017 11:10am - 11:30am PDT
Regency D

Strategy & Collaboration

11:10am PDT

Troubleshooting Your Busted Design Process

Designers are frequently embarrassed by the concessions they make to reality. We try hard to follow the idealized, user-centric processes we’ve read about in books and heard about at conferences, but getting design solutions through organizations requires negotiation and frequently radical adjustments. It can leave even the best designers feeling like imposters.

We aren’t faking it, it’s just that design process is a sloppy thing in the real world. Stakeholder demands don’t always match the organization’s rhetoric about supporting users. Collaboration adds expertise, but sometimes at the expense of innovation. Even the best organizations are inherently inflexible, often not nimble enough to implement sophisticated design solutions.

This talk will provide you with five specific, actionable tactics to shore up design processes ravaged by the vagaries of your organization. You will gain the tools necessary for managing problematic stakeholders; analyzing your organization’s design tolerance; and defining problems in ways that design can successfully address.

Speakers

Dan Willis

Consultant, U.S. Digital Service

I'm currently working with the U.S. Digital Service to overhaul how the government supports people who want to become U.S. citizens. I'm always looking for opportunities to help clients with all aspects of design, including retooling their organizations in order to be able to deliver... Read More →

Sunday March 26, 2017 11:10am - 11:30am PDT
Regency E/F

Strategy & Collaboration

11:40am PDT

All Roads Lead to the Bathroom: Why Thinking of Visitors as People Makes Museums (and everywhere else) Better

Museums and other cultural institutions are really good at sharing knowledge and expertise with visitors. Unfortunately, too often their excitement about imparting information overtakes their awareness of visitors’ spatial needs, resulting in frustration, confusion, and, as a result, less focus by the visitor on the content of the museum. As interaction design moves more and more into physical spaces, it’s natural to look at museums as proving grounds for testing new ideas of how people might interact with their environments. This talk presents a new paradigm for building experiences in public spaces that reposition humans at the center of public work. The larger theory is based on an adaptation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and was developed out of research conducted at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2016. Attendees will learn about why wayfinding to bathrooms and signposts to time planning are just as vital as testimony and artifacts to museums and their visitors, and leave with a framework and tangible action items to help recenter people in buildings of all kinds as human beings.

Speakers

Elissa Frankle

Senior UX Researcher, Ad Hoc LLC

Citizen history, online communities, making excellent experiences for visitors. Looking for fellow wayfinding and signage geeks who love the IA of places.

Sunday March 26, 2017 11:40am - 12:00pm PDT
Regency C

Human-Centered Design

11:40am PDT

Culture as Context: Why and How to Design for Multilingual Users

One out of every 5 Americans speaks a language other than English at home (and online). Information architects ignore this fact at their—and their users’—peril.

This session will explore the impact that diverse, multilingual users should have on our designs. No, you don’t have to add “become an expert in every culture” to your To-Do List, but you should seek out quality research and smart partnerships to create the most effective interactive experiences.

In this lively, optimistic, and example-filled session, you’ll learn about organizations who have successfully tackled this unique challenge—and how you can apply their success to your next project.

Speakers

Cristóbal Almanza

Information Architect, TradeMark Media

Cris has been involved in user experience design and information architecture since 2009 and freelance designer since 2006. His original training came in print design, but he quickly expanded into the digital space. At TradeMark, Cris is involved in the discovery process, the development... Read More →

Sunday March 26, 2017 11:40am - 12:00pm PDT
Regency D

Human-Centered Design

11:40am PDT

Final Destination: Creating a Better Afterlife for Our Digital Treasures

Products have a perspective problem. Their view of a user’s journey is too narrow and fails to account for one of the most basic human qualities of their customers - mortality.

Many digital services that generate personal content and data provide, at best, deactivation and/or memorialization options. This approach addresses profile access control or removal but neglects needs surrounding content collection, preservation and inheritance. People increasingly view their digital content as valuable heirlooms, serving as rich records of their life’s experiences to be shared beyond their lifetime. In reality, friends and family of deceased customers are left with little or no options to retrieve these heirlooms in any meaningful way. The result is large amounts of rich, personal and emotionally significant content left to float in a digital purgatory, just out of reach to those who treasure it most.

Products that sit within highly personal and social spaces have an obligation to their customer community to address these needs. This session will present a framework and set of guiding principles for supporting this underserved, yet important, phase of a product’s user experience.

Speakers

Melissa Martin

Lead Designer, Collective Health

I currently serve as Lead Designer at Collective Health where I lead cross-disciplinary teams on the design of our administration product. As part of this work, I'm interested in 'whole life' experience design, which promotes the idea that deep, universal human events, such as death... Read More →

Sunday March 26, 2017 11:40am - 12:00pm PDT
Regency E/F

Human-Centered Design

12:00pm PDT

IA Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

Grab your lunch and join your fellow IA subject matter experts in improving information about IA-related topics by attending this year's IA Wikipedia Edit-a-thon.

Noreen Whysel will provide an introduction to WikiProject:Information Architecture. We will discuss activities for attendees interested in general Wikipedia editing, contributions to Wikimedia Commons, and information architecture tools and linked open data applications in Wikipedia.

New to editing the Wikipedia? No problem. Noreen will offer beginners guidance in organizing editing groups, planning working sessions, and executing edits. All are welcome.

Interested? Create an Account
If interested in participating, be sure to create an account before you attend the Edit-a-thon. It will ensure that our site can be up as running right away and avoid crowding the signup server. Create a Wikipedia account at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACreateAccount&returnto=Main+Page

IA and Wikimedia Tutorial
You can also review an introductory presentation to get a background on the content guidelines and principles of Wikipedia editing: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0By4jVfIRGeOlSk1qZGtlTmI1ckk/edit?usp=docslist_api&filetype=mspresentation

Become a Member
And be sure to sign up as a member of the WikiProject: Information Architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Information_Architecture

Speakers

Noreen Whysel

Head of Validation Research, Me2B Alliance

Sunday March 26, 2017 12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT
Balmoral

Community Working Session

12:00pm PDT

Lunch

Lunch break for all attendees.

* Note: If you reported a dietary restriction when registering, special meal tickets will be inside your badge. If not, please talk to one of the members of the organizing committee. *

Sunday March 26, 2017 12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT
Plaza and Georgia Ballrooms

Socials & Networking

12:00pm PDT

2018 IA Summit Roundtable

Come and participate in a planning session for the 2018 IA Summit. Share your ideas to make the Summit easier to produce and to set it apart from other conferences.

All are welcome.

Volunteers

Dave Cooksey

saturdave

Co-Chair of IAS17

Stuart Maxwell

Lead Information Architect, REI

Sunday March 26, 2017 12:00pm - 1:15pm PDT
Regency A/B

Community Working Session

1:15pm PDT

Designing for Little Humans: Combining Play, Nature and Technology

What do you get when you take a stuffed animal, shove a smartphone in it, download some nature apps and ask a bunch of kids to play with it for a couple weeks? Answer: Twelve big ideas for how to design for the future of smart toys and nature. In this presentation, we’ll describe how we used a diary study and co-design methods to uncover important design principles that sit at the unique intersection of technology, the outdoors, and nature for the 5-9 year old audience. You’ll walk away with inspiring ideas for designing the future of smart toys and learn strategies for connecting with a hard-to-reach audience of young people.

Speakers

Erin Chan

Designer, EY Intuitive

Nidhi Jalwal

UX Researcher, EY Intuitive

Nidhi believes that design is the act of attuning to observations and building empathy to create experiences that tell stories. She works as a UX Researcher at EY Intuitive to make sure that the user is an integral part of the equation. Nidhi has traveled and worked with different... Read More →

Sunday March 26, 2017 1:15pm - 2:00pm PDT
Regency E/F

Human-Centered Design

1:15pm PDT

The Future of Voice UX and ArtificiaI Intelligence

Voice has evolved from being a small piece of the phone like Siri, Ok Google to personal assistance and robotics. As more and more personal assistance evolve voice will become future of everything and everywhere. Being a key designer for Amazon echo voice design and other voice-based personal assistance for automotive, internet of things and internet of homes, I would like to talk about what the future looks like for these voice AI.

Voice is the future for sure and it's clear with how every small, medium and large companies are striving towards designing voice interfaces. Many companies have even created developer portals and tools to help people design and develop voice applications. But voice AI is beyond a phone or a tower. Unlike a tower or a puck, Voice AI can be an invisible product which can be part of every corner of the house helping users.

There is certainly a lot of opportunity and future for voice AI and with my experience in this space, I would like to present my thoughts with some valid data points. In a storytelling fashion I would talk about the following:

Step 1: I will begin by defining the new "Zero UI" world which includes new possibilities with zero ui, machine learning, and new interaction possibilities. I want to show the intensely human response to AI and user expectations

Step 2: Given those possibilities, I will describe AI/narrow AI, AR, given and provide exposure to what machine learning is, and provide a sense of what a training set might be like, and how to test them

Step 3: I would then show the evolution of how voice and AI evolved from one segment and entered into our house, automobiles and phones.

Step 4: I would present some kind of data/result to show the adoption of Voice AI and chat bots and how it would grow eventually

Step 5: Given these data points, I would talk about what user wants next and what does the future of voice and AI looks like. Given the possibilities of machine learning, developer tools which let users integrate voice in their products, smart contextual chatbots evolving and the AI trend around us, I would present some ideas

Step 6: I would present some best practices around designing Voice UX, Chatbots and how these best practices can help the futuristic voice UX and AI.

I will make this a more two way communication by involving the audience in my talks asking questions, understanding their mindset etc.

Given most participants will have never had exposure to this, I will make sure to go slow, provide concrete examples of products most audience use several times a day (e.g., Netflix, Google Search, Facebook Chatbots, etc.).

Speakers

Shyamala Prayaga

UX Evangelist, Amazon

Sunday March 26, 2017 1:15pm - 2:00pm PDT
Regency D

Humans & Machines

1:15pm PDT

Auto-Suggest: It’s Not Just for Search Engines Anymore. Creating a Knowledge Workflow for Query Writers at eBay

In this talk, I’ll tell you about how eBay broke through the difficulty of supporting data analysts working on one of the world's largest data warehouses. Built on the concept of auto-suggest, eBay enhanced the query writing experience with a just-in-time workflow that gives data analysts what they need to know to find, understand and use data in eBay. We backup the experience with a modern data catalog and software that learns from and leverages activities by data stewards, subject experts, and analysts themselves to enrich the knowledge base that feeds the smart suggestion experience. Smart suggestions during the query writing experience help eBay Analysts to gather data faster for decision making without getting in the way of the creative flow. Come see a demonstration of the smart suggestions workflow in practice, learn how we built and deliver the benefits of the catalog behind it and how we plan to use in other ways in the future.

Speakers

Deb Seys

Self-Service Analytics, eBay

I think a lot about how employees find, understand and use data in their jobs at eBay. My team is called Data Services and Solutions and that's exactly what we do - create insights, services, tools, and applications that are easy to use and understand; populate them with trusted... Read More →

Sunday March 26, 2017 1:15pm - 2:00pm PDT
Regency C

Techniques & Methods

2:15pm PDT

Anticipating User Needs: Software for Humans

What if we could improve the way humans use technology to accommodate and prevent more errors before they even happen? It’s entirely possible by combining our skills as human designers with a machine’s strengths in analyzing cues and adapting. First, we'll look at how humans communicate vs. how machines actually work. Rather than projecting a set of tasks and inputs, anticipatory design meets the user where they are. We'll learn ways designers and engineers can anticipate usability problems rather than react. Finally, we'll discuss emerging technologies that will make digital experiences smarter and improve accessibility.

Speakers

Sarah Auvil

Senior UX Strategist, Cardinal Solutions

Hi! I'm coming to Vancouver from North Carolina, in addition to UX I love to talk about cultural anthropology, Asian culture, languages and design thinking. I'm currently pursuing my master's at Kent State University in Ohio via online learning while working full time as a user experience... Read More →

Sunday March 26, 2017 2:15pm - 3:00pm PDT
Regency D

Human-Centered Design

2:15pm PDT

How Might We Design Human Centered Chatbots?

With more than 30,000 chatbots built on the Facebook Messenger platform alone, industry experts are claiming bots as the next big frontier in tech. Most of these chatbots have not been built with Human Centered Design in mind. Human Centered Design starts with the needs of the user and ends with empowering the life of that user.
Each user has a unique personality, with rich emotions and context. Designers can apply Human Centered Design to take bots beyond the transactional realm to forming a deeper connection with each user. In this hands-on talk, Jayneil will showcase the power of using the ‘How Might We’ method for framing a design challenge to build a chatbot. Attendees will then learn to apply Human Centered Design principles for designing chatbots with the help of live demos and examples.

Speakers

Jayneil Dalal

Design Instructor, https://designmba.show/

Jayneil Dalal is an Arsenal fan and strikes random conversations with random people at random times. He is a chatbot designer and works at AT&T in Dallas. In his past life he was an electrical engineer and worked on the Internet of Things at Intel and Texas Instruments. Outside of... Read More →

How Might We Design Human Centered Chatbots? pdf

Sunday March 26, 2017 2:15pm - 3:00pm PDT
Regency E/F

Humans & Machines

2:15pm PDT

I’m Sorry. I Can’t. Don’t Hate Me: The Post-It Breakup

I know, I know. UX researchers are supposed to be in love with their post-it notes and affinity diagrams. Forgive me, but when it comes to note-taking and distilling findings from user research and usability testing, I think we might have gone a bit overboard. Affinity diagramming is one of the most popular methods for organizing ideas and qualitative data, but if misused, it can easily become a fatiguing exercise, which looses its merit. In this session you will learn some of the pitfalls to avoid when using affinity diagramming for user research and explore some alternative methods that have proven to be successful for collaborative analysis.

Speakers

Kyle Soucy

Founding Principal, Usable Interface, LLC

Sunday March 26, 2017 2:15pm - 3:00pm PDT
Regency C

User Research

3:15pm PDT

Closing Plenary

We are honored to have Dan Klyn, President of the IA Institute and Co-founder of the Understanding Group, present this year's closing plenary. A Summit tradition started at the 2005 IA Summit in Montreal, the closing plenary is a special keynote presentation at the end of the Summit. To cap off IAS17, Dan will put this year's conversation into the larger context of the future of our practice and our community.

Captioning provided by Mad*Pow.

Speakers

Dan Klyn

Information Architect, The Understanding Group (TUG)

Dan Klyn is an information architect from the United States, and co-founder of The Understanding Group (TUG).

Sunday March 26, 2017 3:15pm - 4:00pm PDT
Regency C/D

Plenary Session

4:00pm PDT

Summit Closing and 5-minute Madness

The 2017 IA Summit winds done with thank you's from the co-chairs, the announcement of the location of next year's Summit, and 5-minute Madness, an open mic session where all areinvited to raise issues and share ideas.

Volunteers

Sunday March 26, 2017 4:00pm - 4:45pm PDT
Regency C/D

Plenary Session