Poster Session

This year, back by popular demand we are bringing back the Friday evening Poster Session to run alongside the IA Jam. The atmosphere will be casual with a drinks bar, nibbles and wifi connection, providing you with a collaborative environment to view and share your work with peers.

Cognitive schemas @ website usability
Csilla Herendy, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary

How we didn’t bend the bank for the internet
Hana Soukalová, Mather Advertures, Czech Republic

IA Stencil: A site structure prototyping tool
Atsushi Hasegawa, Concent, Inc., Japan

Non-design roles and their influence on the User Experience
Peter Boersma, Adaptive Path, The Netherlands

Rapid and Rock Solid IA Design
Andrew Mayfield, Optimal Workshop, New Zealand

Research on a Sustainable Human-Centred Interaction Design Framework
Ji Yi, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

XLS Exit: collaborating on requirements using mindmap concepts
Jeroen Grit, GriDD consultancy, The Netherlands

Csilla Herendy, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary

The usability researcher always tries to get involved into the user’s thinking. One of the most important parts of the researches is to access to the users' cognitive schemas.
What are these cognitive schemas? How can we access and measure them? Why should we know them, and how could we access, measure and research them? How and why determine these schemas basically our cognition at online surfaces? Moreover: how can we use this data at information architecture planning / web design / usability / UX? How can help us to solve design problems?
My poster is about the cognitive schemas, about the possible research methods and about their importance at usability. I will show also some examples, using data of my former (usability) researches.

Jakub Feldstein, Air Bank, Czech Republic
Emil Hampejs, Mather Advertures, Czech Republic
Martin Hošek, Air Bank, Czech Republic
Jiří Malý, Mather Advertures, Czech Republic
Jakub Petřina, Air Bank, Czech Republic
Hana Soukalová, Mather Advertures, Czech Republic
Michal Strcula, Air Bank, Czech Republic

Since we weren’t just building a new version of internet banking but a completely new bank, we were able to pull the IA process directly into the product and service creation and integrate this composition into both the architecture (information structure) and the design (user interface) of the online application.
As with every project, everything is connected; this is even truer for a complex IT project like ours.
That’s why we opted for a management system based on flexibility and intensive communication over other less flexible methods. Although some aspects of the work were more difficult as a result, especially coordination of different parts, the IB environment itself is of higher quality and can hold out better when confronted by real users.
By working directly with the information architect, we were able to make sure throughout the entire development process that our our solutions were understood correctly and we were able to directly influence how they were implemented during software development period. Our deep involvement also prevented the development team from making covert changes to the design in order to make it easier on themselves.
Though the assignment was very precisely defined by the client, as soon we beganworking on wireframes and the information architecture of internet banking became more concrete through a series of workshops, we discovered several areas in which the bank products could be optimized.
The information architect, who was directly involved in the entire project, did not merely passively implement requests from the client, but had the opportunity to comment on the IB development and to continuously approach us with new solutions. As a result, he became an integral part of the project, working in close contact with other processes and the course of development.
Our conclusion from the development of internet banking is that if information architecture works closely with the product during development, beyond what is normally standard, it allows the project team to fine-tune both the architecture as well as the final product according to the real needs of the end users.

Atsushi Hasegawa, Concent, Inc., Japan

IA Stencil (a.k.a. Site-it) is a simple but effective  prototyping tool for designing site structure and user experience flow. This tool is a set of physical sticky notes printed typical web page templates.
When you discuss high-level site structures, you'll use plain sticky notes or a white board generally.
However they are too conceptual to share the point with other people especially your clients or non-IA colleagues.
We classified web pages as pattern into 4 types: portal, listing, article, and interactive. Each type has some variations, so they come with 7 types of page templates and will cover almost all web pages. So IAs can use it for site structure brainstorming and discussion.
By using this tool, you can focus on IA discussion and cultivate understandings of user experience of web site with team members and clients. In our presentation, we will demonstrate the tool.

Peter Boersma, Adaptive Path, the Netherlands

Like with many of our fellow practitioners, your focus of attention in projects is probably on typical user-centered design activities: research, design and evaluation. Other people in the organization are responsible for determining the price of the work, the amount of time you get for your part, managing the scope and release schedules, and where your offering will be different from that of the competition. So, focussing just on design deliverables is not enough; much of the resulting User Experience is determined outside of the design department. 
This poster shows organizational roles and non-design deliverables that, in my experience, also affect the user experience and how you, as member of the UX team, can - and should - influence them. You will see real-world examples, highlighting the elements that you can influence, and read tips on how to make sure you get to play your part.

Andrew Mayfield, Optimal Workshop, New Zealand

We’re looking for new ways to take the pain out of designing or refining an IA using card sorting and to make much better use of all the data collected through new analysis algorithms, visualisations and tree testing. Having gone to so much effort to design a good IA it is a huge shame that people often neglect to test that proposed IA before moving on to navigation and interface design.
I would like to present two new visualisations designed to make card sorting faster and more effective and tree testing more transparent and engaging:

1. Participant-Centric Analysis for card sorting and the “FrankenIA”
   We have found a way to effectively surface the top 3 most popular (but substantially different) IAs submitted by online card sort participants and rank. We can then rank these popular participant IAs against the FrankenIA, an IA created by our new analysis and group creation algorithm using participant response data, for acceptability scoring across all participants.
2. The “PieTree”Once you have a proposed IA, whether proposed by a participant directly, a designer, an information architect, or using the FrankenIA; you will want to test it in a task based context using tree testing.  We’ve come up with a new way to visualise the results of a tree test using Treejack and we’ve found that more companies are using the tool to do bigger studies in search of proven IAs.

Although we’re far from finished yet, we’d like to present and discuss these new algorithms and visualisation techniques with the experts and everyday IA practitioners at EuroIA.

Jeroen Grit, GriDD consultancy, the Netherlands

Every designer has been in a project that went through table hell: organizing requirements into a spreadsheet and trying to discuss them with stakeholders. The huge spreadsheet makes your audience lose overview and context, facilitates a discussion only on individual requirements, and decision making becomes a tedious practice. To improve this process we came up with an approach to handle requirements in a visual way using mindmap concepts.

Mindmaps have the ability to harbour a huge amount of data while still providing overview. Adding requirements including prioritization, (stakeholder) logging and contextual content is a perfect fit. It makes it easy to bring a discussion to the right level and point out gaps within the defined needs and ambitions. The layered categorization of requirements ensures you don’t get thrown down to the lowest level, but can drill down gradually. Adding visual metadata like question marks, thumbs up/down, and smilies helps logging the discussion. Any new brought in requirements that are conflicting can be linked.

We have applied this concept in (medium) large internet projects, with stakeholders ranging from 5 to 100. Whenever necessary, areas of the requirements have been shared with their owners for further handling. Our experience proves that communication about requirements can be supported effectively using mindmap methods.

Our poster will feature an annotated requirements mindmap, zooming in on its benefits, pointing out interesting specifics and mentioning drawbacks to take into account.

The poster is a proof point of the fact that complex information deserves visual ways of handling and that this approach is a great way to collaboratively work on requirements, with stakeholders. An approach I would like to share with peers at EuroIA.