What's happening

A structureless approach to issue tracking system
Sascha Maximova, JetBrains, RUS

Big hat, small herd - How to produce professional deliverables on a limited budget
Søren Muus, FatDUX, DK

Cheap and efficient tools: how to engage users in IA design when there is no budget and there is no time
Belén Barros Pena, Ruairi Galavan, Colin Bentley, Brian Donohue, iQ Content, IRE

Combining methods: User Research and Web Analytics
Adam Cox, Martijn Klompenhouwer, User Intelligence, NL

Designing for the Scattered Structures of the Exploding Website
Iskander Smit, Peter Boersma, Info.nl, NL

Doing the right thing: Google and Privacy
Jonathan Arnowitz, Stroomt, US, Gregor Hochmuth, Google, US

Effective Ethnography Techniques for Low Budget Projects
Sabrina Mach, James Page, FeraLabs, UK

Evolution of the sitemap
Chris Pierson, Jacco Nieuwland, User Intelligence, NL

From Enterprise IA to Enterprise UX: Creating a User Experience Framework for a (Big) Bank
Jason Hobbs, Reynhardt Uys, JH-01, SA

From shelves to mobile devices, the structure changes
Cristina Lavazza, Invitalia, I

How accessibility issues affect Information Architecture
Olga Revilla, Itakora, E

Human Factors in Innovation: Structuring for Success
James Kalbach, LexisNexis, D

IA on the field – A Survival Guide in hostile environment
Sylvie Daumal, Duke, a Razorfish company, F

Patterns that Connect: Creating Overview Maps of Complex Data Networks
Paul Kahn, Julia Moisand, Kahn+Associates, F

People search. How the semantic web will change the way we find information
Jørgen Dalen, Halogen, N

The Architecture of Fun: Emotion, Interaction & Design For Massively Social Games
Reinoud Bosman, Joe Lamantia, Philips, Media Catalyst, NL

The future of wayfinding
Cennydd Bowles, Clearleft , UK

The IA Shuffle
Panel with Eric Reiss, FatDUX, DK

The promise of e-
Panel with Filip Borloo, Lancre-Woods, B

Sascha Maximova, JetBrains, RUS

Being a software house we’re always abound with issues. Bugs, feature requests, support inquiries—for everyone in the company. So, there was a task: create a simple issue tracking system that would suite everyone’s needs and habits via a simple user interface.
Imposing structure considered evil—you make a person learn the ropes and move only along them. One-two safe routes through the application, that’s all it usually results in. But what if we give users the freedom of organizing the material as they like? What if we give them just the tools and the building blocks?

Our issue tracker, code-named "Charisma", treats all building blocks (issues) as textual entities with various attributes and gives the user tools to arrange and re-arrange those attributes quickly and conveniently:

• Smart search with suggestions performs as a fastest and simplest query builder.
• Tagging lets users define their own taxonomy over a set of issues and works as their own custom attributes
• With tags, saved searches and smart search, users, almost seamlessly, create their own navigational system satisfying their very needs.

So each time you come to the tracker you create a new temporal view (structure) for actual needs—within mere seconds. By saving them you create a navigational system, which can be also shared among other users.
Inline editing, keyboard shortcuts, language-based commands that the user can apply to multiple issues—all this makes the tool convenient to use without blotting the UI with too many controls.

“Charisma” issue tracker is still in active development and is used only inside the company. Beta release is planned for the third quarter 2009.

Søren Muus, FatDUX, DK

This presentation will show you how the development of a quick-and-dirty prototype became a very concentrated process with concise deliverables. This method has since proven to be suitable for other complex projects with limited resources.

In many European countries, both human and financiel resources to design and develop websites and applications are often limited. Even so, user demands and expectations are the same as with big or international solutions. This presents an apparently unsolvable challange to the assignment; to produce deliverables of the same high quality but with fewer resources.

This case story is about the development of a prototype for a reporting system to a Danish state institution under the Ministry of Defence. We were able to turn the project’s financial limitations into advantages and into an agile process that gave a set of lean deliverables.

I will provide a unique insight into the working environment surrounding small or limited projects with big or great ambitions; from client contact to working close with the developer.

I will show how it is possible to turn limited ressources into an advantage. Moreover, I will try and inspire you to give more for less, without compromising the quality of your work or discounting your prices.

In other words, learn how to wear a big hat, no matter the size of your herd.

Belén Barros Pena, Ruairi Galavan, Colin Bentley, Brian Donohue, iQ Content, IRE

Client work is always carried out under huge budget and time pressures: there is never money for user research, and there is never time. Information architects and interaction designers working for design consultancies not only understand the need for engaging users in the design process: they feel the urge to do so. Making design decisions without understanding your users’ goals and behaviour puts the overall quality and success of your project at risk. Unsuccessful projects put your relationship with clients (and your agency’s viability and solvency) at risk.

Over time, and as a result of project constraints, we have developed some techniques and tools for user research that can be run in very little time, and with very little money. We create prototypes that require minimum development effort while still providing enough interactivity to run valid user tests. Our usability testing lab consists of a laptop computer and a USB mouse. We recruit users and run tests in our clients’ branches. And we exploit the power of event tracking in web analytics to obtain data about users’ behaviour.

All our user research activities are of course of a qualitative nature (our clients don’t have budget to run studies that will provide them with statistically significant data). But they are, nonetheless, useful. We believe they are at the core of our success and our solid market position.

During this case study session, we would like to introduce our prototyping, user testing and event tracking techniques, and how they have been applied to our project work.

Adam Cox, Martijn Klompenhouwer, User Intelligence, NL

Web Analytics is a method that is quantitative in nature. By analyzing traffic on a website you get a lot of data, but interpretation is still needed to transform this data into usable insights. On the other hand, most User Research methods are qualitative; you get a 'why', but you miss the big numbers to back-up the findings.

Our presentation will explain why it makes sense to combine these two different methods. We will argue that Web Analytics should not belong to the IT or Marketing department, but to the User Experience team. A web analyst’s expertise and tools should be applied within the structure of the User Experience design process. Web Analytics should be combined with other User Research methods that are traditionally used in web design. The combination creates a powerful new approach!

The aim of the presentation is not only to explain how and why you should combine methods, but also to show examples to highlight this approach. Instead of having a lengthy dissemination on the differences of the two methods we want to focus on practical examples. These examples will clearly show how both methods were used to complement and strengthen each other in the User Experience process. Furthermore, the presentation will make clear how the User Researcher and the Web Analyst work together as a team.

The combination of Web Analytics and User Research is a valuable new method for User Experience design. It will provide you with more powerful results and stronger evidence to validate existing assumptions or findings. Our main message is that if you are a User experience professionals and are not doing Web Analytics yet, you should be starting now. If you are already doing Web Analytics then you should be combining it with other User Research methods.

Iskander Smit, Peter Boersma, Info.nl, NL

In the past information was limited to the boundaries of the own website. Now the information is scattered over multiple online channels and websites. By the growing use of mobile devices, widgets and API’s, we have to change the way we look at structures. New design methods are necessary.

We translate this development in our model of the Exploding Website. The model describes how services now are revealed in several contexts, and what steps you need to take to define the right part of service in the right context. We also redefined our methodology for user experience design based on the vision of the Exploding Website. Dynamic personas, scenes and rule-based structures are key elements.

In the presentation we use two client cases to demonstrate the model and describe the new design approach to structure information round new contexts. At the end of the presentation we will discuss a list of do’s and don’ts usable for everyone working on online media for the future.

Jonathan Arnowitz, Stroomt Information Management, US
Gregor Hochmuth, Google, US

Google strives to keep both its idealism and its business savvy. To this day a major design and company guideline is “Do no evil.” This is easy when the lines are black and white but a challenge when the shades are more light and dark gray. In this age of sophisticated on-line advertising this is becoming more and more difficult. The case in point is a project that would allow Google to customize ads shown on partnering websites (such as newspapers or blogs) based on a user's previous web activity. Although the data used for this customization would be both anonymous and non-identifying, this new technology caused concern and many discussions within the company over whether this was the best implementation and right step forward for both Google and Google’s end users.

Of particular concern to Google was both how end-users would feel this new functionality would be desirable or undesirable and also what effect would this have on increasing privacy concerns of the US Government and the European Union. Google also had a mandate from a prior legal agreement to let each user see the information kept in their advertising profile. Besides fulfilling this mandate, the company decided early on that the resulting tool would be of value to end users and reflect the best practices in privacy protection for end users.

The ensuing project furthered a practice becoming more and more common: the inclusion of non-design and non-engineer members to the design team. This team had some unique members including legal and privacy advocates; and also included specific users that went beyond user centred design including government, bloggers and non-governmental agencies. This shows the ever expanding and flexible design team and project structures needed to release successful products.

The resulting project also included a novel reliance on prototyping to clarify functionality and reduce emotionally charged situations. It also illustrated the emotional power navigational concepts independent of functionality have on this subject. Also included in the design process was participatory design techniques allowing legal, privacy advocates, bloggers, etc, to directly participate in the design process. This allowed participants to feel they were being seriously listened to and allay emotional fears over privacy abuses.

We will present iterative designs along with how they fit into the narrative written above. The current version of the developed tool can be found at http://www.google.com/ads/preferences.

James Kalbach, Lexis Nexus, D

“Innovation” is a trendy word that gets a lot of attention in the business world these days. Jared Spool has even said, “Innovation is the new black.” Indeed, the buzzability of the term is fairly high, and self-proclaimed innovators abound.

So what does it really mean to be innovative?

This talk first briefly looks at the field of innovation in general. I’ll then focus most of the presentation on human factors involved in the innovation process—namely, how innovations get adopted and why user-centered design is crucial for innovations to succeed.

Adoption of an innovation is a common goal of inventors. That is, we want people in our target groups to actually take notice and use the novel products and tools we create. But having a novel idea is not enough, and there are many reasons for non-adoption, even if financial backing is there.

This presentation will take a detailed look at how user perception of an innovation is as critical in the adoption of an innovation—if not more—than the technology, marketing, or financial support an invention receives. Related advantage, compatibility, and complexity are three such human factors that are critical in the adoption of innovations.

In this light, information architects and user experience researchers play a critical role in the overall innovation process. However, from a business perspective the focus is often on the technical and financial end of innovation. As a result, organisations may be setting themselves up to fail by not considering the human factors that are involved—unnecessarily so.

This talk will look at some practical ways to address the user issues related to innovation.

Jørgen Dalen, Halogen, N

80% of knowledge is undocumented, and can only be found inside people’s heads. To find the answer to your question, you often have to ask a person rather than finding a web page.
Internet search has up to now focused on the 20% of information that is documented, even if it is ultimately a person you want to find.
The presentation is looking forward and will explain how semantic web will revolutionize people search and make persons, not web sites, the new hubs of information.

Background People search on the Internet today is a disaster. Google treat names as any other string of text, and haven’t effectively addressed the problem that a lot of people have the same name.
In April 2009, Google launched a service where users can create their own personal profile page. Competing with Facebook and LinkedIn, Google has certainly moved the social media war into the search realm. Why did Google launch this service?

• People data are too poor to create an effective people search
• The fight over owning the namespace is getting tougher
• There is a need among users for personal SEO

How people search should work The core idea of the semantic web is that all content must be statements about resources that are uniquely identified. Using unique IDs for persons is THE single most important factor to improve people search, getting rid of ambiguity and allowing more content aggregation and filtering.
Here is the rest of the wish list:

• Each person has a profile page with official information and metadata
• Include interests and skills to support knowledge networking on a global scale
• The profile database administered by an independent party (Wikipedia?)
• Easier privacy settings, using both an official and a private ID and profile

Filip Borloo, Lancre-Woods, B

In this panel discussion we will explore the promise of e-business, e-government, e-banking and other e-'s.

Futurists have been painting a picture of a world of ubiquitous computing, everywhere we go our brain is extended by the power of the network, the thousands of sources of knowledge and information that should be able to solve our every problem with the click of the mouse or should I say the tap of a screen? Now, several decades later, already well into the 21st century it may be time to evaluate this vision.

We will be discussing the real world restrictions and hurdles e- projects have to live with and rather than looking at it from the point of view of the user in his flying, talking car we want to look at the fundamental changes organisations will have to go trough to finally realise this dream of being a truly online businesses. When exploring this topic we quickly realise the problem has little to do with technology but everything to do with people and their reluctance to change on one side and information and it's lack of openness and transparency on the other side.

An other issue we need to address is the lack of insight with management. As much as they can believe this vision of the "always on" internet and it's impact on their business in the long term, they are very reluctant to stick out their neck and make the short and middle term changes needed to enable this vision. So how can we motivate them to take the first steps now and not see it as science fiction that will not happen "in their lifetime".

So how can we, as IA's have any influence on this? Managing the streams of information is our bread and butter - that's obvious - but what about the people? Should or could we get involved in changing the processes and procedures defining the people's behaviour. Or in other words, should we get involved in change management?

The goal of this discussion is to take a step back and look at our work from a little more distance. Typically the task of the information architect is to look at the needs of the user, the business objectives and the technological context and then to zoom in on all issues dealing with the information, it's organisation and the different paths trough it. But maybe, in order to do a good job we need to take a step back and look at the larger context ...

The panel will consist of someone with a background in technology, one in e-governement and one in e-banking and co-ordinated by an experienced IA.