Presentations about information architecture
Podcasts, slides, videos and more
Rashmi Sinha - The perils of popularity
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.
Can web-based social systems with their wide reach, user-generated and user-filtered content harness the wisdom of crowds? Duncan Watts’ recent experiments reveal how popularity based web social systems can throw up fickle, random trends that are essentially unreplicable, and only tangentially related to quality. However, popularity as a way to filter information continues to rise in popularity - replacing hierarchical menus, overtaking tags, and even used in lieu of relevance. Rashmi will link decades of psychology research on group decision making and social influence to what is happening on the web today. She will discuss different models of popularity based filtering such as Digg and YouTube. What are ways to avoid the Watts dilemma - including Google’s model of sociality, tag-based social systems, and object-based social networks. She will present some principles for the design of web social systems and how there were used in the design of SlideShare and discuss how SlideShare as an evolving social system handles popularity.
See the slides and hear the podcast »
Andy Clarke - Creating Inspired Design
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.
Designers are more than mere pixel pushers. The role of the creative designer working on the web has changed and will continue to change faster than ever before. In this session, Andy Clarke will discuss how designers should now play the pivotal part in the creation of engaging user experiences, binding together the roles of information architects, content authors and technical developers. It’s time to put designers in the hot seat. See the slides and hear the podcast »
Thomas Vander Wal - IA for the “Come to Me Web”
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.
In this specialised session Thomas gets us up to speed with his "Come to Me Web" framework for structuring information and web sites. This framework includes the "Model of Attraction", Personal InfoCloud, and Folksonomy. This ads the focus of designing and developing for information use across devices and context. With this framework we can consider mobile, broadband, web storage and personal off-line storage of information and its implications as we structure our information and sites. See the slides and hear the podcast »
Donna Maurer - IA: a “how to”
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.
There are 2 aspects to making IA work in a project - an understanding of the key principles of information architecture and a knowledge of activities to put them into practice. This presentation will examine the “how to’s” of information architecture. We’ll look at how to take a content inventory, analyse content, conduct card sorting, analyse user research, choose the right structure, create an information architecture and test it. These activities drive an informed design process so you can be confident in your decisions and communicate them to other people. See the slides and hear the podcast »
Thomas Vander Wal - IA for Web Developers
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006.
Thomas will provide an overview of information architecture for web designers and developers. He will cover the what and why, with a sprinkling of how. Knowing how to work with an information architect or how to build the skills into your role will be covered. See the slides and hear the podcast »