Donna Spencer
April 8 9:00AM
This full day workshop will provide you with a thorough overview and
understanding of information architecture theory & practice. It will cover a
wide range of IA issues, including an understanding of how it fits into a
project, fundamental skills & knowledge required for IA work and current IA
issues. It will be theoretical and practical and allow you to immediately apply
ideas to your projects.
This workshop will cover:
* What information architecture is and how it relates to other user experience
disciplines
* Core IA techniques - analysing content, conducting user research, card
sorting and more
* Core IA theories - classification, categorization, metadata & labeling
* IA patterns - structures for different types of sites
* Designing navigation & page layouts
* Putting it together in an IA project
* Current issues in IA
The workshop will be at the level of an 'advanced intro', covering the basics
and also allowing exploration of key challenges and issues. The format is a
combination of short lectures, group discussion and hands-on activities.
Extensive notes and resources will be provided for further personal
exploration.
April 10 5:00PM
We have patterns for buildings, patterns for interaction design, and patterns
for software development. But are there patterns for information architecture?
Of course there are - patterns emerge from use, and there certainly are enough
information architectures around to identify a set of patterns.
This presentation will describe a wide range of commonly-used information
architecture patterns, including hierarchies small and large, different types
of database structure, hypertext, subsite models, sites with multiple entry
points and ways of combining these (and more that I discover before April).
For each I will describe the core elements of the pattern, discuss the most
appropriate uses and show real-world examples.
Understanding the different patterns will help attendees to select the most
appropriate structures for their content.