Recent posts in my Information Architecture Category

Last week we had the latest London IA evening, featuring a packed programme with an IA Summit theme, as Tim Caynes and Johanna Kollmann reprised their talks from New Orleans, and Giles Colborne provided an overview of the event. As ever, Sense Worldwide were our hosts, and Zebra People our sponsors. Here are my notes from Giles’ talk.

You can’t be involved in digital product design and not have heard the buzz-words “responsive design” - building one URL that changes the information and design displayed as you access it with different devices with different screen sizes. The Boston Globe has won awards for doing it in the news space. A key component of a successful “responsive design” has to be a flexible and responsive IA.

I’ve long been fascinated by how to make content, context and user work on small screens, and intrigued by how to make coherent and satisfying user experiences with a minimum of design and sign-posting, so I’m very pleased to be able to announce one of my main projects for this year - on May 3rd I’ll be teaching a day long masterclass in “Responsive IA”.

Last week we held November’s London IA evening at the Sense Loft, sponsored by Zebra People and CX Partners. Mags Hanley and Vanessa Harden were talking.

This is my final set of notes from last week’s EuroIA conference in Prague - covering Margaret Hanley’s closing plenary session.

I’ve been gradually working through the remaining notes I made on my trip to Prague to speak at this year’s EuroIA. One of my favourite talks was more heavily focussed on software engineering than anything else on the conference programme, which put a big smile on my face. Here are my thoughts on Bob Royce presenting “The Rise and Fall...and Rise Again of Information Architecture.”

Before starting his EuroIA talk, Jason Mesut suggested that if you kept a count of the number of people he offended, you might win a prize at the end. He also asked for people not to tweet his soundbites out of a context - a tweetable soundbite in itself - and asked for a public critique of the talk at the end. Here is mine...

I’ve been catching up on the notes I made in Prague over the course of the EuroIA Summit. Here is what I made of a couple of talks with a Scandinavian twist - Haakon Halvorsen & Kjetil Hansen from Norway, and the BBC’s Anna Dahlström.

I’m trying to keep up the pace with “live blogging” the sessions from EuroIA as soon as they finish today, but there was so much packed into Wouter Sluis-Thiescheffer & Brian Pagán’s talk that I didn’t quite manage to write it up in the fifteen minute break that followed. It was fantastic though - and really great fun as well as useful. And please excuse an above average number of typos...

I’m trying to “live blog” my notes from EuroIA in Prague as quickly as I can. Here are my takeaway points from Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati’s talk about pervasive IA in our cities, which has just finished. You’ll have to be forgiving of an above average number of typos...

I’m trying to blog my notes form the EuroIA 2011 Summit in Prague as quickly as I can, so you’ll have to be a little bit more forgiving than normal about typos, spelling, and thorough linking. Saturday morning’s sessions have started, and the first one I attended was by Boon Sheridan.

This is the essay version of the talk I gave yesterday at the EuroIA Summit in Prague.

This year’s EuroIA Summit kicked off with a keynote from Luke Wroblewski - whose book on web form design is one of my personal bibles. Here are my notes.

Over the course of the next couple of days, I’ll be blogging my notes from the sessions at EuroIA in Prague. Not necessarily, it must be said, in the right order. I’m starting with my notes from a session that has just finished - LBi’s Terry Ma talking about localising web design to compete in the Middle East and Asian markets.

Welcome once again to my probably futile attempt to gather together all the EuroIA slides, resources, poster sessions, and blog posts into one place. If you know of a resource I’ve missed, then drop me a mail at martin.belam@currybet.net or ping me on Twitter - @currybet.

This is the essay version of a talk I gave this morning at the Content Strategy Forum in London - “Taking content strategy to people who already think they have one”. It covers how the Guardian has shifted from traditional to digital publishing, and talks about our CMS, our metadata, our API, and gives my advice for those entering the content strategy field when dealing with traditional publishers.

My notes from 2 sessions at the 2011 Content Strategy Forum, featuring talks by Lisa Welchman and Eric Reiss.

My notes from Karen McGrane’s brilliant talk at Content Strategy Forum 2011.

Since helping redesign the front page and sitting with the team for a few days, I’ve been acting as a kind of unofficial pseudo-techie-in-residence in the “You tell us” open thread on Comment is free. They are mostly a good-natured bunch. Unusually today, an information architecture question cropped up in the thread

We had our first “UX drop-in” at the Guardian yesterday, and judging by the waiting list to get tickets and the reaction on the day, it won’t be the last. It was quite a simple format - get a ticket, turn up at the Guardian on the day, there will be some short talks, the chance to play with some forthcoming products like our Android app, and some free beer.

There are a couple of opportunities open at the moment to visit the user experience team at the Guardian. We are having a “drop-in” open day, and there are vacancies.

Andy Rutledge published a fascinating blog post last week looking at the design of digital news, and to illustrate his points he did a redux of the New York Times. Whilst appreciating the visual design, I thought there were 4 key areas where I very much disagree with Andy’s analysis, and think it would fail to engage with mainstream news readers.

I posted a screengrab to Tumblr last night of the headline from The Times website which unfortunately managed to follow the formula “Live: Someone is dead”. I think it is the perfect example of something that wouldn’t be allowed to happen in print, but which hits a magic Venn diagram intersection of technology, editorial and information architecture allowing it to happen digitally.

I just wanted to briefly post about some of the talks I will be doing, and events I am involved in, between now and the end of the year.

Last week I spoke at the 26th meeting of LIKE, the London Information and Knowledge Exchange. With the title “Information Architects: The Secret librarians of the internet”, the talk was based on both “Come as you are” and “Tags are magic!”, giving an overview of how I became an Information Architect, and some detail on how we tag up our content for the Guardian website.

This is part four of a five part essay based on my Polish IA Summit keynote talk “Come as you are”, looking at how I do my work at The Guardian.

This is the second part of my essay version of “Come as you are”, a talk I gave at the Polish IA Summit which looks back at my digital career and draws out what I think are the key lessons for information architects and user experience practitioners. This post looks at my time working at the BBC between 2000 and 2005.

Last night I was at the Hacks/Hackers meet-up to hear Andreas Gebhart, Stuart Myles and Evan Sandhaus talk about the proposed new IPTC semantic metadata standard rNews.

Over the next few days I’ll be publishing an essay version of “Come as you are”, my Polish IA Summit keynote talk, which looked back over how I came to be an Information Architect, and what I’ve learned in the process.

This week I’ve been publishing the notes I made in Warsaw as I attended the Polish IA Summit. In the last of my notes, here is my take on Peter Boersma’s closing session.

One of the things I was pleased to hear get a mention in Denver at the IA Summit was the value of community management. Johanna Kollmann gave a great talk entitled “We love change. Change is scary”, that explored why humans are initially uncomfortable with change, and recommended good community management as a way to deal with it

I’ve just come back from Poland, where I was giving the opening keynote session at the Polish IA Summit. This is the first of a series of posts about the sessions I saw there, looking at two presentations that featured designing for or with children.

Today I delivered the opening keynote address at the Polish IA Summit in Warsaw, entitled “Come as you are”. It is the story of how I’ve come to spend 13 years building digital products, and how I’ve observed and been part of the changes and development in the UX and IA disciplines over that time. It finishes with what I consider to be the five key lessons about computers and people from my career as an IA practitioner. Here they are...

A (probably futile) attempt to gather all the 2011 IA Summit slides into one handy reference point.

Matthew Solle and I are making up half of a panel at the IA Summit in Denver. We’ll be joined on the day by Joe Sokohl and Eric Reiss. To prepare, we’ve been debating on our blogs the topic of the panel: “blah”. This is the sixth installment, looking at the role of professional development in a UX community.

In just over a fornight’s time I’ll be opening the Polish IA Summit, with a keynote presentation entitled “Come as you are”. It is a reference to the Nirvana track, as an anecdote about the band from my days working in a record shop is one of the elements setting up the talk. It is also a look back at the key things I’ve learned through 13 years of working with websites and digital products, and watching and being part of the disciplines of information architecture and user experience design evolving into the established job roles that they are today. As part of the build-up I’ve been interviewed by Artur Kurasińsk

Matthew Solle, Joe Sokohl, Eric Reiss and I are running a discussion panel at IA Summit 2011 called “UX Communities: Starting from the beginning”. Matthew and I have been preparing by having an online debate about what makes up a community, and how you go about forming them. Matthew kicked off part one and I responded on currybetdotnet. On Thursday Matthew added part three, and this is part four.

Last week I was at the the latest Hacks/Hackers meet up and saw Scott Byrne-Fraser of the BBC talking about how their data visualisations and online interactives have developed.

I’ve been sitting on the news for several weeks now about some upcoming talks and appearances at conferences that I’ve got planned, but since they all seem to have finally been publicly announced I can reveal my jet-setting plans for the next few months.

Last Wednesday we held the latest of our London IA events. As ever it was curated and organised brilliantly by Matthew Solle. I've already posted my handwritten notes from Relly Annett-Baker's talk - she banned the use of technology whilst speaking - and today I've got a rather more conventional blog post about Dan Lockton's talk.

Over the last few blog posts I've been sharing the notes I took at last week's Lightning UX event organised and hosted by Lee McIvor. Today it is the turn of Tyler Tate's talk about UI components.

I've been blogging my notes from last week's Lightning UX evening, and this morning posted my thoughts on Cennydd Bowles' presentation "The dip". Another member of the thriving Brighton UX scene is Dr Harry Brignull, and he was also talking at the event on Tuesday about "Dark patterns".

Tuesday night was Lightning UX night, featuring 8 speakers delivering five minutes each on a variety of UX and IA related topics. The second talk of the evening came from Jonathan Kahn, and it was about the relationship between content strategy and UX.

On Tuesday night I was at Sapient Nitro's offices for an evening of Lightning UX organised by Lee McIvor. Featuring 8 speakers delivering five minutes each, it was a new event on the London UX calendar. Over the next few days I'll be writing up some of my notes from what was a great evening which I hope to see repeated, starting with Boon Chew's talk about "How a developer became a ux designer".

Over the last few weeks on the Guardian's Developer blog we've been publishing a series called "Tags are magic!". Written by myself and tag manager Peter Martin, it is based on the presentation we gave at Online Information in November 2010.

If you were at my talk in Leeds today, then here are some of the resources I mentioned during the presentation.

On Wednesday I'll be in Leeds talking at the Leeds Community News Hub. In the run-up to the event I was interviewed by Tom Page, a second year sports journalist currently studying at Leeds Trinity & All Saints University College. Here is the Q&A session we had.

On Tuesday night we held the first London IA event of the year, and here are my notes from Mark Plant's talk explaining why wireframes are dead - "Experiments and experience from the UX/Agile divide"

This week on the Developer blog we've begun posting a series of articles entitled "Tags are magic!", about the metadata under-pinning the content on guardian.co.uk, co-authored by myself and Peter Martin.

There has been a recent thread on the SIGIA-L mailing list featuring Eric Scheid and Stephen Collins asking about "the role of IAs in Data Journalism"

There was a lovely short post from Joe Leech a couple of weeks back about organisations showing their underpants in their navigational structures on the web. It is unhelpful for users, and totally works against them achieving task based goals. But I think news is different, and I'm actually rather fond of flashing The Guardian's pants at the world...

In early November 2010 I gave a presentation at the London UKUPA meeting for 'World Usability Day'. In it, I took the day's theme of 'communication', and examined how twenty years of digital technology had smashed the boundaries between media organisations and their audiences. In this five part series, I've written that talk up as an essay, covering how the media now have to deal with users on a much more personal level, involve them in product design, and build tools to enable story-telling. This is the final part.

Pretty much every time I finished a freelance contract between 2006 and 2008, I'd return to my adopted Greek home and tell my wife, "Right, now I'm going to start writing my book". I never did. Which in some ways is just as well, because having listened to Giles Colborne talk at London IA on Tuesday night, I realise that I was in no way prepared for how much work it would be.

I had two awkward questions after my talk at the UK UPA's World Usability Day event last night. One was basically "Does journalism have a future? Discuss" and the other was from Ann Danylkiw. She spoke to me afterwards to complain that I hadn't really answered it, so here is a fuller more considered answer in a blog post than she got in the Q&A itself.

I've written quite a few blog posts already about my trip to Paris for EuroIA so far. This one is a bit of a round-up of some of the bits and pieces that didn't really merit an entire blog post all of their own, but which I nevertheless found interesting, and it features Greeks, UX Basis, Daleks, the otherwise absent BBC, and an intimidating matter of life and death...

No, not a blog post complaining that I missed out on the Friday night partying at EuroIA this year because I was too tired, but a thought about some of the isolationism in our discipline. There was no overall theme to the EuroIA programme, but you always hope that the confluence of talks will help you join some dots and spark some connections. At times I almost got a feeling of being in the 'The Quiz Broadcast' on That Mitchell and Webb Look, as if the information architect of today emerged stumbling from a mysterious vacuum...

The second session I went to on the Saturday morning at EuroIA 2010 had a focus on the mobile platform, as Johann Richard from UNIC spoke about how to "Start Your IA with Mobile". Johann gave some very clear examples of how the small screen and context of use on phones forces you to focus on the key tasks and activities the user needs to be able to achieve. With mobile use in mind, forms become simpler, navigation tauter, and the complexity of choice is reduced for the user.

All of the slides from this year's EuroIA that I have been able to find online gathered in one place.

One of the most interesting things for me at EuroIA this year was that keynote speaker Oliver Reichenstein has done so much work in digital newspaper website design. In the Q&A session after his talk he made the interesting suggestion that "Journalists are information architects in their way as well"