Coordinated By:
Craig M. MacDonald
craig.m.macdonald@gmail.com
Samantha Raddatz
samantha.raddatz@gmail.com
Carl Collins
carlcollins@gmail.com
Word IA Day NYC is gonna be a warm and friendly day out for those who need a bit more Information Architecture in their lives.
We're planning a day of talks with plenty of breaks so you can hang out more with some of the nicest folk around. If you're new to IA or a seasoned veteran, come out and share the ways IA makes a difference in your life.
Watch it live on Ustream
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We're excited to host this years event in the ADP Chelsea Innovation Lab on the 5th floor of 135 W. 18th St. The location is a short walk from the A, F, L or 1 trains.
Agenda
Unwrangled, mismanaged, untamed, messy, incoherent information can make our life miserable. Unfortunately, nonsense is everywhere you look these days. No body escapes the feeling of being totally confused, totally overwhelmed, and totally tiny in comparison to the messes of big data, ubiquitous computing and objects getting “smart”.
The right information getting to us at the right time and in the right form, is the closest thing most people experience to a miracle.
Maybe it was last query you Googled successfully, the last time you asked a friend for advice, or the last time you tracked your health with the intent to improve your life. Whatever it was, information can make us happy, if it doesn’t make us miserable.
Whatever level you work at you can feel happier about the processes and tools you use to do it. Whatever your goal in life, you can feel happier about the way you move towards it.
Effective IA is the foundation of a happy website. Re-architecting our library website was the foundation of our redesign. Throughout, we publicly and internally stated and restated our commitment to user-centered, UX-based design: to making our users “happy”. What does a “happy” library website user look like? Which users were we committed to making happy? How did we use IA in our redesign process, how (and when and if) did IA make things easier, and how are we using IA going forward to keep everyone happy? Our IA has been completely transformed, and we continue to be committed to an agile design process using a more flexible IA framework, hopefully making a happier environment for users, for developers and designers, and for content contributors.. This talk will address how we’ve done that so far and a roadmap for what is to come. Our users don’t remain stagnant, and we can’t stagnate either!
So much of the news about technology tells us that the Internet makes us anxious, our smartphones take us out of the present moment, and social media ensnares us in a dopamine loop. If you look at what makes people happy, rarely is an app or a website in the mix. Happiness, it seems, is not a screen.
Yet, delight is something of a holy grail. Clever, shiny, a little self-referential and certain to win hearts and minds. Of course, the sad truth is that most online experiences are just OK, and most sites and apps don’t make people very happy.
So what does make people happy? And how much does it matter anyway? Based on data from a large-scale study, combining online studies, interviews, and social experiments, this session will look at happiness online and the implications for the user experience. Come away from the talk with guiding principles for practicing happiness first design.
In the fast paced environment of the financial industry, the UX team at Goldman Sachs has had to develop scalable solutions for a myriad of groups, products, and use cases. Tamara Waye and Nikki Roda will be presenting the “internally-open-sourced” web component and pattern library that the team has developed to distribute best practices across the firm. They’ll also give specific examples of how standard design patterns and interactive information visualization have been used to improve comprehension of complex datasets in the securities space.
Working with IBM Global Design Studios, a team at VSA ventured to Tokyo and London to help transform IBM's approach to digital sales enablement, client engagement and opportunity progression. As with any large workforce, IBM's sales force had been using a disparate coalition of apps, sites, digital and analog tools to support the sales process. The VSA team sought to help create a responsive web app that allowed the IBM seller to connect and engage with clients, news, experts and sales opportunities in more meaningful and contextual ways––when and where they need it. Isaiah will share the story of the challenges, adventures and awkward moments that came along with creating enjoyable disruption within one of the world's largest and longest-standing technology companies.
The recent explosion of what I term “digital happiness” has revolutionized self-help and positive psychology efforts to assess and maximize well-being by using the tools and methods of big data, sentiment analysis, crowdsourcing, social networking, the quantified self, and biometrics. This talk first provides an overview of these initiatives, demonstrating their efforts to track and triangulate individual internal emotional states, networked virtual data and connections, and real social relations and policies. I then position their rhetoric and ideology within the larger discourses of self-help, positive psychology, and utopian studies, and critically interrogate these projects’ utopian aspirations, analyzing their aims and methods for instantiating different ways of being and living, of creating both the happy person and the good society in the image of (and from) the raw data of individuals’ emotions.
In a world looking for rules of thumb, checklists, best practices, and guarantees how do we know what we know? Even worse, how to choose when every rule has an equal and opposite position? As knowledge increases and every dissenting opinion is available for citation, it becomes more important to set aside the mundane challenges… at least that’s what were told by a succession of books, speakers, and multi-media campaigns. How can one be expected to produce a manifesto, let alone get work done, when every other day someone else is muscling up to the church door with a new sheaf of papers to share with the world? Sanity (in the slimmest possible definition of the word) is only possible when one takes charge of their own body of knowledge, shakes it hard, and is mindful of what falls out. In this talk I will plead a great deal, cajole a bit, and threaten my own notions of structure and knowledge in the hope you will do the same to yours.
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AND WITH THANKS TO OUR GLOBAL SPONSORS
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