Dynamic IA: External & Internal Contexts for Reframing

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Technological, economic, social, and cultural elements of change have thoroughly transformed the scenario in which information architecture operated in the late 1990s, and a reframing is moving the conversation forward, consolidating intuitions into discipline, and helping establish a common language and grammar for both practice and research in the field.

The ideas within this presentation are elaborated in Duane’s chapter of the same name in the recently released book: Reframing Information Architecture, edited by Andrea Resmini. Dynamic IA outlines ways that Information Architects can consider evolving changes in user context, data structure and availability, and technology, as well as the methods in the practice of IA.

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Duane Degler

Analyzing Entities When Integrating Multiple Taxonomies

The taxonomist's process of “reconciliation” that analyzes disparate terms in order to merge them, plan their structure, and where needed translate them to a knowledge graph.
Exploratory Experiences Built by Design

Discovery: It is more than just finding a piece of information to complete a specific task. It is about encountering the unexpected, experiencing an “aha!” moment, or uncovering the deeper story behind a familiar subject. It is an experience – the user experience – within a digital space. It is an experience – the user experience – within a digital space. This insight talks about how user experience design can facilitate discovery.
Enabling Exploratory Discovery Through Taxonomy

Not everything can just be searched. “Aha!” moments deliver value. Exploration leads to insights and surfaces contexts. How do you prepare your content for these user experiences?
AI Explanations as Two-Way Experiences, Led by Users

How do we craft designs that "explain" concepts and respond to users’ intent? Can AI identify, elicit and apply relevant user contexts, to help us understand AI outputs? How do explanations become two-way, as users can explain their expectations and offer feedback?
Menu Mania: What's Wrong With Menus and How to Fix Them

Menus are ubiquitous in websites and applications of all types. They are critical to accessing the information and actions that users need, yet they can be very frustrating to use. In this presentation we review what we have learned about best practices for designing mega menus, context menus, hamburger menus, full page menus and other types, and share case studies of menu redesigns for enterprise applications, mobile apps, and information-rich websites.
Connecting Art & Archives for Research, Discovery, and Storytelling

If you’ve ever sat in on a discussion between a curator and an archivist, then you understand the breadth and richness of stories hidden in collections. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has developed a scalable infrastructure supporting integrated information from art, archival, library and historic home collections. Collections Online is a vital shared resource for the Museum and the public. Exploring rich relationships reveals a wealth of contexts, perspectives, events, and places. Learn about how the Museum is envisioning the future of its publishing and collections-based storytelling.
IA for AI: Shaping the Experience for Human-AI Systems

Participants collaborated in building upon the IA-for-AI framework that was first presented at IAC 2021. We explored what it means to understand, translate, and describe the types of situations where human-machine interaction occurs, and the way the relationship changes in real-time. Participants discussed opportunities and responsibilities that IA brings to human-AI relationships.
Hello, Meet Hola! Design for Mixed-language Interfaces

A global online user population necessitates the exchange of content from different sources, and the ability to aggregate multilingual content is a critical requirement within many research and business contexts. To effectively reach a global audience and provide access to content in multiple languages, we must structure mixed-language content to support its successful presentation and delivery, and provide innovative designs that facilitate exploration. In this interactive session, we provide real-world examples for doing just that.
Guiding Users Towards Action: Empowering Decisions Through Effective Data Design

Good design can help users quickly grasp a situation, make better decisions, and take productive actions. In this session, we provide a framework that describes a progressive evolution of data displays and actions, and share a broad range of examples, from consumer products to enterprise web applications, to discuss ways to design effective data displays and integrate actions.
How IAs Can Shape the Future of Human-AI Collaboration

Sometimes people describe Artificial intelligence (AI) as an “emerging intelligence,” but it is, in truth, the emergent collaboration with humans that fosters positive personal, societal, and environmental outcomes. We outline a framework that Information Architects (IAs) can use to help them think about the key issues in designing for AI systems.
Sensemaking as a Learned Experience

Human ability to “make sense” in both sensory and information experiences is learned, then developed through attention and practice over time. This talk guides IAs, designers, and developers toward creating supportive environments for sensemaking. It outlines the role of language, symbols, structure, and tools that help us make sense of our interactions with information.
The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections Website

In this demonstration of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's collection browse website, launched as a beta in September 2019, Duane Degler and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's Rana Chan discuss the project background, linked data architecture approach, and the O'Keeffe team's thoughts on the future. This webinar was presented to the Museum interest group of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) community.
The Delicate Art of Facilitating a Content Strategy

Good facilitation skills are essential for many content strategy tasks and projects. In this session, Duane Degler discussed techniques and approaches to channel the passions and personal goals of each participant, effectively guiding the group towards successful outcomes. Topics covered include learning how to lead discussions, manage personalities, and adapt to the unexpected to benefit both clients and customers.
Linked Information and an Enhancement Ecosystem

In his Information Architecture Conference poster, Duane Degler offers key steps in the theory and practice of managing information as linked data, a framework that supports ongoing enhancement of digital resources, and ways to support cross-silo information resources within, and across, organizations.
The Delicate Art of Facilitation

Good facilitation skills are essential for many IA tasks and projects. The ability to successfully guide internal colleagues as well as external groups to shared, valuable outcomes serves a wide range of project needs – achieving stakeholder and team consensus, creating a clear vision for IA strategy, refining a taxonomy, to name just a few. This IAC2019 workshop builds activities around real-world scenarios from the presenters' own experiences that participants can use to plan for and guide their own work.
User and Information Design Considerations for Effective Semantic Search

Semantic search seeks to enhance the meaning in content, to more closely align the searcher and the available information resources. This means there is a strong user-centered aspect needed to unlock the benefits. In this NFAIS Conference presentation, Duane Degler explores strategies and considerations for best supporting your users through effective semantic search.
Going Global: The Intersection of IA and UX in a Multilingual Environment

In their IA Summit talk, Kate Blanch, Rachel Sengers, and Janette Shew discuss how to structure multilingual content to support its successful presentation and delivery, and how to provide innovative designs that facilitate exploration of that content.
No Static: IA for Dynamic Information Environments

In this IA Summit talk, Duane Degler provides an overview of the dynamic information landscape, positions the role of IA firmly at the heart of its ecosystem design, and provides ideas for weaving this into your practice.
Linked Collections and an Enhancement Ecosystem

In their ARLIS/NA poster, Duane Degler and Kate Blanch offer key steps in the theory and practice of managing collection data as linked data, a framework that supports ongoing enhancement of digital resources, and ways to discuss your approach toward digital scholarship.
Integrating Taxonomies and Ontologies into Enterprise Search and Browse

In this Data Harmony User Group 2018 session, Duane Degler outlines approaches for increasing taxonomy integration into search and browse, thus drawing the greatest value from your taxonomies for your users.
Guerrilla Glue: Making Collaborative Digital Innovation Projects Stick

In this MCN2017 session, Duane Degler moderates a panel discussing how institutions and projects are using linked data and modern technologies to achieve long-term outcomes for themselves and others.
Designing and Evaluating Powerful, Relevant Search and Browse Experiences

In this hands-on course, Duane Degler took participants on a journey through the evolving search landscape, with a particular focus on considerations for designing and evaluating the user experience.
Aligning Your Organization's Strategic Direction, Roadmaps, and Technology

In this session, Duane Degler helps association executives think about how we can better use roadmaps to plan our technology journeys and keep everyone in sync, and provides valuable insights to help coordinate organization and technology goals across parallel initiatives and departments.
Understanding How Content Is Used in Enterprise Settings

Enabling knowledge management capabilities through search and discovery can benefit from richer data to learn the ways users think about the information they find and use. This article describes an approach we developed to support enterprise search and content synthesis for case management and research in legal and scientific/academic domains. We use an extremely lightweight (yet powerful) mechanism to bridge the silos and establish a network of data around the use of information.
Intelligent Understanding of Content Use

Using a rich network of data about how people actually use content, we can find insights by integrating it with other enterprise information sources. In this article, Duane Degler explores how it becomes a valuable input to governance processes, at both the organizational and content levels.
Building Bridges with Taxonomy: Enabling Semantic Integration

Taxonomies should be designed with enough flexibility and transition points to be a bridge to other taxonomies and datasets. Enabling your taxonomy to fit into the larger universe of partner companies, industry standards, federal requirements and complementary term sets gives it a solid foundation for future growth. We explore which vocabulary sets are available for reuse by the enterprise information architect and demonstrate how thinking about semantic integration from the beginning of the design process helps build a taxonomy that endures.
7 Steps for a More Accessible Association Information Ecosystem

It can be easy for associations to get buried under all the information they produce and curate. Here are seven steps create an information ecosystem in which resources are accessible and up to date.
Creating Personal Profiles Across Time and Distance

Personal data capture and algorithmic modeling of user preferences and interests is maturing. In this talk, Duane Degler explores some of the considerations for longitudinal preference management, how adaptive interfaces might play a role, and how users could interact with a model at a particular time in an application.
Emerging Tastes: Considering How Preferences Evolve

Experiencing cultural heritage is a voyage of discovery and learning, where emerging insights and serendipity play a significant role. The experience also happens in a blended personal and social context. At the broader level, engagement is longitudinal – what we learn from modern cultural experiences (daily life in our surroundings) can provide clues to analogous interests in cultural materials, and vice versa. This paper addresses richness of personal experience poses challenges and opportunities for capturing preferences in ways that support a user’s experience with cultural heritage across institutions and over time, both in the digital realm and where digital interaction blends with a physical space.
Positive Psychology and the Architecture of Information Happiness

The science of happiness has come a long way in recent decades: prominent scholars such as Martin Seligman, Tal Ben-Shahar, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi have studied and written about the impact that positive psychology can have in our lives. Csikszentmihalyi’s research on the concept of flow, in particular, is relevant to our work as information architects. Can we find the right mix of skills and challenges to bring our clients, our end users, and ourselves into the “flow” state of optimal experience? If we can achieve the right balance (in the stretch zone, as opposed to the panic zone!) happiness is found in the sense of accomplishment at what we’ve achieved.
User Experience for Content Sites

Have you seen those beautiful websites that you can't use? Or the super-cool ones that make it hard to actually accomplish your tasks? There's a better way. Duane Degler joined the DC Web Mavens to cover the landscape of understanding goals, users, tasks, content, and, particularly, context.
Blowing Up the Book: Design Challenges for Online Cultural Heritage Information

In 2009, The Getty Foundation issued a challenge to eight art museums: translate a scholarly catalog rich with cultural heritage data, images, and interpretation into an online resource that strives to reach beyond the limitations of print in creative and useful ways. "Systematic catalogs" are a time-honored and resource-intensive method of publishing the core art historical data and art research associated with the cultural objects that these institutions hold in public trust. And so the Online Scholarly Catalog Initiative (OSCI) was begun with the goal of "blowing up the book"... not to eliminate or destroy, but rather to expand the utility and audience of these important resources.
Dynamic IA: External & Internal Contexts for Reframing

The world of information architecture has changed, and a reframing is moving the conversation forward. Duane Degler contributes a chapter called “Dynamic Information Architecture—External and Internal Contexts for Reframing” to Reframing Information Architecture, a book edited by Andrea Resmini.
Enhancement Ecosystems: Enriching Structured Content with User Tagging and Annotation

Formal and informal metadata, classification and descriptions play a significant role in the quality of user experience with content and search. This talk describes “enhancement ecosystems” involving users and content experts.
Supporting Relevance for Users – A Design Challenge

Presenting “related” content can unfortunately be perceived by users as not relevant to their current needs, particularly in complex knowledge work and interactive applications. At risk is a loss of credibility, which can weaken trust in the application or underlying information, which in turn colors their ongoing experience with an application. Relevance algorithms have gotten more sophisticated, providing designers and developers with useful tools. But from a user experience perspective, relevance is often perceived in the context of a user’s immediate tasks and goals, as much (or more) than it is associated with their prior actions and patterns from similar users.
IA 2.0: An Open Conversation about Context, Mobility and Semantics

Information Architecture has the potential to take a leading role in making the next generation of web and mobile applications more valuable for our users. We have key skills to clarify structured data relationships, identify relevance and context, and streamline the usefulness of information. In order to lead, IAs need to understand and address the implications of an environment that is changing fundamentally from what we've known in Web 1.0 and 2.0. What does it mean to design for a Context Web? Note: This file contains points transcribed from the conversations with participants.
Semantics, Search, and Findability

Search is changing - we see it in public search and particularly what is possible with individual site searching. But it's more than search — findability is changing! Content relationships and linking, more structure and metadata, richer designs. Semantic Web concepts and techniques are becoming practical, finding their way into authoring tools and site designs. How do we take advantage of this? This is a brief overview of findability and search with a semantic twist, with examples and demos.
Achieving Business Value by Integrating Tasks, Topics and Content

“The shortest distance between two points is a relevant keyword.” When users need information, the most direct path returns them to their task as quickly as possible with the knowledge needed to be successful. This requires us to design and write with an understanding of the user's context, task, and need. We then reduce seeking time by carefully defining the 'glue' between applications and supporting information. In this paper, I discuss some 'big picture' ideas for User Assistance practices: understanding the user's context, identifying relevant keywords, and integrating applications and content using techniques from the Semantic Web and Topic Maps.
Policy Content at SSA: Using XML and Semantic Metadata

A new content management and delivery system has been growing over the past years at SSA. From a content perspective, users have been asking for “simple answers, with all supporting information, relevant to my situation.” From an organizational perspective, the role of content is increasingly seen as integrated with transactional systems in order to sustain quality service delivery in an increasingly complex business environment. From a technology perspective, the use of emerging tools based on XML and semantic technologies provides opportunities for simpler systems that control content maintenance more effectively, improve integration, provide easier content access, and allow migration as systems evolve over time. This case study shows the application and discusses design considerations.
Maintaining Ontology Implementations: The Value of Listening

It's hard to argue against the concepts of self-describing data, contextual interfaces, and richer metadata for content that eventually will make up the Semantic Web. However, it is easy to imagine semantic environments suffering from the same challenges that many content management system implementations and the Web itself suffer from: the preoccupation with data could easily leave us drowning in it. This paper focuses on approaches being explored to promote feedback and user involvement for the maintenance of semantic representations, to ensure they remain useful and current.
Knowledge Management in Pursuit of Performance: The Challenge of Context

Much of the current focus on knowledge management is on the acquisition and storage of knowledge resources. Unfortunately, because most knowledge management solutions are developed to stand alone, the context of a person’s need for information when using business applications is often left to the individual. This article discusses ways to merge the best practices of knowledge management and performance support, so that knowledge can be integrated more seamlessly within working applications, and applications can be used to solicit knowledge as a byproduct of people’s work.