Highlights

Presentation

Enabling Exploratory Discovery Through Taxonomy

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2024

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?

Presentation

AI Explanations as Two-Way Experiences, Led by Users

User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) conference

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?

Presentation

Menu Mania: What's Wrong With Menus

User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) conference

Menus are ubiquitous in websites and applications of all types. They are critical to accessing the information and actions that users need. In this presentation we share best practices for designing menus.

Presentation

Connecting Art & Archives for Research, Discovery, and Storytelling

MuseumNext (virtual)

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and Design for Context have developed a scalable infrastructure supporting integrated information from art, archival, library, historic home collections and exhibitions. 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.

Our insights

Presentation

Enabling Exploratory Discovery Through Taxonomy

Taxonomy Boot Camp in Washington, D.C. – November 18, 2024

Duane Degler

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?

Read more
Presentation

AI Explanations as Two-Way Experiences, Led by Users

User Experience Professionals Conference – June 25, 2024

Duane Degler

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?

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Presentation

Menu Mania: What's Wrong With Menus and How to Fix Them

UXPA 2024 Conference, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida – June 25, 2024

Lisa Battle, Rachel Sengers

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.

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Presentation

Connecting Art & Archives for Research, Discovery, and Storytelling

MuseumNext Digital Collections Conference – October 10, 2022

Duane Degler, Liz Neely

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.

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Workshop

IA for AI: Shaping the Experience for Human-AI Systems

Information Architecture Conference - April 18-23, 2022

Duane Degler, Carol Smith, Rebecca Evanhoe

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.

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Presentation

Hello, Meet Hola! Design for Mixed-language Interfaces

UXPA International Conference, Baltimore, MD – September 2, 2021

Duane Degler, Rachel Sengers

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.

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Presentation

Guiding Users Towards Action: Empowering Decisions Through Effective Data Design

UXPA International Conference, Baltimore, MD – September 1, 2021

Lisa Battle, Laura Chessman

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.

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Presentation

How IAs Can Shape the Future of Human-AI Collaboration

Information Architecture Conference - April 28-30, 2021

Duane Degler, Carol Smith

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.

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Article

Business as (Un)Usual: How a UX Audit Can Help

May 22, 2020

Michael Owens

It may be the understatement of the century to say that 2020 is not going the way any of us had planned. In the best of times, it can be difficult to justify the allocation of resources to assess and redesign your UX. And in tough times, like now, it can be especially hard to make needed progress, which is where a UX audit can really make a difference.

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Presentation

Sensemaking as a Learned Experience

Information Architecture Conference – April 28, 2020

Duane Degler

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.

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Article

Don’t Document it—Prototype it!

February 11, 2020

Michael Owens

In this article by Michael Owens, she explores the Catch 22 of traditional documentation: that whatever you write is inevitably going to be either too much or too little. Walking the tightrope between providing enough detail to be useful and avoiding too many words to be overwhelming can be a delicate balance to strike for any designer, and that's where prototypes can make all the difference.

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Article

The Delicate Art of Facilitation: Preparing for a Facilitation Session

Published January 9, 2020

Karen Bachmann, Duane Degler

A successful facilitation session is one where participants are empowered to achieve specific outcomes supporting a shared goal. In this blog post, Duane Degler and Karen Bachmann detail the most important aspects of preparing for a facilitation session to ensure that you set out with the right maps, milestones, and possible alternative paths at hand.

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Presentation

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections Website

Webinar, IIIF Museum Community Group – January 7, 2020

Duane Degler, Charlie Butcosk, Rana Chan

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.

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Presentation

Don’t Document It, Prototype It!

DCUX Conference, Washington, DC – November 9, 2019

Michael Owens

In this DCUX 2019 lightning talk, Michael Owens shares valuable tips about communicating UX requirements to your development team with annotated prototypes.

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Presentation

The Delicate Art of Facilitating a Content Strategy

Content Strategy DC -- August 29, 2019

Duane Degler

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.

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Presentation

Designing More Ethical and Unbiased Experiences

Abstractions 2019 in Pittsburgh, PA -- August 23, 2019

Karen Bachmann, Carol Smith, Karen Bachmann

Humans are biased, and sadly, we are not always able to filter our deeply ingrained biases. UX designers and researchers have long understood this, but we need tools to explore and challenge our biases in a productive way to deliver better outcomes. In this session, Karen Bachmann and Carol Smith (Carnegie Mellon University) share ways you can empower yourself and your teams to do the right thing for people.

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Conference

Linked Information and an Enhancement Ecosystem

2019 Information Architecture Conference in Orlando, FL -- March 15, 2019

Duane Degler

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.

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Workshop

The Delicate Art of Facilitation

IAC 2019 in Orlando, FL -- March 14, 2019

Karen Bachmann, Duane Degler

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.

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Conference

User and Information Design Considerations for Effective Semantic Search

NFAIS 2019 Annual Conference in Alexandria, VA -- February 14, 2019

Duane Degler

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.

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Presentation

Know Thyself, and To Thine Users Be True: Understanding and Managing Biases that Can Influence UX Work

UXPA 2018 Conference in Puerto Rico -- June 28, 2018

Karen Bachmann

In her UXPA 2018 session, Karen Bachmann explores ways to discover and discuss biases constructively before they undermine work, look at case studies of products that suffered from hidden biases, and consider pragmatic approaches to manage their influence in our projects.

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Presentation

Big Data in Small Graphics: Micro-Visualizations in SaaS and Enterprise Applications

UXPA Conference, Puerto Rico – June 26, 2018

Lisa Battle, Rachel Sengers

In this UXPA session, Lisa Battle and Rachel Sengers explored the use of micro-visualizations to enhance user experience and how to best design effective visualizations.

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Workshop

How to Design Great Dashboards and Visualizations for SaaS and Enterprise Applications

UXPA 2018 Conference in Puerto Rico -- June 25, 2018

Lisa Battle, Rachel Sengers

In their UXPA 2018 workshop, Lisa Battle and Rachel Sengers discussed how to ensure a good user experience for dashboards, brainstorm together on the common building blocks of dashboard design, and generate ideas for visualizations to quickly communicate data.

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Presentation

Listen Up! Improving your Listening Skills and Awareness

UXPA Boston 2018 Conference, Boston, MA – May 10, 2018

Karen Bachmann

In this UXPA Boston 2018 session, Karen Bachmann shares insights, exercises, and practical tips to help you improve your listening skills.

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Conference

Archives Strengthening Historical Narrative: Sharing Digital And Linked Data Resources For Broader Reach And Sustainability

Museum and the Web 2018 Conference in Vancouver, Canada -- April 19, 2018

Duane Degler, Mark Coffey - Texas Coastal Bend Collection, Alan Watts - Texas Coastal Bend Collection

In their MW2018 panel presentation, Duane Degler joins Mark Coffey and Alan Watts, both from the Texas Coastal Bend Collection, to provide insights into ways oral history and images can be used to assemble flexible topic-based narrative structures. This session provides insight into technical and curatorial approaches, so others don’t have to “start from scratch.”

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Conference

Going Global: The Intersection of IA and UX in a Multilingual Environment

IA Summit 2018 Conference in Chicago, IL -- March 25, 2018

Kate Blanch, Rachel Sengers, Janette Shew

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.

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Conference

No Static: IA for Dynamic Information Environments

IA Summit 2018 Conference in Chicago, IL -- March 24, 2018

Duane Degler

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.

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Conference

Linked Collections and an Enhancement Ecosystem

Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) 2018 Conference in New York, NY -- February 26, 2018

Duane Degler, Kate Blanch

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.

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Presentation

Integrating Taxonomies and Ontologies into Enterprise Search and Browse

Data Harmony User Group in Albuquerque, NM – February 6, 2018

Duane Degler

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.

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Presentation

Guerrilla Glue: Making Collaborative Digital Innovation Projects Stick

MCN 2017 Conference, Pittsburgh, PA – November 10, 2017

Duane Degler

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.

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Presentation

Split Focus: Designing Applications for Multiple Monitor Setups

UXPA 2017 Conference, Toronto, Ontario – June 8, 2017

Lisa Battle, Rachel Sengers, Michael Owens

In this UXPA 2017 session, Lisa Battle, Michael Owens, and Rachel Sengers discuss new UX design patterns and challenges that arise in software and web-based application design for multiple monitors, illustrating them with real project examples.

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Presentation

Ethics: A Human-Centered Design Goal

UXPA 2017 Conference, Toronto, Ontario – June 6, 2017

Karen Bachmann

In this UXPA 2017 session, Karen Bachmann addresses about how to talk carrots (value) and not sticks (legality) to make ethics a core human-centered design constraint.

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Workshop

Designing and Evaluating Powerful, Relevant Search and Browse Experiences

UXPA 2017 Conference, Toronto, Ontario – June 5, 2017

Duane Degler

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.

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Presentation

Perspectives on Open Source for Museums’ Digital Projects

American Alliance of Museums 2017 Annual Meeting & MuseumEXPO, St. Louis, MO – May 10, 2017

Duane Degler, David Newbury, Robert Sanderson

In this AAM session, Duane Degler, David Newbury (Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh), and Robert Sanderson (The J. Paul Getty Trust) discuss a range of topics related to the role of open-source software in museum projects.

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Presentation

Accessibility 101

Baltimore UX Meetup, Baltimore, MD – May 9, 2017

Michael Owens, Lesley Humphreys

In this Baltimore UX Meetup presentation, Michael Owens and Lesley Humphreys explore recent standards, assistive technologies, and the types of deliverables that can be used to specify accessibility compliant interactions.

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Presentation

Micro-Visualizations: Small Visualizations That Make A Big Impact

UXDC Conference, Washington, DC – April 15, 2017

Lisa Battle, Rachel Sengers

In this UXDC session, Lisa Battle and Rachel Sengers present examples of several different types of micro-visualizations and discuss how they can be used effectively to improve user experience.

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Presentation

Aligning Your Organization's Strategic Direction, Roadmaps, and Technology

ASAE Technology Conference & Expo, Washington, DC - December 14, 2016

Duane Degler

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.

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Presentation

User Experience Design Considerations for Multi-Museum Online Collaborations

MCN2016 Conference, New Orleans, LA – November 4, 2016

Duane Degler, Lesley Humphreys

In this MCN2016 session, Duane Degler and Lesley Humphreys share human-centered user experience considerations and requirements that pertain specifically to the challenges faced by collaborations among multiple collections, sites, and institutions.

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Presentation

Designing Great Dashboards for SaaS and Enterprise Applications

UXPA Conference, Seattle, WA - June 3, 2016

Lisa Battle

Dashboards present a great opportunity to improve user experience by providing quick answers to users’ common questions, but they are also full of potential pitfalls for design. In this session, Lisa Battle will discuss our approach to ensuring a good user experience for dashboards, focusing on 8 principles of UX design that are particularly relevant and illustrating them with real project examples.

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Presentation

First Impressions Matter: Onboarding for First Time Users

UXPA Conference, Seattle, WA - June 1, 2016

Lisa Battle

First time user experience, while critical to product success, may not be getting the attention it deserves. In this talk, Lisa Battle presents design principles for great onboarding experiences that engage and inform new users, helping them become productive quickly.

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White paper

Understanding How Content Is Used in Enterprise Settings

March 16, 2016

Duane Degler

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.

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Publication

Intelligent Understanding of Content Use

Published in KMWorld Magazine, March 1, 2016

Duane Degler

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.

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Presentation

Building Bridges with Taxonomy: Enabling Semantic Integration

Taxonomy Bootcamp, associated with KM World, Washington, DC - November 2, 2015

Duane Degler, Jayne Dutra

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.

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Publication

7 Steps for a More Accessible Association Information Ecosystem

Published by the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), Associations Now Plus - October 5, 2015

Duane Degler, Jacqui Olkin

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.

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Presentation

Creating Personal Profiles Across Time and Distance

SmartData Conference, San Jose, CA - August 19, 2015

Duane Degler

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.

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Publication

8 Tips For Achieving User-Friendly Search

Published by the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), Associations Now Plus - August 17, 2015

Duane Degler, Jacqui Olkin

Search is an increasingly important component in desktop and mobile online experiences, yet too often search is not designed to meet the needs of users. Associations have unique challenges that come with serving multiple audiences and delivering a variety of information types through search—for example, balancing the relevance of publications, issue summaries, research papers, membership information, and event information. Here, we offer a practical to-do list to achieve user-friendly search for association websites and apps.

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Presentation

Designing the Next Generation of Search User Experience

User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) Conference, San Diego, CA - June 24, 2015

Duane Degler, Lisa Battle

Design is coming to the forefront of effective search applications, to help make sense of mobile search, data search, semantic search, enterprise search, federated search, and embedded search. So what do we need to know about designing for search? In this UXPA 2015 session, Duane Degler and Lisa Battle dive into the essentials for a new generation of search design.

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Presentation

Simplicity in Web Application Design

User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) Conference, San Diego, CA - June 23, 2015

Lisa Battle, Laura Chessman

Simplicity is one of the most important principles of design. But, realistically, simplicity isn’t always simple. This talk covers what to try when removing functionality or features isn’t an option, provides practical questions to ask when deciding whether and how to simplify an application, and summarizes proven design techniques to use when simplifying applications.

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Presentation

Delicious Design: UXers and Visual Designers Collaborating Together

UXPA Boston’s 2015 Conference – May 15, 2015

Rachel Sengers, Jennifer Chaffee

Led by a UX designer and a visual designer, this session provides practical ideas and recommendations for ensuring a smooth and effective collaboration between specialists in these disciplines.

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Presentation

Structure and Metadata: Shortening The On-Ramp To Linked Data

IA Summit, Minneapolis, MN – April 25, 2015

Duane Degler, Dalia R. Levine

Information Architects codify information’s purpose and context – that is vital for effective use and management. This talk summarizes our approach to understanding dynamic, multi-dimensional information models and the practical tools that help us create them.

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Workshop

Emerging Tastes: Considering How Preferences Evolve

International Workshop on Personalized Access to Cultural Heritage (PATCH 2015), Atlanta, GA – March 29, 2015

Duane Degler

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.

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Presentation

Positive Psychology and the Architecture of Information Happiness

World IA Day, Washington, DC - February 21, 2015

Lesley Humphreys

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.

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Presentation

Keeping the Vision Alive: Techniques for Communication Throughout the Project Lifecycle

Interaction15, the IxDA conference, San Francisco, CA - February 9, 2015

Lisa Battle, Duane Degler

As UX practitioners, we often face challenges “keeping the vision alive” as projects get caught up in constraints, details, and politics. Also, as consultants there is much we can do to prepare the project team to hold the line on needed improvements, advocate for user needs, and build on the “big picture” over the long haul after the UX work is completed. In this talk, we discuss strategies and practical techniques to help teams stay focused on meeting long-term goals, while addressing short-term needs and facing the circumstances and challenges that arise through the design and implementation process, and beyond.

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Presentation

User Experience for Content Sites

Web Content Mavens, Washington, DC – January 27, 2015

Duane Degler

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.

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Presentation

Perspectives and Considerations for Linked Open Data in Cultural Heritage

American Art Collaborative partners – January 15, 2015

Duane Degler, Neal Johnson

An overview of considerations for creating, publishing, managing, and using linked data in a cultural heritage context.

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Presentation

Blowing Up the Book: Design Challenges for Online Cultural Heritage Information

User Focus, Washington, DC – October 17, 2014

Lesley Humphreys, Neal Johnson

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.

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Presentation

Beyond Wireframes: Empowering Long-Term Project Success

User Focus, the UXPA DC Chapter Conference,Washington, DC – October 17, 2014

Jade Davis, Elizabeth Simister

We discuss practical ways UX experts can help set the project team up for long-term success and maintain the value of the UX investment.

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Presentation

Keeping the Vision Alive: UX Leadership in Long-Term Projects

User Focus, the UXPA DC Chapter conference in Washington, DC – October 17, 2014

Lisa Battle, Laura Chessman

As UX practitioners, we often face challenges “keeping the vision alive” as projects get caught up in constraints, details, and politics. But we cannot let those things derail us or take things too far from that solid, long-term vision. In this talk, we discuss strategies and practical techniques to help teams stay focused on meeting long-term goals, while addressing short-term needs and facing the circumstances and challenges that arise through the design and implementation process. Topics include: maintaining the rationale behind “blue-sky” thinking, methods for questioning constraints to get to innovative ideas, working with interim designs as intermediate steps to the final vision, and creating shared understanding and buy-in across the team for the long-term vision.

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Presentation

Design Concepts and Lessons from Linked Data for Digital Humanities

Semantic Business and Technology Conference, San Jose, CA – August 20, 2014

Duane Degler, Neal Johnson

Projects in LOD-LAM (Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums) give us a perspective on creating rich, relevant, usable applications for heterogeneous linked data. This presentation shows examples and describes our design approach.

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Workshop

Now What? Creating Innovative LODLAM Sites and Apps

LODLAM Training Day, Semantic Business and Technology Conference, San Jose, CA – August 19, 2014

Duane Degler, Neal Johnson

With the rapid evolution of a semantic web, it is no surprise that many cultural institutions, large and small, are exploring Linked Open Data (LOD) as a means of connecting distributed data across the Web and across internal repositories. This presentation explores the questions, practicalities, and implications related to designing sites and applications for linked open data.

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Presentation

Red Alert! Communicating Status Through Great UX, Graphics and Accessibility

User Experience Professional Association (UXPA) Conference, London, England – July 24, 2014

Lisa Battle, Jennifer Chaffee, Marguerite Bergel

Effective visual design is essential for communicating system and workflow status, alerts, notifications, categories, and prioritization that often must be understood at a glance. Some people believe they can’t use graphics or color for important cues because of accessibility, which is not true. At UXPA’s 2014 conference, we discuss how to create great, visually appealing UX designs that optimize communication of status information for all users.

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Publication

Dynamic IA: External & Internal Contexts for Reframing

Springer - 2014

Duane Degler

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.

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Presentation

Design Meets Data (Linked, Open, Heterogeneous)

Museums and the Web Conference, Baltimore, MD – April 5, 2014

Duane Degler

The tide of available information continues to rise. The opportunities that come from open access, linked data, sharing resources with other institutions, and standards-based data are enticing - and perhaps overwhelming? In this talk, we discuss the role of design to help you find ways to make the most of your opportunities for new types of interactions and engagement with Information Objects. We share experiences from projects and research that help you think about Information Objects and the emerging drivers for user experience, including Getty and Mellon-funded systems where we’re beginning to test ideas about how to support a broad set of goals for interaction in complex information spaces we're facing today.

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Presentation

Designing for Information Objects: The Library, Archive & Museum (LAM) Information Ecosystem for Now and for the Future

EdUI Conference, Richmond, VA – November 5, 2013

Duane Degler, Neal Johnson

Museums, libraries and archives hold physical objects that people interact with every day. Just as there is a physical object, there is an “Information Object” that people use, and authoritative institutions curate that information for now and the future. This talk is about designing the Information Object, and the role of shareable, structured information.

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Presentation

Enhancement Ecosystems: Enriching Structured Content with User Tagging and Annotation

Semantic Technology & Business Conference, New York, NY – October 2, 2013

Duane Degler, Thomas Vander Wal

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.

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Publication

Sewing the Seams of Sensemaking: A Practical Interface for Tagging and Organizing Saved Search Results

HCIR '13: The Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval - October 2013

Duane Degler, Marti A. Hearst

This paper presents a usability-tested interface design that enables time-constrained analysts to organize their search results in a lightweight manner during and immediately following their search sessions. The research literature suggests that users want to lay out search results spatially in overlapping “piles,” but a pilot study with a flexible canvas tool revealed that this design requires too much manipulation and has other drawbacks. This finding led to a novel hybrid design that combines structure with a flexible visual layout and which allows the analysts to quickly triage documents first and organize them later, or interweave these two processes.

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Presentation

Supporting Relevance for Users – A Design Challenge

Semantic Technology & Business Conference, San Francisco, CA – June 3, 2013

Duane Degler

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.

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Presentation

Design Guidelines: Real-Life Stories

Information Architecture Summit, Baltimore, MD – April 5, 2013

Rachel Sengers, Lesley Humphreys, Rob Fay

As an organization grows and its products proliferate, how can it maintain a coherent sense of identity and usability across them, while allowing room for flexibility and growth? For a family of online communications channels or applications, design guidelines can document and disseminate the organization’s UX principles and patterns. This presentation offers resources and insights from both practitioners and professionals outside the field who have undertaken these types of projects together.

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Presentation

Developing Style Guidelines for Suites of Applications

User Focus, the UXPA DC conference, Washington, DC – October 19, 2012

Rachel Sengers, Lesley Humphreys

Many enterprises grow organically, with diverse products managed by different teams. Style guidelines provide a way for the organization brand itself and ensure consistency across its family of apps while leaving in flexibility to accommodate different contexts of use.

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Presentation

Designing Configurable and Customizable Applications

User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) Conference, Las Vegas, NV – June 5, 2012

Lisa Battle, Laura Chessman

In complex applications, such as claims processing, learning management, scheduling systems, engineering software, and other such tools, it is common to provide flexibility to modify the user interface (and the underlying processing) to meet widely varying needs, rather than assuming that one size fits all. When working on the user experience design for such products, we need to ensure that it is easy for clients or users to configure the product as they wish, and be mindful of impacts on the overall user experience.

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Presentation

Lemonade out of Lemons: Design increases your data's value to your users

Semantic Technology Conference, Washington, DC – December 1, 2011

Duane Degler, Jasmin Phua

We all want users to gain value from our information and applications. The use of semantic technologies has grown significantly over the last few years, and with that growth has come the challenge of designing clear, useful interactions to help your users find meaning in large and varied datasets. This talk demonstrates that the risk of poor design is that much of the richness of semantically-enabled environments can be lost because the user experiences tend to be overwhelming rather than meaningful and engaging.

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Presentation

Search Mental Models and Interactions

User Focus, the UPA DC Chapter conference, Washington, DC – September 16, 2011

Duane Degler, Jasmin Phua

Discover how user mental models relate to online search, particularly for more intensive knowledge work or critical information needs. This talk addresses the different types and stages of searching, similarities and differences in user mental models and the effect that may have on what tools and support should be available, and design solutions and patterns that have been employed to support the various search stages and users.

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Presentation

Design 10:5:2 - 10 Best Practices, 5 Examples, 2 Actions

Semantic Technologies, San Francisco, CA – June 8, 2011

Duane Degler

Are you thinking about how to achieve designs that will get a positive response from your users? Are you wondering how to refine an interface to work well with semantic data? While the ‘magic’ in design can’t be boiled down to a few simple rules, this talk will show you things you can do that will help get your project started on the right path.

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Presentation

IA 2.0: An Open Conversation about Context, Mobility and Semantics

IA Summit, Denver, CO – April 2, 2011

Duane Degler

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.

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Presentation

UI Design for Semantic Web: From Idea to Experience

Semantic Web Summit, Boston, MA – November 16, 2010

Duane Degler

User Experience is critical to success - we've seen the evidence of that repeatedly in the Web 1.0 and 2.0 worlds. What role does UX play in the Linked Data world? As more people engage with semantic-driven applications and information - both as consumers and creators - unique interaction styles and experiences are surfacing. At the same time, this presentation points out some new interaction challenges raised by the potential of the Semantic Web.

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Presentation

Design Trends for Faceted Search

User Focus, the UPA DC Chapter conference, Washington, DC – October 15, 2010

Duane Degler

Faceted refinement and filtering is now a common part of search results interfaces, and faceted navigation is being used for many other types of interactions. At the same time, the underlying data on the web is changing (with increasing structured data, semantics, and use of more sophisticated categorization), as are the tool sets that can be used to implement facet interfaces “out of the box.” This talk addresses how the increasing availability of data and tools puts the focus even more firmly on the designer to make decisions that affect usability.

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Presentation

Semantics, Search, and Findability

Web CMS and Semantic Web Meetups, Washington, D.C. – September 28, 2010

Duane Degler

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.

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Publication

Layered, Adaptive Results: Interaction Concepts for Large, Heterogeneous Data Sets

HCI for Information Retrieval (HCIR) workshop, New Brunswick, NJ – August 22, 2010

Duane Degler

Some data environments are not well served by current styles of search results presentation. One example of this is large-scale archival, library or museum collections. The range of user goals and interaction needs can be quite broad, and the information itself is highly structured yet very heterogeneous — it spans many subject areas, information types, and presentation/media. Based on the use of semantic web formats for metadata, in this paper we explore how to leverage the semantic relationships to drive aspects of results presentation — to change elements of the UI itself in response to the results data.

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Presentation

User Interfaces for the Semantic Web

Presented at Semantic Technologies Conference on June 22, 2010

Duane Degler

This is a tangible guided tour of innovative semantic web applications and user interfaces, as well as interesting interfaces that ask the questions: “What is being adopted from current Internet — and Rich Internet — apps and sites? What new design concepts might be possible now or in the future?” The presentation begins to open up opportunities, issues, and implications for people who will be users of the “linked web of data.” And we continue to ask one of our favorite questions: How can it be made easier and more useful?

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Publication

Usability Knowledge Online: Discover the BoK

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) Conference, Munich, Germany – May 26, 2010

Lisa Battle, Duane Degler

Every professional discipline builds a framework that outlines the overall practice, techniques, and standards. This paper discusses how a framework guides individual practitioners and educators, providing a way of identifying that the professional discipline is delivering on its service aims. The UPA Usability Body of Knowledge site is the source for methods, design techniques, management advice, emerging research, and more! Members provide content, links and ideas; the site features make it easy and relevant.

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Presentation

Achieving Business Value by Integrating Tasks, Topics and Content

Writers of User Assistance conference, Portland, OR – March 18, 2008

Duane Degler

“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.

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Publication

Preliminary Analysis of Users and Tasks for the Semantic Web

Semantic Web User Interaction Workshop, International Semantic Web Conference, Athens, GA – 2006

Lisa Battle

This position paper raises the importance of understanding the users of the Semantic Web and the tasks that will bring them to the Semantic Web. It proposes a high-level framework for categorizing those users and tasks, and provides implications to be considered in end-user interaction design.

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Presentation

Applying User-Centered Methods to Inform New Product Selection and Strategic Planning

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 15th Annual Conference, Broomfield, CO – 2006

Lisa Battle, Tim Herbst, Bill Dixon, Sean Wheeler

Usability professionals always say the best time to start user-centered design is at the beginning of a project. But what about starting even earlier, when the vision or concept is first considered? This presentation discusses integrating UCD with marketing methods to inform/support executive decision-making and strategic prioritization of projects.
Presentation

The Usability Professional as Visionary/Strategist

User Focus, UPA DC Chapter conference, Washington, D.C. – October 2006

Duane Degler

Have you had insights and observations that go beyond the scope of a particular system or site? Are you talking with business leaders, sharing how things could be better for users overall? A quality user experience is important for organizations and their customers, citizens, and staff. User advocates can take on a “thought leadership” role within organizations and projects. This talk addresses how we can do that.

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Presentation

Integrating UCD with Requirements Engineering: Improving Processes, Formats, and Communication

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 15th Annual Conference, Bloomfield, CO – June 2006

Lisa Battle, Rebecca Ray, Karen Bachmann

User-centered design practitioners are skilled in eliciting user needs and translating them into design. However, our methods are sometimes poorly integrated with requirements engineering. This panel discussion presents practical approaches to coordinating UCD with other types of activities involved in the creation of requirements.

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Publication

Emerging issues, solutions & challenges from the top 20 issues affecting web application accessibility

Poster presented at ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Assistive Technologies, Baltimore, MD – 2005

Lisa Battle, David Hoffman

We describe emerging accessible design issues, based on a second in-depth analysis of hundreds of accessibility issues documented in real projects, and a comparison of those results to a prior study of 1000+ accessibility issues. This poster demonstrates recent trends in the top 20 UI design situations that are likely to pose problems for users with disabilities; highlights several creative design solutions; and identifies several challenges that lack adequate solutions.

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Presentation

Top 20 Design Recommendations for Accessible (and Usable) Web Applications

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 14th Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada – 2005

Lisa Battle, David Hoffman

This paper describes common challenges and solutions for accessible design, based on an in-depth analysis of 1000+ accessibility issues documented in real projects.
Presentation

Delivering Services Online: It’s More Than Forms

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 14th Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada – 2005

Lisa Battle, Linda Elengold

New technologies, reduced workforces, and higher expectations from the public are transforming the way that businesses and government agencies deliver online services. However, online services are not just forms. We describe ways to improve user experience by providing integrated services, preventing errors, using appropriate tone and language, and structuring the interaction.
Workshop

Requirements in User-Centered Design and Software Engineering: Tools for Bridging Design Cultures

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) UPA 14th Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada – 2005

Lisa Battle, Ahmed Seffah, Daniel Engelberg

This workshop explored various formats for documenting user needs, and discussed approaches to better integrating UCD and traditional requirements engineering approaches for interactive systems.
Presentation

Supporting Aging Citizens and Employees at the Social Security Administration

Aging by Design II Conference, Bentley College, Boston, MA – 2005

Lisa Battle, Duane Degler, Sean Wheeler

Both to meet the needs of an aging public and to ensure that staff members nearing retirement age can continue to work productively, information technology must be usable for older adults. Usability specialists have been at the heart of analysis, design and testing activities that help the agency respond, both internally and externally.
Publication

Patterns of Integration: Bringing User Centered Design into the Software Development Lifecycle

User-Centered Systems Design and Software Engineering Integration: Institutionalizing Usability in the Development Process, eds. Ahmed Seffah, Michel Desmarais, and Jan Gulliksen – 2005

Lisa Battle

Faced with a need to integrate user-centered methods into existing software development lifecycles, many practitioners lack clear direction and continue to negotiate the scope of their involvement on a project-by-project basis. There are best practices that can be adopted, however. This book chapter distills the experiences of many practitioners into a collection of process patterns that describe an evolutionary path towards full integration.

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Publication

Designing Software Architectures to Facilitate Accessible Web Applications

IBM Systems Journal – 2005

Lisa Battle, David Hoffman, Eric Grivel

The web application is increasingly a platform of choice for complex business software, as well as for Internet online services. We are beginning to identify guidelines for web application architectures that support accessibility. This paper describes common accessibility problems encountered in web applications and explains how architecture can help address these problems through reusable accessible objects; supplementing information in links, buttons and labels; providing comparable access to signposting; handling errors; and providing time-out notification and recovery. It also discusses the critical role of architecture in supporting what we believe is the best way of meeting the needs of diverse user groups: multiple dynamic views of the user interface.

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Presentation

Design Patterns and Guidelines for Usable and Accessible Web Applications

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 13th Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN – 2004

Lisa Battle, David Hoffman

Because we are committed to achieving ease of use for all users, we have encountered challenges on real projects that have led us to question the common belief that accessibility benefits all users. Although the user experience goals of accessibility and usability often complement each other, sometimes they are incompatible—the best solution for one user group compromises the needs of another group. This presentation introduces design patterns that specifically address accessibility, and identifies design tradeoffs that suggest the need for alternate views of the user interface.
Presentation

When Your Group Can’t Do It All: Investing UCD Resources Wisely

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 13th Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN – 2004

Lisa Battle

When an organization’s internal UCD group is too small to support all projects that request its services, management is faced with a need to prioritize and invest its limited resources wisely. This is how one UCD group defined different levels of service and implemented criteria for evaluating project requests.

Matt Oliphant’s blog on this presentation
Publication

Policy Content at SSA: Using XML and Semantic Metadata

XML2004 conference, Washington, DC – November 17, 2004

Duane Degler, Terry Hynes

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.

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Publication

Maintaining Ontology Implementations: The Value of Listening

Extreme Markup conference, Montreal, Quebec, Canada – August 2004

Duane Degler, Renee Lewis

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.

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Presentation

The Usability Imperative Inherent in the Semantic Web

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 13th Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN – June 10, 2004

Duane Degler, Renee Lewis

A tremendous amount of hope — and hype — has been attached to Tim Berners-Lee's concept of the Semantic Web, where machine-readable “meaning” enriches the promise of the web. Creating a positive, successful, trust-worthy experience for users is crucial to its success. What does that mean? What is imperative for it to become the “next generation” web? Most importantly, why must the usability community play a leading role to shape the Semantic Web in a positive, user-centered way? This paper addresses these questions and more.
Workshop

How to Design User Interfaces to Support Users and Their Tasks

GSA Workshop on Usability and the Federal Enterprise Architecture – October 28, 2003

Lisa Battle, Sean Wheeler

An analysis of users and their tasks typically generates a lot of rich information… but the process of translating that information into design solutions may seem like “magic.” The truth is that user-centered design is iterative, and requires a mixture of art and science — it takes a series of small steps that both transform and refine the collected information into design solutions. This presentation uses the analogy of building a house to illustrate the process from high-level visioning all the way through detailed design.

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Publication

Can Topic Maps Provide Context for Enterprise-Wide Applications?

Extreme Markup conference, Montreal, Quebec, Canada – August 4, 2003

Lisa Battle, Duane Degler

Topic maps provide exciting opportunities not just to make information easier to find, but to increase the usability of software. In order to provide users with the information that applies to their particular situations, in forms that they can use, software must be aware of a user’s context (in a broad, multi-dimensional sense). This paper describes how topic maps can serve as the language for linking information to software applications and for sharing information about context among applications.

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Publication

Sharing the Vision = Designs that Get Built

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 12th Annual Conference, Scottsdale,
AZ - June 2003

Duane Degler, Lisa Battle, Darrell Taylor

For user-centered designs to be successfully implemented, the stakeholders and members of a multidisciplinary project team must reach a shared understanding of the problem and the solution. This article explores ways of sharing information between usability specialists and technical team members who are using object modeling techniques based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We illustrate points where UCD deliverables can connect with UML deliverables, and vice versa, to help a project team create and communicate a shared vision.

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Publication

Around the Interface in 80 Clicks

Performance Improvement, ISPI, 40(7) – August 2001

Duane Degler, Lisa Battle

As more people gain access to computers and the Internet, it has become increasingly important for designers to meet the needs of a diverse international user population. “One-size-fits-all” is no longer accepted by users. This article outlines many of the things that the designer needs to consider for both internationalization of software (making an interface understandable in many cultures) and localization (changing aspects of the interface, such as language and icons, to match the local cultural expectations and experiences).

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Publication

KnowledgePlanet KP2000 Learner Interface Redesign

Award of Excellence, 2001 Performance Centered Design Competition

Duane Degler, Lisa Battle

KnowledgePlanet provides a learning and performance management application used by a number of Fortune 100 companies to support their organizational learning. IPGems was asked to look at the opportunities to improve the interface that hundreds of thousands of people use to plan and keep track of their learning and performance activities. The goal was to increase the user's ability to be in control without having to learn the application, and for KP's customer companies to simplify and reduce implementation time and cost. The result received the Award of Excellence at the 2001 PerformanceCentered Design Competition.

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Publication

Eventful Event Management Application

Platinum Award of Excellence, 2000 Performance Centered Design Competition

Duane Degler

We developed a prototype application to support the management of large public retail events. The application allows both regular and temporary staff to manage large volumes of sales inventory, suppliers, guest lists, and press communication from a simple, easy to understand, flexible interface. The goal was to increase the user's ability to respond quickly to the needs of different groups of people, often at the same time, in a chaotic environment. The result received the top honor, the Platinum Award of Excellence, at the 2000 Performance Centered Design Competition.

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Publication

Knowledge Management in Pursuit of Performance: The Challenge of Context

Performance Improvement, ISPI, 39(6) – July 2000

Duane Degler, Lisa Battle

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.

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Presentation

An Information Make-Over for Performance Centered Design

Society for Technical Communication (STC) Conference, Orlando, FL – 2000

Lisa Battle

Many of the same types of content that have traditionally been placed in manuals or online help
systems can actually be incorporated directly into the user interface. Connecting the necessary
instructions and information directly to the tasks that they support helps users to perform their work
more successfully. An analysis of existing content types can be done to identify opportunities for
moving content into the user interface.