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Design Readings

Listen to Adrienne Massanari’s “Personas and politics: The Discursive Construction of The User” talk at IA Summit 2009

Adrienne Massanari, Instructor of New/Digital Media in the School of Communication at Loyola University – Chicago, assesses the problematic relationship between new media designers and “users” in texts written about user-centered design […]

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Design Information Technology Trend Watching

Listen to Jeff Dachis’ “User Experience as a Crucial Driver of Social Business Design” talk at IDEA 2009

Everything that can be digital will be. Why? Because it’s faster, better, and cheaper. UX in the digital world will be the key definer of value. UX design now means to embrace a whole new set of behaviors and characteristics. Social Business Design is a framework to understand and think about the multi-faceted users and the way they participates inside a business ecosystem in meaningful ways […]

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Design Information Technology Trend Watching

Listen to Luke Wroblewski’s “Impact of Social Models” talk at IDEA 2009

As Richard Farson’s truism “no one smokes in church no matter how addicted” points out, context informs almost everything that happens in an environment. Online social experiences are no exception. How a product’s social model is set up can impact not only who contributes, but how much, and why. From permission-based subscriptions to one-click follows, Luke will discuss the attributes and implications of several popular social models by looking at data and behavior in the Web’s most popular social applications […]

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Design Information Technology Software

Listen to Fred Beecher’s “Integrating Effective Prototyping into Your Design Process” talk at IA Summit 2009

Senior User Experience Consultant Fred Beecher shows his audience how to determine what, for your particular situation, is the most effective way to use prototyping to improve the user experience of your site or software […]

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Design Information Technology

Watch Maya Design’s “What is Information?” short film

This is a short film by MAYA Design about information: although most of us think we know what we mean when we say “information,” we sometimes confuse the medium with the message.

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Design Readings

Listen to Andrew Hinton’s “You are (Mostly) Here: Digital Space and The Context Problem” talk at IA Summit 2009

Lead Information Architect in Vanguard’s User Experience Group, Andrew Hinton provides engaging examples (including Mr. Spock, a speeding trolley, and a Dada urinal), illustrating how language powerfully affects context, and vice-versa. Andrew connects this understanding with real-life Information Architecture design issues such as Twitter’s syntax or Facebook’s Beacon and challenges us to think more carefully about how we shape context in the digital dimension […]

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Innovation Readings

Listen to Dorelle Rabinowitz’s “Motivating Teams: Inspiring People To Do Great Work” talk at IA Summit 2009

How does a manager deal with an inherited team, rather than a team she hand-picked? Sometimes a manager has to motivate someone who applied for that manager’s job – and is extremely resentful. What about the differences between innies and outies? Dorelle Rabinowitz, lead of the Design Systems Group at eBay, shares stories from both managers and individual contributors about how they either inspired their teams to do great things or how things fell apart […]

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Design Readings

Listen to Christina Wodtke’s “Business-Centered Design” talk at IA Summit 2009

In this talk, Christina Wodtke, founder of Boxes and Arrows and product developer at LinkedIn, walks through the most common business models, the desired user behavior that supports them, and how those business models affect the architecture of the website including features and functionality […]

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Design Readings

Listen to Joe Sokohl’s “A Real Nowhere Man: Managing Remote Teams Remotely” talk at IA Summit 2009

Not only do we work with people across the hall, across town, and across the country, but we also work with people we never meet from countries we know about only through Wikipedia or the Travel Channel. UX Lead for PracticeWorks, Joe Sokohl discusses principles to live by when managing teams remotely including: communication, flexibility, sensitivity, courage, and the best tool of all, empathy […]

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Design Readings

Listen to Eric Reiss’ “ROI: Speaking the Language of Business” talk at IA Summit 2009

What is the business value of Information Architecture? Eric Reiss, co-founder of FatDUX, a user-experience design company headquartered in Copenhagen, reviews our current approaches, including limited use of the language of business bean-counter acronyms, and explains why these arguments are usually not compelling for business executives […]