This is a guest post by Carol Righi who is waiting patiently for some Card Sort data to come in. Enjoy!

1. Write the report. Make sure to leave a couple of blanks for the actual data.
2. Think of new requirements for Jed to build into WebSort, e.g., “I want to hit a button and have it send my bill to the client.”
3. Do a Google search on all possible anagrams of “Dendogram.”
4. Dig up the 3D glasses you got at the last Disney movie you took the kids to see and stare at the Item x Item matrix.
5. Photoshop out the letters in the Periodic Table of the Elements and try to pass it off as the new IA.

I am going to take some liberty as the author and add one more, get an ex-mentee to make a blog post for you.

Thanks Carol!

photo credit: CannedTuna

The final track that I attended was given by Whitney Hess (twitter), and was by far one of the most inspiring and influtential tracks of the IA Summit. Her message was simple, to be a success and be part of a community you have to get involved. The following are my tweets from her session:

http://thisisindexed.com/ Takes complex problems and talks about them in simple lines

It is bullshit to say that you can’t change the world if no one knows your name.

“Your voice and your name can be decoupled — that one CAN make a diff behind the scenes” – @KathySierra

Unless you practice your talents and share your knowledge you will never be a rockstar.

Can you explain why you are important in a single sentence? If not than that is something you need to work on.

Know what your strengths are and your weaknesses are. Accept your weaknesses and build on your strengths.

Having a blog is about sharing your expertise, it doesn’t help keeping that knowledge to yourself.

USE TWITTER – that is all D

Share your ideas and opinions, find people that inspire you, communicate with them. Find your voice.

Don’t be a lurker on twitter, you need to engage and bring value to the group

Google is your resume, your online presence is out there and people will find it.

You are a representative of the community, if you make yourself look bad you make us all look bad.

You don’t have to be an extrovert to network, some of the best connectors are introverts.

Connect with everyone on LinkedIn if you meet them personally they deserve to be on there.

There is no reason to be private on any social network, make yourself public.

Use twitter to network, use your real name, fill out the one-liner, link to your blog.There is no reason to protect your tweets

Think hard about what you say and what that says about you.

No matter what social network you use link back to your blog, use the same email address, and use the same usernames.

Seek out events, no matter where you live there is a community there. You just have to find it.

How to overcome shyness? Have a goal that you want to accomplish before meeting people.

The best thing to do is just walk up to someone and say ‘Hi’, if you do this you are networking

Always have a card to give someone, even if you just meet them in passing.

Follow up with everyone that you meet and solidify the relationship that you started.

Find out what people are working on, learn about their work. You are able to reach out to them for help in the future

In the end we are each other’s resources, we can’t be everything and we need to know who to go to for help.

Exude Confidence – “If you think you can or think you can’t, you are right” Henry Ford.

3 types of confidence – about yourself, making others feel confident in you, and helping others find their own confidence.

Which of these three are you good at? Identify that, but try to build up the other two.

Act ‘as if’ you are worthy. Doing that will eventually make you worthy.

Be willing to walk away if you find yourself surrounded by negativity. Remember that not all feedback is negative.

Admit your mistakes, learn from them and move on.

“God gave us two ears and one mouth to use in proportion” – unknown.

How to become a leader? Organize events, mentor others, give feedback and recognition, connect the dots.

Call Mentorship going out for coffee if it makes you feel better.

All this is about communicating hope, optimism, and enthusiasm. Take that in and share it.

We are helping each other get to a better place. So in the end don’t feed the trolls. Ignore the haters.

There are no rules, she is just making all this up anyway , but you need to follow your gut.

Go forth unafraid @whitneyhess

‘I think a lot of people want to be modest” – @whitneyhess

“You can put better stuff out there on your blog than my mom.” – Whitney Hess

Following the advise that Whitney puts forth, anyone should be able to become a vocal advocate in their field. She shows how tools like blogging, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be used to get yourself out there and how best to use them. If Whitney wasn’t able to get someone to go out and starting blogging, twittering, and connecting with like minded folks I don’t know what would.

Evangelizing Yourself

View more presentations from Whitney Hess.

It is standard for a User Experience Designer to have a passion for the people, but occasionally they forget about the business that serves them. Christina Wodtke (twitter) gave the attendees of the IA Summit a reminder of why keeping the business in mind is important for any design project. The following are my tweets from her session:

Money is oxygen for a company, if you don’t have money you WILL die.

ROI is simply a return on investment. Whatever you put out creates some kind of value.

WIkipedia is a non-profit, but the still need money to operate.

Designers would profit from thinking about not just about helping the user but also helping the users.

Designers need to know what the key metrics are for a business and how that can effect their design.

If you are a book reseller how are you different from amazon? What do you have to offer that is better?

“A guy selling beans in a fish market is crazy, crazy like a fox!”@cwodtke

Behavior is just a function of a person and his environment. If you design the environment, you can change a persons behavior.

What is the one activity for my user to accomplish for the business to be successful?

Engineers see users as a set of problems that need to be solved equally.

Only 1% of your users are actually doing the work on Wikipedia. They are doing the heavy lifting for your business.

Group managers only make up a small % of a user group, but they monitor the site, kick people out, and do all the real work.

Deriving marketplace dynamics from ‘Hello Dolly’ – pure genius.

Advertising starts to become contextual based on what you are doing, which also reinforces the brand.

We need to ask ourselves about the rules that make sense to put into place as designers

Once you notice that demographics can make you money, you start looking at things differently.

“Your boss comes up to you and tells you that they want user generated content because it is free” @cwodtke

You need to think about how your users are connecting with each other, determine who are the word spreaders.

Money will come if you create a service that encourages users to care and become active, even if you don’t have a business model.

Free trails make it easier for users to evaluate the offering and commit to paying a fee to continue the service.

If people don’t eventually understand the value that you offer, then the card credit access will be turned off.

Having a combo business model, when the market shirts you still make money just from different offerings.

Over the users value, the user will come back for more, and eventually give something back. Content, Money, Sponsorship, etc.

You can prove through metrics that what you created actually does provide value, really hard to do without the metrics.

Customers centers are a good place to get an idea what the key metrics are.

It is easy to get caught up in user research and being an advocate for users that you loss sight of the big picture. At the end of the day, a product or service needs to give back to the business as much as it provides the users with a good experience. I think the most important aspect of Christina’s track is how a business can be structured to support multiple models. Having several models to support a business, users have more options on how they can interact with the business.

If there was a best of show award given at the IA Summit, Fred Beecher’s (twitter) track on prototyping would be one of the nominees. Jonathan Knoll (twitter) summed it up best by stating ‘@fred_beecher‘s prototyping session is turning into the most directly educational & practical I’ve seen in a long time.’ Below are my tweets from the presentation:

Prototyping is just a tool to communicate ideas and explore ideas.

The level of prototyping depends on the level of fidelity you need.

Fidelity has two types of dimensions: Visual Fidelity, lowest form is sketches. A sketch prototype is more than one page.

Highest Visual Prototype is colored JPG pages.

The second dimension of fidelity is functionality, how interactive the prototype needs to be.

Proof of concept allows you to test an idea in an interactive way to see if you are on the right path or not.

To get a good idea of if some of the design ideas work, it is important to test them in an interactive method.

“Slap & Map” image mapped jpgs offer a great middle ground between high visual fidelity and mid-level functionality.

Problems with production level prototyping is that it can constrain the design. As a designer we need to be free to explore.

People in development are creative, and they can offer insights into many design issues.

Content is another dimension of the fidelity of a prototype. Your prototype isn’t just about interaction, but also the content.

The screen just randomly rolled up into the ceiling for @fred_beecher, doing a great job just rolling with it though.

Content doesn’t need to be perfect, you just need plausible content the makes sense to the user when testing it.

“There is no such thing as high or low fidelity, only appropriate fidelity.” Bill Buxton

You can also test out the various concepts to see which work and which don’t.

Prototyping also allows you to have the conversation about ‘Is this what you meant?’

LVF/HFF prototypes are good for using testing as a design tools. It tells the designer if their ideas work or suck.

Proof of concept testing of isolated interactions, the design may work but it tests if the necessary interactions work as well.

Interactive prototypes supplement documentation for the development teams. Visually express the desired interactions.

HVR/LFF prototypes are good for discovering usability problems introduced by visual design.

You are able to find problems with the workflow when testing with non-savvy user groups.

HVF/HFF enable user testing as a design tool when testing new functionality into an established system.

This type of prototype gives you supplemental documentation for OFFSHORE dev teams.

“People are dumb and we like shiny and movable things” @fred_beecher

Know what questions you want your prototypes to answer, early in design the questions are structural, later questions about usability

In corporate agile mature ux organization use prototypes to show small complex proof of concepts.

Corporate-Waterfall-new to UX start off by developing detailed scenarios you want to test.

Walk through the interactive prototype using the printed documentation with developers and stakeholders.

Consulting/Agency Develop the detailed scenarios you want to test, sketch 2 oe 3 of your UX design concepts into small prototypes.

It is important to keep clients involved in the process, walk them through each prototype and gather their feedback.

Last context is when doing Hardware Devices. First step, once again, develop detailed scenarios you want to test.

Do as many iterations of a low functional fidelity prototype as you can.

Creating wireframes and prototypes are an important aspect of what an interaction designer does, and one of my personal passions. The key takeaway from this track was the methodology for the various forms of fidelity a prototype can have and the situations they are best utilized in. It is a fine line between having a detailed design and a conceptual design. Using Fred’s process for developing prototypes, a designer can better gauge when they need to do something more conceptual, or get down and dirty with the details.

Integrating Effective Prototyping Into Your Design Process

View more presentations from Fred Beecher.

Personas are one of my favorite tools in the user experience tackle box. They can be used to drive the design of a project from start to finish, and also answer many pesky design problems. Adrienne Massanari (blog) pointed out another use for them at this years IA Summit in Memphis, political leverage. The following are my tweets from the session:

As she was working on a work flow diagram it occurred to her that she didn’t have a clue who the users were.

We are going to look at using Personas to tackle political issues inside an organization.

Discourse is the space in which carious objects emerge and are continuously transformed.

Discourse is powerful stuff, just as powerful as a language.

“Users are not monolithic or straight forward, but are complex and fragmented in nature..”

Theme 1: the ‘stupid user’ is a concept that is going away. Anyone who has done a usability test has felt this way though.

Not everyone wants to be a power user, and it makes sense to hide some advanced features to support the common user.

Theme 2: Users as victims of bad design. Nelson is seen as encouraging the view that users are simply victims.

If the user is a victim, then the designers can be viewed as teh heroes that swoop in to safe them.

Theme 3: Users as the co-designers. This is seen a lot in participatory design and users are seen as part of the overall system.

Personas and politics: Users are not good partners for coming up with design, better to have pretend users and design for them.

Good ole Eagle-Eye Edward from Cisco. He was a good desk topper for over a year at my old company.

Dan Saffer (@odannyboy) states that half of the personas that are out there are made up, and mostly just imaginary friends.

Personas are boundary objects, they encompass complex IA concept into a story.

PM’s and analysts can use personas as political leverage inside of their own organization.

IA/UCD uses users are resources to be mined, we flatten the difference between different people.

IA/UCD can also undervalue the users hands on knowledge and considers themselves the expert rather than the user.

IA/UCD already use users in the form of personas as political tools in their organization.

With personas we need to make sure we don’t mistake the map for the territory.

It is difficult for designers to be heroes because there is no tyrant to overthrow, no dragon to slay…

We can’t simply “understand users and then ignore them” — Robert Hoekman

The information Adrienne gave us did an excellent job of pointing out something that has always been there, but no one ever noticed. By showing us the variety of ways an organization can use a persona, it gives more strength to the agrument on why projects should take them time to develop them. It also adds another line of seperation between personas and market segments, though some can argue that market segments are used in the same manner.

Personas and politics: The discursive construction of the “user” in Information Architecture – IA Summit 2009

View more presentations from tankgrrl.

Cindy Chastain (twitter) started an amazing conversation with her presentation at this years IA Summit in Memphis. It is common practice for authors and playwrights to use themes when creating a new story. Cindy, through real world practice, has discovered that this same concept can be applied to designing a user experience. The following are my tweets from this session:

Storytelling and be used as a communication tool that can lead to a design frame and used as a vehicle for engagement/response.

Comics, storyboards, scenarios, and concept narrative are the communication tools.

There was a missing component to their design process. They couldn’t nail down a final vision of what they are trying to do.

Even if we can’t tell a good story, we know if a story is good.

A theme is the subject-matter, topic, or idea on which a work of art or literature is based. It makes the story more memorable.

A theme impacts the writer and reader differently. It helps the writers with decisions, and the reader with connecting to the story.

For design a theme can put experience at the forefront of a concept, unify teams, lead to strategy, lead design solutions …

If Flickr had a theme it would be to define yourself with photos.

Mothra is the technology product, Godzilla is the user. Who do you think should win?

The yin and yang of UX are tangible and intangible. Tangible need to be expressed, intangible needs to be felt by the user.

Function, performance, ease of use + beauty, emotion, and meaning = the optimal user experience.

Unfortunately I was not able to capture the entire session via twitter due to a crummy wifi connection. This session was extremely interesting because it offers designers another tool to use in order to set a baseline for a project. Mission statements, project visions, and personas also attempt to do this, but by nature they are more analytical tools. Using a theme to drive a project design invokes creative thought and behavior. In theory, this allows designers to tackle complex problems and come up with truly amazing solutions. It will be interesting to see how other people use themes in the future, and their resulting work.

Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design

View more presentations from Cindy Chastain.

The opening keynote at this years IA Summit down in Memphis, TN was given by Micheal Welch. The following are my tweets from the session:

His research began from his work in Papua New Guinea. Studied for a full two years in the area.

He used a sleeping bag he called his ‘Little America’ to isolate himself from all the bugs.

That’s awesome, he wrestled around with his own right arm.

In the village your entire being is defined by the face to face relationships you have with the people around you.

When there is a dispute in the village they used to just gather and resolve it, now they have a paper based court they must follow.

Media mediates relationships and when media changes the method of creating relations changes.

The winning User generated Doritos Superbowl Commercial only cost the creators $12.79, It cost Doritos over $2 million just to air.

Just played a time lapsed version of a video he created. ‘The Machine is Using Us’ http://tinyurl.com/yw8co3

Tags are a method of providing User-Generated Distribution.

User-Generated Ratings is based on who talks about your content and who links to it.

The ‘bias’ of media, talking with regards to the medium itself. This includes Intellectual, Emotional, Spatial and Temporal, sensory

The concept of an assembling line encouraged for the workers of the line to become insignificant. They are just part of the machine.

Pre-1960 Whatever = That’s what I meant. Late 60′s it turned more into ‘I don’t care’

Highly recommends ‘Mediated’ http://is.gd/obT3

During the 90′s ‘Whatever’ turned into ‘Meh’ thanks to the Simpsons.

Late 90′s to the present ‘Whatever’ has evolved again into meaning ‘I will do what I want’. Ala Eric Cartmen!

Digital Information is different. The people here are the ones trying to figure out what this information is and how to use it.

DHTML was thought to bring the web closer to its cousin the TV. Ha!

‘It’s is not supposed to be a glorified TV channel” quote from one of the ‘fathers’ of the internet.

By separating content from presentation, it was no longer required to use complex code to make your own website.

‘The medium shapes the message’ @mwesch

Video of a baby biting his big brothers finger got viewed by 30 million people and spawned tons of parodies.

Search results of all the different videos including the original. http://is.gd/oc1q

“Replay allows for a deeper level of understanding than first play.”

People want to have a connection with other people without constraints.

New forms of communication creates new forms of understanding.

Jay Rosen describes twitter as mindcasting, putting your thoughts out there.

Leisa Reichelt says twitter is creating “ambient intimacy”

Theresa Senft describes twitter users as becoming a micro- celebrity. I agree with the statement on many different levels.

Just got introduced to http://www.4chan.org, it is a simple image-based bulletin board. Going to check this out more later.

Lolcats has totally invaded all of our lives.

Thank you @mwesch for not showing us Goatse, thank you thank you thank you!!

Wow that dragonball z clip just brought me way back to my teenage years.

Being a troll on the internet is fun, if you do it respectively.

‘We are everyone and we are no one’ sums up the people on the internet. Very Neo-like saying.

Members of 4chan are described as a flock of birds, which always travel in the same direction.

Ahh the time has come to see the video ‘FlyingPenis’ I remember when this happened too on 2nd life.

Another reason why I love the internet. http://tinyurl.com/5c3kak

‘Content Collapse’ You never know where you are or who you are talking to since you can be picked up at anytime.

Retweeting LOL @whitneyhess: Wanna keep people awake and listening during your 8:30am keynote? Talk about penises and pornography

Futurists all agree on one trend, toward an ubiquitous world in short. Full list too long for twitter

IA is blending with the architecture of the real world.

‘Whatever’ is being redefined again to Doing whatever it takes.

My take away from this is that information isn’t something that we are going to have to organize and structure in some meaningful manner. We need to design method in which people access information, and we need to structure the interaction between people and the information they are seeking.