Adaptable Information Architecture: How to say no to your next redesign
A workshop with Louis Rosenfeld
March 5, 2012
Your web site or intranet has major problems, and everyone knows it. Worse, it's been that way for a very, very long time.
Occasionally someone tries to do something about it. Senior leaders typically start with the insanely ambitious goal to "fix it once and for all". The result? They throw a few pieces of expensive technology at the problem, or they launch a huge redesign initiative that distracts everyone for a year or two and often results in minimal, cosmetic improvements.
You, however, will continue to be stuck dealing with the mess, condemned to repeat this painful cycle every few years. Unless you attend my workshop. I've been at this for over 15 years; I've seen (and will show you) more realistic and effective techniques for improving your site's performance that will cost far less than redesigns.
You can't make your site perfect, but you can make it much better: let me show you how to tune your information architecture.
Benefits
The day will include:
- A very quick overview of information architecture—so we're all on the same page
- Practical ways to prioritize your information architecture's challenges and keep it tuned
- A rich combination of lecture, discussion, and hands-on exercises
- A handout, including all the slides and a checklist of things you can do to tune your site's performance
- A copy of my new book, Site Search Analytics
- And huge savings from foregoing your next information architecture redesign in favor of a adaptable approach
Get a taste of what we'll cover: view the full presentation (via SlideShare).
What you'll learn:
- How to prioritize the IA challenges your organization should be addressing, rather than wasting money on ambitious attempts to "boil the ocean"
- Practical steps you can take to tune and improve your site's:
- Top-down navigation (e.g., main page, site index)
- Contextual navigation (e.g., moving horizontally through the guts of your content)
- Search performance (e.g., search results design, best bets
Who Should Attend
Information architects, content strategists, user researchers, designers, UX team managers, and anyone who is responsible for managing and improving a large web site or intranet.
Lou Rosenfeld wears two hats.
As an information architecture consultant, he helps Fortune 500s and other large, highly political organizations make their messy information easier to find. His past clients include PayPal, Caterpillar, Ford, The Centers for Disease Control, SIGGRAPH, AT&T, and Borders. With Peter Morville, Lou is co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O'Reilly & Associates; 3rd edition, 2006) regarded as the bible of information architecture, and has been a regular contributor to Web Review, Internet World, and CIO magazines. He is co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute and UXnet, the User Experience Network. Lou blogs at www.louisrosenfeld.com
As a publisher, Lou founded Rosenfeld Media, so that there would be at least one publishing house dedicated to serving the needs of the growing community of user experience practitioners. In its short life, the company has published such seminal titles as Luke Wroblewski's Web Form Design and Storytelling for User Experience by Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks. Lou's book is the eighth title that Rosenfeld Media has published, and about a dozen more should be available by 2013.
Lou holds a Masters in Information and Library Studies and a B.A. in History, both from the University of Michigan. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, Mary Jean Babic, their children, Iris and Nate, and two cats that don't seem to be even remotely interested in user experience.