James Kelway on Information Architecture, User Experience, Web and Iterative Design

 

Photo courtesy of Bill Liao

Last month was Copenhagen’s turn to host the Euro IA summit, and being a resident I was fortunate to attend the 5th event. Beyond Structure was the title of the conference and many talks echoed the thoughts of Everyware, the need for going beyond the web page paradigm and the emergence of UX principles.

 

Picture courtesy of Pete Karl II

Scott Thomas (@simplescott) opened the event with a keynote that was fascinating and not just because it was about Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. He gave us the insight into the hard hours the team  put into the site and all the elements of the campaign to create a cohesive communication to the American public. What stood out was the multi-disciplinary team behind it and the iterative design process that created such an effective site (he  has a book about the work that you can pre-order here)

Highlights

The conference itself had an interesting mix of speakers. Jason Hobbs shared a thorough case story about Enterprise UX that had some brilliant takeaways about how he distills UX principles to guide the design process. I really like the process of doing this and he took the findings of business analysis from a spreadsheet and card sorted those findings into themes and groups. From this he could extract 12 statements that clarified important strategic aims of the project.

 

The UX principle process from Jason Hobbs

 

Leisa Reichelt showed a way of using video to show a group of designers and developers real user testing. Rather than tell the designers she set up a collaborative environment where she showed the user testing in action. This negated many of the pitfalls of the client interpreting data and I can see this as a great way to move towards transparency.

Cennydd Bowles’ talk on Wayfinding was a fast paced, interesting ride through the many elements of this increasingly important area. What I really liked was his concentration throughout on the physical world and his references to Adam Greenfield’s and Timo Arnall’s work. The realisation that we need as a group of UX professionals to see beyond screen based interfaces was captured by the speaker here.

 

There was also an amusing moment when a member of the audience disliked the use of the word findability, stating she could not see how a jug of water could become findable. To which Cennydd replied: ‘it could if it had wheels’. So not just beyond structure here, but more importantly beyond the screen itself.

Passion, commitment and focus on the future

The presence of so many cultures, and varied talks made for a surprisingly vibrant and enlightening event. This is the EuroIA’s real strength and perhaps why I feel it has a greater meaning in the global sphere. There are few other groups in UX who have such a mix of backgrounds, experience and cultural references to call upon. You can join the community here.

Eric Reiss made clear the site is in development as is the group itself, having recently gained formal legal status as a not for profit organisation. To have such a group formed, that as a UX professional you can call upon, is a great thing for any European working in this field.

What really made the conference a success for me were the people and the enthusiasm they showed (many had paid their own way to attend). This passion was evident all around, and I met a group a people who were highly experienced, knowledgeable and eager to move their discipline on into the future. This progressive feel was even more evident talking to those in corridors or over a drink after the sessions. Not unlike the Miami summit last year, I seem to gain my most important insights from talking with people about how they work and their real experiences. I’m looking forward to next year in Paris.

Tags: Cennydd Bowles, Copenhagen, EuroIA 2009, Jason Hobbs, Leisa Reichelt, Scott Thomas

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Conference reviews, Events, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.