Podcast appearances and mentions of abby covert

Today, our special guest is Abby Covert, Chief Sensemaker at the Sensemaker Club. Join Brendan as he interviews Abby, an information architect, author, and community leader in UX design. Abby shares insights into her work in UX design, the importance of customer feedback, and her journey as an author. They discuss topics such as misdiagnosis, neurodivergent experiences, the evolution of information architecture, ethical responsibility in tech, and effective communication through diagrams. Take advantage of this insightful and thought-provoking conversation. Highlights include: 0:00 - Introduction and Abby's Accomplishments 3:17 - Abby's Experience of Buying a House 6:45 - Abby's Book "How to Make Sense of Any Mess" 13:01 - Friendship with Christina Wodtke 16:56 - Abby's Work and Life OKRs 20:45 - Decision to Become a "Digital Recluse" 26:10 - Experience of Being Diagnosed with ADHD 37:56 - Abby's Journey in Information Architecture (IA) 44:28 - Challenges in Promoting Ethical Responsibility in UX Design   Who is Abby Covert Abby Covert is an information architect, writer, and community organizer with two decades of experience helping people make sense of messes. In addition to being an active mentor to those new to sensemaking, she has also served the design community as President of the Information Architecture Institute, co-chair of the Information Architecture Summit, and Executive Producer of the I.D.E.A Conference.   Abby is a founding faculty member of the School of Visual Arts' Products of Design graduate program. She also managed the team that helped Rosenfeld Media start the Design Operations Summit and Advancing Research Conference. Her most proud achievement is coming up with the idea for World Information Architecture Day, which brings accessibly priced education to thousands in their local communities annually.   Abby has written two books for her students. In 2014, she published How to Make Sense of Any Mess, a book to teach IA to everybody. In 2022, she released her much-anticipated follow-up, Stuck? Diagrams Help. She currently spends her time making things that help you make the unclear clear, many of which she makes available for free on her website, abbycovert.com or at accessible price points in her popular Etsy shop, AbbytheIA.   Find Abby Here Abby Covert on LinkedIn Sensemaker Club on LinkedIn Sensemaker Club Website Abby Covert's Book How to Make Sense of Any Mess Subscribe to Brave UX Like what you heard and want to hear more? Subscribe and support the show by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). Apple Podcast Spotify YouTube Podbean Follow us on our other social channels for more great Brave UX content! LinkedIn Instagram Brendan Jarvis hosts the Show, and you can find him here: Brendan Jarvis on LinkedIn The Space InBetween Website

Abby Covert, an information architect, discusses the significance of language and the role of information in our lives. She explains that information is unique to each individual and is the result of data and content processing in our brains. Abby emphasizes the importance of understanding mental models and how they shape our perception of information. She also highlights the role of language in organizations and the need for clarity and consistency. Abby shares insights on the power of diagrams in sense-making and decision-making. She encourages individuals and teams to zoom out to gain a broader perspective and to live and lead by their values. Chapters 00:00 Introduction and the Definition of Information 05:23 The Role of Language in Organizations 11:33 Perfectionism and the Challenges of Making Sense 25:07 Living and Leading by Our Values 30:01 The Impact of Information Architecture on Media Consumption   Ready to Learn More with Abby Covert? https://abbycovert.com/ What Do You Mean? Information architecture for kids (and their adults) - assemble with the author https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnTsKmsGmvw   Reach out to us and let us know what topic you want next season to focus on: https://www.unhingedcollaboration.com  

> Episode website < Episode Summary: In this enlightening episode of Insights Unlocked, UserTesting's Bailey Copithorne talks with Abby Covert, an esteemed information architect and author, to unravel the intricacies of information architecture (IA). They explore Abby's journey from graphic design to information architecture, the challenges to understanding information architecture, effectively introducing IA to teams where the concept may be new, and how to leverage AI in the field of information architecture. Guest bio: Our guest is Abby Covert. Abby is an information architect who helps people make sense of information. She writes books and teaches courses on information architecture. She is also the founder of The Sensemakers Club, a digital clubhouse where you can meet sensemakers with similar interests and challenges to your own. What You'll Learn: Abby's professional evolution: from aspirations in musical theater to information architecture, Abby shares how her career transitioned through various phases of graphic and digital design. Challenges in Information Architecture: understanding the common misconceptions that beginners have and how Abby's teaching approach addresses these challenges. Practical applications: insight into Abby's tenure at Etsy, including her innovative approach to implementing a voice of the customer program that reshaped how user feedback influenced product development. Future of Information Architecture: discussions on how information architecture is becoming increasingly crucial in the development and humanization of AI and machine learning technologies. The Sensemakers Club: Abby talks about her initiative to create a community for information architecture enthusiasts to connect, learn, and grow through The Sensemakers Club. Key Quotes: "Information architecture is not just about organizing data; it's about organizing it with intention." "Democratizing information architecture means making it a tool everyone can use to make sense of their messes, not just the trained professionals." Resources Mentioned: Abby Covert's Books: How to Make Sense of Any Mess and Stuck? Diagrams Help. The Sensemakers Club: www.thesensemakersclub.com Episode Timestamps: [00:00] Introduction to Abby Covert and the episode theme [05:22] Abby's journey from graphic design to information architecture [15:45] Common misconceptions and educational approaches in information architecture [25:30] Implementing customer voice at Etsy and its impact [35:50] The critical role of information architecture in AI and machine learning [45:10] Discussion on the future and democratization of information architecture [55:00] Conclusion and information about the Sense Makers Club Call to Action: Check out The Sensemakers Club and consider joining to connect with a community of like-minded professionals and enthusiasts. Read Abby's influential books to gain a deeper understanding and practical insights into tackling complex information architecture challenges. Further reading: For more information, read this UserTesting blog post, Information architecture: a comprehensive UX guide for beginners.

Abby Covert is an information architect, writer and community organizer with two decades of experience helping people make sense of messes. She is the author of the 2014 book, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, "a book to teach IA to everybody," and more recently, Stuck, Diagrams Help, a book for teaching the art of diagramming. In this episode of the podcast, Sophia and Abby talk about letting go of perfectionism in dealing with tech debt, the power of language and why words are hard, plus why diagramming is a high order skill. LINKS: Connect with Abby on LinkedIn. Keep up with Abby on her website. Purchase Abby's book, How to Make Sense of Any Mess. Purchase Abby's book, Stuck, Diagrams Help. Sign up for the OOUX for AI & AI for OOUX meetup, May 16, 2024 at 3:00PM. Upgrade your career with The Self-Paced OOUX Masterclass! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ooux/support

As the digital practices have grown and evolved over the past few decades, the job title "information architect" has become less common. That doesn't necessarily mean that the work isn't being done, but IA is now often in the province of a designer, content strategist, or other practitioner. Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign of progress and as an opportunity to more deliberately democratize the craft of information architecture. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/abby-covert/

Power of Ten is a podcast hosted by Andy Polaine about design operating at many levels, zooming out from thoughtful detail through to organisational transformation and on to changes in society and the world. My guest in this episode is the wonderful Abby Covert, an author, teacher and community leader in the field of information architecture who aims to make information architecture and sensemaking skills accessible to everyone. Abby's first book, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, demystified information architecture into a practical skillset that anyone can apply to any context where sense might need to be made. She recently published her second book, Stuck? Diagrams Help a field guide for the trek from diagram novice to diagram nerd. Show Links This show's web page Abby Abby's website Stuck? Diagrams Help How to Make Sense of Any Mess Abby's Etsy shop Abby on LinkedIn Abby on Twitter Andy Subscribe to Power of Ten Subscribe to Andy's newsletter Doctor's Note Andy's online courses Andy on Twitter Andy on LinkedIn Polaine.com Suggestions? Feedback? Get in touch!

Okay, take a guess... Which services are probably the most challenging to design? I argue that it's the services that your users don't explicitly ask for. Wait, what?! Who designs services that their users don't ask for? Well, your government does. A lot. Think of public services like collecting taxes, keeping your street clean, and providing quality education, and helping to alleviate poverty. These are often the "forgotten" services that are so important in order to maintain the wellbeing of our cities and countries. It's one thing to make sure these services are available, but a completely different challenge to improve the experiences of these forgotten services. Our guest, Sally Halls, has taken on this challenge and is using service design to bridge the gap between citizens and policy-makers. In this episode, we'll explore how to design services that people haven't explicitly asked for, how to bring the public's voice into policy-making, and the impact service design professionals can have on the public sector. Sally also shares her experience with service design and how it can be used to benefit the public sector. The insights from this episode can be used in any sector. If you're dealing with abstract or high-level goals in your work, then you'll surely pick up a few nuggets of wisdom from this conversation. Enjoy! - Marc --- [ 1. GUIDE ] --- 00:00 Welcome to episode 169 06:00 Who is Sally 07:00 60 second rapid fire 09:30 Three types of services 14:30 Preventative service misconceptions 18:30 Specific challenges 23:00 Taking the first step 25:30 How to find fulfillment 28:00 Evidencing services 30:45 What are arms length services 35:00 Is this still our work 37:45 What is the most difficult 40:15 Mistakes and pitfalls 44:30 What do you wish you had known 46:30 Recommended resources 47:15 Closing thoughts --- [ 2. LINKS ] --- https://www.linkedin.com/in/sally-halls-a3715417/ https://publicpolicydesign.blog.gov.uk https://openpolicy.blog.gov.uk/category/skills-tools-and-techniques/ https://www.gov.uk/guidance/open-policy-making-toolkit --- [ 3. BOOKS ] --- Hello World by Hannah Fry - https://amzn.to/3EcDZYH How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert - https://amzn.to/3IqWI5k Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman - https://amzn.to/3XzLwYt Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard P. Rumelt - https://amzn.to/3RZRZKZ --- [ 4. SELLING SERVICE DESIGN WITH CONFIDENCE ] --- Learn how to get buy-in for service design from your clients, stakeholders and co-workers! https://www.servicedesignshow.com/confidence

Att hantera dokument och Information med SharePoint kan vara klurigt. Olika behörigheter och målgrupper och sånt. Men hur gör man när man bara vill använda Teams? För att få tankarna i ordning är det bäst att vi börjar från början. Varför ser våra delade mappar ut som de gör? Hur översätter vi det till Teams? Sen blir det såklart lite nyheter.  I avsnittet refererar jag till följande: Abby Covert har en bok och en sajt om Informationsarkitektur: How to make sense of any mess https://howtomakesenseofanymess.com    

Abby Covert is an information architect, writer and community organizer with two decades of experience helping people make sense of messes. In addition to being an active mentor to those new to sensemaking, she has also served the design community as President of the Information Architecture Institute, co-chair of Information Architecture Summit, and Executive Producer of the I.D.E.A Conference. Abby is a founding faculty member of School of Visual Arts' Products of Design graduate program. She also managed the team that helped Rosenfeld Media to start both the Design Operations Summit and Advancing Research Conference. Her most proud achievement is having come up with the idea for World Information Architecture Day, bringing accessibly priced education to thousands in their local communities annually. In addition to running events, you may have seen her presenting her work on stage at: Blend, Business to Buttons, Confab, Creative Mornings, Designing for Digital, EdUI, EMACTL, EuroIA, Generate, GIANT, IA Summit, IA Conference, Italian IA Conference, Interactions, Midwest UX, Mind the Product, Momentum, Plain Language Summit, SearchLOVE, STC Summit, TalkUX, UI21, UI22, UX Cambridge, UX Ottawa, UX Lisbon, UX Tokyo, UX Week, Webstock, Wharton Web Conference, World IA Day Abby has written two books for her students. In 2014 she published How to Make Sense of Any Mess, a book to teach IA to everybody. In 2022, she released her much anticipated follow-up, Stuck? Diagrams Help. She currently spends her time making things that help you to make the unclear, clear, many of which she makes available for free on her website abbycovert.com or at accessible price points in her popular Etsy shop AbbytheIA. Abby lives and writes from Melbourne, Florida where her most important job title is ‘Mom'. Episode Notes Products & Guides for SensemakersHow to Make Sense of Any MessSTUCK? Diagrams HelpMy Monthly Email List Related Episodes Episode #223: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic Episode #203: Alli Torban Episode #198: Scott Berkun Episode #145: RJ Andrews Episode #2: Dear Data iTunes Spotify

Abby Covert is an information architect, writer and community organizer with two decades of experience helping people make sense of messes. In addition to being an active mentor to those new to sensemaking, she has also served the design community... The post Episode #226: Abby Covert appeared first on PolicyViz.

Vamos continuar falando do Teatro de UX que vivemos a cada dia? Escolhemos estar nessa simulação? Essa história de que tudo é falso e estamos encenando tem impacto real? Uma breve introdução para estrear essa nova série que começou no Bom dia UX (link dessa conversa está aqui https://open.spotify.com/episode/4FIrTj8BwYN4FOsKigyzar?si=8579c09fd8cb4160) e vai se estender por alguns vídeos com foco em explorar mais o assunto do teatro e acrescentar ideias ou sugestões para solucionar, resolver ou apenar lidar com o contexto. Esse papo tem como base alguns artigos e conteúdos já publicados em artigos, livros e videos, e você pode conferi-los abaixo: https://www.fastcompany.com/90686473/… https://uxpodcast.com/267-ux-theatre-… Livro citado: How design makes the world de Scott Berkun, https://amzn.to/3L0mcWv Good Morning UX citado com Abby Covert: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Y6Yt2Y9041QrPRZYxin0G?si=a87d129a143b47d6 ——————————————— Passe no canal ou clique no link aí na frente e assine o canal https://www.youtube.com/c/designteamb…. E escute o PODCAST do canal DesignTeam https://open.spotify.com/show/0yE3kkK… Torne-se membro de conteúdo exclusivo do canal https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTkZ…

Vamos continuar falando do Teatro de UX que vivemos a cada dia? Escolhemos estar nessa simulação? Essa história de que tudo é falso e estamos encenando tem impacto real? Uma breve introdução para estrear essa nova série que começou no Bom dia UX (link dessa conversa está aqui https://open.spotify.com/episode/4FIrTj8BwYN4FOsKigyzar?si=8579c09fd8cb4160) e vai se estender por alguns vídeos com foco em explorar mais o assunto do teatro e acrescentar ideias ou sugestões para solucionar, resolver ou apenar lidar com o contexto. Esse papo tem como base alguns artigos e conteúdos já publicados em artigos, livros e videos, e você pode conferi-los abaixo: https://www.fastcompany.com/90686473/… https://uxpodcast.com/267-ux-theatre-… Livro citado: How design makes the world de Scott Berkun, https://amzn.to/3L0mcWv Good Morning UX citado com Abby Covert: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Y6Yt2Y9041QrPRZYxin0G?si=a87d129a143b47d6

Abby discusses information architecture, diagrams, and her new book.  We had an impromptu surprise diagram critique session of a "Jobs To Be Done" job types map.  This one ended up a bit visual, so I suggest watching the YouTube version if possible: https://youtu.be/zF07B3lVyos -------   Like, comment, subscribe, and tell friends about Delta CX on YouTube, please!    Find out more about Delta CX: https://deltacx.com  Join the free Delta CX community on Discord: https://deltacx.link/discord  Join the free Delta CX community on Slack: https://deltacx.link/joinslack  Follow on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/delta-cx/    If you're interested in one-on-one coaching with Debbie, everybody gets 30 min for free (once). https://deltacx.link/coaching     All other links like our events calendar, how to send stuff in, portfolio reviews, etc. https://deltacx.com/links

"Talvez você nunca tenha ouvido falar em ergodesign, mas pode ter certa familiaridade com os termos “usabilidade”, “design centrado no usuário”, “experiência do usuário”, “design emocional”." Quando falamos de design de produto e experiência do usuário é impossível, e talvez inaceitável, não falar de Arquituetura de informação. Este termo cunhado por Richard Saul Wruman, que trata da interpretação da informação e expressão de distinções entre signos e sistemas de signos, tendo implicações fundamentais também no marketing e no negócio. Ela talvez esteja na origem do que chamamos hoje de UX design, conectadando e conectada com princípios de interface e engenharia, tanto quanto de arquitetura, sem esquecer da biblioteconomia, resumindo, como fazer experiência sem entender o contexto? Já que AI é tudo sobre o contexto. Temos percebido que esta disciplina tem perdido seu espaço nas discussões e até mesmo nas grades de ensino, até por isso temos trazido temas que passam por essa situação, como o especial com Abby Covert. Qual será o impacto dessa falta de atenção a arquitetura de informação em nossa profissão? Temos discutido sobre a eficiência e qualidade dos produtos que temos colocado no mercado, como designers, e será que o desconhecimento dessas habilidades tem um papel nisso? Para conversarmos sobre o tema convidamos o Luiz Agner (https://www.linkedin.com/in/luizagner/), professor, designer e autor do clássico livro Ergodesign, para falarmos sobre como o estudo desse conhecimento pode ser importante para a carreira e o resutlado de nosso trabalho em vários cenários. Livros: Ergodesign e Arquitetura de Informação: Trabalhando com o Usuário https://amzn.to/34qwmz5 Ansiedade da Informação 2 https://amzn.to/3rwR35m Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond (English Edition) https://amzn.to/3JcS8Fy Arquitetura da Informação e UX: Como o design da experiência do usuário pode salvar as pessoas da overdose de informação https://amzn.to/3JsrDft How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody (English Edition) https://amzn.to/3JaprJ9 Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture https://amzn.to/3sjRr6m Links: Cursocast - O olhar do usuário Qual a sua opinião sobre isso? Esse é o Bom dia UX, um programa feito ao vivo no canal do youtube do Design Team, toda quarta-fei

"Há um fenômeno estranho no mundo do design de experiência do usuário." Uma expressão que tem crescido na industria do UX é o tal "teatro de ux" ou "teatro do design", e sem dúvida é um contexto que temos debatido aqui nestes quase 2 anos de Bom dia UX, culminando na citação do caso pela própria Abby Covert em nossa série especial do Good Morning UX. Esse tal teatro acontece quando os designers são solicitados a fingir fazer o trabalho de design e não têm permissão para fazer o trabalho de design. Mas será que acontece apenas por solicitação, ou nós mesmo fazemos isso nos enganando que estamos aplicando o design pela experiência? Outro profissional e autor que cita o termo é Scott Berkun em seu conceituado How Design makes the world, onde ele fala sobre a paixão que os designers têm, mas como eles raramente têm o poder de agir, pois o poder está em outro lugar, discutindo o “teatro do design” e o que faz o design bom versus o design ruim. Isso acontece quando somos solicitados a realizar, ou realizamos por escolha, pesquisas que nunca são usadas. Quando entregamos descobertas que são arquivadas porque não se alinham às expectativas dos executivos ou acionistas. Quando nos pedem para facilitar workshops em que os funcionários fingem ser usuários porque é mais barato e mais rápido do que fazer pesquisas com usuários reais. Ou quando só conseguimos revisar o design quando o produto está prestes a chegar às ruas e é tarde demais para qualquer melhoria de design real. Essa é uma livre tradução adaptada do artigo da FastCompany: https://www.fastcompany.com/90686473/ux-design-has-a-dirty-secret Convidamos os queridos e já da casa, Rogério Fratin e Thoz para tratar dessa polêmica, com um café sem açúcar, logo cedo. Links úteis: Artigo citado por Abby no Good Morning UX: https://www.fastcompany.com/90686473/ux-design-has-a-dirty-secret Livro citado: How design makes the world de Scott Berkun, https://amzn.to/3L0mcWv Good Morning UX citado com Abby Covert: Is Information Architecture dead? With Abby Covert | Good Morning UX UXpodcast com Scott Berkun: https://uxpodcast.com/261-design-makes-the-world-scott-berkun/ Qual a sua opinião sobre isso? Esse é o Bom dia UX, um programa feito ao vivo no canal do youtube do Design Team, toda quarta-feira de manhã às 7 horas. * Acesse nosso site * http://www.designteam.com.br * Junte-se ao Telegram * https://bit.ly/3dOea2Y * Assine nosso podcast * https://anchor.fm/designteambr Rafael Burity Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafaelburity Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rafaelburity/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/rafaelburity Rodrigo Lemes Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrigolemes Twitter: https://twitter.com/rodrigolemes

Episode 072 of Underserved features Brian Durkin, Sr. Group Manager & Head of User Experience, Data & Analytics at BNY Mellon. Brian leveraged his art degree into some web design work but found his true passion was in information architecture. He came to this realization in the middle of an interview, which he politely asked to terminate. Instead, he was offered a new IA job the next day! Also covered: World IA Day, getting fintech to understand IA, and the fun parts of working for Nickelodeon.     Charles Zicari, Brian's first real IA mentor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-zicari-90798/   IxDA: https://ixda.org/   UXPA Boston: http://uxpaboston.org/    World IA Day, Brian started the one for Boston: https://worldiaday.org/    Some of the past speakers of World IA Day Boston:  Peter Morville - https://www.linkedin.com/in/morville    Steve Portigal - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveportigal/  Josh Seiden - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jseiden/  Abby Covert - https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbytheia/  Aaron Irizarry - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaroni/  Todd Zaki-Warfel - https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakiwarfel/  Dana Chisnell - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-chisnell/  Christina Wodtke - https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinawodtke/ 

Diagrams are everywhere and used by many people in many professions. But what is a diagram? When are they useful? And what makes a good one? Information architect and author of “How To Make Sense of Any Mess” Abby Covert joins us to talk about diagrams and diagramming – which is the topic of her... The post #289 Diagramming with Abby Covert appeared first on UX Podcast.

In which Peter and Jesse are joined by information architect and author Abby Covert, who shares her story of moving from independent consultant, to Etsy's staff information architect, to product manager, and then independent writer and teacher. She shares what she learned along the way about burnout and work-life balance, and gives us a peek at her forthcoming book on the power of diagrams as tools for thinking. Find more about Abby at http://abbycovert.com, and read "I Choose Me," the post that inspired this episode. Learn more about Jesse's coaching practice at http://jessejamesgarrett.com/ Peter occasionally writes about design orgs and leadership at http://petermerholz.com/

Loui Rosenfeld spoke some time ago, in ILA 2019 at Medellin, about the death of Information Architecture. He made this provocation based on the search in google for example. We are living in a kind of What If episode when some people decide to teach about UX without this knowledge. Maybe it's for shame or just ignorance. But, what are the problems this made in our industry when we think about IA and digital products? We decided to start this new project called Good Morning UX, an extension of another show called Bom Dia UX, with such special-international guests. Actually, we invited 6 professionals who are references for us and that have so much history in our industry. For this, we invited Abby Covert, an information architect who loves to make sense of messes, to talk to us about, obviously, Information Architecture. Follow Joe on these links: https://abbycovert.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbytheia/ https://pt.slideshare.net/AbbyCovert Abby's book: (FREE) http://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/ https://amzn.to/3e8U3xn Related Links: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/clean-up-your-mess-working-with-ia-abby-covert/ https://productsofdesign.sva.edu/faculty/abby-covert-2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6lXWgnTmRE (livro) https://amzn.to/3yTC9rR ----------------------------- This is the Bom Dia UX, a live show produced and launched at the Design Team channel every Wednesday at 7 am, in the Brazilian time zone. ----------------------------- Sign up the channel https://www.youtube.com/c/designteambr?sub_confirmation=1. Listen to the PODCAST (in Portuguese) https://open.spotify.com/show/0yE3kkKCcdPKaMFUfgSED7 Came to membership and have exclusive content https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTkZTDIq25Czsazq2N493Cg/join Follow us: Rodrigo Lemes Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrigolemes Twitter: https://twitter.com/rodrigolemes Rafael Burity Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafaelburity Twitter: https://twitter.com/rafaelburity Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/rafaelburity ----------------------------- * Join us at Telegram * https://bit.ly/3dOea2Y * Access our website * http://www.designteam.com.br

Dan Klyn is co-founder of The Understanding Group, an information architecture consultancy based in Michigan. Dan has also created useful and influential IA frameworks, and in this conversation, we focus on his latest: the BASIC framework. If you're enjoying the show, please rate or review it in Apple's Podcasts directory: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-informed-life/id1450117117?itsct=podcast_box&itscg=30200 Show notes Dan Klyn The Understanding Group The BASIC framework Chris Farnum Peter Morville Louis Rosenfeld Andreas Resmini Richard Saul Wurman Bob Royce Edith Farnsworth House Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Kimbell Art Museum Louis Kahn Renzo Piano Brian Eno Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Dan, welcome to the show. Dan: Thank you. Jorge: It is such a pleasure to have you here. As I was telling you before we started recording, you're one of the people that I originally thought of having as a guest on the show, when I first conceived of the show. I am constantly inspired and just amazed by the contributions you've brought to our field of information architecture. And I'm honored to have you on the show and looking forward to hearing about you. In particular, about a framework that you've been sharing recently. About Dan Jorge: But before we get into that, I'm hoping that you will tell us about yourself. Who are you, Dan? Dan: Sure. Let's see... I was a fat baby. I think the reason that I have the pleasure of talking with you today... we can blame Chris Farnham, who is an information architect in Southeast Michigan. I went to a conference about information architecture in 2009. My first professional conference had ever been to in any field, and I didn't know if I was particularly welcome or fit well into the field of information architecture, but I had a mentor who encouraged me and that was Peter Morville. So Chris Farnham and Peter Morville, these two guys from Ann Arbor are the only people I thought I knew at this conference, which was true for about five minutes. And as we were walking to the opening reception, Chris said, "Hey, those two guys walking in front of us... those guys are architect-architects. Like, you know, like what you're interested in, Klyn!" Because even back then, the architecture part of information architecture is what I was mostly interested in. And walking in front of me on the way to this opening reception at the IA Summit, as it was called back then was Jorge Arango and Andreas Resmini. And I never talked to Chris again for four or five years, I think. And I have held fast to Jorge and Andreas ever since. And I'm so grateful to have had... I've been given by you guys permission to be as excited as I am about the architecture part of information architecture. Which is so different than my experience with other professionals in the built environment. When I started enthusing about information architecture and the ways that I think what makes places good for people in the built environment has something immediately relevant for us to learn from, as people who make digital products and services.... they're not into it. They scold me for not having consulted the correct sources. Or having the wrong opinions about some buildings or what have you. And you and Andreas both welcomed my amateurism, at a time when you could have just, you know... I don't know! So that's why I'm here. Hi, my name is Dan Klyn. I'm an information architect and I am fascinated by — I am on fire about — the ways that architecture in the built environment can teach us how to do things with digital products and services. And any second now, metaverse-icle products and services and such. So that's what I'm interested. I'm interested in the spatiality of meaning. That is a mouthful that nobody wants to hear, but that's how I say it sometimes. And I have drawn most of my ways of thinking about and seeing this from an increasingly intensive pursuit of Richard Saul Wurman from a biographical standpoint. I figured if I could learn everything that he knows about information architecture, then that would be pretty good. So I've been trying to turn him upside down and shake him, and catch what comes out of his pockets for about seven years or so now. So, that's what I do. Jorge: That's a great intro and I feel like this episode is turning into the Jorge and Dan mutual appreciation society. But I think that we can't wrap up the intro without also naming the fact that you are a co-founder of The Understanding Group, Dan: right? The Understanding Group Dan: That's right. Yes! And Mr. Wurman having been so essential to the founding of our company. Bob Royce and I, when he... he as a serial entrepreneur was in the school of information and library studies at the same time that Peter and Lou were back in the day. And so, as somebody from a business development background standpoint, interested in information architecture, his interest in it went all the way back to Richard Saul Wurman. And the first time I saw Richard in person was a speech that he gave at the University of Michigan and the only person that I knew in the audience and we sat right next to each other right in the front row is Bob Royce. So yeah, together, our enthusiasm for information architecture, digital strategy... whatever ways that we can apply architectural thinking to usually large-scale software and information systems, that's what we wanted to start a company to focus on. And certainly we were inspired by and got to learn through their advice. Peter and Lou having operated the world's first really large scale information architecture consultancy, which was called Argus, which operated back in the late 1990s and disbanded, about the same time that a lot of things did in March of 2001. Yeah, there's probably a way that you could have a business that focuses on information architecture and that... we want it to be that. So, that was 10 years ago and TUG continues to be among the... if you were to say, "Hey, who should we get to help us with information architecture?" people would probably say, Jorge Arango, Abby Covert. An aspiration that we're just pleased that we are often in that same sort of three or four things that you would just know about when it comes to taking on significant information architectural challenges in software and digital products and services, yeah! That's what we've become. "The spatiality of meaning" Jorge: I want to circle back to this phrase, "the spatiality of meaning." And you referenced being inspired by Mr. Wurman. And you also talked about "Being on fire about the architecture of the built environment," and talking about gravitating to Andreas and myself at that first information architecture summit. And one thing that the three of us have in common, the three of us being Mr. Wurman, Andreas, and myself, is that our background is in building architecture. But that is not your background, right? Dan: Correct. Library science over here. Jorge: Library science. So, I'm wondering what drew you to the architecture of the built environment? Dan: It's gonna sound... it's exactly... think of the most boring cliche way to answer your question and that's the answer. Since I was a little boy, I had a Crayola drafting set of a T-square and a triangle. And big paper. And my parents got me a tilty desk. Like it was the only thing I knew that I wanted it to be until I didn't think that I could because I was bad at math. So, for as long as I can remember, I wanted to make the shapes that I make on paper turn into an experience that people could have. Especially me, but other people may be also. And since then, and especially since becoming a consultant who travels a lot, I have had an extraordinary opportunity to go to buildings. And I have had my cognition, my heart rate, my pulse, my skin temperature... I have been physically changed by every different kind of place that I've been to. And by doing that on purpose, that's where the BASIC Framework comes from is an awareness that I developed at some point that what these buildings do is they are machines that uniquely change our human experience by changing our blood pressure and our cognition and our pulse. And the effects that it uses are both, you know, the physics of the earth, the density of the walls... if you're in a crypt of a cathedral and the density of the walls is two feet thick and it is granite, the air pressure changes in there make what your body can... what's possible for you to experience has been concrete-ized literally in ways that are just extraordinary. And so, by putting myself in so many of these different places, and yes, I've catered to my list of initially is canonical buildings that architects who control what is considered to be a good building in the Western tradition, right? But that's the kind of list that I started from. And by going to as many of these places as possible, continually re-energizing and re-believing in reifying the reality... not some neat-o idea that I choose to have, but an actual experience that is undeniable that the way that these places have been set up through the arrangement of material and space and through the arrangement of the information that is either encoded in that material or inscribed on that material, the situatedness of things in space changes how we... how we experience things. The radical architect, Christopher Alexander — people scoff! Like, spit their coffee out when he says stuff like that he knows how to make God appear in a field. But that's... I think also a part of why I've been so interested in this is having been raised in a deeply religious context and hearing about power that people can have access to and experiences with and transformation, transfiguration, transubstantiation, immanence... that I've had those experiences. And they're not so much with sermons of words — it's sermons in stone that really changed my whole life. So, now I seek out experiences in places so that I can understand better how to somehow transfer or remember at a minimum, all of the different ways that I've been made to feel through experiences with architectures. And then, how can I tap into that at some other time for some other purpose. That's how I've been trying to rationalize such the luxurious experience of going to so many kick-ass buildings. Jorge: Well, that was beautifully put and I'll reflect it back to you. What I heard there is that this phrase, "the spatiality of meaning," at least part of it, has to do with the fact that buildings play a functional role in our lives, right? Like they keep us dry and warm — you know, safe from external conditions. But there's this other role that they can play — at least some buildings can play — which has to do with somehow moving us, reminding us of perhaps higher states of being somehow. And the question is... you and I both work on architecting experiences that people have mostly within the confines of the small glass rectangles that we carry around in our pockets. And what's the connection between these — if any — between these transcendent experiences that you have when walking into a special place and the sort of experience that you can have through a digital artifact? Back to screens Dan: Well, I'm trying to think about it in terms of the last thing that I worked on or some real case in point. And I'm thinking about an app that I've been working on that has all kinds of different functionality. And there are ideas about what does prominence mean? So, imagine that this app that has all sorts of different kinds of functions, that there's a giant global organization, and there are people who are mapped to those functions and that they all feel like their thing needs to be the most important and therefore the most prominent or vice versa. So, there's a space race, or there's a competition for the most opportune positions on screens in this screen-iverse that they operate. And finding an order that both works from the, "I'm a brain in a jar," and there are semantic categories and there are things... there's knowledge in the world, not just in my head. And on the basis of knowledge in the world and on figuring things out from a sense-making standpoint, there's no right way. But there are good ways. And so what I'm trying to learn from the built environment, every location in the built environment is special. So, it's not so much that I've been to special places and then, "oh crap. What do you do when you're working on something quotidian? Something that's just every day." It's the idea that every place is charged with wonder. Every... everything is amazing. Because look at it! There it is! People made that! And so, trying to help this organization, this global organization with all these poor people who are, you know, if their thing is high up on the screen, then they win. Trying to posit order for how to situate all of those things in space that's both good for the organization that they can continue to operate as an organization and as a business. It's good for people who have to use it because it isn't like, "oh! Where is the blank?" And also then the trifecta is: and could all of this be key to our embodiment as human beings? And so, we came up with a way to position proprioceptively. Imagine yourself looking at your phone screen. There's left, right, up, down. To make left and right and up and down mean something, other than "most important," "least important," or "most prominent" and "least prominent." So, things of this nature you can expect to find them over to the left. Things of that other nature you can expect to find those to the right. And governance... a way of working with the organization to help diffuse the person with the highest tolerance for discomfort wins, for there to be reasons for belonging and space and place that everybody can understand, and that, when people follow it, it creates more wellbeing and prosperity. It sounds like fantasy, but that's really what we get to do when we're doing it right. And it's great! And I couldn't do it if I didn't have these experiences in my own body and have felt and believed in the pleasure and the learnability and the... to reliably be able to reach over here and get something because you know it's going to be there. And on what basis, other than, "well, that's where it always was." Jorge: What I'm getting from what you're saying there is that in both cases, in both the physical environment than these information environments, there is the possibility of a higher level of order that might bring coherence to what might otherwise be forces that are pulling the experience into different directions, that make it incoherent, right? Dan: That's right. The BASIC framework Jorge: And with that in mind I wanted to ask you... during your career, you've shared a few frameworks that have been influential and helped us see the type of work that we do in different ways. And recently you've shared a draft of a framework that is new to me at least, called BASIC. And it seems to me to be an effort in this direction of providing kind of a framework for order and coherence. Dan: Yes. Jorge: And I was hoping that you would tell us about the BASIC framework. What is it? Dan: I am learning along with everybody else what it is. That's one of the risks! When you put something out there that isn't done yet, that's the reason to do something like that. And so, having put it out there not entirely baked, and then asking for and eliciting feedback... one of the first most powerful pieces of feedback that I got after presenting it for the first time at a meetup online was from a colleague in the UK who posited that what BASIC is, is it's about where you as the designer... it gives you five vantage points into the problem space. It's like, "where should I stand to see the thing that would be good to notice?" So, that's one way to start explaining it is: it's an easy-to-remember acronym that gives you five ways to have a posture vis-a-vis some kind of a complex system. And if you stand in these five places, and if you ask some of the questions that I've provided with each of those postures, then possibly you will see the architecture of the thing. So, that's really the goal. And one of the ways that I came to make it, was a friend of mine... we went on a field trip. We went to the Edith Farnsworth house in Plano, Illinois by Mies van der Rohe. And we were so lucky! It was in the winter and we were the only ones on the tour. So we had a whole hour with the docent. Couldn't go in because it was winter, have since of rectified that. Have been back with the same friend and we got to go inside. But first time we're just outdoors, in the snow, circling the Edith Farnsworth house. And then afterward, I shared the photos that I took. And my friend noted that... he looked at the photos that he... we went to the same place, we took many of the same pictures. But that there was something going on in the pictures that I was taking that he wanted to know about, because it seemed like I was accessing different parts of the same experience. And whether it was just purely on the basis of the otherness of the what... something that somebody else is doing it in the same place, you wonder what that is? It's not... I don't believe it's because I have superior aesthetic judgements or anything like that. I think it has to do though with having developed a set of postures for when I'm trying to relate to buildings first of all, in order to see the right stuff. By my own internal compass, the right stuff. And then, talking this out with my friend and then him encouraging me to do something with it because it seemed like it could be learnable. Like, if I stood there and if I cocked my head that way, I would see it too. So, that's what it is. It's postures that you can use. Questions... So, the first one is boundaries. And if you didn't do any of the other elements, if you found a way to perceive the boundaries... and where was the boundary before where it is now, and who gets to move the... just some really dumb questions about boundaries and where one material stops and another begins is an especially potent thing to notice in buildings. But whether it's buildings or an intranet, the boundaries. How did they get here? Where were they before? Is there a plan to make there be different boundaries? Do you see any evidence of, you know, the ghost traces of where things used to be, or where they're fixing to go? And then you can go right on down the line. And the second one, let's see, what is the second one? You've got the book there, you tell me! Jorge: There is a little booklet that you can print out and I'm holding one in my hands. So, the first one is boundaries. The second one is associations. Dan: Yes. Perfect! So, what do we associate a stepped gable with in the built environment? I'm Dutch. If you go to Holland, Michigan, nearby where I live, there are these buildings that were built within the last 20 years that have these stepped gables not because they serve any functional purpose, but because they remind everybody who lives there, that many of the people here have Dutch heritage, and that that's how the buildings look. So there are direct associations like that. There are more diffused associations, like the kind... does it link to a PDF? You associate that differently than if it's to HTML page, then if it's a video. So just associations. The A, S... Situatedness. Why is anything where it is? If you go to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas — which I encourage you to do — there has been an expansion to that museum. It was originally by Louis Kahn opened in 1972, the year I was born. An expansion to the museum was done by Renzo Piano in the nineties. You now enter the Kimbell from the back, relative to where the architect imagined you would enter the building. So just little... why is anything where it is gives you access to so many architectural decisions that were made in the environment. And then the last two are twinned. And probably I'm too in love with BASIC because it's so easy to remember and I want it to be basic like food-hole, air-hole, dumb-basic. But the last two are invariants. So, what are the forces in the environment that don't change or that seem like they don't change? Brian Eno has wisely said that repetition is a form of change. So you have to be careful with this one. And that's why it is paired with cycles. And those two postures, those two places to stand relative to some complex system... if you were able to perceive what was invariant in the environment, that would explain to you why it shows up the way that it does and each of these elements in the model has a building that I've been to. They're all in the United States so far, and the example cartoon of a building for invariance is a garage I saw in Seattle. Where I live in Michigan, the roofs are a pointy, peaked roof, like kids around here would draw a picture of a house. But in Seattle, there's a shape of a roof that is inverted to catch the rain because it is on a steep hill, in a microclimate that is a rainforest basically. So, it's an invariant. There's so much water there, you're going to change the shape of the roof to rise to channel those forces better. And that was the consequence... consequence to that, a million other decisions about the building. And then cycle, the last one, you can plug that one into what's invariant. In Michigan, we have four seasons. In Seattle, they have maybe two. And so, by looking at what has the system done to anticipate cyclical change in the environment that it's in... put all those five postures together, ask a question from each one, and I feel pretty good that you're not talking about the design so much as you're talking about the architecture of the system. Jorge: What attracts me so much about this framework is that it takes a systemic lens at examining the... or a set of lenses, right? To your point, these are different vantage points from which you can examine the system. And although it is grounded in architecture, as in built architecture — and like you said, the booklet includes drawings of buildings as illustrations of these various lenses — they seem applicable to other types of things that might be architected, right? Like this notion that you can examine the system through the perspective of what distinctions does it manifest, versus what perhaps memories, cultural or otherwise, it triggers, right? Like those are very different perspectives that are part of architected systems, regardless of whether they are buildings or what have you. Dan: That's right. And the caveat here with any methods that I've developed, if you're trying to apply them, it has to be in an architectural context where the nature of the change that is expected or at least possible? Is more than an increment. It can be executed incrementally but the nature of the change... if you're looking for recommendations about how to change the architecture, it should be safe to presume that those kinds of changes are harder to do, possibly take more time, and are more costly because they are more consequential. And so, if people are just making shit, then this framework won't help you because there isn't a reason for everything that was done. And that is... I'm so glad that we've got to here and maybe because of time, we might land here or start landing here, is: the built environment is such a terrific teacher because almost always, except now, every decision that was made is because of a reason. And the traceability of every move that is made to a reason, you need to do that in design too, if you're doing it right. But when you're talking about architecture what that means is that it's being taken on and thought of systemically. And if the thing is being made in a way where it doesn't care about being systemic, then these lenses won't help you because it just is the way that it is because it is. This all presumes total accountability for every move that you make as a recommender of changes to an environment. And I've recommended changes to a digital environment that have made it so that people's jobs went away. I'm glad that I haven't worked on products and services where the changes I've recommended have caused harm to people, that I know of, but it's certainly possible. And as we enter into this metaverse time of everything being part of the experiences that we work on, I think having a framework like this is also helpful because it might check an impulsive feeling of, "oh, I get it." Or, "I've seen it." Or, "I know what it is." Or, "clearly the solution is..." Maybe this framework would help you go slower and not move with so much certainty. Maybe these are five ways to undermine the decision that you were about to make. And I would be good with that, in most cases. Jorge: How do you keep that from paralyzing you altogether? Because when you say you have full accountability over a thing, like... Dan: It all depends on having extraordinary clients. Without clients who are willing to work in that fashion... I mean, whether you want to take maximum accountability for your recommendations or not, Jorge: I can see what you mean, but I can also understand how that sense would or could paralyze you as a designer, right? So, how do you keep the dance going? Responsibility Dan: It's a two way street and if the client isn't playing along and giving you that accountability and that responsibility, then you're not actually... you know, it's not actually happening. So, I think it absolutely depends on having the right clients and TUG has been so fortunate to have not prospered enough to have clients that aren't the right kind. It's weird to engage with information architects to affect change to complex digital products and services. And I think we show up... weird enough, where we've scared away the ones who wouldn't be a good partner with us in wanting to have that level of accountability, that level of traceability for the recommendations that we make. Because it requires that the stakeholders be super accountable to what they want, because you're going to get it, right? Like, that's what I'm saying is, as your architect, if you show me your intent, if you let me make a model of your intent and then the model is more or less correct, then I can make a whole bunch of decisions about the situatedness of things in your space that will deliver against that intent. So God help you if you don't know what you want. Because I need that in order to make decisions on your... with you, not on your behalf. When we started TUG a long time ago, we decided the word agency must not be the word for... We don't want to borrow anyone's agency for money for a couple of months and then give it back to them. They need to keep their agency all along the way to keep instructing us and intending back when we make our moves to make sure that things stay good. So, yeah, it's all about having the right clients and quite frankly, it has a lot to do with my own personal choices over the last year or so to get away from consulting as much as I personally can, and be more in the mode of scholarship and writing because I don't know how much longer the client world is going to be able to make room for the kinds of work that I personally want to do. Closing Jorge: Well Dan, I would love to hear more about what that might be. And I would like to extend you an invitation to do another recording with me, if you are open to it, to explore that and the notion of architecting the thing that architects the thing, somehow, right? Because that's what is implied in what you're saying, I think. But for now, where can folks follow up with you? Dan: Well, I think maybe BASIC would be a good way to start. So if you go to understandinggroup.com/basic, you can download a PDF of the most recent version of the little mini booklet. I've created an instructional video for how to cut and fold said booklet so that it has its maximum booklet-iness for you when you make it. And from there I... yeah, I'm omni-available, except through Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram. Jorge: You're not going Meta. Dan: I would accept money from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to research the potential for harm to human beings, through what they intend to do in the so-called metaverse. But I'm not willing to use their products. Jorge: It sounds like that might yet be another reason for us to have a second conversation here. But I'll just allude to it because I'll include links to the stuff that you've been discussing on the show. And, I'll just reiterate that the booklet is beautiful, simple, useful. I have one printed out and keep it on my desk. So, I encourage folks to check it out. Thank you, Dan, for... Dan: The only thing better than that for me Jorge, is if I could be little and be there on your desk instead of the booklet, but that's... I'd love that. Jorge: I can see you on a little screen here. On a little window in my screen, so... it's not the same, but it's... it'll have to do for now. Well, thank you so much for being with us, Dan. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Dan: Let's talk again.

Abby Covert is an Information Architect, writer and community organiser. served as President of IA Institute, co-chair of IA Summit, and Executive Producer of IDEA. She is a founding faculty member of SVA's Products of Design program, Design Operations Summit and Advancing Research Conference. She invented World IA Day, bringing IA education to thousands in local communities annually. In our latest XXEquals podcast, we speak to Information Architect, Writer and Community Organiser, Abby Covert. Our conversation explores Abby's introduction into information architecture, how the craft and theory of diagrams led to the inspiration of her new book 'Stuck', and, Abby also shares the advice that she would give to her 25-year-old self.

Back in the dark ages of web design — back when the job title Webmaster was a thing — every team included someone who specialised in Information Architecture (IA). These days, that work is often considered to be part of UX, but that can mean that we're not doing the job well enough. Abby Covert joins us on the podcast to chat about why IA is important, how and when we should work with Information Architects, and how you can incorporate the principles and lessons from the discipline into your work.Featured Links: Follow Abby on LinkedIn and Twitter | Abby's Website | Abby's first book 'How To Make Sense Of Any Mess: Information Architecture For Everybody' | Pre-order Abby's forthcoming  book 'Stuck: The Purpose, Process And Craft Of Diagramming' | Max Cohn's 'Karl Marx Visits The Cheesecake Factory' | IHOP's omelette pancake batter secret feature at Huffington Post

Conversations about Information Architecture Dan Brown talks with Abby Covert about the Lens of Stability

No guest in this episode. Instead, I answer listener questions. If you have a question you'd like me to address on the show, please email me at live@theinformed.life or tweet to @informed_life. Listen to the show Download episode 67 Show notes The Informed Life episode 17: Rachel Price on Improvisation The Informed Life episode 65: Sarah Barrett on Architectural Scale A brief history of information architecture (pdf) by Peter Morville Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman David Macaulay Alexander Tsiaras Why Software is Eating the World by Marc Andreessen (WSJ paywall) Dave Gray The Information Architecture Institute How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango The Information Architecture Conference World IA Day Information Architects Facebook group UX Design Information Architecture LinkedIn group Mags Hanley's Information Architecture Masterclasses Jorge Arango's Information Architecture Essentials workshop Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript A question from Vinish Garg The first question comes from Vinish Garg. And I apologize if I have mispronounced that. Vinish is based in Chandigarh, and he writes, "the design agencies with around a hundred plus headcount have big and experienced teams in user research, interaction, design, and UX design. But many of them don't have an information architect. How do they see the need of a specialist IA and make space for this role?" And he adds a postscript, he says "those who have an IA, I spoke to many of them, but they are doing wireframes or card sorting without really understanding anything of taxonomy or findability. This is misplaced IA." All right. So, let me take the question first. Information architecture in general has withered as a job title. In the last 20 years, we've seen fewer and fewer people signing up to become information architects in organizations, not just in internal design teams, but also in agencies. In fact, I don't know many organizations that still have internal information architects. One notable exception — and I'm just calling it out because we've had two of their folks in the show — is Microsoft. Rachel Price and Sarah Barrett, both former guests of The Informed Life, are information architects within Microsoft. So, that's an example of an organization that still has the role internally. But I think that the more common scenario is that there is someone with another job title. It might be a UX designer or interaction designer or something like that, is tasked with structuring the system somehow. Sadly. I think that the even more common scenario is that no one does this explicitly at all, and they're just basically painting screens. I suspect that is the more common scenario. And it's a shame, because information architecture is very important, especially if you're dealing with a large complex system that presents a lot of information to end users. I want to comment a bit on the postscript. I think that it may be the case that there are people who, as Vinish points out, are practicing what they call information architecture, but they're doing it very superficially. And I encounter this most often in the confusion that people have between site maps and information architecture. I've seen folks draw up an outline in the form of a site map and basically call it a day. A site map is a useful artifact for communicating structural intent, but there's much more to information architecture than making a site map. And for many interactive systems, a site map might not even be the most appropriate artifact to communicate intent. Site maps tend to be very hierarchical, which is something that is more appropriate for some systems than others. I expect that, given the waning of information architecture, as I was saying earlier, much of what is practiced today under the rubric of information architecture is kind of cargo cult IA, where folks go through the motions of doing something like putting together a site map without understanding the reasoning behind the decisions they're making or why they're even making the artifact at all. And this is not something that's unique to IA. There are a lot of other areas of practice, other disciplines, where folks adopt the superficial trappings of the practice without really understanding the foundations. And in the case of information architecture, the foundations have to do with making meaningful distinctions. So, setting things aside in categories that are recognizable to the users of the system, that allow them to relate to the information in the system in meaningful ways, with the goal of ultimately making the system easier to use by making information easier to find and understand. Now, Vinish asked specifically about the context of agencies. I don't know much about the Indian market, but here in the U.S., the role of agencies in the design process has also waned as compared to 20 years ago. A lot of the work is happening internally in organizations, and that might be part of the reason why the role has waned as well. Because I think that people think about information architecture — if they think about it at all — when there's a major system change, when there's a redesign or a new product is being built and not so much during the day-to-day operations of the system. Again, there are exceptions. I called out Rachel and Sarah, who are part of a team that has ongoing responsibilities, because it's such a large system where so much content is produced. But in many cases, folks only need to do this sort of thing when they're making a major change, when they're implementing a new system or redesigning a system, as I said before. Which would lead me to expect that it is a role that would be more appropriate for design agencies, if, for no other reason, because design agencies do deal with more projects at the beginning their life, as opposed to the operational phase of the project. But alas, as Vinish points out, the role has also been waning in agencies as well. I don't know how they see the need for IA specialists. I don't know that they'd see the need for IA specialists. I believe that more likely they are experiencing the pain of not having an information architect in the team. Peter Morville has written of the "pain with no name" in reference to information architecture, this idea that people in the team might know that there's a problem, but they don't know how to name it. And they don't know that I'm more careful distinction making our structuring of the information in the environment might be part of the solution. And the net result is that frankly, information architecture isn't as popular as it used to be. And that may be a failing on the part of us who practice IA. We simply haven't been very good at explaining why it's important, why it's needed and why teams should consider having folks look after this stuff. That said, I know that there are people doing it out there. They just don't have the job title information architect — or at least that's what I would like to be the case. A question from Jose Gutierrez The next question comes from Jose Gutierrez; I think Jose is writing from Costa Rica. He writes, "I'm curious about what subjects does IA impact, but people normally don't associate with." These days, most people who think about information architecture — at least the few that do — think of it in relation to user experience design or digital design. But when I first learned about information architecture, I did so through Richard's Saul Wurman's 1996 book Information Architects. The impression that I got from that book was that IA was much, much broader. The very cover of the book has three definitions of what information architects are, and the first one says, "the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear." There's nothing in there about digital anything. We encounter patterns inherent in data and complexity in many different parts of reality, not just in digital systems. In fact, while the book touches on digital design, it's remit as much broader. It profiles folks like author David Macaulay, who has produced a series of wonderful books that explain how things work, or Alexander Tsiaras who works in medical imaging. And there's also cartography and illustration and yep, also some digital design, like structuring websites and that sort of thing, which is what we today, mostly associate with information architecture. And this isn't surprising because as software has eaten more of the world — to use Marc Andreessen's memorable phrase — more and more of our information is digital, and we experience more of the information that we deal with in digital environments. But structuring information to ease findability and understandability is much older than computers. I remember seeing a presentation many years ago by Dave Gray on the history of the book as an artifact, which really opened my eyes to this. Before there were books, we would write down information in things like scrolls. And what we know of as books — the form of a book, what is called a codex — was an innovation. It allowed for greater portability and random access to the information in the book, because you didn't have to unroll the whole thing to get to a particular section. Those were all innovations, right? But the very first codexes didn't have things like page numbers or tables of contents or indices or any of those things, and those were all innovations that allowed readers to find information more easily in books. I think that those are examples of information architecture, and they are many centuries old. So, any time that you're trying to make things easier to find and understand — whether it be in a book or a built environment or a medical image, or an app — Information architecture can help. As I said, in response to Vinish's question, I consider the essence of information architecture to be about making more meaningful distinctions. And this is something that applies to all sorts of aspects of reality. In fact, part of the intent for launching this podcast was precisely because I think that information architecture manifests in so many different fields. And I'm very interested in hearing from folks about how structuring, categorizing, organizing information more mindfully helps them get things done. A question from Elijah Claude Finally, here's a question from Elijah Claude. And again, I hope that I am pronouncing your name properly. I believe that Elijah is writing from Atlanta. He writes, " what are some of the best ways to learn good information architecture outside of school and work. In other words, how do you do personal projects where you can practice real information architecture? Great resources for IA books, podcasts, videos, et cetera." This question has two parts. So, there's a part that has to do with learning IA. And there's another part that has to do with practicing IA in our everyday lives. I must note upfront that I personally don't like to draw hard lines between life, work, school and all these things. I think that you can practice information architecture at any time. Information architecture is as much a mindset as it is a practice. And it's a mindset that has to do with looking beneath the surface of things to the way that things are organized and structured, and the ways in which we create shared meaning in how we organize and structure things in our world. That sounds a little abstract, so I'll give you an example. When we moved into the house that we're currently living in, my wife and I had a conversation about where we were going to store the various objects in our kitchen. So, we had boxes with things like plates and cutlery and food items, spices, and such. There are many categories of food items. There are dry foods, and there are big bulky foods that take up a lot of space, things like sacks of flour, rice and stuff like that. And here we are in this new house with a different layout than the one that we're used to, and many places in which to put things. And we had to coordinate where we were going to store things. Because if not, we would make it very difficult for each other to find things when we need them. And that's something that happened somewhat organically. We had an informal conversation saying, "Hey, maybe the cutlery can go in this drawer. And maybe this cabinet close to the stove would be perfect for things like spices and so on." Some things were obvious where they should go, others less so — and the arrangement has evolved over time. Over the time that we've been living here, we've occasionally moved things and found better ways to organize our kitchen. So, it's an ongoing thing and we talk about it. I think that it would be different if either one of us was organizing the kitchen for ourselves as individuals. When you must consider that at least one other person is going to be sharing the place with you, then you must take into consideration how they are going to be able to navigate the environment to find the stuff that they need. And I consider that to be an information architecture challenge. I'll give you another example. And funny enough, this one also has to do with our kitchen. Recently, we discovered that we have a minor problem. This is something that has emerged in the pandemic. It used to be that before the pandemic, I would often work outside of the house. And of course, with the arrival of the pandemic, more of us have been working from home. And as I've started working from home — and I tend to wake up very early — I would find that some days I would feed Bumpkin, our dog. I would feed bumpkin. And then, later in the morning, my wife, who normally feeds Bumpkin, would come along and would feed him not knowing that that I had already fed him. Bumpkin can be very insistent if he's hungry. So, if he comes knocking on my home office door, I will feed him because that's what gets him to stop knocking. And my wife and I have been prototyping a system to let each other know if Bumpkin has eaten or not. I wrote two sticky notes, one that said, "Bumpkin has eaten breakfast" and the other one said, "Bumpkin has eaten dinner." And we put it up on the cabinet where we keep his food. And the idea was that every time that she or I fed him a meal, we would place the appropriate sticky on the outside of the cabinet door. And that kind of worked for a while. But the glue the sticky started wearing out after switching them around so many times. So, we tried something else. We tried another sticky, this one on the refrigerator door with a checkbox. And one checkbox says, "Bumpkin has eaten breakfast" and the other checkbox says, "Bumpkin has eaten dinner." And we have a little magnet that we move between them. And what we discovered with that new prototype is that the sticky is much more resilient, because we're not moving it around, but it's in the wrong part of the environment because we're normally not looking in the refrigerator when we're feeding Bumpkin. So, we often forget to move the magnet. And I'm now thinking about the third rev of this thing, which would combine the two. And this will probably involve putting some kind of magnetic board on the door where we keep the dog food. And I consider all of these to be information architecture problems. On the one hand, clarifying the distinction between what was the last meal that Bumpkin had eaten, that's information architecture. And another is the location of this marker in the environment. Like I said, we were having a lot more traction when we had the sticky on the door that had the dog food in it than when we put it on the refrigerator door. And the only reason why we did it, there was a completely technical reason, which is that the fridge is already magnetized. So, these are examples of information architecture or architectural thinking at play in real-world problems — admittedly a very simple one. But it's not unusual. It's not unusual for us to apply that kind of mindset to organizing the real world. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we structure our environments so that we can get things done. And it doesn't just happen in information environments, it happens in physical environments as well. So, that's with regards to the practice question. The learning question is a bit tougher, because as I have said in the previous questions in this episode, interest in information architecture has waned over the last 20 years. So, resources are less plentiful than they used to be. The Information Architecture Institute, which was the preeminent place that I would point people to who wanted to learn about IA has seized operations. It feels to me like the discipline is in something of a state of transition. I am sure that there is a robust future for information architecture, but it's hard for me right now to point to any one definitive resource and say, this is what you should check out. There are books. That is the first thing that I recommend that folks check out. And Elijah, given the fact that you asked about non-work or school related contexts, the number one book that I would recommend for you, if you haven't seen it already, is Abby Covert's How to Make Sense of Any Mess, which is a primer on information architecture. It's a beautiful book in that it really articulates the core issues that transcend digital in a very useful way. Another book — and this one is, alas, a bit self-serving — is the fourth edition of the polar bear book, Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond. And I say it's self-serving because I had the great privilege of having been invited to coauthor the fourth edition alongside the original authors, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. And that book is more specific to digital information environments, but I still think that it's one of the best places to learn about IA. There are also conferences. The two most prominent are the Information Architecture Conference and World IA Day. Both of those happen in the spring. The IA Conference is global. It usually happens in one city and folks fly from all over the world — or at least they did in the before times. The last two years, it's been virtual because of COVID. But it's more global, and it's a central gathering for IAS and the IA-curious. If you are interested in learning more about IA, I would recommend that you participate in the IA Conference. World IA Day is more of a localized initiative. It's a single day event and many cities participate around the world. It's driven by the communities in those cities. So again, super local. And it's a great way to meet people who are interested in information architecture in your own community. So, those are two events that I recommend: the IA Conference and World IA Day. There's also social media. There is at least one group on Facebook that is dedicated to information architecture. I know that there are also groups in LinkedIn. I haven't participated much in either of those, but I know that they exist. If that's what you prefer, you have those options. And then there are also courses. I know that Mags Hanley has a course on information architecture and by the way, a little bit of a spoiler: Mags is an upcoming guest of the show. We don't get in depth into her course, we talk about other subjects, but I know that Mags has a course that she does online and that may be worthwhile checking out. And then I have a workshop that I've done several times called Information Architecture Essentials, which is designed to introduce folks to the discipline. And I'm in the process of turning that into an online course as well. And by the way, if you are interested in that, I would love to hear from you, because I'm in the process of crafting that now. I'm also interested. If you have suggestions for folks like Elijah who want to find out more about information architecture. I would love to learn about other resources I might've missed, so please do get in touch. Closing So, there you have it, the first listener question episode of the show. I have other questions that folks sent in, but we didn't get a chance to get to them. So, I might do this again. Please do reach out if you enjoyed this episode, if you think I should do another one, and most especially, if you have a question yourself that you would like me to answer on the show. You can find contact information on the show's website at theinformed.life. That's also where you can find show notes and a transcript for this episode. For now, I want to thank Vinish, Jose, and Elijah for their questions. And thank you for listening. As a reminder, please rate or review the show in the Apple Podcasts app or in the Apple podcast directory. This helps other folks find it. Thanks!

The Iowa Idea: Abby Covert “Maybe we don't know.” In this episode of The Iowa Idea Podcast, I'm joined by Abby Covert. Abby is an information architect, writer, community organizer, and all-around awesome human. Abby served as President of IA Institute, co-chair of IA Summit, and Executive Producer of IDEA. She is a founding faculty […]

Join IA genius and author Abby Covert to learn more about Information Architecture. This one had a few visuals so you might want to watch it on YouTube. https://youtu.be/vy16Hnu6BG0

Abby Covert joins the show to talk about information architecture, usability research, and adding humanity into the design process. This episode is sponsored by Squiz.

A conversation with information architects Abby Covert and Andrew Hinton about dealing with digital change and how to make future changes better. Originally Recorded at UXLx 2015, we touched on numerous subjects and challenges, including: The pace of digital change, the challenges of updating our mental models, cleaning up the underlying mess or the mess will return,... The post #254 Sorting out this mess with Abby Covert & Andrew Hinton (UXP Classic) appeared first on UX Podcast.

My guest today is my friend Lou Rosenfeld. Besides publishing books — including my own Living in Information — Lou and his team at Rosenfeld Media organize and manage industry conferences. In this episode, we talk about how they transitioned the recent Advancing Research conference from an in-person to a fully virtual event. Listen to the full conversation   Show notes Louis Rosenfeld Rosenfeld Media @louisrosenfeld on Twitter The Informed Life Episode 1: Louis Rosenfeld on Managing Advancing Research 2020 Conference Some lessons learned from producing a virtual conference by Louis Rosenfeld Zoom Video Webinars Vimeo Cheryl Platz Abby Covert Steve Portigal Natalie Hanson Mailchimp Mural Slack The Brady Bunch title screen Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango Hopin IxDA Berlin The User's Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love by Donna Lichaw Meld Studios Enterprise Experience Conference 2020 DesignOps Summit Doctor's Note (Andy Polaine's newsletter) Power of Ten (Andy Polaine's podcast) Informa(c)tion (Jorge Arango's newsletter) Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: Lou, welcome to the show. Lou: Thanks, Jorge. Glad to be here – again. Jorge: Yeah. Usually I start episodes by asking guests to introduce themselves, but you not only have the distinction of having been our first-ever guest on the show, you now have the double distinction of being the first-ever repeat guest on the show. Lou: Well, Jorge, I'm glad to be a Guinea pig in any of your experiments, so thank you. The remote Advancing Research Conference Jorge: The reason that I thought it would be interesting for us to have another conversation now is that the coronavirus pandemic has driven all sorts of changes in our society, in our economies, and in the way that we work. And among those changes, we are meeting differently, and we are doing things like conferences differently. And you and your team organize conferences and had the experience recently of having to very quickly restructure an event that was scheduled to be live and in-person. And you had to switch it to have it be all online. And I've heard nothing but good things about that experience, and I was hoping that you would tell us how you did it. Lou: Aw, well, thanks. I'm glad you're hearing good things. I mean, the general response among attendees and speakers and sponsors, actually, seem to have been very positive and I'm really grateful for that. I think it's really important that when you say how you did it, that's a… going to be a collective you, not an individual you, because it was really like a Herculean effort. I mean, I call it a moonshot, where we had like a couple of weeks that involved our speakers, our curators, our internal team, a lot of vendors. It was massive. The conference was Advancing Research, and actually it's the first time we've done it. We were going to do it in New York City, and it was programmed, and it was actually sold out five weeks in advance. And then suddenly everything hit the fan or started to, and at first we were going to create a hybrid event of in-person and virtual because New York City was still open for business, and you know, it's still seemed like a lot of people wanted to come in person, and the venue was assuming we were coming, they weren't going to refund our money, or even a part of it – a lot of moving parts. And then ultimately, we went into a new mode where you could not have people in-person at any scale, and, at least some force majeure clauses kicked in and, you know, we still financially took a big bath, but we had a great program. We felt very strongly that people wanted us to continue with it. The speakers had prepared at that point for probably about four months. Because we do extensive program design and then months of speaker preparation once the program is in place, and we didn't feel it was right to cancel for them. Nor did we feel like it was right to cancel for attendees if we could do a virtual event. Changes to the conference So, what did we do? We decided we had to stick to the original two-day schedule for the main program, just single track. And two days was not ideal in terms of keeping people engaged. You know, you're basically running nine hours a day. But we felt like we kind of had to stay true to that on behalf of the attendees. We didn't think it was going to be easy for them to adjust their schedules at that late point now, two, three weeks before the event. So, we kept that together. We'd have also inconvenienced many speakers to change it. And so, I wrote a little article in Medium if people are interested. They can probably just find me by searching my Twitter ID, @louisrosenfeld. I wrote some of the ideas up, but I will tell you a few highlights. One is that it's hugely important to prep speakers for the remote experience. Our speakers were already prepped from a content perspective. They were in great shape, had fantastic talks. But we did two rounds of tech checks to speakers, one the day of, but more importantly, one during the week prior. And you will see, if you're doing a virtual event of any type, that speakers, if they're new to this, they don't know where to stand or sit. You may want to do one or the other. Their faces aren't close enough to the camera in many cases. Their technology is problematic. And so we actually, gave them a credit to order their own equipment. Go get a better mic, that type of thing. At that point, it wasn't always possible for Amazon to turn it around very quickly, but we did our best. Things like lighting, things like what they wore, and also getting them comfortable with the technology. In our case, we used Zoom Webinar. But, not so simple, we actually then streamed a livecast version from Zoom to Vimeo, and then we embedded… it's a little Rube Goldberg, but we embedded the Vimeo stream onto a password protected webpage on our website, conference website. So, we made the content and the livestream exclusive to paid attendees. Not surprising. Having the speakers in Zoom Webinar was comfortable for them. They were mostly comfortable with presenting in Zoom. But when we did the those tech checks, we made sure they were comfortable because I can tell you firsthand that, when I presented remotely, especially early on when Zoom was new for me, I didn't always know where to find that “share screen” button when the, you know, I had that deer-in-the-headlights moment. You may be very experienced in Zoom but there still may be things that you don't have much experience with as a presenter in Zoom. So, we got them comfortable with that. It was nice in Zoom, to not have the attendees there. Attendees are all experiencing things through the livecast. And that made it easier to manage the Zoom space as a space for speakers and curators and the MC. We also found that the signal actually worked pretty well for people consuming the livecasts. There were surprisingly few technical problems. They were almost exclusively due to poor local bandwidth, which is often correctable by plugging into a router directly or getting closer to the router or turning off background apps that suck bandwidth up and just using the right browser. We found that Chrome didn't work well, it didn't play well with Vimeo, surprisingly. Establishing contingencies So, we also put in place like a huge number of contingencies. Like, I got to tell you, the thing that kept me up at night the most was what if… what if Zoom goes down, what if Vimeo goes down? What if our website goes down? What if the speaker's local connection goes down? And we came up with contingency upon contingency. And we only had one problem technically, with one speaker having to go to the contingency because they're local connectivity was suffering. So, I can get into some of those if you like. I will just say this. I would not rely on a recording as a backup. I don't think that's necessary; I don't think it's very good for the speakers, I don't think it's very good for the attendees. I think just having something as simple as the speaker dialing in to Zoom on their phone, or at least using a phone connection with the Zoom client on their phone. Muting that connection, having it ready to go to unmute should their computer crap out and having us ready to run the slides for them was a much better backup plan than having a recording ready to go. So, there's just like a whole bunch of these little persnickety things that we had to learn in two weeks' time. About the team We also had a fantastic MC, Cheryl Platz, who we already had lined up to be our MC. And we got so lucky because she was someone who was very comfortable with being an MC remotely. And she did it like making sure speaker number one got out of the way while she chatted up speaker number two and made sure speaker number two had their screen shared before she went away. So, she was just a fantastic, fantastic MC. Our curators, Abby Covert, as you mentioned, and Steve Portigal, and Natalie Hanson, all did a wonderful job. Our team did a wonderful job operating the whole thing. And it basically allowed the program to really stand up for itself, and the technology didn't get in the way. The sponsor experience I do want to mention one more thing though. We're a company that puts conferences on that really try to appeal to our sponsors. So, I will say, we never let our sponsors call the shots in our program. We've never done pay-for-play. The integrity of our programming efforts is tantamount, critical for us. That said, we want to have sponsors participate. And when we do an in-person conference, we have an expo and sponsors get involved in other ways. In this case, we went to our sponsors two weeks before the show and said, listen, we'll work with you, and we're going to develop a platform for a secondary program of sponsor-led events that would happen before and after the conference each day and during breaks. And we will basically create a webpage and essentially a platform and some support for sponsors. You are the sponsors, here are some ideas. This is your chance to step up, show your support for the community, your thought leadership, highlight your really great ideas, your great content. And Jorge, they really did step up to the plate. In fact, in a way, we had too many sponsor-led activities. We had something like 43 sponsor-led activities over two days. And they were fantastic. Like we've had people saying, I want to get a recording of that great session that MailChimp did or that Mural did, or whatever, and I don't know if you see that happen very much in an in person event that that people are dying for the sponsor's content. And again, it's because you're doing it virtually, the sponsors are pushed in effect to make sure what they're doing is engaging and not just a pitch or no one's going to come. And we opened the sponsor events to our broader community. We have, each of our conferences has an associated community of thousands of people that can participate. So, the sponsors ended up getting better turnout and better engagement than normal because they did, you know, we opened it up, but they also did a great job with their content. Flattening of hierarchies And a lot of our attendees found that the interaction in Slack – this is where the discussion went on – was superior than the interaction they might have in person. The hierarchy was flattened in many cases, introverts were able to ask questions, even of speakers, and interact with each other… Ultimately, in many respects it was a better experience than people might ordinarily get. And the time zones are an issue, but we always make our recordings as well as our sketchnotes and our trip notes and other materials available to attendees after the event, and that was part of the exclusive deal. They got all that content. So, if they missed something, or slept in or didn't want to stay up late, they could go back to it. So, it was a fantastic experience. But now that we have that under our belt and we have two more conferences we're doing this year and some partially clean slate with one and a fully clean slate with the other, we're really excited to try some new ideas out, as well as folding in the experience we had with Advanced Research. Jorge: I want to touch on something that you said there towards the tail end. I'm actually going to mix two things that you said. So, one was about the flattening of hierarchies, because one of the things that I've observed in participating in remote meetings of all sorts, I have noticed that flattening of hierarchy, where all of a sudden it's like there's no place in the physical room where the person is standing in, and this is the speaker, and you are the audience and sitting over here. All of a sudden, everyone is kind of on the same plane literally, everyone's got a little thumbnail, and you are one of many little thumbnails. And I know that when it's a webinar on something like Zoom, you don't see the “Brady Bunch screen, ” but it's almost like everyone's on the same playing field, more so than they are in a physical space. So that's one thing that I wanted to follow up on, particularly in the context of the sponsor experience, because I was super intrigued when you said that sponsors got more… I don't think I'm going to do service to what you said, but the way that I interpreted it is they got more traction on their presentation somehow from folks. And I'm wondering if the fact that in a physical conference, you have space set aside for sponsors – they have their tables, and that's where the sponsors live – and then you have the presentations, which usually happen in some kind of auditorium-like space. But now, everyone's using the same technologies to communicate, and there is this blurring, this potential… I mean, you made the disclaimer. It's like we've always been, you know, very serious about not letting sponsors drive the program. And it strikes me that there's an opportunity here for potentially blurring the lines between those that doesn't exist in the real world just by the very nature of the places where we're meeting, no? Lou: Well, yeah. I think that's a really good point, and it makes me think of sponsored search results versus organic ones and how you differentiate them. We, as you might expect that we would always err toward being clear:** here are sponsor-led activities. They're optional. They're part of the program in a sense, but they're not. These are not the speakers we've spent the last four or five months prepping, but this has a role and this helps make things feasible for us as a business and you know, one of the really interesting things about this, though it comes back to actually you, Jorge, and the book you wrote for us Living In Information, because I thought a lot about the metaphor of designing place, especially as we put together these sponsor places. Zoom Lounges Zoom already has, like, we did the sponsor events in Zoom, but with Slack channels – and we're going to take a slightly different approach in the future – but, regardless, we got kind of mucked up by Zoom's sort of uneven use of the place metaphor. I mean, you have Zoom rooms and you have Zoom, I don't know, events, and Zoom spaces… Honestly, they're not really clear, and I find that a lot of people, myself included, abuse the terminology that Zoom would like us to use because it doesn't really make sense. I want to call these things Zoom Rooms, but that's a product, that's a specific product. So, we ended up calling the sponsor Zoom areas, “Zoom Lounges,” which are places, they're places that are part of the bigger place, namely the entire conference – I'll come back to that term in a minute – but they had a different flavor. A lounge is not a place that you will necessarily have to… it's a place that you can relax in a way you can still learn and still interact. Some of the sponsor activities were completely interactive, some were, happy hours, and a trivia contest but they were not classrooms and they were not auditoriums. I was actually, you know, along these lines, looking at the Hopin platform last week, because I was a sponsor at IXDA Berlin, and they used the Hopin platform as Zoom alternative. And that's been designed around the place metaphor for events much more concretely, and they have an expo area that we were in, and they have a number of other uses that really kind of run ahead with the place metaphor and there's a bunch of problems with it – we can get into that if you like – but I really thought a lot about your ideas when we were putting this together and it's the second time one of our books has really resonated well for us in conference design. The other is Donna Lichaw's A User's Journey and trying to have a narrative arc to how the events unfold over time. Navigating uncertainty Jorge: Another thread that I wanted to pull on in what you said has to do with how you and the amazing team that helped you put this conference on, how you navigated this period of uncertainty. I'm placing myself back to that time, which seems like a long time ago, even though it wasn't that long ago. Lou: Another world, Jorge. Jorge: Yeah. Well, it was the moment when we were starting to step through this weird portal that we've stepped through or are stepping through still. Right? And it was a moment where we didn't know…. there was a lot of uncertainty. Like we didn't know if people are going to be able to fly. We didn't know if people in this city over here are going to be dealing with it differently than those of us over here, right? I have family abroad. And I talk with them every week and I can compare notes with how they're dealing with the situation and how we're dealing with the situation. And I could tell that everyone was coming to the same conclusions, but not everyone was coming to it at the same times. And when you're trying to coordinate an event that is going to rely on people traveling, I would expect that it would have been tremendously stressful. And I'm wondering if there are any tools, processes, approaches that helped you and your team come to the decision eventually to transition to a fully online conference, even though I don't think it was a given perhaps at the time when you were starting those conversations no? So, can you think back to what it was like making that decision? Lou: About that pivot? Oh, I don't know that there was any one thing that guided us. I think that was part of the difficulty, was this sensation of the sand shifting under your feet every 15 minutes. So to give you an example of that, while we were still in the assumption that we were going to run a hybrid event, last month, and not go fully virtual, there were about three or four days in a row where I drafted a communication to our attendees who had already registered, explaining to them what was going to happen and how it was going to work. Before I could send it, that would change, and then it changed again. And then finally, all right, we're going to go full virtual. We have no choice now. Change again, and it was exhausting. It was just, oh my God, we don't even, we can't keep up with these changes. So, that was the hard part, psychologically. I think once we knew we could only do a virtual event, we were committed to doing it for the reasons I mentioned earlier that, you know, attendees had already booked it, although not all of them want to go forward with the virtual event. I think, 90 or 85% still wanted to do it. And the speakers have already done all their work. It didn't feel like it was fair to them, and we felt like it was just going to be a fantastic event programmatically, which it was, to be honest. So, at that point it was, okay, we don't really have to think, we have to do. It's not an emotional thing anymore. We have a point on the calendar we have to be ready for, and let's just work weekends and nights and we'll get it done. And we did. I'd say, if it was a day earlier, it would have been a lot harder. It just seemed like maybe that's the psychology of how you use your time, and we just managed to get it in, in the nick of time. I don't know. Maybe it's just the way these things work, no matter how much time you have. I was talking with Steve Baty and I probably am mispronouncing her first name, Janna DeVylder at Meld, in Sydney, and they were putting on one of their events, not UX Australia, but a different one, and I think they had one or two days and they pulled it off. Well, here's one of the stressors. So, I also know people who were doing events in May. I would rather not have had one or two days to pull it off because you won't learn as much. You're just going to throw it in Zoom and hope for the best. And they did a great job, but there was very little they could do in terms of trying new things and thinking it through. Or you do it you know, where there's… we're talking about back in March, if you have a May horizon, by time May rolls around, the expectations are going to be much higher and the economics remain uncertain. So, I'm really glad our event wasn't in May or April for that matter. We had just enough time pull it off and still keep our attendees. Jorge: So, what I'm hearing there is that folks may have been more forgiving because they knew how short of a timeframe you had to pull things together. Lou: Yes Tweaks for future events Jorge: So, with that in mind, do you have thoughts on what aspects of the experience you're going to tweak for the next events? Because those are happening further in the future, right? Lou: Right. So, the next one we have is Enterprise Experience used to be known as Enterprise UX. This'll be the sixth one, and it's taking place August 31st through September 3rd. It was originally going to be in San Francisco, and now it is virtual of course. And the program has already been created, it was originally designed, like most of our main programs, two-day, single track. We're now going to have it as a four-day, shorter days, each day, it's like a mini conference, each day has a very strong theme. And we'll allow people to go to one, two, three, or four days. And you know, so there's a lot of sort of how you take something that was designed to flow over two days and make it flow over four days. And that's where things like the narrative arc are really important to consider. How do you keep people engaged? Not just in the middle, but in the beginning and the end, and hopefully they register for all four days. The other conference we have is Design Ops Summit. It'll be the third one of those… no, the fourth one of those. And that's going to be in October. Again, it'll be virtualized. It was originally going to be here in New York. And we're just starting that from scratch. So, we get all three scenarios, something that we can't really change, something that's been programmed, but we can move the sessions around, and then something that has a complete clean slate. The thing that we're going to really work on with both of them, there's a few little things, like having attendee troubleshooting tech check sessions before the conference starts a couple of different times to make sure they can get in so they're not late for the conference because they're having a problem getting in. More importantly though, is working in a different mode with sponsors to emphasize quality over quantity in their engagement. So not 43 sessions, but maybe 15 really high-quality sessions. And not that there was anything low quality, but at a certain point there's too much. So, you want to really focus on, you know home runs for every session that sponsors do. We also are going to be experimenting with a mode for, again, taking your concept of designing digital places, and create a place or a series of rooms for attendees to attend the conference the whole time together, and to do so based on a number of big ideas. So, it could be affinity groups. We'll have to assemble them in advance. You're all from the same industry, or you're working on the same type of problem, and we'll put you together with people like you and with a facilitator. Or, it's your team from your organization who wants to attend together, or you just want to be matched with random people. Either way, they will all be facilitated, you'll get together before the conference kicks off, you'll have an opportunity to meet the other people in your room and you will, together with your facilitators, help figure out what are the things you want to learn over the coming days. And you may check in during each conference and at the very end of the conference, you'll get back together with your crew in your room. And it could be you be figuring out what you learned, figure out what you might not have learned, and see if there's anything you want to do together after the conference. So, we're building an infrastructure to help people do that. It's not too complex, but it's not simple. The easy part is the technology. The hard part will be figuring out who to connect with whom and to make sure they're well facilitated. But that's like, so exciting, like we can then take that model and take it to the in-person events. In fact, you know, one of the things we'll do in the future, I don't think we're ever not going to have a conference that's virtual. I do think we're going to have hybrids, and I'm really also excited by the models we're coming up with to make a hybrid in-person and virtual event work even if we're still in the age of social distancing come 2021. Closing Jorge: That sounds super exciting Lou. Where can folks go to find out more about the upcoming events? Lou: Oh, just go to RosenfeldMedia.com. And, if they really are interested in our three events and want to either first to know when tickets go on sale, especially the cheap tickets or apply for scholarships or even pitch a talk, the way we communicate those is through the corresponding communities we've created for each of our conferences. For those reasons alone, we think you'll want to join whether you're interested in enterprise experience, advancing research, or design operations. But each of those communities, besides having those kinds of connections to the conferences, each has a monthly video conference call where we have a guest presenter or facilitator. And we get some amazing people to lead discussions because we're trying to keep the conversation going between the annual events, the other 360-odd days a year. And so, we have these fantastic, like we had a session with Kamdyn Moore and Kristin Skinner and Alison Rand for Design Ops community. I think it was about two, three weeks ago… we had 240 people participate. That's fantastic. Laura Klein, we had I think 110 people for the Enterprise Experience conversation we had a week or so ago. We do one a month for each community and it's all free. Go to RosenfeldMedia.com, check out communities. You'll see them and, Hey! We love this model; it makes really great sense at this stage of pandemic. And so, we're ramping up to do more. Jorge: Well, fantastic. Lou. I'm going to include links to those in the show notes. Thank you so much for being with us today. Lou: Hey, it's my pleasure. And I'm so happy not only that you bothered to have me on not once, but twice, but that you're doing this. It's one of the… you and Andy Polaine are doing two of the most interesting newsletters and also podcasts. And I just find what you guys are up to so interesting, and it's hard work. I know you put a lot into both the newsletter and the podcast, and I just want to thank you for doing it. Even if you didn't have me on it, I would be grateful. It's just wonderful information you're putting together and making available to the world, and I hope everyone is smart enough after I pitched it to at least sign up for your newsletter if they haven't already. And obviously they're already listening to the podcast, so they know that's great. Thanks again, Jorge, glad to be part of it. Jorge: Thank you Lou, I appreciate that.

My guest today is my friend Abby Covert, also known as Abby the IA. Abby is a Senior Information Architect at Etsy. She wrote the book How to Make Sense of Any Mess, a wonderful primer on information architecture, and co-founded World IA Day. She's also taught graduate design students and curated global conferences about design. She's done many of these things remotely over the last decade, which makes her a great guide for how to collaborate in our new reality. Listen to the full conversation   Show notes Abby the IA (Abby Covert's website) Etsy How To Make Sense of Any Mess, by Abby Covert World Information Architecture Day Fax machines Melbourne, Florida Rosenfeld Media Advancing Research Conference School of Visual Arts Photo of Abby's home setup DesignOps Summit The Museum of the Moving Image Louis Rosenfeld Zoom Zoom Webinar Slack Cheryl Platz Mural Steinberg UR12 Herman Miller chairs Opening sequence of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: Abby, welcome to the show. Abby: Thank you so much for having me. Jorge: For folks who might not know you, would you please introduce yourself. Abby: Sure. So, my name is Abby Covert. I am the senior staff information architect at Etsy. I also am the author of a book came out about five years ago called How To Make Sense Of Any Mess, which is a beginner's guide to information architecture. You might also have, heard of my work in terms of World Information Architecture Day. It's an event that I hold very close to my heart and it takes place in 60 plus locations every year in February, celebrating information architecture and bringing information architecture thinking to new communities and people who are interested in that. Jorge: For folks who might not have seen your book, it is a really wonderful guide to this domain. And I'm wondering if you could recap for the listeners of the show, how you introduce information architecture. Abby: Sure. Yeah. So, information architecture, I think at its core is the way that we arrange the pieces of something to make sense as a whole. And one of the things I think is really interesting about that framing is that it basically means that it applies to everything. It means that you are probably practicing information architecture today in your own daily life. It means that many people who do not know the term information architecture are making information architecture decisions all day long for other people. And I think like through that framing, it really brings it to the right level of focus that I would like to see more people have in terms of understanding what the impact is of those choices on other people, and on our ability to get anything done. Jorge: One of the things I like about the book is that it frames it as a solution to making sense of messes, like it says in the cover. And we are recording this at a time when things feel a little messy, right? Abby: Just a little bit! Jorge: We're in the process of kind of… settling into “no new normal,” is the way that I've been describing it. And one of the reasons that I thought now would be a good time for us to talk on the show, is that many of us are now being asked to work remotely. And before I say anything else, I'll say that I consider the ability to work remotely as a privilege in these times, in that we can continue adding value in our homes from our computers. There are many, many people in our society who are not able to do that because they either work in a service industry that requires in-person presence, like folks in restaurants and stuff like that. So, I'll just to get it right out of the way, I consider what we're doing right now something that is really privileged. And you are also one of the people I know who has been doing it the longest — collaborating remotely — and I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about your experience doing that. Abby: Sure. Yeah. I mean, we could go back about 10 years when I decided that I was no longer going to a physical office anymore, or we could go back even further and talk about that I was actually homeschooled through all of my high school education. And by homeschooled, I mean I was in school at home. My parents both worked full time, so I wasn't taught by my parents. I was actually in a self-directed education program from ninth grade through my graduation. So, the basis of kind of my remote working experience started with a fax machine, which is sort of bizarre to dwell on at this point. But yeah, back then, I had textbooks that were mailed to me on subjects that you would see in a regular high school curriculum… chemistry, history, you know, sociology, all those things. But my assignments were delivered to me via fax. I would deliver them back to my instructors via fax. I remember every time the fax machine used to ring back then, I was excited because I would be getting my grades or getting some sort of feedback. So yeah my attachment to remote life I guess started really early and then fast forward to just 10 years back, I was a few years into my agency career, I had decided that I was not really liking the current location that I was in — I was in Chicago at the time — I wanted to move to New York, and I was about to go independent and it just made sense that I wouldn't get an office. I never really thought that it would lead me to the place I'm in now where three years ago I took on a full-time remote employee position with a company that is not entirely remote. So, Etsy has about 20% of us that are remote, and the majority of those folks are working out of their home offices, although some of them have co-working facilities and stuff like that. But yeah, I've really grown very attached to remoting. And I would say that the interesting reflection that I have in the current moment is that, somehow, I still show up at my desk in my home every day, and it's exactly the same as before all of this started, but it feels really, really different. And I think that that's really interesting that like my location has not changed, but somehow, I feel just as quarantined as all the rest of you. And I don't actually leave my house all that often, but it's more than your location, I guess, is the thing that I'm taking away from it at this point. Jorge: In what way has the feeling changed? Abby: Well, there's obviously the sneaking suspicion that dread is creeping in. There's that constant kind of flow. There's also just like, I think my empathy for my coworkers and my friends who are trying to go remote for the very first time under duress. You know, I'm kind of a… I've become sort of like everybody's remote mom. I'm telling people to get ergonomic chairs, I'm shaming them on video calls where I can see their spouse in the background and being like, look, you need to spend $500 on a chair. I'm telling you this is important for like, five years from now, you're going to thank me! When you don't have to pay a trainer to fix your back! So, there's this, all these little things that like, I guess emotionally watching the world go remote has been really a lot for me. And so even though I'm showing up and I'm in the same place all day, I'm doing very different things. I feel like I'm kind of everybody's emotional support friend right now about what it's like to be remote. But yeah, it's a lot. Jorge: Well, if I might read into it, it sounds to me like one of the changes that the current situation has triggered is that you're perhaps having to be a little more meta about it, like thinking more explicitly? Abby: Yeah. I mean, the only people that I ever had to give advice on going remote were people who were going remote because they were choosing to. So, there was a lot of like built-in excitement about this possibility, and in most cases when people have reached out to me for advice on that is because something really exciting is happening for them. You know, their spouse needs to move to another country, and they're able to keep their job, but they got to figure out this thing called remote work, or, you know, they've decided to start their own company, but they've always worked in an office job. So now we have to talk about what it's like to be self-directed in a remote environment. Like those are all happy moments. This is not a happy moment. Like, this is not a moment that anybody chose. This is not a moment that many people were excited about going remote for, so it's more like, I guess, yeah, remote under duress is not the greatest first experience. I would also just say like, I don't want to be like the poster child for remote work, but like this is not normal. This is not what remote feels like. Please do not take the next couple of months of experience that you have working from your homes with bad chairs and children running around screaming and all of your coworkers in a bad mood, like, that is not normal remote work. So please know that. I'm happy to give my experience and tips and tricks, but I just don't want anybody to walk away from this experience thinking like, this is what it's like all the time and that we would all choose this! It just doesn't make any sense. Jorge: One of the things that I've become aware of is that this situation, while it feels temporary, I expect is going to change us, in much the same way that something like 9/11 changed us, right? Part of the reason that I am wanting to talk to you about what you're doing to be more effective when working remote, is that the very fact that this has forced us down that path, hopefully is going to make us more effective at working remote. And it might be that some people don't go back to other ways of working, not out of necessity, but out of choice. Like they may discover that, hey, now I don't have to sit in a car for an hour and a half each way to get to my job, I can perfectly do this. Or maybe I'm actually even more efficient. Abby: I have a lot of coworkers, I have a lot of friends that have approached their organizations with the request to go remote. You know, there's, there's a lot of things about the cost of living in large cities that I think technology companies specifically should be really aware of in terms of the inequity that that creates and the types of people that they're able to attract in terms of talent. There's a certain kind of pattern to people's existence that in some cases includes going to a place where you can have a little bit of space to bring other humans in. You know, I know for me and James, that was our decision to leave New York city had everything to do with like, we want him to start a family and yes, you can have a family in Manhattan, I'm aware, but to be honest, I didn't want to work that hard. I wanted to do it the way that felt like it was achievable, that we could have a really sweet life and that required us to unplug from that whole system. And I think in a lot of cases, people have been told that if their job is not heads-down coding, then it is not a remote-appropriate job. You know, I was told by many people that they don't understand how I can do a collaborative function remotely. And even when I first started at Etsy, I was there almost every month. Because I needed to build that trust with my coworkers so that I could be away. And, and now, you know, I haven't been to the office since mid-December? I don't know when I'll go back again. I mean my coworkers aren't even there, so who knows when the next time I will be there, but my job has not changed. So, I think that there will be a revisiting of a lot of people's perceptions about remote work and what jobs are appropriate for work remote and which aren't. I hope that the consideration is not just from the practitioner side, I guess is my point. I hope that companies are also kind of changing their perspective and the choices that they make about the ability to offer that, because it's, it's really a benefit in some cases. For a lot of my coworkers at Etsy, the reason that they're remote is because they want to live near their families who don't live in major cities. They want to live in a place that has really great school systems. They want to live in a place where they can afford to buy a home. And those things are achievable in the remote life. And to only say that people who have coding as jobs or like deeply technical alone jobs as being remote appropriate, I think it's overly prescriptive. So, I hope it all changes. Jorge: And for the sake of listeners, you said you left New York, you're now in Florida, right? Abby: Yup! Sunny Melbourne, Florida. Jorge: You've not only worked remotely with organizations like Etsy, now. You've al so taught remotely and recently, you've also helped with Rosenfeld Media's Advancing Research Conference. And I'm wondering if you could be “remote mom” for all of us and share with us some of the things that you've learned to make all of those more effective. Abby: Sure. So, a little bit of background. The reason that I ended up teaching remotely — aside from, you know, like webinars and things like that — is, I was teaching in a graduate program for the School of Visual Arts when I lived in New York City and in my third year teaching, I told the chair of the program that I was going to move to Florida, that James and I really wanted to start a family, we were going to relocate, buy a house, do the whole thing. And I was effectively resigning at that point. He did not take the resignation, which I really, really appreciate looking back on it. He was like, “Nope, we're going to make this work. I want to keep you, I want you to do your job just like you did it before and, and we're just going to go remote.” So, I was really appreciative of the opportunity to do that. I did that for two years. My job was thesis coordinator-advisor slash information architecture, den mom, to the graduate program there. And so, I had a weekly studio class, a four-hour studio class once a week, and we moved it remotely. So, the way that we did that was a little bit different than what we would do if we were, you know, working under the circumstances that you all are. My students continue to meet in person. I was just remote. So, you know, I had a TA that would set me up on the big screen in a video conferencing situation, and I would give my lecture and I would have discussion with the students through that. And it was, it was a really interesting pivot for me. The things that I really learned were, in a four-hour studio class, I really needed to think about how much of that time was me talking at them. And it's interesting because that was not something I ever considered thinking about when I was with them in person. I just assumed that in that four hours, I should be talking a lot, I suppose, or whatever amount I needed to, to deliver the content and the value that I thought I was giving. But what I realized when I went remote was that I really needed to focus on giving them as much as I could of the value and the content I wanted to bring to them, but without boring them to tears, which I probably was doing before, but I didn't know it until I was like forced to watch it happen on a web connection. So, I reduced my lecturing down dramatically. I went to the 20-minute sermon format. So, at the beginning of every class we had a 20-minute sermon and it was like a tight 20 minutes. It was, I'm going to talk to you for 20 minutes, then we're going to have a discussion. The discussion is going to be based on what I asked you to come prepared for from last class, and then the rest of the studio time, I would set up an activity for them, and they would do the activity. And this was the hardest part for me as a remote teacher, because when I was in person, I felt the need to hover over all of the groups doing the work. But one thing that I always prided myself on, and also ticked off all my students with, was that I refused to enter into those discussions as another participant. So, in this class, they're doing all of these workshop activities and their thesis subjects — their individual thesis subjects — are the content that they're working through, and each one of them has their own subject that are not related to each other. So, the way that the exercises were formatted was that basically as one person's project was in focus, all of the other people were IA consultants on that person's project. Well, I am just another IA consultant, so if I'm walking into that interaction with less context than the rest of that group, I'm basically just dive bombing and I'm coming in as like, you know, another smart person, which I think is sometimes the worst thing you can possibly be in a situation like that. So remote made it way easier; I was just not there. And the way that we kind of manage the, “are they still going to do what I'm asking them to do,” is I just stayed on my computer. I was open in a window working on Etsy stuff while they were in the studio with a camera pointed at them. With the sound on, which sounded crazy, because it's just like the sound of lots of muffled talking. But if ever there was a point where they were like, I have a question or my group is stuck or something weird is happening with this activity, they could just walk up to the laptop and address me, just like they could walk up to me sitting next to my podium in the real person environment. So yeah, it was, it was a really interesting transition, I think it worked fairly well. I wish that I could continue that position, but you know, other things happened. I got pregnant, I had a beautiful baby boy and took some time off for that. Now I'm figuring out how to stitch my life back together, coming out of that. So, so yeah, no more teaching remotely for me for now, but it was a really good experience. Jorge: It sounds like the studio-based experience was very synchronous, right? Like the students were meeting in a single room, as you said, and you were there kind of live but remote. Were you also using any asynchronous channels? Abby: Yeah. So, the main asynchronous channel for us was email. I'm pretty old school about that. At least at that point, I was not on Slack or any of those things, and nor was my program. They might've moved to something like that by now. I wouldn't be surprised to find out. But one thing that I did that I found to be a really good asynchronous activity was I had a weekly survey that I had them tell me about how they were feeling. I had them kind of give me, their emotions around their thesis topic that week, I had them tell me the things that they were hoping to accomplish that week, I had them tell me if they accomplished the things that they had said they were going to accomplish the week before. So, we moved sort of like the status check-in that you would maybe have in more of like a round table, office hours kind of environment. We moved that to a survey and so that that made it so I could passively kind of keep an eye on their emotional health and kind of like where they were in their thought process with each of their projects. And that gave me a really good insight into when I might need to intervene into somebody's life. So like if I saw something come through in those surveys that made me feel, like, “Oh, okay, this person needs extra time,” I would then reach out to them on email and see if I could get time with them or if we could work something out over email. So that sort of added that part. Jorge: Can you share with us some insights into the work you just completed with The Advancing Research Conference? You shared a photograph of your setup, a nd I'll describe it for listeners, there were two laptops there. But what was your role in the conference, and can you share with us your setup? Abby: Yeah, sure. So, the conference is The Advancing Research Conference run by Rosenfeld Media. and Rosenfeld runs a series of conferences. I'm actually involved with another one called The Design Operations Summit, that happens every fall. We — about a year and a half ago — started talking about starting a new conference about research, specifically the idea of, can a conference or a community advance the topic and function and professional research? And we were really seeing a lot of opportunity to do that kind of work, to bring those sorts of people together around content in a conference environment. So, we went through the whole planning process, assuming that we were going to have a two-day, in-person conference at this beautiful venue, The Museum of Moving Images, in Astoria, in New York, right outside of New York City, and it was just going to be so great. It was so exciting, just the content and the curation approach. My role on the team is I'm one of four curators, so I was responsible for a team of speakers. They made up a quarter of the content of the conference. So, it was just like a really inspiring group of people, and the whole time we're thinking this is going to be in person, this is going to be great. And then, everything went wrong. So, about a month ago, it started to feel really uncomfortable that we were proceeding with an in-person event. We started to get some conversation on speakers and attendees about whether or not we were going to cancel, whether or not we were going to postpone. And Lou and team really rallied and made all of the assessments that needed to be made, and we finally made the call about two weeks prior to show-time that we were going to go all remote for the two-day conference. We did end up postponing our workshops — that was not something that we could accomplish getting online that quickly — but for the conference content, you're like, single track conference, 20 sessions, 300-something attendees, let's do this. And honestly, it was beautiful. It was beautiful to watch. It was beautiful to watch the team rally around a real challenge. It was beautiful to see our speakers just commit and dig in and say, we're in this with you. And ultimately, it turned into something that was better than I could've even imagined. You know this literally just ended yesterday as we're talking, and I am starting to think, would it have been as good if it was in person? And that is something that, if you had told me a month ago that the day after the conference, I would be thinking that about the all-digital version? I just couldn't even imagine. So, yeah, it was a real moment. Jorge: Well, that makes me very excited to learn more about how you did it. Abby: Okay. So, the conference was run on Zoom and all the credit for the operations of this goes to Rosenfeld Media. Obviously, my remote experience, I consulted with them on how to put it all together, but ultimately, like that team, this is on their backs. They did an amazing, amazing job putting us together. So, all of the conference sessions were in Zoom. They were all run live. We talked about maybe doing prerecorded, but ultimately, we decided that for the benefit of the speaker being part of the moment, we really wanted to maintain the live. That did mean that we had speakers that were presenting in the middle of the night in their local time. We had somebody from Tasmania, a person dialing in from Sydney. And so, they were giving talks and the literal middle of the night when their kids are sleeping in the next room, which was also like its own really special, beautiful commitment to this whole thing. So we had all of the speakers dial into a Zoom with our MC and our theme leader of that theme, and then the audience was experiencing a live streamed webcast version of that Zoom, that was locked behind the paywall of the Rosenfeld Media site, so they would go to the live stream page, they would see what we were broadcasting. The speakers were seeing kind of the backstage view. So, they were dialed into a Zoom call much like the one we're in right now, but we had someone on the Rosenfeld side that was controlling whose camera and audio and whose slides are presented to the audience through that webinar. So, Zoom webinar is a product out there; it's something you can do, and it just gives you a little bit more lockdown control of what the audience is actually experiencing So that was the content part. Then we had the question of what about the networking? Like people go to conferences because of the content, but they're also in a lot of cases there for the networking; to meet other people, to feel that camaraderie, to meet their new work bestie. And we didn't want to lose that. We were really like worried that this would just turn into a set of videos that people would like watch over the coming weeks or months, and that's not a conference. That's a library of videos. So, we turned to Slack. They're like Slack can maybe do this. And our fearless MC, Cheryl Platz, who is absolutely amazing through this entire process, she really took on the like, “how do we make the social stuff happen?” and Slack was like the main hub. We were referring to Slack of sort of like “the atrium.” It was like, if you're at a conference, the atrium is sort of like where you enter, and like that's where registration is, and that's where everybody is talking before and after the sessions. So, we built Slack that way. So, Slack had different channels for all of the sponsors. So, in a real conference, in real person-land, you would go walk up to a sponsor's table. In an online conference, you go to their Slack channel, and you have a little chat with them. But then on top of that, we also did alternative sessions, in between the official sessions, in different Zoom rooms. So those were not the livecast version. This was like, people could come into the Zoom rooms, they could be on their video, they can be speaking out loud to the person who's moderating it, and that was all around like collaboration and also like a little bit of networking and fun. So, we had a bunch of activities that were run through those Zoom rooms. We just had like a virtual cocktail party the first night which people just showed up and chatted and we had a moderator and it was great. And then MURAL also became a really interesting plugin for us for this experience. So, our MC Cheryl put together a bunch of activities that were all coordinated through MURAL boards. So, we had a pet pageant where everybody put pictures of their pets. And we actually had a winner! And a runner up! And an honorable mention, which was a fish! Somebody's son's fish made honorable mention. But like they set up a MURAL board which was like put your pet in a category and we're going to vote, and there's judges. And so that was great. And then we had a COVID chat board on MURAL which was: worked well, needs to change, unanswered questions, new things to try. So, it was sort of like, taking the moment that we're all in and admitting the elephant in the room that like… We're all at this remote conference because of this thing, so let's talk about this thing. And, you know, with an audience of researchers, you would expect that they're constantly going to be researching each other. So that was really interesting to watch as well. So yeah. It was just like a combination of all the tools we already have, you know, which blew my mind. And I've been using these tools for years but to put them all together and get everybody online at the same time across time zones and all those challenges it was just… Yeah it was it was beautiful. Jorge: The photo that you shared showed two laptops. What was that about? Abby: People always react really funny to the two-laptop thing. The reason I have two laptops is because one of the laptops belongs to Etsy and the other belongs to Abby the IA. And I still work as Abby the IA, and I don't use my Etsy machine to do that. So, the lines do get blurry when I'm doing things like running a 300-person conference remotely for the first time, I did borrow on my Etsy machine a little bit. But my general setup is, I have two laptops. They are on a laptop riser. My husband built me a double laptop riser because they don't exist, from what I can tell in buying them. And then I have a big monitor, I have a 24-inch monitor, for each of them. The one on Abby the IA's side is turned to landscape because I work mostly on decks when I'm doing work as Abby the IA. So, it's, it's all like presentation decks. I do a lot of writing, which doesn't even require the secondary monitor. So that one is set that way. And then I have a portrait-aligned monitor for my Etsy machine, because at Etsy I deal with a lot of very, very, very, very, very, very, very long spreadsheets. So, I find that the portrait mode works well. And then, in terms of my accessory setup, which is also I think maybe unique, I have a full sized keyboard with a numpad, which a lot of people I guess don't have these days, but I find it is required for me to feel comfortable and ergonomically sound, which is very important. And so, I have that plugged into a USB switch selector that splits that keyboard out to both laptops. So, I choose which laptop to be typing on. And then I have two mice, they look exactly the same. So, one of them has a sticker on it that says Etsy, so that I know which one is which. And then I have some speakers. I've got a Steinberg UR-12 audio interface here. I've got a microphone that I don't use very often. Yeah, that's my tech setup. Jorge: You also talked about the importance of the chair; you mentioned it a couple of times. Abby: Herman Miller chairs with the best chairs. Ergonomic chairs, man! There are two things. There's the ergonomic nature of your chair, but there's also the, “how are you positioning your tools on your table?” So, the laptop riser is a really good example If you are sitting at a table and you are typing on a laptop keyboard, you are not ergonomically sound. And if you are doing that all, day every day, for the rest of your career, you will be very hunchy and not very comfortable in life. So yeah, the laptop riser is a big part of it, the external keyboard is a big part of it. I also have this really puffy-like foot riser thing. I don't know; it's kind of like a pillow but it's meant to sit on the floor for your feet to be slightly elevated. I'm also a short person so I think that has something to do with it. But, yeah, ergonomics! It's a thing. I'm not an expert, but it's a thing. Jorge: What I'm taking from this is that you have very mindfully configured your physical environment… Because you spend so much time dealing with these information systems, you have configured your physical environment so that your body will be comfortable and healthy while doing it, right? Abby: Yeah, and I mean I think like another part of that… I know your audience can't, see but the room that we're in right now is completely 100% dedicated to work. So, I don't come up here for any other reason than work. This room is actually a detached part of my home. So, our whole house is on the lower floor, and then above our garage is this weird room that is surrounded by bookcases, which is pretty cool, and windows. So, I work in this tree house that only is for work. So, the point you made about like my body feeling right about being at work? It applies to that too. Like when I walk in the door of this room, I feel like I'm out at work, in that way that like if I have to run up here to get my, you know I left my glasses on Friday afternoon and on Saturday morning I go to read and I don't have them and I have to go upstairs, it's like if I asked you to drive into your office on a weekend because you forgot something. It's weird! It feels wrong! I feel like, what day is it? It's just very strange. So, there's like little patterns like that. And I think that the physical separation of spaces is actually a really important one. And I understand when people say how hard it is to get into the mode of work from home. I understand that point because if I try to take this laptop and go do something downstairs. It's impossible. I can't get anything done! I have to be, like, in my workspace. Which is… It's weird! Jorge: You know your comments about having a separate space to go into made me think of this image that I always remember from my childhood, of the beginning of each episode of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood TV show, where he goes through the door and then he changes into the cardigan and changes his shoes, and that becomes like the little ritual that starts the show. Abby: Yup! Jorge: It's almost like you're getting into the mindset, where it was like I'm now leaving that world and I'm entering this world and even though it's there a few feet away, my mindset needs to change, right? Abby: Can I tell you a secret? Jorge: Please do! Abby: I'm wearing bedroom slippers right now! I tell you that because I usually do not wear bedroom slippers in my office. And actually yesterday, on the second day of The Advancing Research Conference, I made myself put on real shoes because I was just… I just wasn't able! Do you know what I mean? Like it was, just, there's something about the moment that we're in right now, where I'm finding myself wearing my bedroom slippers up to my office more. And I know that that's saying something about like where I'm at right now. Like you all should be very worried about me because I'm wearing bedroom slippers for probably the third day in a row today. So, no good! But yesterday afternoon? I righted the wrong! I went downstairs, and I was like I have to put on real shoes. And I did, and I felt better! So, I'm reminding myself to go put on real shoes after this! Jorge: That sounds like a great place to wrap the conversation: a reminder for everyone to put on real shoes, even as we're having to make this weird switch to our ways of working, right? Abby: Well at least take a damn shower! I mean, I find myself telling my coworkers to take a shower and not because they look weird or gross or anything but because like, it's obvious that we're not okay right now. And you know what? It's okay to not be okay right now. This is not normal. I don't want this to be normal. Please say this isn't normal! Jorge: It's not normal, but we still have to find ways of continuing with our lives, right? Like not everything in the world has to stop. And there are things that we can do to keep ourselves going, and you've highlighted several of those things which I'm very grateful for, Abby. So where can folks follow up with you? Abby: The best place to see me is probably on the internet. We've been talking a lot about that, that's where I live! So, AbbyTheIA.com is where you can read things that I've written. I'm also on Twitter. Same name. And then I'm a big email person. So, yeah, if you have like a meaty question you want to get int o about remote working, about information architecture, about whatever is top of mind from this conversation, I'm happy to field emails on that; that's AbbyCovert@gmail. Jorge: Thank you Abby. It was fabulous having you on. Abby: Thanks Jorge.

Abby Covert, better known as Abby the IA, returns to the show for a repeat appearance to talk about information architecture, her influential book, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, and life in the design world as a new mom (congratulations!). In this episode, she breaks down the steps to information architecture as outlined in her book, and shares some real-world stories of sensemaking from her readers.

Four members of our Advancing Research curation team join Lou to discuss the research they did to help shape our inaugural Advancing Research conference (New York City; March 30-April 1, 2020). The team analyzed over 700 survey responses (including about 10,000 answers to open-ended questions!) to learn about user and customer researchers, their learning behaviors, and what they want from conference experiences. Read their summary of the results here: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/advancing-research-community/archive/who-does-research-and-how-do-they-learn/ ; you can also explore the study’s quantitative data yourself via Tableau: https://public.tableau.com/profile/lou.rosenfeld.rosenfeld.media#!/vizhome/WhoDoesResearchandHowDoTheyLearn/StoryDraft1 Podcast guests: Abby Covert (principal investigator), Staff Information Architect at Etsy Sean Oslin, Consultant at Aventine Hill Partners Rocio Werner, Senior User Experience Researcher at ZS Patricia Thommi, User Experience Researcher at ZS The rest of the team: Johan Sarmiento, Steve Portigal, Natalie Hanson, Lou Rosenfeld

Abby Covert, also known as Abby the IA, is a pioneer in the field of Information Architecture. Abby likes to think of herself as a “Sensemaker,” a role she believes is becoming more and more necessary in our increasingly messy world. To spread this message, Abby wrote the book How to Make Sense of Any Mess, helped found World IA Day that now has events all over the globe, and shared her thoughts on the subject here with us.

Author, speaker, and noted information architect Abby Covert joins Kristina to talk about the IA community and finding your own community of discipline. They also touch on the relationship (and overlap) between content strategy and IA, and what IA looks like at a large company like Etsy where Abby works.

Abby Covert is an information architect at Etsy. She's the author of “How to Make Sense of Any Mess” and invented World IA Day. In this podcast, Abby talks about democratizing IA – Making IA approachable and useful to people in all walks of life. Abby's legacy will likely be taking IA out of the box and making it something that anyone can get value from because after all, IA makes the world a clearer place! UX-radio hosts podcasts about Information Architecture, User Experience and Design. Listen to inspiring conversations with industry experts. The purpose of this show is to educate, inspire and provide valuable information architecture and user experience resources.

Information Architecture: making sense of messes

Information Architecture: making sense of messes

This episode was fun! I love Abby Covert, she's a delight to talk with. It was interesting editing this episode because I could see it was more of a *conversation* than an *interview*...as opposed to episode one with Phil McKenzie, just from the waveforms. Abby is an Information Architecture rock star, and you'll learn more about her in the episode.   We talk about How much my mother loves her book “How to make sense of any mess”, how to really plan research to reduce bias and how to hold the space for problem framing versus problem solving.   Visit her at http://abbytheia.com/ and check out her book http://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/

You're sitting in front of a mound of user research data. How do you take that mound and make it into valuable bite-sized chunks? How do you make decisionmakers care? Abby Covert, author of How to Make Sense of Any Mess, shares her approach to packaging research in ways that get at what audiences need. Buy Abby’s book: https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Sense-Any-Mess/dp/1500615994 Follow Abby on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Abby_the_IA Follow Rosenfeld Media: https://twitter.com/rosenfeldmedia

Abby Covert comes to talk information architecture, systems, and finding clarity in a messy world. We talk about digital cats! (briefly)

This week on the Boagworld show we are joined by Abby Covert to discuss availability, gaining respect and the customers perspective. This weeks show is sponsored by Shopify and Invision.

Abby Covert What does a restaurant menu, a business to business sales process and an eCommerce website have in common? All of these things involve structuring information for an audience to understand. And while the audience and context may change, the practice of seeing our way through the associated complexities and iterations does not. Information Architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable. No matter what your job or mission in life: if you are working with other people you are dealing with information architecture. Whether it is determining the labels for your products and services or creating navigational systems to help users move through a complex ecosystem of marketing channels, everybody architects information. In this short talk, Abby Covert will teach us some basic lessons on how to think about the structures and language choices that we make everyday.

Jeffrey Zeldman's guest is Abby Covert, Information Architect; curator of IA Summit; co-founder of World IA Day; president of IA Institute; teacher in the Products of Design MFA program at New York's School of Visual Arts; and author of How To Make Sense of Any Mess, a “brilliant introduction to information architecture” (Peter Morville) that is frequently purchased at Amazon with Don't Make Me Think and The Design of Everyday Things, the two classics of usable design. Discussed: why IA matters now more than ever, the difference between IA and content strategy (IA is building the vehicle, CS is putting fueling it and making sure it won't run out of gas), writing and designing a book, building agreement among stakeholders, “not having opinions, not having ideas of one's own,” IA's origins in language and structure, the fun of the IA Summit, the creation and growth of World IA Day, the joy of teaching, and more.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s guest is Abby Covert, Information Architect; curator of IA Summit; co-founder of World IA Day; president of IA Institute; teacher in the Products of Design MFA program at New York’s School of Visual Arts; and author of How To Make Sense of Any Mess, a “brilliant introduction to information architecture” (Peter Morville) that is frequently purchased at Amazon with Don’t Make Me Think and The Design of Everyday Things, the two classics of usable design. Discussed: why IA matters now more than ever, the difference between IA and content strategy (IA is building the vehicle, CS is putting fueling it and making sure it won’t run out of gas), writing and designing a book, building agreement among stakeholders, “not having opinions, not having ideas of one’s own,” IA’s origins in language and structure, the fun of the IA Summit, the creation and growth of World IA Day, the joy of teaching, and more.

Abby Covert is an independent Information Architect and also the President of the Information Architecture Institute. She's the author of "How to Make Sense of Any Mess" and spends her life trying to make the unclear be clear. In this episode, she explains the difference between UX and IA, and sets Scott straight about some common misconceptions about information architecture.

Abby Covert, author of How to Make Sense of Any Mess, teaches us about information architecture, a subject she strongly feels is a core life skill. She's seen people get fired over language and informs us that – quite obviously in hindsight – architecture is less expensive than design.

A conversation with Abby Covert and Andrew Hinton about dealing with digital change. Recorded at UXLx 2015. Abby is an independent information architect and author of How to Make Sense of Any Mess. Andrew is also an information architect and author of Understanding Context.

Another DAM Podcast interview with Abby Covert on Digital Asset Management and Information Architecture Here are the questions asked: -How are you involved with Digital Asset Management? -As an Information Architect, you recently authored a book titled How to Make Sense of Any Mess (http://amzn.to/2pX7dTs). Tell us more about what we can learn from this book since many DAM professionals need to do the same. -What are the biggest challenges and successes you've seen with Digital Asset Management? -What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals, and people who are aspiring to become DAM professionals? For a transcript, visit http://anotherdampodcast.com/2015/05/14/abby-covert/ Questions? Email them to anotherdamblog@gmail.com #reDAM #UX #information #mess #IA

Hear Another DAM Podcast interview with Abby Covert on Digital Asset Management and Information Architecture Continue reading →

This week on the Boagworld Web Show we are joined by Abby Covert who will redefine how you see information architecture. For a transcript of this week's show and all of the links mentioned visit: http://boag.me/1FTplAU

This week, we have been building up our Energy/Effort/Persistence (viriya) by focusing on the virtue (middah) of Order (seder).  That may seem like a strange choice, but with a little discernment, we realized it was the right thing to do.Effort is one of the Five Strengths, and as such, it controls Laziness.  When we thought about this, we found many examples of Effort in our lives, and while I would not say our Effort is perfect, we had a difficult time finding the flaw we needed to work on, or how exactly we could work on building up the virtue.When we turned our eye to what it is meant to control, Laziness, we saw that while we couldn't call ourselves lazy, there were significant aspects of our lives that were blocked.  There are messes so big and projects so daunting, so we choose not to expend any effort at all toward them.Ah ha!  That is the biggest problem with our practice of Right Effort.  When we couldn't see a way forward, we turned and went another way.  The messes seemed insurmountable.  So what we needed to focus on was our understanding and practice of Order (seder).As our Musar text, we picked How to make sense of any mess, by Abby Covert.  I would recommend this book to anyone who needs to do this.  The book is simple straightforward and easy to read.  It will change the way you see any mess in your life.I am not going to go on about the book.  I might later, but right now, I feel like I should focus more on the spiritual things.  The book is eminently practical.That is not to say that spirituality isn't, but I know that I often spend way too much time in my head wrestling with arcane theological and mystical insights, but what I have learned this week is that my understanding of spiritual order has a direct effect on my practice of order in my daily life.The Order of ZionI have been baptized and confirmed in Jesus Christ and thus, I am a citizen of Zion still living in Babylon.  I hope to build a little piece of Zion here, but for now I am surrounded by Babylon.  I am consecrated to Jesus through Mary, and I awake everyday with the familiar prayer, "I am all yours, and all that I have is yours, O Jesus, through Mary, our Holy Mother."Zion is the Kingdom of Heaven.  It is not a political change here, nor is it a geographical location.  I am a warrior/ambassador of Zion, and if you are Friend of Christ and his Cross, you are too.  I cannot cower in the face of the mess of the world.My work and practice is to make myself into the best warrior/ambassador that I can be, and hopefully make others interested in taking citizenship in Zion as well.  I have to not only fill myself with the energies of God, but connect my life to them so they can flow through me unimpeded.The Order of Zion is not learning the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality and taking up the ten practices.  It is learning to live Dabhar, Royal Personhood, Kenosis, Creativity, and Transformation (among so many other things).  It is not enough to know what Dabhar is.  It is the creative word of God.  I have to learn to connect with Dabhar, and to live it out in my life.I have a lot of ideas about how to do this, and I will share them as I write them out.  I would love to hear your comments and ideas.  I am moving forward through the practice of Musar, since I have seen it have the most effect on my heart and my life.O, Light of God that could not be overcome, shine through me and conquer the darkness around me.  Amen. Get full access to Creation's Paths at www.creationspaths.com/subscribe

Sadly, a lot of websites are a mess. They're rife with inconsistencies, broken links, mangled meaning, confusion and frustration. How does this happen? How do we get out of these messes? Information architecture can help. Abby Covert joins Jen Simmons to explain.

Abby Covert, Information Architect and Author of "How to Make Sense of Any Mess", talks with us about the integral role IA plays in every aspect of our lives. In regards to business, she discusses how the concepts of ontology, taxonomy, and choreography m Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices