Podcasts about world ia day

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/ 

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.

In this episode of Surfacing, co-hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to information architect and educator Jorge Arango. This episode saw a discussion of digital ethics and the roles that designers, business leaders, policymakers, and ethicists play in keeping digital spaces safe. Jorge considers the responsibilities associated with architecting online experiences and offers insight into the dynamics that come with the long arc of technological innovation. Episode transcript About Jorge Arango Jorge Arango is an information architect and strategic designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. In his consulting practice, Jorge partners with product, design, and innovation leaders to create digital places that make people smarter. He has designed information environments for all types of organizations, ranging from developing world non-profits to Fortune 500 corporations. Jorge is a frequent speaker at global UX conferences. He is the author of Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places (Two Waves Books, 2018) and co-author of Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond (O'Reilly Media, 2015). He has also served the global UX community as president and director of the Information Architecture Institute, and as thematic director of the first World IA Day. Besides his consulting practice, Jorge is also an adjunct professor in the Interaction Design program at the California College of the Arts (CCA). Jorge's Personal Links Jorge Arango Website The Informed Life Podcast Jorge Arango on Twitter   Books Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Lou Rosenfeld, Peter Morville & Jorge Arango   Topics Discussed Twitter blocked in Nigeria The Code of Hammurabi Drop-in Audio App Clubhouse is Dying. It Was Fun While It Lasted Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast Simone Biles doing amazing things Platform for the Ethics and Politics of Technology (University of Amsterdam) Clayton Christensen Calvin, God, and Architecture  

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!

Sarah Barrett is a principal IA Manager at Microsoft. She's been writing compellingly about information architecture in Medium, and in this conversation, we focus on her most recent posts, which deal with how architectural scale affects our perception of information environments. Download episode 64 Show notes Sarah R. Barrett @documentalope (Sarah Barrett) on Twitter Known Item (Medium publication) Microsoft Learn MSDN docs.microsoft.com World IA Day Breadcrumb navigation Rachel Price Websites are not living rooms and other lessons for information architecture by Sarah Barrett Understanding Architectural Scale: Tabletops and landscapes by Sarah Barrett Microsoft Bob The Informed Life episode 17: Rachel Price on Improvisation Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Sarah, welcome to the show. Sarah: Thank you for having me. This is so exciting. Jorge: Well, I'm excited to have you here. For folks who might not know you, would you mind please introducing yourself? About Sarah Sarah: Sure. My name is Sarah Barrett and I lead the information architecture team for Microsoft's Developer Relations organization. So, in addition to the kind of stuff that you might think of as standard developer relations, like advocates going out and doing talks about Microsoft technologies and that kind of thing, we also have a huge web presence. So, we publish Microsoft Docs, developer.microsoft.com Learn, which is a training and kind of like micro-learning platform. All of the information about Microsoft certifications, a Q & A site, a whole bunch of other stuff. So, it's really everywhere where we're not trying to sell you stuff; we're just trying to teach you how to use all of Microsoft technical products. It's a really fun, huge problem. And we've got a good-sized information architecture team for information architecture teams, which tend to be small. So that's really exciting. Before that, I was a consultant and I worked with a lot of different companies looking into how they solve their information architecture problems. But I wanted to go in-house somewhere, so I could actually sit with a problem and work with people in order to make it happen rather than just creating some shelfware, which everybody does, no matter how good your work is because organizations just aren't ready for it. So, I've been in house there for about three and a half years. It's been a really fun challenge. Jorge: That's great. I think I'm going to be revealing my age here by saying that at one point, I had an MSDN subscription where I would get these big boxes full of CDs, basically. And I'm guessing that with the advent of the internet, those things are no longer distributed on CDs and your team looks after the organization of all that content. Is that right? Sarah: Yeah. So, I mean, the funny thing about information is that it did not arise with the internet, as you know. This stuff has been around for a really long time. And even you know, a tech company like Microsoft is newer than many others, but like all of that information about MSDN did not go away. And MSDN TechNet, which was kind of IT pro side... originally, they would mail you physical CDs, and that was kind of the gold standard. Then all that stuff got put on websites. There was msdn.com. And we just finished migrating all of msdn.com over onto Docs - docs.microsoft.com. A lot of that information is still stuff that we're half-heartedly organizing and trying to find a place for because that history is so long. Jorge: From my brief experience with it, I get the sense that it is a massive amount of content. And it's also content that is undergoing constant revisions, because it deals with the documentation that developers need in order to use Microsoft's products and platforms, correct? Sarah: Yeah. So, it's a funny thing, because I sort of feel like if you were to go to docs.microsoft.com, which is the main thing we publish, you'd look at it and go, "somebody does the IA for this?" Like, it doesn't look like there's a lot of IA there — which, I promise you, we do! And we're even good at it. It's just a huge... it's a huge problem. It's a huge space. It's an enormous ecosystem of things. And a lot of the work we do is really around strategy and policy and winning hearts and minds and that kind of thing. It's been a long process. And yeah, because it is so big, so many different teams at the company publish to it, it's really more of a platform than a product. The way you talk about websites as places and emergent places rather than products or services or something like that, is extremely true for us, because it is something that lots of people are creating in an ongoing way all together, in perpetuity. And it changes constantly. So, a lot of what we do is try to adjust rules, try to incentivize different behaviors, create standards and structures around what people do rather than just architecting a site and saying, "cool, it's architected. There's your IA! It's done." There's no room for that in our work. Jorge: What I'm hearing there is that you are more the stewards of the place than the people who are structuring the nitty gritty content. Is that fair? Sarah: Absolutely. You know, we create guidelines for how you structure a table of contents or the kinds of things you put in navigation. We don't actually do any of it for you if you're a publisher on our platform. How websites are not living rooms Jorge: Well, that sounds super interesting, exciting, and necessary, I would imagine, especially in such a large distributed system. I've been wanting to have you on the show for a while, but what prompted me to reach out to you was a post you published to Medium called, "Websites are Not Living Rooms and Other Lessons for Information Architecture." I was hoping that you would tell us a bit about this. What do you mean by "websites are not living rooms?" Sarah: This article that you're talking about came out of a workshop I put together for World IA Day, when you and I last met in Switzerland. And the idea of the workshop really arose out of this work I was doing at Microsoft, which is so different from the consulting I was doing before. I often found, as a consultant, people are very ready to treat you as an expert. And oftentimes when you come in as part of a consultancy or an agency, some project sponsor or kind of some champion for there even being an information architecture problem that needs to be solved by a consultant, has done so much legwork for you in convincing everybody that this is a problem, in convincing everybody that information architecture is a thing. You know, somebody has done so much of that work. And so, everybody's very primed to treat you like an expert and accept the basics of what you're telling them when you come in in that context. When I started at Microsoft, I was the only information architect. There are more of us now, but at the time it was only me. And in retrospect, like I still can't figure out why they hired me, because I spent the first, probably 18 months I was there going to meetings with extraordinarily nice and talented people who I adore... but going to meetings with them and then being like, "I don't see why you have to have breadcrumbs. I don't see why things in the navigation all have to go to the same website. Why?" And it was... it wasn't hostile, but it was a challenge to explain the first principles of everything that tend to be true about information architecture. Like, "yes, you ought to have breadcrumbs on every page." Like, "yes, the steps in the breadcrumbs should go to pages where you can get to the subsequent breadcrumbs!" Very nitty gritty details like that, where I had never had to explain how breadcrumbs worked before because usually we all just have such a shared mental model about them. And one of the things that comes out of this so frequently, and the example I use in the article actually comes from my colleague Rachel Price, from her consulting days where people often come with a very simple idea of how they feel like it should just work. And those ways, like, "why can't we just..." so frequently comes from an experience in the real world, where I think the example that Rachel has is she was working on a product that was for college students. And the product manager was like, "why can't it just be a dorm room? And my backpack is on the floor and my wallet is in my backpack. And if I need to change something about my payment, I go in the backpack and I get my wallet. Why can't it just work that way?" And as an information architect, like I know in my bones that the answer is, "it can't. That will not work!" But it's really actually very hard to explain why, other than like, "that's weird and we tried it in the nineties! But it won't work." And so, a lot of this article is about like, okay, why does that idea of structuring something like physical space — why does it feel so appealing? Why does it seem so easy? And then why is won't it work? Why is it a red herring? Jorge: And what you're talking about here, I want to unpack it for the folks who are listening, is the idea that you can structure a digital system in ways that mimic the ways that we structure our physical environments, where we do things because, hey, we're used to operating in a living room or an office or what have you, why can't we just have the same affordances and signifiers, but presented in a two dimensional screen somehow. Is that right? Sarah: Yeah. And it seems like it ought to work, but it really doesn't. And it's because... and the point I'm making in the article is that there are implicit rules to how physical spaces work and I'm actually working on the next article in this series to unpack some of those more. I'm trying to get it published this week as we record it. But I have a two-year-old, so we'll see how that works. There are implicit rules to how these spaces work in the real world. And it's easy to mimic the look and feel of a physical space without actually following those implicit rules. So, we need to unpack what the implicit rules are. Jorge: The example that you bring up in the article is one that... again, I'm going to reveal my age by saying this, I remember being on the market, which is Microsoft Bob. And there might be a lot of folks in the audience who are not familiar with Microsoft Bob. How will you describe It for someone who hasn't seen it? Sarah: It wasn't the only one of these kinds of products. I think there were a lot of them in the early days of software and the internet. We didn't have this one, but I remember the very first computer I used that accessed the internet... it had other things that were like this. But it was basically that Microsoft was trying to sell the idea of an operating system and a personal computer to a home market. And in order to make it more accessible and appealing, they tried to structure the desktop, or like the operating system, as if it were a house. And so, the idea was that your accounting would be in a checkbook that was on a little drawing of a desk, which was in a study. And if you wanted to look at your contacts, that was in a Rolodex on the desk. If you wanted to do something that wasn't in a study or an office context, you would go to a different room, and that would be there instead. And it has some weird rooms. I've never actually used it, so I've only been able to kind of piece it together from stuff on the internet. But there's like a barn or something — it gets very strange! There are obviously parts of it that are just silly, where, you know... why do you need that room? But there are also parts of it that just, again, they don't follow the rules of how architectures are going to work, so it's not going to work. And it provides a kind of fun counterpoint to realistic requests and objections that you do get doing this kind of work. Metaphors Jorge: We use the desktop and file folder metaphor in interacting with our… let's call them personal computers as opposed to mobile devices. And that is a metaphor; it's not inherent to the underlying technology. Why would you say that the desktop and file folder metaphor works whereas the architectural metaphor doesn't work as well? Sarah: Yeah. I think there are a couple of things going on. This is very much like the subject of the next article that I'm working on. Which is that I would argue that our brains understand space at different scales. And we understand what I call tabletops, but you could also call a desktop or something like that in a very different way than we understand larger scale physical space, like a room, a house, a city, and then you even get into a nation and understanding that scale of space, which is huge. We understand those things in very different ways, and a lot of the ways that the personal computer and like the notion of the desktop have evolved to work mirror the ways our brains expect tabletop-like spaces to function. Tabletop-like spaces, I think in general... you can see them all at once or at least see how you would get to all of their pieces at once. And they consist of small moving parts. In a very similar way to how, if you're working at an analog desk, you can just have your stuff around you and you see it in your peripheral vision and you can affect most of the things around you. This is very different to how larger scale spaces work, where you can't see them all at one time and you have to construct a mental model of that space by moving around it and stitching those pieces together over time. There's a whole neuro-biological component to this where we have certain kinds of cells called place cells that fire in certain kinds of circumstances that tell you, “Ah, this is a new place." And that doesn't happen when a small object moves around you on a tabletop. It does happen when you move from room to room. And so when we're in more operating system-like experiences or more app-like experiences, you know? You and I are talking to each other on Zoom right now. That really functions like a tabletop. Everything's right there. I could open stuff up, but it works more like drawers or something like that. It's not at all like something like Microsoft Docs or the BBC's website or any other kind of like large, content-based website, which is really much more like a landscape where you have to kind of move around from place to place and reconstruct a picture of it. And so, the big argument there — and this is something that I work with my designers on a lot — the big argument there is you have to be really clear about what you're building so you know what kinds of rules to use, because those things are actually really different. And most of the time we just kind of go, "eh, it's sort of like an app, right?" Like, "what is this app like?" And it's like, "Oh, its website-like." We know that Zoom and the Wall Street Journal don't and shouldn't work the same way, but we have a hard time articulating why. And for me, it's that difference in architectural scale and how our brains understand it. Agency Jorge: I find that idea super intriguing. I'm wondering if you could elaborate or give us examples of how something like the Wall Street Journal would differ from something that is more... I don't know, a communication tool like Zoom. Sarah: Yeah. So gosh, I wish I'd opened the article up, because I haven't thought about this a couple of days, but they vary in some kind of predictable ways. One is the scale of the things around you. Something like Zoom tends to have a lot of little pieces or I use Keynote as an example too. The reference, in the real world that you're using as metaphors, tend to be smaller and the actual elements in the interface tend to consist of a lot of little things. Whereas in a more landscape-like environment, you're dealing with a few big things. In a real-world landscape, those are buildings. Those are landmarks. They are mountains that are far away, as opposed to like objects that you have on a table around you. And we have a similar scale with the tabletop kind of apps versus landscape-y websites. You also get different degrees of agency. I have a lot of say over exactly what Zoom does. Perhaps not as much as one might like, but I can customize something about it, and I would expect that customization to persist. I can rearrange things. There's not a lot of expectation that I can do anything to gov.uk, other than maybe put my information in a form. I'm not going to do a lot of customization. It's not going to remember a lot of details from time to time. We also talk about kind of how you interact with the thing. The best way to learn something like Zoom, even if they put an overlay on it, is just to kind of poke at stuff. You know, turn that on and off and see what it does. You move things around you, open up settings. It really rewards interaction. Whereas with a large content-based landscape-like website, you have to move around. You're walking around and looking at stuff. You're moving from page to page and forming that mental model rather than poking at stuff to see what it does. There are a few different things like that. And then they come with different expectations too. There's a real expectation of intimacy with tabletops or with app-like experiences, even if they are a web apps. You kind of expect that it's yours in some way, and you don't expect that kind of of more websites that seem more like public goods. And we run into funny situations with that, like with things like Twitter, which I would argue functions like a tabletop, even though it's kind of a web app. You can experience it as an actual app too, but it's mine. I don't go anywhere. I just push buttons and do things on it and my stuff is there. And there all kinds of stories about people getting wildly upset about a new line showing up or a design change happening. I remember how much everybody freaked out when they went from 140 to 280 characters. You tend not to get such a feeling of ownership and people being so concerned about changes in websites that feel like public accommodations. You know, people have lived their lives in docs. They spend tons of time there. They don't tend to care very much about the exact details of the design or something like that. Because it doesn't feel like theirs. Jorge: If I might reflect that back to you, this principle of understanding the scale at which we're working seems to have something to do with the degree of agency that you have over the thing that you're interacting with. And the more granular the level of control that you have with the thing that you're interacting with, the more... I'll use the word intimate, maybe the more like personalized... it's something that you use as opposed to something you inhabit, in some ways. Is that right? Sarah: Very much so, yeah. And I think it's really like, "does your brain think that this is a place or not?" We don't expect places for the most part to be only for us that no one else could ever get into. It's an easy jump to be like, "ah, yes. Other people are here too. This is not just only for me." Whereas something at a much smaller scale... like, I don't expect other people to be messing around with my nightstand. Or my desk at work. Even though theoretically they could, but it's my stuff and I left it there. And there's that greater expectation of control and of intimacy. Naive geography Jorge: Great. So, I don't know if to call these principles or just things to be mindful of when doing this kind of work. You've mentioned scale as one of them, and you've already said that there's another post coming out specifically on that. In the post that is currently published, you mentioned three other principles, if we might call them that. And I was wondering if you could, recap them for our listeners. So, scale is one. A second here you say, "leverage the principles of naive geography." What does that mean? Sarah: I came across a really interesting article a few years ago that is by geographers for geographers, which is like not a field I'd thought about at all. And I was looking into the idea of cognitive maps and cognitive mapping with the idea of like, "oh, do people have like complex maps in their heads that they navigate and are those things the same in the real world and the digital world?" And the answer is, for the most part, no, we don't have maps that have any integrity to them. There are a couple of exceptions, but this was the theory for a while, and it's been pretty disproven. It's not a thing we have. We do, however, have representations of ways to get places in our head. I distinguished between the kind of tabletop more small-scale and the landscape more large-scale because we don't need these representations and we don't form them for small scale experiences. If you can rely on everything you need being in your peripheral vision, your brain doesn't bother remembering where everything is. Because it can get that kind of continuous sensory input. But for these larger-scale experiences where you have to construct a representation over time, and you have to reason against that to figure out where you're going. We construct those representations. And the interesting thing about it is that we're very good at it. I talk about that a little bit in this article with all kinds of cultural traditions that rely on remembering things by relying on how good humans are at remembering places and how to get between places. We're very good at it. But like more interestingly to me, we also make a lot of mistakes while we do it and we make those mistakes in predictable ways. So, one of the principles of naive geography that I think is just fascinating is that for the most part, when we remember things, we remember the earth as flat and square. We're very bad at remembering or estimating depths and heights in comparison to lengths and widths and distances and that kind of thing. Our brains really smoosh everything down. We also, for instance, think about distance in terms of time, not absolute distance. And so, they have eight of these or something like that. And the idea was that naive geography is how everybody understands geography and makes geographic calculations, even if they are not geographers. And they compare it to the idea of naive physics, which is that you can tell what's going to happen when you throw a ball without being a physicist. Like we can figure that out. The same way as we can give directions, we can make judgments and we can reason based on distances without being a geographer. And we're good at it, but we're also bad at it in these kinds of known ways. And I found that almost all of those ways are relevant for digital spaces as well as physical spaces. So, we go into exactly how those work and how you can apply them to your designer information architecture work. Wayfinding Jorge: Another principle here says, "check your wayfinding." That sounds like it's related to this concept of naive geography. What's the distinction here between wayfinding and what we've been talking about so far? Sarah: Yeah. I think of it as, naive geography is what humans do. And developing wayfinding principles or instantiating those way-finding principles in our designs, is what we as information architects do. Basically, it's great to know that people's brains mislead them in this standard way that we can predict, but you have to turn that into something that we can use because nobody I work with cares as much about neuroscience as I do, you know! Or geography, or cognitive mapping, or any of these things. We have to change it into guidelines and principles that I can give to product designers and developers and that kind of thing. And so, for wayfinding, it's really bringing it out of the more esoteric and theoretical space of like landscapes and tabletops and whatever is happening with cognitive geography and this kind of thing into like, "okay, what does that mean?" It's very simple stuff that I largely adapted from museum exhibit design, where it's like, "hey, you need to make sure people have landmarks. You need to pave paths so they know where to go." And we tie that back to the principles of naive geography to figure out why. I tend to illustrate this with grocery stores because I find that they have great wayfinding and it is way more accessible than a lot of the other examples people use like airports, especially with none of us have been in an airport for a year. And grocery stores make a lot of complex things very findable. I often have conversations with stakeholders where they're like, "well, no wonder nobody can find anything. We have 200 products!" And like the average grocery store has something like 800,000 SKUs, and you never are surprised that you can find your brand of maple syrup or be sure it's not there. Which is like the gold standard of wayfinding as far as I'm concerned. So, you can use the structure well enough to be sure that something doesn't exist. "Oh, that's so findable, it's great!" So, we talk about the specific things that you need to check that you're doing in your experience to make sure people can use those naive geographic skills they have. Jorge: And that's a learned skill, right? Knowing to expect something to be there and realizing that it isn't because of its absence is something that you have to pick up. This weekend, I took my kids to Barnes and Noble. They were wanting to buy some books and as convenient as it is to do it online, it's still quite pleasurable to browse through the shelves. And I was explaining to them how the books are organized alphabetically by the author's last name on the shelves. And that came up in the context of looking for a specific book and realizing that it wasn't there because the author's name wasn't on there. That's kind of what we're talking about here. Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. Jorge: This example of the grocery stores is also useful in that perhaps we understand these organization schemes at different levels of granularity. Once we understand how a grocery store is organized, we can find our way from the very highest level of the organization scheme all the way down to a specific product. And, at the highest level, the distinction that sticks in my mind is this phrase that I've heard used for people looking to eat healthier. They say, "shop the perimeter." Shop the edges of the grocery store, because that's where the fresh foods are kept. Whereas all of this stuff in the middle is processed foods. And that's a very high-level distinction that once you understand it, you can navigate that environment differently. Sarah: Yeah, that's also a great example of being able to reason based on a structure, rather than on content. Which is another gold standard of doing information architecture, I think. If somebody can understand the structure and your wayfinding and experience well enough that they can go, "hmm, I'm going to go around the edges!" Rather than saying, "I'm going to go to the lettuce and then I will go to the chard!" You know, that's what we dream of creating for our users. Standard elements Jorge: I want to move on to the last of the principles that you present in the article. It says, "use standard elements intentionally." What do you mean by 'standard elements'? Sarah: Occasionally, I get comments or people worrying that our information architecture isn't innovative enough that we're not doing anything surprising or introducing anything brand new. And I feel very strongly that your architecture is not the place to surprise people. Like, there are actual architects out there building very innovative homes that no one wants to live in. And I have no interest in doing that. I really want us to use the oldest, most standard, most expected way of doing things. I think the example of the grocery store is another great way here. There's a lot of benefit to not innovating in the layout of a grocery store. There probably is some benefit in innovating a little bit around the edges or in some details, but you gain a lot from making it legible and making it expected for people. And so, that one is really about... okay, given these things that we expect to have: we expect to have global navigation, we expect to have metadata on content, we expect to have titles and breadcrumbs... how do we unpack what each of those things is doing for us and make sure that between the suite of those elements we are using? Because you never use just one, you use lots of them together. Between all of those elements, we are presenting a coherent, complete view of the wayfinding people need. And this comes up a lot for us in things like design reviews, where the group will decide that we really don't need a content-type label on that card. And I'll say, "okay, the thing that that is doing for us is this thing!" Like, it is fulfilling this wayfinding need. How else are we going to do that? Because if you want to take this label off, I have to pick up the slack somewhere else. Whereas if somebody says, "oh, hey, I think we don't actually need..." I don't know, "we don't use breadcrumbs on this page or something." I can say, "okay, cool." Because actually that same need for being able to zoom out or being able to orient yourself relative to a landmark is actually being taken care of in these three other ways on the page already. So, if we lose that one, it's okay. It can help you make decisions about those trade-offs with design elements. It can also help you check the things that you absolutely need to be coherent with each other, that you need to be consistent because they're trying to do the same thing. And if they give people two different sets of information, that's worse than not having it at all. Jorge: It's an exhortation to be mindful about not just the elements you're using, but why they're there, right? Sarah: Yes, and all of this is really because, again, I had ideas about what I was doing as an information architect and I didn't have great answers for the little granular-wise. And so this is a result of my exploration of, okay, well, why? Why do we need them to work that way? And so, I'm sharing it with everybody else. Jorge: I'm wondering how thinking this way has affected your own work? Sarah: So much of information architecture is in the people and not the models. And so, my work has been about gaining allies and building relationships and getting people on board, and a good explanation that you can be confident about that doesn't rely on, "just trust me!" goes a really long way. Being able to break it down and decide where I make trade-offs and where I can accept more dissent, where I can encourage that and really learn from it versus where I really need to double down and say, " no, we need this." That's made a huge difference in my ability to get things done and to just build better experiences. Closing Jorge: Well, that's great. I'm very excited to see the upcoming posts in the series. It sounds like you're well ahead with the one about scale. Where can folks follow up with you to keep up to date with what you're writing and sharing. Sarah: Yeah, you can find me on Twitter @documentalope, or you can find everything I and my colleague Rachel Price write at a Medium publication called "Known Item." Jorge: Fantastic. And I have to call out that Rachel is a previous guest in the show as well. And I'll link to the conversation we had in the show notes. It's been so great having you on the show, Sarah. Sarah: Thank you so much. It's been fun. Jorge: Thank you.

Joyce welcomes Greg Weinstein, Jennifer Mazza-Cagliuso, Jennifer Trich Kremer, and Alina Bengert-Lombardi to the show. They are organizers of the World Information Architecture (IA) Day Pittsburgh 2021. The nonprofit World IA Day provides the foundation for learning about information architecture, a discipline devoted to the understanding of how information is structured and understood. World IA Day is the one day a year the community gets together for a global conference, curated and organized by volunteers around the world. They have plans to conduct collaborative research and mentoring projects to address change in culture and society. Joyce's guests will explain Pittsburgh's efforts to commemorate this annual event virtually, Monday, February 27, 2021.

Joyce welcomes Greg Weinstein, Jennifer Mazza-Cagliuso, Jennifer Trich Kremer, and Alina Bengert-Lombardi to the show. They are organizers of the World Information Architecture (IA) Day Pittsburgh 2021. The nonprofit World IA Day provides the foundation for learning about information architecture, a discipline devoted to the understanding of how information is structured and understood. World IA Day is the one day a year the community gets together for a global conference, curated and organized by volunteers around the world. They have plans to conduct collaborative research and mentoring projects to address change in culture and society. Joyce's guests will explain Pittsburgh's efforts to commemorate this annual event virtually, Monday, February 27, 2021.

Grace Lau is an information architect and user experience designer based in the Greater Los Angeles area. She's the co-president of World IA Day and one of the program chairs of the 2021 IA Conference. In this conversation, we discuss those professional community events, and why you should participate. Listen to the show Download episode 52 Show notes Grace Lau @lauggh on Twitter Grace G. Lau on LinkedIn My Disney Experience UCLA ASIS&T ALA SLA The Los Angeles User Experience Meetup World IA Day San Gabriel Valley UX Meetup The Information Architecture Conference Vito Discord Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Grace, welcome to the show. Grace: Thank you very much for having me. It's an honor. Jorge: No, it's an honor to have you here. For folks who might not know about you, can you please tell us about yourself? About Grace Grace: My name is Grace Lau. I'm a designer and information architect and a product designer and community organizer based outside of Los Angeles. I'm originally from Boston, though I've been in LA for about 20 years now. I started my past in library information studies. I was an IA at Disney where my claim to fame is having worked on the top-secret project for My Disney Experience, in the early days. And most recently I was a product designer at a healthcare startup in Santa Monica. Jorge: Wow. I did not know that you were at Disney behind that product and I'm a big fan and I would love to talk to you about that, but that's not what we're going to be talking about today. You described yourself as a designer, an IA and a community organizer. And I'm especially interested in the overlap between IA and community organizations. Can you tell us a little bit about your career as a community organizer? Grace: I have to say that it really started in my grad school, at the library school. At UCLA, there's a library school program and it is heavily in the archives and library studies. And there's a small number of people who were into the informatics track. During that time period, when I was there — we were just before the boom in 2007 or 2008 — and we were all scrambling to learn, like, "how do we design websites? How did we get database? And what does all that stuff?" So, I started doing a lot of event organizing as part of the student clubs, the student groups there. I was part of the student chapter for ASIS&T, ALA, and SLA. And so, we did a lot of organizing there. So, it really started from there as just hearing what people are learning, or are anxious about, and it's trying to find ways to pull people together and move resources together to help each other learn the skills needed to get into the job force. And once I left... once I graduated from there, it wasn't until the last, I'd say five or six years, that I really got back into trying to build a community. Meaning, like actually hearing what other people are worried about. Because, at Disney, that was kind of, when we first started the IA Meetup group — the older people in the LA area would know this as IA-55, and so now it's the LA UX Meetup group now that has over 6,000 people — but in the early days, it was like trying to get people together to learn about: what is IA, what is UX, what is design? And it was a great community! But over time, it got really large and it was hard to feel that sense of closeness to learn together because once events get really large, it's really hard to find that sense of... that safe space that you can go, meet people, and learn about things together. It turns into events where you have lots of people who are talking, but you're not really learning that much. And so I kind of found that space where I want to do more of that. And I did that through being involved with World IA Day in Los Angeles. And then most recently I had started a smaller UX meetup in Los Angeles called the San Gabriel Valley UX Meetup and we had much more smaller events. And we had speakers who are either very new at speaking, or still learning about products or learning about design and it was more of a learning cohort or a place where we can learn together and speak together and be able to have a platform for us to do that. Jorge: It sounds to me like you were part of organizing a meetup in LA and then you organized another meetup. Is that right? Grace: So, I was part of the World IA Day in Los Angeles. I did some of that event organizing and then I also started another one where it is a small local meetup. So as part of the LA Meetup — it's the large one where I'm a member of, which I didn't organize. Scale and scope Jorge: Oh, I see. What I'm hearing there, Grace, is that there is something about scale that changes the character of communities. Is that right? Grace: Yes, definitely. Because the bigger the platform, the bigger the audience, it's harder for new people to break in, right? So, if you go to a large space and you're hearing all these people are using jargon or terms that you don't understand, it's harder for the introverts or the wallflowers To really jump in there and be part of it and engage in more active ways. And so, having smaller events makes it easier to learn, because then you're free to ask questions and you're free to be closer to the topic at hand. Jorge: So, what I'm hearing there is that the aspect of scale that you're focusing on here has to do with how easy it is for newcomers. It also sounded to me like the communities that you're talking about have at least two factors that define them. One is kind of an area of interest, right? Like you talked about IA, UX, which is I would guess like a career or discipline area of focus. And the other one that you spoke of was geography, where the larger meetup that you talked about, seemed to me to be like LA as the geographic region, which is a huge area, right? It's a very large population. And then the second one that you spoke of sounded to me like it has a smaller geographic scope, is that right? Grace: Yeah. We call it the San Gabriel Valley UX Meetup, because we're located right outside of LA. We're a little bit East of LA. It's a very, minority-majority populated area where there's lots of Latinos and Asians in that area. And so, whenever we need to say, "want to go to a UX meetup?" It usually tends to be in the main LA area where you have to drive through the LA traffic and deal with parking, you know back before normal times. We had to deal with an hour, an hour and a half just to get to a meetup, right? It wasn't very convenient for people who are living in the 626 area, which is the San Gabriel Valley. So, my thought was like, "well, we can start a new meetup, it's closer to home, it's closer to the food that we love to eat." So, we have easy access to good food, free parking, good Boba... All these things that are important for a good meetup. And then we could be free to talk about it, we can spend hours socializing and talking about things. It's not as, I guess, as...I don't know... well, put together maybe as some of the more official UX meetups out on the West side of LA. Jorge: these things that you're talking about — food, parking, Boba, "all the things that make for a good meetup" — those all sound like they're characteristics that were applicable in the "before times," right? Grace: The before times, yeah. Jorge: So, how are you all dealing with that now? Are you still doing meetups? Meetups in the age of Covid Grace: We're taking a sabbatical, a hiatus — because of the holidays and because we're all getting ready for World IA Day. Some of the meet up organizers and also part of World IA Day as well. So, that's why we are taking a sabbatical. But we've been doing lots of happy hours. And then in the early times when we were in lockdown, we were doing lots of co-working sessions. So, lots of co-working having Discord or Zoom open, and we'll be like working and chatting at the same time, reminiscing about the good old days when we could go out and get woven together, all that stuff. Jorge: I'm asking you, because I've spoken with other folks who also run events and especially regional events... a great part of the motivation for folks coming together is like, "these are my neighbors." You know, these are the people that are part of my... not just my community of practice, but my community, right? And one of the effects of the pandemic has been the... I'm not going to use the word "erasure," but these geographic distinctions have become less relevant. I've been invited to speak at meetups in far-flung places around the world that I would not have been able to be invited to if I had had to fly there, for example. And so, it's something that is changing. And part of the reason why I wanted to speak with you on the show is because you are a community organizer, like you said, driving this local event in the San Gabriel Valley, but you've also alluded to World IA Day and you're also one of the program chairs for the 2021 Information Architecture Conference. So, I think that you're quite active in community building and in trying to bring folks together, especially in the information architecture community of practice... bring them together during this time when we cannot meet in person. And I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about these more global events... World IA Day, Information Architecture Conference. Why don't we start with what's your role in each of those? Information architecture events Grace: So, with the IA Conference, my role is as one of the program chairs. I'm one of four. So, there's myself, Cassini and Teresa and Claire. And I am specifically working on the marketing and communications part of the conference. So that means getting people together to understand like what's going on. I [also] do the volunteer updates. Whenever we get emails about like, "oh, I want to volunteer!" I try to get them to coordinate with the people who are leading those particular circles. It's really more around like the attendee and volunteer experience before the actual conference starts. Right now, at least in this phase of the planning. At the same time, I'm also inserting myself with understanding what are the good platforms that we might be using to run the conference. What are different ways that we might want to include as many people as possible, to attend a block. And so also working with the diversity, inclusion, and equity chair as well on creating more diversity at the conference as well. So, there's a lot that I'm doing there, but I guess it's not something that I can summarize in a short way. Jorge: It's worth noting for folks who might not be familiar with the IA Conference, that this is a volunteer-driven event, right? Grace: Yes, it's all volunteers. I spend at least 20 hours a week trying to get things together, trying to, get the website up or working with other volunteers to work on these things. As IAs, we tend to question a lot of what's going on and the words that we're using. So this particular year, we're focusing a lot on clean language and making sure that we're not using jargon and things that might alienate people from understanding what this conference and event is about. And of course, you know, having the name "Information Architecture" can be a little bit of a hard hurdle to run over. Jorge: Why would that be? Grace: I think it's because information architecture can be a very hard term to understand. When people hear "user experience," they're like, yeah, I got it! You know? Because UX is good, right? But then when you say, "oh, IA," because if you're seeing good IA then it's invisible. So, it's not something that is top of mind for most people. But when there is bad IA on a site, on an app, on an experience, you hear all about it. But then people want to know that the reason behind it is that it's because it's a bad IA. Jorge: All right. That's the role you're playing in the IA Conference. What about World IA Day? Grace: World IA Day, for people who don't know what it is, it's like a global awareness day. It's one day where we have local events all over the world, having talks and discussions about what IA is, what IA means. And we have a global theme every year, a new theme. This particular year, for World IA 2021, it's about curiosity. So what does curiosity have to do with information architecture? And so, this might be another way for people to understand what IA means, through the plain language way of understanding what IA is. Like what is this, what is that? How do you structure? How do you understand something? And that in itself is IA. With World IA Day, it's more globally focused. You have local events everywhere. In the past with World IA Day, it's been heavily North American and European. We have lots of events in Europe, like 20 or so in the United States, 20 events or something in Europe. But this past year, or this past summer, we've been focused on growing areas in Latin America, growing more locations in Arabic speaking countries and locations. We've been developing I guess... growing the global board of directors. So, not having just people in North America who happened to be leading the leadership, but also people from Italy and Colombia and Egypt to be part of a team as well, to understand what are the different needs of people in those countries and regions. Jorge: Great! And what is your role in helping them come about? Grace: My official title is "co-president." And my role right now is like... well, we want to do more! So, we trying to nail down sponsorships so that we can support the local organizers in hosting their local events. So right now, we just secured a sponsorship with Vito, the Vito community. They're able to provide a good platform where we can set up and help put up virtual events in a more professional way. It's really more about building community as well. We're happy to partner with Vito because they're also very community focused. They want to build community around topics of interest. We want to build a space where people can get together and learn more about IA, and how we can support that, and how can we like help with transcription and understanding the information and content that is normally just available in English or Spanish, but also in other languages too. So, we're also doing more around translation, transcription, trying to figure out what kind of platforms are out there that we can help I guess coordinate these types of efforts. Again, World IA Day is also all volunteer, all not for profit. So, it's difficult because lots of the local organizers also have full-time jobs. As someone on a global leadership team, you have to figure out how can we best support them without overwhelming them with lots of event planning logistics. So, we're trying, on the global team... we try to make it easier for them to manage their day as well. Jorge: It's worth noting the dates for these things. World IA Day, I think, is in February? Grace: Yeah! World IA Day is February 27th. We're also trying to organize regional roundtables for World IA Day. Just so we can help, you know, build more exposure to what IA is, and also to build communities in those regions. And then the IA Conference is in late April. The difference between World IA Day and the IA Conference Jorge: I've participated in both World IA Day and IA Conference for a long time. And the distinction between them has been fairly clear in my mind. The IA Conference — previously IA Summit — was a yearly gathering of folks from many parts of the world, mostly North America, but many parts of the world, who would come together for a week or so to discuss the discipline, right? And try to move the discipline forward. World IA Day was one day a year and it was more local. The intent was to have it be more regional and encourage folks to develop the community of practice in their own geography. And I'm curious now in the times that we're living in where everything is happening virtually, what happens to the distinction between these two events? Grace: That's been a very tricky question because the IA Conference has always been where people can continue their education. It is one week a year that people get together. But at the same time, it's also one of the cheaper professional conferences that are out there. So, I think before the pandemic, it's been, I don't know, at least $900, $800, to attend a conference in North America, and you usually have to pay airfare and lodging, and you actually go to a place, right? For World IA Day, it has always been either free or low cost depending on where you are. And all the local organizers have the burden of trying to find local sponsors. It's more about elevating the local community as well. So, finding local sponsors to sponsor the event and then being able to be more affordable to people who live in that area. Right now, in these times, you still have the benefit of being regional because it's in your time zone. So, I mean, ideally... yeah, you could wake up really early in the morning, like, five in the morning for me to attend events in Europe. But at the same time, that's one great advantage of it being in these times, that you can attend any of the events. But you still want to be able to maybe... you know, on some faraway date when people can meet up in person again, you can say, "Hey buddy who lives across the street, can you be my mentor? And we could talk about job hunting around here." I think still having a local community still counts a lot, because we're still navigating in our current spaces — even though having a wider global mindset is important. There's still a lot of attachment that people feel comfortable and familiarity around, like, what's around us. So for me, being able to connect with the world's IA community, is very important. At the same time, it's also important for me to build a community around me locally because it's more of a grounding effect. Jorge: What I'm hearing there is that World IA Day still has very much a local focus, where it's about building this local community of practice. I'm wondering, given your experience with doing that in the San Gabriel Valley... and also, I think that you're a local World IA Day organizer, right? Grace: Yes, I work with that, yeah. Remote regional events Jorge: So, given the times that we're in, where so much of this kind of stuff is happening remotely... Like, I have in my mind a clearer picture of how a more traditional conference, like IA Conference, how that can play out remotely, but how does a remote regional event infrastructure work? Grace: With the local events, we're still trying to promote local speakers, right? So, it's still providing more opportunities and platforms for our new speakers to get into the speaking circuit, learn about how to speak in online events. It's still a launching point for people to learn, to get used to and then before they start speaking at larger regional conferences or international conferences, even though, anyone from anywhere can speak. If people say from Atlanta want to speak at an event in Singapore, that's still very possible. It's more about time zone, right? I think the local impact is still about... it's providing an audience. People still find affinity towards, "Oh yeah, I'm going to go to the one in LA because that's still my family. That's still my community of people that I want to be touch with." Whereas when you have like a global IA day, and you have like a IA event where it's including people from all over the world, it might be intimidating for some people to reach out and to talk to people. Jorge: Does World IA Day provide frameworks or infrastructure or advice on... like I'm thinking like very tactically. It's like, what do we do? Do we set up a new Discord site to have these discussions? Like, how do folks... and I'm thinking now, like I'm putting myself in the situation of a listener who might be hearing us talk and thinking, "you know, I might want to organize something like a World IA Day Meetup in my community." What would the experience be like for those folks? Grace: So, the call for locations still open because our success criteria for organizing an event is very low. I mean, if you can get a group of people just talking about IA, then that's an event already. We have a call for location open on the website board at worldiaday.org. You can apply, we'll go through it and see you know if you need any additional support, you get set up with a location page. We'll set you up with an event page. You get access to our Discord. If you are an organizer, then you'll get access to the secret organizing channels. But if you just want to learn about what IA is, you can also get access to the same Discord server as well. We have lots of channels and topics talking about like accessibility and language and how do we want to organize a content repository to help support the events next year? Jorge: And you said it's still open. And just for folks listening in, we are recording in early December. When would that window close? Grace: Hopefully, maybe in January. Jorge: Okay, so there might still be a little bit of time left then for folks to do that. Grace: Yeah! We're not really closing it per se... I mean it depends on how much energy people have to put together a call for speakers and things like that. Why you should participate Jorge: In the last few minutes we have left, I'm hoping that you could tell folks why they would want to participate in either or both of these events. Grace: Being part of the IA community has been really grounding for me. And I think it's really easy to find a family outside of family. For me it's been... so, even if I don't see them in person we've been meeting irregularly, it's been a really great way to get motivated and be mentored and guided through, working with a group of other volunteers. A lot of the volunteers are also veterans in the IA field and in the UX field so there's a lot of researchers, a lot of designers as well, who participate and volunteer their time as part of World IA Day and the IA Conference. So, just being a volunteer just brings you that much closer to the great names of Jorge Arango, Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld. So, it's a really, really great networking opportunity as well too to just be a volunteer. Jorge: Well, I'm flattered. Thank you for including me in that august group! That's as far as volunteers goes, but what about folks who might just want to tune in? Grace: It's also just really great to hear like, "Oh yeah. So that's what IA means. And there's a name for something that you've always been doing." Whether or not you are actually practicing IA or its just you learning or being productive... those are all IA things. I think just learning on its own — whether you're listening to podcast or reading from a book — that's also IA work that you're doing. So, I would say, "Come! Come learn with us. Come participate and contribute." It's a great way to meet other people. It's a great way to network. It's also a great way to feel a part of another larger community of people. Closing Jorge: Well, fantastic, Grace. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing to help make all of this happen. Where can folks follow up with you? Grace: You can find me on Twitter; @lauggh it's laugh, with two g's. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Grace G. Lau and you can also find me on my website, graceglau.com. Jorge: Thank you so much. I'm going to include those and also links to both World IA Day and the IA Conference in the show notes, so if folks want to follow up with the conferences and meetups, you can go there as well. Thank you so much, Grace. Grace: Thank you.

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, 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.

今回はWORLD IA DAYとOOUIの話をしました WORLD IA DAYのハッシュタグ: https://twitter.com/hashtag/wiadtyo [トピックス] WORLD IA DAY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jqXiAhqCm0) OOUX (https://www.sociomedia.co.jp/7279) 手続き型との比較 なぜ今注目されているのか 表現は制限しない 表現の範囲を見る側、作る側 技術からデザインへ 2019年_日本のキャッシュレス決済事情 (https://chikirin.hatenablog.com/entry/2019/02/24/2019%E5%B9%B4_%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E3%81%AE%E3%82%AD%E3%83%A3%E3%83%83%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A5%E3%83%AC%E3%82%B9%E6%B1%BA%E6%B8%88%E4%BA%8B%E6%83%85) レジと購入体験 デザインと国民性と人口

ProjectUX had the distinct pleasure of attending the Dallas World IA Day event held at UT Dallas. While we were there, we interviewed the presenters as well as one of the organizers including:Jennifer Blatz (Organizer, Senior UX Designer, Fidelity Investments)LaBoria Willis (UX Operations Manager Alkami)Lana Gibbons (Senior UX Content Strategist, Fidelity Investments)Loretta Hudelot (CX Strategist / Researcher, Verizon)Courtney Cox Wakefield (Digital Marketing Expert and Speaker, Children’s Health)Ben Judy (Head of User Experience, 7-Eleven)Brian Sullivan (Design Strategist, Researcher, Award-Winning Designer, College Professor, Author, Speaker, Big Design Conference Founder, Sabre and Big Design)Wanna support and help ProjectUX? You can do so in the following ways:Share an article, podcast, and/or episode with othersIf you have an idea for an article or podcast topic, let us know!Become a patron of ProjectUX on PatreonBecome a sponsor of our show

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.

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.

World IA Day 2015で東京のローカルコーディネーターを務めた山本郁也さんをゲストに迎えました。