A client recently reached out to say he was totally new to the SXSW experience and was looking for "noob pointers" -- this is my top lessons learned from attending SXSW. Enjoy!
Augmented Reality For Marketers: Future of Consumer Interactions (Part 1) - S...Lynne d Johnson
Part 1 of Lynne d Johnson and John C. Havens presentation—Augmented Reality For Marketers: Future of Consumer Interactions at SXSW Interactive 2011.
Emerging technologies are changing the way we communicate in culture and in commerce. Learn both the social and marketing implications of these future technologies.
After not being at SXSW the last couple of years, I went back to Austin in 2011 to find the event had exploded in size and breadth in the interim. Here is my Top 10 list of what I took away from it.
Language: Your Organization's Most Important and Least Valued Asset (Confab 2...Abby Covert
Have you ever felt like differences in language were holding your organization back? Perhaps you have tried to standardize language across parts of your organization only to find you have opened a huge can of worms?
The experiences we make for our users are made of language choices. We also depend on language to collaborate with the people we work with. Yet language is most often only tended to when you talk about things like content and copy.
Controlling your organization’s vocabulary is one of the murkiest messes we can take on, but it also might be one of the most impactful ways we can help our organizations.
In this talk, Abby Covert, staff information architect at Etsy, will share with us the strategies and tactics they are using to pay closer attention to language choices they make across both internal and external user experiences.
Language: Your Organization's Most Important and Least Valued AssetAbby Covert
Have you ever felt like differences in language were holding your organization back? Perhaps you have tried to standardize language across parts of your organization only to find you have opened a huge can of worms?
The experiences we make for our users are made of language choices. We also depend on language to collaborate with the people we work with. Yet language is most often only tended to when you talk about things like content and copy.
Controlling your organization’s vocabulary is one of the murkiest messes we can take on, but it also might be one of the most impactful ways we can help our organizations.
In this talk Abby Covert, staff information architect at Etsy, will share with us the strategies and tactics they are using to pay closer attention to language choices they make across both internal and external user experiences.
Collaborative Information Architecture (ias17)Abby Covert
You’ve worked hard on the information architecture models you’ve created but haven’t been able to sell them to the client, or your co-workers. Maybe the conversation around the IA has broken down into an unhealthy debate over semantics. In another scenario, you are tasked with creating a controlled vocabulary for a large organization that has a silo mentality and a lot of legacy content. Where to begin?
These scenarios will sound familiar to most IA professionals.
In this workshop, Abby will share her techniques for getting an organization that may have different ideas about how to organize and name content to agree upon a controlled vocabulary.
Abby will share specific tools in the form of diagrams, beyond the ubiquitous sitemap and wireframe, which communicate complex ideas. And she’ll share techniques for practicing information architecture with clients collaboratively.
I want to focus on the soft skills that make someone good at IA. So the lessons here are really about leveling up in skill set. Including:
- Conflict Resolution in IA
- Selling IA to others in your organization
- Improving stakeholder interviews
- Facilitating Low Fidelity Conversation about language
- Visualizing language with simple pictures to get clarity
You’ve worked hard on the information architecture models you’ve created but haven’t been able to sell them to the client, or your co-workers. Maybe the conversation around the IA has broken down into an unhealthy debate over semantics. In another scenario, you are tasked with creating a controlled vocabulary for a large organization that has a silo mentality and a lot of legacy content. Where to begin?
These scenarios will sound familiar to most user experience professionals. In this deck, I share my techniques for getting an organization that may have different ideas about how to organize and name content to agree upon a controlled vocabulary.
I also share specific tools in the form of diagrams, beyond the ubiquitous sitemap and wireframe, which communicate complex ideas. And techniques for practicing information architecture with clients collaboratively.
Interactions South America 2015 KeynoteAbby Covert
How to Make Sense of Any Mess
In a world where everything is getting more complex and we are all experiencing personal information overload, there is a growing need to understand the tools and processes that are used to make sense of complex subjects and situations. These tools aren’t hard to learn or even tough to implement but they are also not part of many people’s education. Information Architecture is a practice of making sense. A set of principles, lessons and tools to help anyone make sense of anything. Whether you are – a student or professional, a designer, technologist or small business owner, an intern or executive – learn how information architecture can help you make sense of your next endeavor.
In a world where everything is getting more complex and we are all experiencing personal information overload, there is a growing need to understand the tools and processes that are used to make sense of complex subjects and situations. These tools aren't hard to learn or even tough to implement but they are also not part of many people's education.
Information Architecture is a practice of making sense. A set of principles, lessons and tools to help anyone make sense of any thing. Whether you are - a student or professional, a designer, technologist or small business owner, an intern or executive - learn how information architecture can help you make sense of your next endeavor.
Augmented Reality For Marketers: Future of Consumer Interactions (Part 1) - S...Lynne d Johnson
Part 1 of Lynne d Johnson and John C. Havens presentation—Augmented Reality For Marketers: Future of Consumer Interactions at SXSW Interactive 2011.
Emerging technologies are changing the way we communicate in culture and in commerce. Learn both the social and marketing implications of these future technologies.
After not being at SXSW the last couple of years, I went back to Austin in 2011 to find the event had exploded in size and breadth in the interim. Here is my Top 10 list of what I took away from it.
Language: Your Organization's Most Important and Least Valued Asset (Confab 2...Abby Covert
Have you ever felt like differences in language were holding your organization back? Perhaps you have tried to standardize language across parts of your organization only to find you have opened a huge can of worms?
The experiences we make for our users are made of language choices. We also depend on language to collaborate with the people we work with. Yet language is most often only tended to when you talk about things like content and copy.
Controlling your organization’s vocabulary is one of the murkiest messes we can take on, but it also might be one of the most impactful ways we can help our organizations.
In this talk, Abby Covert, staff information architect at Etsy, will share with us the strategies and tactics they are using to pay closer attention to language choices they make across both internal and external user experiences.
Language: Your Organization's Most Important and Least Valued AssetAbby Covert
Have you ever felt like differences in language were holding your organization back? Perhaps you have tried to standardize language across parts of your organization only to find you have opened a huge can of worms?
The experiences we make for our users are made of language choices. We also depend on language to collaborate with the people we work with. Yet language is most often only tended to when you talk about things like content and copy.
Controlling your organization’s vocabulary is one of the murkiest messes we can take on, but it also might be one of the most impactful ways we can help our organizations.
In this talk Abby Covert, staff information architect at Etsy, will share with us the strategies and tactics they are using to pay closer attention to language choices they make across both internal and external user experiences.
Collaborative Information Architecture (ias17)Abby Covert
You’ve worked hard on the information architecture models you’ve created but haven’t been able to sell them to the client, or your co-workers. Maybe the conversation around the IA has broken down into an unhealthy debate over semantics. In another scenario, you are tasked with creating a controlled vocabulary for a large organization that has a silo mentality and a lot of legacy content. Where to begin?
These scenarios will sound familiar to most IA professionals.
In this workshop, Abby will share her techniques for getting an organization that may have different ideas about how to organize and name content to agree upon a controlled vocabulary.
Abby will share specific tools in the form of diagrams, beyond the ubiquitous sitemap and wireframe, which communicate complex ideas. And she’ll share techniques for practicing information architecture with clients collaboratively.
I want to focus on the soft skills that make someone good at IA. So the lessons here are really about leveling up in skill set. Including:
- Conflict Resolution in IA
- Selling IA to others in your organization
- Improving stakeholder interviews
- Facilitating Low Fidelity Conversation about language
- Visualizing language with simple pictures to get clarity
You’ve worked hard on the information architecture models you’ve created but haven’t been able to sell them to the client, or your co-workers. Maybe the conversation around the IA has broken down into an unhealthy debate over semantics. In another scenario, you are tasked with creating a controlled vocabulary for a large organization that has a silo mentality and a lot of legacy content. Where to begin?
These scenarios will sound familiar to most user experience professionals. In this deck, I share my techniques for getting an organization that may have different ideas about how to organize and name content to agree upon a controlled vocabulary.
I also share specific tools in the form of diagrams, beyond the ubiquitous sitemap and wireframe, which communicate complex ideas. And techniques for practicing information architecture with clients collaboratively.
Interactions South America 2015 KeynoteAbby Covert
How to Make Sense of Any Mess
In a world where everything is getting more complex and we are all experiencing personal information overload, there is a growing need to understand the tools and processes that are used to make sense of complex subjects and situations. These tools aren’t hard to learn or even tough to implement but they are also not part of many people’s education. Information Architecture is a practice of making sense. A set of principles, lessons and tools to help anyone make sense of anything. Whether you are – a student or professional, a designer, technologist or small business owner, an intern or executive – learn how information architecture can help you make sense of your next endeavor.
In a world where everything is getting more complex and we are all experiencing personal information overload, there is a growing need to understand the tools and processes that are used to make sense of complex subjects and situations. These tools aren't hard to learn or even tough to implement but they are also not part of many people's education.
Information Architecture is a practice of making sense. A set of principles, lessons and tools to help anyone make sense of any thing. Whether you are - a student or professional, a designer, technologist or small business owner, an intern or executive - learn how information architecture can help you make sense of your next endeavor.
What terms and concepts do you use to deliver your product experience? What organizational structures do you use to present those terms and concepts? To what degree is the meaning you intend through those choices clear to the person for which you intended it? These are the questions to ask yourself when attempting to make a product make sense to others.
Information Architecture is the practice of making sense of meaning through the consideration of ontology, taxonomy and choreography. In this three hour workshop we will discuss and work through what it means to think about affecting the information architecture of a product.
Doors are our common language for passing into a place for commerce, socialization or pleasure. Passing from one experience to the next. Doors are our refuge at the end of a long day, they are the start to every work day, every meeting, every meal.
Search is the closest thing we have to a front door, yet it is so often forgotten in the design of user experiences.
Our digital world is becoming more and more like a real place, where we spend our time rather than a tool that we use and put down.
This short talk for Search Love Boston 2013 covers some ways in which user experience and search professionals can better work together to make the internet a better place.
Part one of a three part workshop co taught with Dan Klyn and Christina Wodtke on Feb 7, 2013 at General Assembly in NYC.
ABOUT THIS WORKSHOP
Information architecture (IA) once was practiced as a sort of web-era librarianship. It was about organizing the information contained within websites to make things easier to find and use. But today an increasingly significant proportion of our daily business is conducted digitally. Using a variety of devices, people communicate with one another, search for information and entertainment, make retail purchases, initiate and negotiate business transactions, and more.
This class will explore well-architected digital experiences. What does it mean to architect information? How does the structure of information relate to understanding? How can information architects manage complex information across channels and contexts? What unique value can professional information architects bring to the creation and delivery of products and services? What is the interplay of information architecture and the other disciplines within user experience? This class will provide a broad introduction to a useful set of tools and ideas that provide a framework under which user and business insight can be harvested and used in pursuit of real business goals.
Understanding What It Is Like to Not UnderstandAbby Covert
The eighth class of a 15 week course in Information Architecture taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Topics include: How to have a great conversation, interviewing basics, and how to write questions that get good answers.
Creating Clarity and Establishing TruthAbby Covert
The sixth class of a 15 week course in Information Architecture taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Topics include: Addressing "What now?", Creating an Elevator Pitch to further clarify audience and purpose prior to feature level discussions.
The fifth class of a 15 week course in Information Architecture taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Topics include: Putting the Why before the what and the what before the how. The relationship of goals, requirements and features. How to deal with needed research and data as a requirement.
The fourth class of a 15 week course in Information Architecture taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Topics include: Understanding the terms stake, stakeholder, make, maker and how these role intersect in terms of needs. Development of directional and specific measurable goals.
The third class of a 15 week course in Information Architecture taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Topics include: Understanding Peoples Needs, Research tactics best suited for user understanding, How to use personas for consensus creation.
Wrangling Complexity through Cat-herdingAbby Covert
The second class of a 15 week course taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Topics include: Understanding Complexity and the effects of not understanding complexity when solving problems. 3 tools for complexity wrangling are outlined, including an in class workshop format for "frame-storming" and homework.
Introduction to Information ArchitectureAbby Covert
The first class of a 15 week course taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Covers Information Architecture intents and beliefs as well as a comparison to the related studies of interaction design, content strategy and user research. Lastly, speaking to the role of User Experience in all of these roles.
Whether you are a designer, a developer, a marketer, a student or anything in between - in today's creative job market every differentiator will count towards getting the job. Gone are the days of being able to talk over your future employer's head, just showing the latest deliverable you are working on, even worse showing nothing at all. Welcome instead to a world where your work is being measured not by what you say it was, but by what it really was.
This workshop was developed for General Assembly in NYC. It is meant to be run in 90 minutes.
This presentation is for anyone who has had technical, strategic and/or budgetary constraints influence what was built vs. what was imagined. We will dig into how to use systems-based thinking to understand how things influence one another and learn techniques to discover constraints sooner. We will learn how to start creating efficiencies of digital process, infrastructure and communication in pursuit of better user experiences.
Includes the definition, value, usage and history of heuristics as well as 10 principles with starter questions for use in an evaluation. (As presented most recently at Interaction 12 in Dublin)
What terms and concepts do you use to deliver your product experience? What organizational structures do you use to present those terms and concepts? To what degree is the meaning you intend through those choices clear to the person for which you intended it? These are the questions to ask yourself when attempting to make a product make sense to others.
Information Architecture is the practice of making sense of meaning through the consideration of ontology, taxonomy and choreography. In this three hour workshop we will discuss and work through what it means to think about affecting the information architecture of a product.
Doors are our common language for passing into a place for commerce, socialization or pleasure. Passing from one experience to the next. Doors are our refuge at the end of a long day, they are the start to every work day, every meeting, every meal.
Search is the closest thing we have to a front door, yet it is so often forgotten in the design of user experiences.
Our digital world is becoming more and more like a real place, where we spend our time rather than a tool that we use and put down.
This short talk for Search Love Boston 2013 covers some ways in which user experience and search professionals can better work together to make the internet a better place.
Part one of a three part workshop co taught with Dan Klyn and Christina Wodtke on Feb 7, 2013 at General Assembly in NYC.
ABOUT THIS WORKSHOP
Information architecture (IA) once was practiced as a sort of web-era librarianship. It was about organizing the information contained within websites to make things easier to find and use. But today an increasingly significant proportion of our daily business is conducted digitally. Using a variety of devices, people communicate with one another, search for information and entertainment, make retail purchases, initiate and negotiate business transactions, and more.
This class will explore well-architected digital experiences. What does it mean to architect information? How does the structure of information relate to understanding? How can information architects manage complex information across channels and contexts? What unique value can professional information architects bring to the creation and delivery of products and services? What is the interplay of information architecture and the other disciplines within user experience? This class will provide a broad introduction to a useful set of tools and ideas that provide a framework under which user and business insight can be harvested and used in pursuit of real business goals.
Understanding What It Is Like to Not UnderstandAbby Covert
The eighth class of a 15 week course in Information Architecture taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Topics include: How to have a great conversation, interviewing basics, and how to write questions that get good answers.
Creating Clarity and Establishing TruthAbby Covert
The sixth class of a 15 week course in Information Architecture taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Topics include: Addressing "What now?", Creating an Elevator Pitch to further clarify audience and purpose prior to feature level discussions.
The fifth class of a 15 week course in Information Architecture taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Topics include: Putting the Why before the what and the what before the how. The relationship of goals, requirements and features. How to deal with needed research and data as a requirement.
The fourth class of a 15 week course in Information Architecture taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Topics include: Understanding the terms stake, stakeholder, make, maker and how these role intersect in terms of needs. Development of directional and specific measurable goals.
The third class of a 15 week course in Information Architecture taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Topics include: Understanding Peoples Needs, Research tactics best suited for user understanding, How to use personas for consensus creation.
Wrangling Complexity through Cat-herdingAbby Covert
The second class of a 15 week course taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Topics include: Understanding Complexity and the effects of not understanding complexity when solving problems. 3 tools for complexity wrangling are outlined, including an in class workshop format for "frame-storming" and homework.
Introduction to Information ArchitectureAbby Covert
The first class of a 15 week course taught at Parsons, the New School for Design. Covers Information Architecture intents and beliefs as well as a comparison to the related studies of interaction design, content strategy and user research. Lastly, speaking to the role of User Experience in all of these roles.
Whether you are a designer, a developer, a marketer, a student or anything in between - in today's creative job market every differentiator will count towards getting the job. Gone are the days of being able to talk over your future employer's head, just showing the latest deliverable you are working on, even worse showing nothing at all. Welcome instead to a world where your work is being measured not by what you say it was, but by what it really was.
This workshop was developed for General Assembly in NYC. It is meant to be run in 90 minutes.
This presentation is for anyone who has had technical, strategic and/or budgetary constraints influence what was built vs. what was imagined. We will dig into how to use systems-based thinking to understand how things influence one another and learn techniques to discover constraints sooner. We will learn how to start creating efficiencies of digital process, infrastructure and communication in pursuit of better user experiences.
Includes the definition, value, usage and history of heuristics as well as 10 principles with starter questions for use in an evaluation. (As presented most recently at Interaction 12 in Dublin)
Book Formatting: Quality Control Checks for DesignersConfidence Ago
This presentation was made to help designers who work in publishing houses or format books for printing ensure quality.
Quality control is vital to every industry. This is why every department in a company need create a method they use in ensuring quality. This, perhaps, will not only improve the quality of products and bring errors to the barest minimum, but take it to a near perfect finish.
It is beyond a moot point that a good book will somewhat be judged by its cover, but the content of the book remains king. No matter how beautiful the cover, if the quality of writing or presentation is off, that will be a reason for readers not to come back to the book or recommend it.
So, this presentation points designers to some important things that may be missed by an editor that they could eventually discover and call the attention of the editor.
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Hello everyone! I am thrilled to present my latest portfolio on LinkedIn, marking the culmination of my architectural journey thus far. Over the span of five years, I've been fortunate to acquire a wealth of knowledge under the guidance of esteemed professors and industry mentors. From rigorous academic pursuits to practical engagements, each experience has contributed to my growth and refinement as an architecture student. This portfolio not only showcases my projects but also underscores my attention to detail and to innovative architecture as a profession.