Presenter's blog

My ibm.com colleague Will Smith and I presented at NEOUPA on September 20th: ibm.com - Experiences of the User Experience Design team. An update to our Internet User Experience presentation from earlier in the year.

We told lots of stories about what it is like working on the IBM web site, from year-long re-designs to day-to-day maintenance and everything in between. Great questions from the audience - hard to remember all of the topics but some where accessibility, search log analysis, standards vs. guidelines, Web 2.0, politics.

I participated in the panel "Setting the IA research agenda" at the IA Summit in Vancouver yesterday. Great talks by the panelists (of course), but more importantly, excellent participation from the audience and a good birds-of-a-feather at the end of the day. See my presentation, background information, and other notes.

In a few years, will this panel be seen as an important kick-off to an IA research agenda, or will it be seen as just another event where we talked about "IA research" but did nothing about it?

I presented "ibm.com re-design and standards" last month at Internet user experience (Ann Arbor, Michigan).

Here is a the outline.

• Evolution of ibm.com over the past 10 years
• 2004 project: OneXperience
• Standards site: IA before and after
• Page elements
• Automation tools
• Relationship with other corporate standards
• Special events: Lenovo
• Business as usual
• Challenges ahead

I presented at the CASE V conference in Chicago yesterday. I went into detailed IA issues such as specific-to vs. relevant-for audiences, org-chart-itis, faceted browsing and navigation frameworks. Actually, there was so much good discussion on the audience organizational scheme (central to university sites) that I barely got to cover the rest.

Attached (way) below is a PDF of my slides. Here are links to items covered in the presentation.

• IA institute
• IA WWW (2nd edition)
• Elements of user experience
• ibm.com, SMB, Solutions, A&D, E&U
• Northwestern
• U. Michigan
• Ball State
• U. Cincinnati
• IGS, Systems, Software services, E&TS
• OSU colleges & schools, index, Alumni
• U. Chicago
• U. Toledo Colleges & departments
• Finders: Server, Workstations, Training
• Epicurious
• Amazon diamonds
• MSN TVs
• Yahoo! Farechase
• Yahoo! Local
• Courses: Owens, Ohio U.
• Calendar: Purdue
• Navigation stress test
• Bradley
• Path breadcrumbs: Sweater, New for holiday, Ones to give
• Attribute breadcrumbs

The best part of the trip: attending other sessions the day before, hearing about the user experience challenges being faced by others. And picking up the "CASE lingo" to help me frame my presentation better. I like being the last talk on the last day.

"The difference between a good website and a great website happens before you begin coding"

I presented at the SEOMUG Spring <br> conference yesterday. This talk focused on work products and methodologies for IA and UCD.

I only had 45 minutes, so I had to breeze thru things. Hopefully the book references will help people who want to learn more.

"Task-based navigation," Poster presentation with IBM colleagues at the 2005 IA Summit, March 2005. Download - warning, very large file, may want to save to disk.

I did 2 presentations about faceted browsing in 2004.

July 8, 2004, "Faceted Browsing - How User Interfaces Represent and Benefit from a Faceted Classification System", SOASIST meeting, Dayton, Ohio.

• Discover what is "faceted browsing" and other Web-focused terms for old ideas
• Dissect faceted browsing examples from IBM, Amazon.com, MSN, Forrester and others
• Discuss faceted browsing research questions about user interface design, information architecture and faceted classification systems

February 28, 2004, "Fun with faceted browse", IA Summit 2004, Austin, Texas. Introduced the term to the IA community (and there turned out to be a whole series of presentations on this same topic).

Selected slides from the presentation (click for larger version)

"Information architecture: From wire frames to business strategy," October 26, 2004 at MSU Usability and accessibility conference. My introduction to information architeture, some of its deliverables, and its larger impact on the business.

"Web Navigation" Recently: March 25, 2004 at Spring <br> info tech conference. Updated for local web usability class (Feb 23 2005).

Presented at several local professional societies in 2001-2: MOCHI (March 14, 2001), Great Lakes Information Architects (August 1, 2001), BuckCHI (August 14, 2001), Puget Sound SIGCHI (September 16, 2002).

• Navigation Stress Test
• Global Navigation
• Local Navigation
• Contextual Navigation
• Personalized Navigation
• Breadcrumb Navigation

"Web User Experience" My introduction of user experience as a broad concept. Original presentation: March 25, 2004 at Spring <br> info tech conference. Also presented at Toledo Area MacroMedia User's Group (Feb 17 2005) and local web usability class (Feb 28 2005).