Pat’s Point of View

I’m very happy indeed to be speaking at OzCHI this year. My short paper on mentoring and collaboration in information architecture was accepted after the blind peer review process, to my surprise. It’s the same topic I presented at OZ-IA, but thanks for the feedback I received from that experience I hope to improve it substantially.

All this week I’ve been working hard to become nationally accredited in workplace training and assessment, which will no doubt also allow me to improve my presentation. Although I’ll only have about 15 minutes, so I don’t think there will be any audience activities :)

So I get another trip to Adelaide, which I visited a few times for work last year. I’m looking forward to it, although I’m not keen on being away from home (felt my baby kick for the first time yesterday!). However, it’s a lot better than if I had to go overseas.

See what people are blogging about: OzCHI 2007, mentoring, collaborative IA

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Another day, another eight sessions! There were some good discussions today, both in and out of the sessions.

I received a heap of feedback on my presentation, all positive. The use of collaboration in web design and information architecture struck a chord with the audience and it was universally acknowledged as best practice. Almost as equally the topic of mentoring was intriguing to most people I talked to.

Some of the comments thrown my way, and discussions which ensued, included:

“Very open and honest”

“How much of the mentor’s time is taken up?”

“Just how much longer did the project take?”

“I liked that it was specific, not just theory”

“Delays between sessions could be beneficial, gets them to get on with it”

“I realised I’ve been doing that for ages but I didn’t know it!”

“What is the long-term future of UX teams within government agencies?”

“How sustainable is it? Have the mentorees become mentors and champions of UCD?”

“How do you get clients to go along with it [mentoring]?”

“How comfortable was the team with collaboration?”

“It’s unusual that the organisation would want to build up the skills of the team”

“Yeah but the problem is that once you train them up, they will leave and get an IA job”

I’ll roll these ideas into the next time I present on this topic, or indeed the next round of mentoring I do.

(Thanks to JJ for the photo.)

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The first day of the second OZ-IA conference went pretty smoothly. There were some great presentations, really giving us something to think about. And the Mercure hotel is a pretty good venue, although the room layout could have been better (those damn columns got in the way!). I’ll write a proper review shortly.

And of course this afternoon I delivered my Collaborative Information Architecture presentation. It was quite daunting presenting to your peers, much more so than speaking to clients or people in fields other than your own. So I was a tad anxious, but I managed to cover the material I wanted…even if there were a few stumbles.

My slides are now available on SlideShare.

I decided to have an early night and spend some time at home, but I’m looking forward to tomorrow. There’s still plenty of people to catch up with!

(Thanks to James for the photo)

See what people are blogging about: ozia2007

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It’s official, I’ll be one of the happy campers presenting at this year’s OZ-IA conference in September (22nd and 23rd to be exact).

My presentation is called “There’s no I in team” – a case study in collaborative information architecture and will, as the name suggests, focus on doing IA in a collaborative team environment.

It’s great to have an IA conference of our very own, without having to travel to foreign lands. And we have such a great line-up of local experts, I think it’s shaping up to be a great two days.

Now I just need to work out what to talk about (shhh, don’t tell Eric).

See what people are blogging about: OZ-IA

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Today I ran the first of my series of Information Architecture Fundamentals workshops. It was a good day, with a nice small group so we had lots of good discussion.

And it was a really great group of people too, with similar situations and levels of experience. Everybody worked in public sector, either health or education. And because these weren’t absolute beginners, I could dispense with some of the material in the course and discuss stuff that was a bit more advanced.

The feedback from attendees was really positive, with high praise for the lunch (oh and they thought I was pretty good too). The most frequent comments were that the group discussion was great, giving them a chance to hear other people’s perspective. The scope and level of detail was also appreciated. This is good since I deliberately tried to keep the focus on ‘big picture’ and properly defining the problem space, rather than jumping into the details of specific techniques, which IA training tends to do.

Next step Canberra, and there are plenty of places so I might see you there.

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This afternoon I presented my topic at Open Publish 2007, in Sydney. It was quite a good turn out, but still a nice small audience.

My topic covered two central topics:

• Ethnographic techniques for ‘needs analysis’ and user research, and
• The application of these techniques for ‘Whatever 2.0′ solutions

This was well received and I enjoyed talking on this subject to this audience. Hopefully, being the last presentation of the day, I didn’t bore folks too much. There were also lots of other interesting presentations and altogether it created a great little conference. There’s definitely some good thinking in the publishing (and content management) space; not at all matching the external perception of the publishing industry.

My slides are up on SlideShare.

See what people are blogging about: open publish, user research

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Over the next few months I’ll be running two public workshops on information architecture fundamentals. Here’s the blurb:

One-day workshop run by Patrick Kennedy of Step Two Designs. This workshop will present an introduction to information architecture (IA), the core methodology for organising and designing information-rich websites and intranets. Fundamental principles will be covered, along with a hands-on exploration of practical techniques. A must for all web teams.

The first workshop will be in Sydney on August 24th followed by Canberra on 26th October.

For further information and to register, visit www.steptwo.com.au/seminars/070824/ [Sydney] and www.steptwo.com.au/seminars/071026/ [Canberra].

This should be a good opportunity for me to brush up on my presentation skills and hopefully send my audience away with some knowledge and skills to help them produce better websites, intranets, software or whatever their particular thing is.

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I will be giving a short presentation at the 7th annual Open Publish conference on the subject of Information Architecture Best Practice. The conference will be focusing on management and implementation issues relating to publishing technology based on open standards.

The conference is at the Rydges World Square Hotel, in Sydney, from August 1st to 3rd. My session will be on August 2nd at 4:45pm (awesome, last session of the day!). Here’s my blurb for the topic:

This presentation will examine the purpose and application of information architecture for the so-called ‘next generation’ of information tools, including blogs and wikis. We will introduce ‘needs based’ information architecture, the methodology used for organising and designing information-rich environments in a way that allows people to use them more easily. We will then look at how the best practice principles behind this approach apply equally well to emerging technologies.

There are at least five presentations with ‘2.0′ in the title, so I think there will be more than plenty of discussion regarding social tools and Rich Internet Applications. There are also at least three other presenters touching on IA or user experience design. So trying to find a unique perspective is going to be a challenge :)

Some of the other presenters I hope to see during the conference include Lisa Herrod, Russ Weakley and Ash Donaldson.

See what people are blogging about: Open Publish 2007, information architecture, open standards

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Last night I presented my talk on intranets at the Sydney Web Standards Group meeting. I spoke about the topic of two of my recent posts, namely web developers have the power and intranets: the beast we love to hate. In a nutshell, I covered these points:

1. So what is an intranet anyway? Not an internal website, but rather a core business tool. A place to get things done.
2. Why do we love to hate intranets? There are downsides to intranets, but the reasons I hear from designers and developers tend to be more like they’re boring, they’re not sexy, they’re low profile.
3. What can we do about this? Two things; sharing skills between intranet people and web people, and selling the benefits of working on intranets.
4. Cross-pollination of skills: educating the web community about what a good intranet is and how to create them; learning from the intranet managers and CKOs of the world.
5. Selling the benefits of intranets: there are many upsides to intranets including the freedom to experiment, a ‘captive audience’, more functionality and most of all the greater satisfaction of empowering users in a way which effects their working day in a tangible way.
6. Showing off some of the small innovations being made in good intranets, including web 2.0 features, tailored business ‘apps’, and collaboration tools such as integrated staff directories.
7. So what does this have to do with web standards? The obvious connection is that with the increase in interactive functionality, those who are conscious of standards based web developers have a role to play to keep it all in check, but the not so obvious connection is the role developers can have in driving intranet innovation. As with web standards, accessibility and usability, building good intranets could become an enthusiast [let's be honest the word should really be 'zealot' :)] topic; pushed into focus by the sheer force of will of designers and developers who simply choose to care.

I’ve also posted the slides [PDF 2.4MB] if you’re interested.My slides are now on SlideShare.

I think it all went well and I got some really positive feedback. I was expecting a fairly underwhelmed, if not outright hostile, reception to the topic, so it was great to see that by and large the audience was interested.

Some of the discussions afterwards were also really interesting. For example:

• The challenge of exposing the good work we might do on intranets, and to a lesser extent sharing ideas. I didn’t want to turn the night into a big ad for Step Two, but the ILF, intranet peers and Intranet Innovation Awards are all ways of increasing exposure in this regard.
• How developers can achieve a lot through tinkering and getting stuck into tasks such as improving the code behind an intranet. Without the know-how which web developers bring to the party, inadequacies in the performance/appearance/functionality of the intranet are too often tackled by the ‘5 year IT plan’ mentality which usually involves implementing a very expensive CMS to solve the problem (both ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ and ‘cracking a peanut with a sledgehammer’). Someone who knows how to write good mark-up can improve the templates in a fraction of the time it takes for a corporate platform decision to be made.
• Another selling point for web developers regarding intranets is the transferability of their skills. Opening their eyes to the possibilities of good intranets also opens their opportunities in terms of areas they can move into, and indeed take change of. As we become more complacent about ‘just another website’ then perhaps this will be a big factor. In a market that is becoming increasingly more competitive (even commoditised) web developers and designers and devigners might look to intranets as their next horizon, especially considering much of the skills required are in common (it’s just the paradigm shift they need to worry about).

It would be wrong of me to discuss the evening without mentioning Shane’s talk on developers and designers getting along. He posed many interesting questions which have been floating around for a while but we still don’t have answers for. What exactly does it mean to be a designer and where (if at all) does the line exist between development and design? Do you need to know how the thing will be implemented (or at least an idea of what’s possible) in order to design? Would be a good topic for a panel session.

See what people are blogging about: intranet, web standards, Enterprise 2.0, devigners

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I’ll be giving a talk at the next Web Standards Group meeting in Sydney, on the 31st of May, entitled “Intranets, why you should care”. This will focus on some of the things I have blogged about recently.

Whilst there will be an obvious skew toward web developers and techies, hopefully the topic will be interesting for other people to. This event may prove to be a practise run for several talks later in the year, including OZCHI, OZ-IA and Open Publish.

Also presenting on the night will be Shane Morris from Microsoft Australia. In such company I only hope I don’t embarrass myself :)

Refer to the WSG website for more details on the evening.

It’s worth noting that the date has been moved from the 24th to the 31st due to some hassles with the venue.

See what people are blogging about: web standards group, intranets

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