EuroIA Presentations and Proceedings Available

All (well, almost all) of the EuroIA Summitpresentations and proceedings are available online now. If you couldn't make the conference, then definitely take advantage of this great material.

View the presentations here.

Download the proceedings here.

local tags: conferences, euro_ia_2007, events

Speaking At The Italian IA Summit In November

I'm excited to be speaking at the Italian IA Summit 2007, in Trento Italy, November 16th and 17th. Organized by Alberto Mucignat, Emanuele Quintarelli, Andrea Resmini, Luca Rosati and many others, this is the second Italian IA Summit. It's great that so many events like the German IA conference, the EuroIA Summit, and OZ-IA related to design, information architecture, and user experience, are happening around the world.

The program is posted (in Italian). My closing keynote is Saturday, right before five-minute-madness, which allows plenty of time for a long and leisurely afternoon lunch following the conference.

Hope to see you there!

local tags: conferences, events, italian_IA_summit

3 Conferences In October: BarCampNYC2, UI11, IDEA

Proving that it's good to get out of the house - even if you've just moved in - my schedule for October includes three conferences, covering both coasts.

In order, you can find me at BarCampNYC2, UI11 in Cambridge, and IDEA in Seattle.

I'm not presenting, so I'm hoping to relax and enjoy the sessions, speakers, and inevitable hallway conversations with other members of the IA / UX / design communities. If you're there and you have a minute, say hello!

ps. Did I mention that Bruce Sterling is speaking at IDEA? How cool is that! Seriously, I think this is a good example of convergence bringing fundamentally related ideas and ways of thinking into proximity. It's also evidence that the IA community is in active search of grounding to help us build a point of view on what the future holds - for everyone who inhabits the information environments we help create, not just ourselves.

local tags: barcampnyc2, conferences, idea2006, new_york, sterling, ui11

Usability Everywhere

Usability issues pop up in the strangest places. For example, Monday night, while I was sitting in the Lisbon Tourist Police office, filling out a report on how I'd just been robbed. The officer handling my report took a moment to apologize for how long it took him to complete the process. He said, "We have a new internet based system to fill out all the forms, and its very confusing." Seems that Accenture created a .net based environment for the Portugese police to record assaults on travellers, but they didn't pay proper attention to user experience and usability concerns. The officers use all the classic workarounds: composing text in a word-processor before pasting it into input fields, post-it notes for shortcuts and passwords all over the workstations; and they live in fear of hitting the wrong navigation button and losing all their in-progress work.

It's not as good as getting my wallet back, but it might make a good anecdote at the next IA cocktail hour.

local tags: portugal, travel, usability, user_research, ux

NYC Information Architecture Meetup

Two thumbs up to Anders Ramsay for organizing IA meetups down in NYC. I had the chance to come to one of these regular get-togethers in January, and meet Anders, Lou Rosenfeld, Liz Danzico, Peter Van Dijk, and quite a few others while in town to see clients. After some refreshing beverages at Vig Bar, we moved on to the Mercer Kitchen for a swanky, tasty dinner. Word of mouth has it that the duck at is a religious experience. And it's always nice to put faces to a great many blog posts.

Anders posted some photos here:

http://ia.meetup.com/14/photos/

I don't see any of the umbrellas decorating the interior of the main dining area in the photos - but you had to look up to see them hanging from the ceiling in the first place.

Visual Puzzler Challenge: someone in these photos is a System Architect maquerading as an IA - can you spot the imposter?

local tags: events, groups, ia, nyc