Highlights

Presentation

Enabling Exploratory Discovery Through Taxonomy

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2024

Not everything can just be searched. “Aha!” moments deliver value. Exploration leads to insights and surfaces contexts. How do you prepare your content for these user experiences?

Presentation

AI Explanations as Two-Way Experiences, Led by Users

User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) conference

How do we craft designs that "explain" concepts and respond to users’ intent? Can AI identify, elicit and apply relevant user contexts, to help us understand AI outputs? How do explanations become two-way?

Presentation

Menu Mania: What's Wrong With Menus

User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) conference

Menus are ubiquitous in websites and applications of all types. They are critical to accessing the information and actions that users need. In this presentation we share best practices for designing menus.

Presentation

Connecting Art & Archives for Research, Discovery, and Storytelling

MuseumNext (virtual)

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and Design for Context have developed a scalable infrastructure supporting integrated information from art, archival, library, historic home collections and exhibitions. Exploring rich relationships reveals a wealth of contexts, perspectives, events, and places. Learn about how the Museum is envisioning the future of its publishing and collections-based storytelling.

Our insights

Presentation

Enabling Exploratory Discovery Through Taxonomy

Taxonomy Boot Camp in Washington, D.C. – November 18, 2024

Duane Degler

Not everything can just be searched. “Aha!” moments deliver value. Exploration leads to insights and surfaces contexts. How do you prepare your content for these user experiences?

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Presentation

AI Explanations as Two-Way Experiences, Led by Users

User Experience Professionals Conference – June 25, 2024

Duane Degler

How do we craft designs that "explain" concepts and respond to users’ intent? Can AI identify, elicit and apply relevant user contexts, to help us understand AI outputs? How do explanations become two-way, as users can explain their expectations and offer feedback?

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Workshop

IA for AI: Shaping the Experience for Human-AI Systems

Information Architecture Conference - April 18-23, 2022

Duane Degler, Carol Smith, Rebecca Evanhoe

Participants collaborated in building upon the IA-for-AI framework that was first presented at IAC 2021. We explored what it means to understand, translate, and describe the types of situations where human-machine interaction occurs, and the way the relationship changes in real-time. Participants discussed opportunities and responsibilities that IA brings to human-AI relationships.

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Presentation

Guiding Users Towards Action: Empowering Decisions Through Effective Data Design

UXPA International Conference, Baltimore, MD – September 1, 2021

Lisa Battle, Laura Chessman

Good design can help users quickly grasp a situation, make better decisions, and take productive actions. In this session, we provide a framework that describes a progressive evolution of data displays and actions, and share a broad range of examples, from consumer products to enterprise web applications, to discuss ways to design effective data displays and integrate actions.

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Presentation

How IAs Can Shape the Future of Human-AI Collaboration

Information Architecture Conference - April 28-30, 2021

Duane Degler, Carol Smith

Sometimes people describe Artificial intelligence (AI) as an “emerging intelligence,” but it is, in truth, the emergent collaboration with humans that fosters positive personal, societal, and environmental outcomes. We outline a framework that Information Architects (IAs) can use to help them think about the key issues in designing for AI systems.

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Presentation

Integrating Taxonomies and Ontologies into Enterprise Search and Browse

Data Harmony User Group in Albuquerque, NM – February 6, 2018

Duane Degler

In this Data Harmony User Group 2018 session, Duane Degler outlines approaches for increasing taxonomy integration into search and browse, thus drawing the greatest value from your taxonomies for your users.

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Presentation

Guerrilla Glue: Making Collaborative Digital Innovation Projects Stick

MCN 2017 Conference, Pittsburgh, PA – November 10, 2017

Duane Degler

In this MCN2017 session, Duane Degler moderates a panel discussing how institutions and projects are using linked data and modern technologies to achieve long-term outcomes for themselves and others.

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Presentation

Building Bridges with Taxonomy: Enabling Semantic Integration

Taxonomy Bootcamp, associated with KM World, Washington, DC - November 2, 2015

Duane Degler, Jayne Dutra

Taxonomies should be designed with enough flexibility and transition points to be a bridge to other taxonomies and datasets. Enabling your taxonomy to fit into the larger universe of partner companies, industry standards, federal requirements and complementary term sets gives it a solid foundation for future growth. We explore which vocabulary sets are available for reuse by the enterprise information architect and demonstrate how thinking about semantic integration from the beginning of the design process helps build a taxonomy that endures.

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Presentation

Creating Personal Profiles Across Time and Distance

SmartData Conference, San Jose, CA - August 19, 2015

Duane Degler

Personal data capture and algorithmic modeling of user preferences and interests is maturing. In this talk, Duane Degler explores some of the considerations for longitudinal preference management, how adaptive interfaces might play a role, and how users could interact with a model at a particular time in an application.

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Publication

8 Tips For Achieving User-Friendly Search

Published by the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), Associations Now Plus - August 17, 2015

Duane Degler, Jacqui Olkin

Search is an increasingly important component in desktop and mobile online experiences, yet too often search is not designed to meet the needs of users. Associations have unique challenges that come with serving multiple audiences and delivering a variety of information types through search—for example, balancing the relevance of publications, issue summaries, research papers, membership information, and event information. Here, we offer a practical to-do list to achieve user-friendly search for association websites and apps.

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Presentation

Structure and Metadata: Shortening The On-Ramp To Linked Data

IA Summit, Minneapolis, MN – April 25, 2015

Duane Degler, Dalia R. Levine

Information Architects codify information’s purpose and context – that is vital for effective use and management. This talk summarizes our approach to understanding dynamic, multi-dimensional information models and the practical tools that help us create them.

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Publication

Dynamic IA: External & Internal Contexts for Reframing

Springer - 2014

Duane Degler

The world of information architecture has changed, and a reframing is moving the conversation forward. Duane Degler contributes a chapter called “Dynamic Information Architecture—External and Internal Contexts for Reframing” to Reframing Information Architecture, a book edited by Andrea Resmini.

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Presentation

Enhancement Ecosystems: Enriching Structured Content with User Tagging and Annotation

Semantic Technology & Business Conference, New York, NY – October 2, 2013

Duane Degler, Thomas Vander Wal

Formal and informal metadata, classification and descriptions play a significant role in the quality of user experience with content and search. This talk describes “enhancement ecosystems” involving users and content experts.

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Presentation

Supporting Relevance for Users – A Design Challenge

Semantic Technology & Business Conference, San Francisco, CA – June 3, 2013

Duane Degler

Presenting “related” content can unfortunately be perceived by users as not relevant to their current needs, particularly in complex knowledge work and interactive applications. At risk is a loss of credibility, which can weaken trust in the application or underlying information, which in turn colors their ongoing experience with an application. Relevance algorithms have gotten more sophisticated, providing designers and developers with useful tools. But from a user experience perspective, relevance is often perceived in the context of a user’s immediate tasks and goals, as much (or more) than it is associated with their prior actions and patterns from similar users.

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Presentation

IA 2.0: An Open Conversation about Context, Mobility and Semantics

IA Summit, Denver, CO – April 2, 2011

Duane Degler

Information Architecture has the potential to take a leading role in making the next generation of web and mobile applications more valuable for our users. We have key skills to clarify structured data relationships, identify relevance and context, and streamline the usefulness of information. In order to lead, IAs need to understand and address the implications of an environment that is changing fundamentally from what we've known in Web 1.0 and 2.0. What does it mean to design for a Context Web? Note: This file contains points transcribed from the conversations with participants.

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Publication

Layered, Adaptive Results: Interaction Concepts for Large, Heterogeneous Data Sets

HCI for Information Retrieval (HCIR) workshop, New Brunswick, NJ – August 22, 2010

Duane Degler

Some data environments are not well served by current styles of search results presentation. One example of this is large-scale archival, library or museum collections. The range of user goals and interaction needs can be quite broad, and the information itself is highly structured yet very heterogeneous — it spans many subject areas, information types, and presentation/media. Based on the use of semantic web formats for metadata, in this paper we explore how to leverage the semantic relationships to drive aspects of results presentation — to change elements of the UI itself in response to the results data.

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Presentation

User Interfaces for the Semantic Web

Presented at Semantic Technologies Conference on June 22, 2010

Duane Degler

This is a tangible guided tour of innovative semantic web applications and user interfaces, as well as interesting interfaces that ask the questions: “What is being adopted from current Internet — and Rich Internet — apps and sites? What new design concepts might be possible now or in the future?” The presentation begins to open up opportunities, issues, and implications for people who will be users of the “linked web of data.” And we continue to ask one of our favorite questions: How can it be made easier and more useful?

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Presentation

Achieving Business Value by Integrating Tasks, Topics and Content

Writers of User Assistance conference, Portland, OR – March 18, 2008

Duane Degler

“The shortest distance between two points is a relevant keyword.” When users need information, the most direct path returns them to their task as quickly as possible with the knowledge needed to be successful. This requires us to design and write with an understanding of the user's context, task, and need. We then reduce seeking time by carefully defining the 'glue' between applications and supporting information. In this paper, I discuss some 'big picture' ideas for User Assistance practices: understanding the user's context, identifying relevant keywords, and integrating applications and content using techniques from the Semantic Web and Topic Maps.

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Publication

Maintaining Ontology Implementations: The Value of Listening

Extreme Markup conference, Montreal, Quebec, Canada – August 2004

Duane Degler, Renee Lewis

It's hard to argue against the concepts of self-describing data, contextual interfaces, and richer metadata for content that eventually will make up the Semantic Web. However, it is easy to imagine semantic environments suffering from the same challenges that many content management system implementations and the Web itself suffer from: the preoccupation with data could easily leave us drowning in it. This paper focuses on approaches being explored to promote feedback and user involvement for the maintenance of semantic representations, to ensure they remain useful and current.

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Publication

Knowledge Management in Pursuit of Performance: The Challenge of Context

Performance Improvement, ISPI, 39(6) – July 2000

Duane Degler, Lisa Battle

Much of the current focus on knowledge management is on the acquisition and storage of knowledge resources. Unfortunately, because most knowledge management solutions are developed to stand alone, the context of a person’s need for information when using business applications is often left to the individual. This article discusses ways to merge the best practices of knowledge management and performance support, so that knowledge can be integrated more seamlessly within working applications, and applications can be used to solicit knowledge as a byproduct of people’s work.

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