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

Article

Don’t Document it—Prototype it!

February 11, 2020

Michael Owens

In this article by Michael Owens, she explores the Catch 22 of traditional documentation: that whatever you write is inevitably going to be either too much or too little. Walking the tightrope between providing enough detail to be useful and avoiding too many words to be overwhelming can be a delicate balance to strike for any designer, and that's where prototypes can make all the difference.

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Article

The Delicate Art of Facilitation: Preparing for a Facilitation Session

Published January 9, 2020

Karen Bachmann, Duane Degler

A successful facilitation session is one where participants are empowered to achieve specific outcomes supporting a shared goal. In this blog post, Duane Degler and Karen Bachmann detail the most important aspects of preparing for a facilitation session to ensure that you set out with the right maps, milestones, and possible alternative paths at hand.

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Presentation

Don’t Document It, Prototype It!

DCUX Conference, Washington, DC – November 9, 2019

Michael Owens

In this DCUX 2019 lightning talk, Michael Owens shares valuable tips about communicating UX requirements to your development team with annotated prototypes.

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Presentation

The Delicate Art of Facilitating a Content Strategy

Content Strategy DC -- August 29, 2019

Duane Degler

Good facilitation skills are essential for many content strategy tasks and projects. In this session, Duane Degler discussed techniques and approaches to channel the passions and personal goals of each participant, effectively guiding the group towards successful outcomes. Topics covered include learning how to lead discussions, manage personalities, and adapt to the unexpected to benefit both clients and customers.

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Workshop

The Delicate Art of Facilitation

IAC 2019 in Orlando, FL -- March 14, 2019

Karen Bachmann, Duane Degler

Good facilitation skills are essential for many IA tasks and projects. The ability to successfully guide internal colleagues as well as external groups to shared, valuable outcomes serves a wide range of project needs – achieving stakeholder and team consensus, creating a clear vision for IA strategy, refining a taxonomy, to name just a few. This IAC2019 workshop builds activities around real-world scenarios from the presenters' own experiences that participants can use to plan for and guide their own work.

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Presentation

Know Thyself, and To Thine Users Be True: Understanding and Managing Biases that Can Influence UX Work

UXPA 2018 Conference in Puerto Rico -- June 28, 2018

Karen Bachmann

In her UXPA 2018 session, Karen Bachmann explores ways to discover and discuss biases constructively before they undermine work, look at case studies of products that suffered from hidden biases, and consider pragmatic approaches to manage their influence in our projects.

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Presentation

Aligning Your Organization's Strategic Direction, Roadmaps, and Technology

ASAE Technology Conference & Expo, Washington, DC - December 14, 2016

Duane Degler

In this session, Duane Degler helps association executives think about how we can better use roadmaps to plan our technology journeys and keep everyone in sync, and provides valuable insights to help coordinate organization and technology goals across parallel initiatives and departments.

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Presentation

User Experience Design Considerations for Multi-Museum Online Collaborations

MCN2016 Conference, New Orleans, LA – November 4, 2016

Duane Degler, Lesley Humphreys

In this MCN2016 session, Duane Degler and Lesley Humphreys share human-centered user experience considerations and requirements that pertain specifically to the challenges faced by collaborations among multiple collections, sites, and institutions.

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Presentation

Keeping the Vision Alive: Techniques for Communication Throughout the Project Lifecycle

Interaction15, the IxDA conference, San Francisco, CA - February 9, 2015

Lisa Battle, Duane Degler

As UX practitioners, we often face challenges “keeping the vision alive” as projects get caught up in constraints, details, and politics. Also, as consultants there is much we can do to prepare the project team to hold the line on needed improvements, advocate for user needs, and build on the “big picture” over the long haul after the UX work is completed. In this talk, we discuss strategies and practical techniques to help teams stay focused on meeting long-term goals, while addressing short-term needs and facing the circumstances and challenges that arise through the design and implementation process, and beyond.

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Presentation

Beyond Wireframes: Empowering Long-Term Project Success

User Focus, the UXPA DC Chapter Conference,Washington, DC – October 17, 2014

Jade Davis, Elizabeth Simister

We discuss practical ways UX experts can help set the project team up for long-term success and maintain the value of the UX investment.

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Presentation

Keeping the Vision Alive: UX Leadership in Long-Term Projects

User Focus, the UXPA DC Chapter conference in Washington, DC – October 17, 2014

Lisa Battle, Laura Chessman

As UX practitioners, we often face challenges “keeping the vision alive” as projects get caught up in constraints, details, and politics. But we cannot let those things derail us or take things too far from that solid, long-term vision. In this talk, we discuss strategies and practical techniques to help teams stay focused on meeting long-term goals, while addressing short-term needs and facing the circumstances and challenges that arise through the design and implementation process. Topics include: maintaining the rationale behind “blue-sky” thinking, methods for questioning constraints to get to innovative ideas, working with interim designs as intermediate steps to the final vision, and creating shared understanding and buy-in across the team for the long-term vision.

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Presentation

Integrating UCD with Requirements Engineering: Improving Processes, Formats, and Communication

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 15th Annual Conference, Bloomfield, CO – June 2006

Lisa Battle, Rebecca Ray, Karen Bachmann

User-centered design practitioners are skilled in eliciting user needs and translating them into design. However, our methods are sometimes poorly integrated with requirements engineering. This panel discussion presents practical approaches to coordinating UCD with other types of activities involved in the creation of requirements.

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Publication

Sharing the Vision = Designs that Get Built

Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 12th Annual Conference, Scottsdale,
AZ - June 2003

Duane Degler, Lisa Battle, Darrell Taylor

For user-centered designs to be successfully implemented, the stakeholders and members of a multidisciplinary project team must reach a shared understanding of the problem and the solution. This article explores ways of sharing information between usability specialists and technical team members who are using object modeling techniques based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We illustrate points where UCD deliverables can connect with UML deliverables, and vice versa, to help a project team create and communicate a shared vision.

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