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

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

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

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

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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Publication

7 Steps for a More Accessible Association Information Ecosystem

Published by the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), Associations Now Plus - October 5, 2015

Duane Degler, Jacqui Olkin

It can be easy for associations to get buried under all the information they produce and curate. Here are seven steps create an information ecosystem in which resources are accessible and up to date.

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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

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

Applying User-Centered Methods to Inform New Product Selection and Strategic Planning

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

Lisa Battle, Tim Herbst, Bill Dixon, Sean Wheeler

Usability professionals always say the best time to start user-centered design is at the beginning of a project. But what about starting even earlier, when the vision or concept is first considered? This presentation discusses integrating UCD with marketing methods to inform/support executive decision-making and strategic prioritization of projects.
Presentation

The Usability Professional as Visionary/Strategist

User Focus, UPA DC Chapter conference, Washington, D.C. – October 2006

Duane Degler

Have you had insights and observations that go beyond the scope of a particular system or site? Are you talking with business leaders, sharing how things could be better for users overall? A quality user experience is important for organizations and their customers, citizens, and staff. User advocates can take on a “thought leadership” role within organizations and projects. This talk addresses how we can do that.

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