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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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

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

Sensemaking as a Learned Experience

Information Architecture Conference – April 28, 2020

Duane Degler

Human ability to “make sense” in both sensory and information experiences is learned, then developed through attention and practice over time. This talk guides IAs, designers, and developers toward creating supportive environments for sensemaking. It outlines the role of language, symbols, structure, and tools that help us make sense of our interactions with information.

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Conference

User and Information Design Considerations for Effective Semantic Search

NFAIS 2019 Annual Conference in Alexandria, VA -- February 14, 2019

Duane Degler

Semantic search seeks to enhance the meaning in content, to more closely align the searcher and the available information resources. This means there is a strong user-centered aspect needed to unlock the benefits. In this NFAIS Conference presentation, Duane Degler explores strategies and considerations for best supporting your users through effective semantic search.

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Conference

Going Global: The Intersection of IA and UX in a Multilingual Environment

IA Summit 2018 Conference in Chicago, IL -- March 25, 2018

Kate Blanch, Rachel Sengers, Janette Shew

In their IA Summit talk, Kate Blanch, Rachel Sengers, and Janette Shew discuss how to structure multilingual content to support its successful presentation and delivery, and how to provide innovative designs that facilitate exploration of that content.

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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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Workshop

Designing and Evaluating Powerful, Relevant Search and Browse Experiences

UXPA 2017 Conference, Toronto, Ontario – June 5, 2017

Duane Degler

In this hands-on course, Duane Degler took participants on a journey through the evolving search landscape, with a particular focus on considerations for designing and evaluating the user experience.

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White paper

Understanding How Content Is Used in Enterprise Settings

March 16, 2016

Duane Degler

Enabling knowledge management capabilities through search and discovery can benefit from richer data to learn the ways users think about the information they find and use. This article describes an approach we developed to support enterprise search and content synthesis for case management and research in legal and scientific/academic domains. We use an extremely lightweight (yet powerful) mechanism to bridge the silos and establish a network of data around the use of information.

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Publication

Intelligent Understanding of Content Use

Published in KMWorld Magazine, March 1, 2016

Duane Degler

Using a rich network of data about how people actually use content, we can find insights by integrating it with other enterprise information sources. In this article, Duane Degler explores how it becomes a valuable input to governance processes, at both the organizational and content levels.

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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

Designing the Next Generation of Search User Experience

User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) Conference, San Diego, CA - June 24, 2015

Duane Degler, Lisa Battle

Design is coming to the forefront of effective search applications, to help make sense of mobile search, data search, semantic search, enterprise search, federated search, and embedded search. So what do we need to know about designing for search? In this UXPA 2015 session, Duane Degler and Lisa Battle dive into the essentials for a new generation of search design.

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Publication

Sewing the Seams of Sensemaking: A Practical Interface for Tagging and Organizing Saved Search Results

HCIR '13: The Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval - October 2013

Duane Degler, Marti A. Hearst

This paper presents a usability-tested interface design that enables time-constrained analysts to organize their search results in a lightweight manner during and immediately following their search sessions. The research literature suggests that users want to lay out search results spatially in overlapping “piles,” but a pilot study with a flexible canvas tool revealed that this design requires too much manipulation and has other drawbacks. This finding led to a novel hybrid design that combines structure with a flexible visual layout and which allows the analysts to quickly triage documents first and organize them later, or interweave these two processes.

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Presentation

Search Mental Models and Interactions

User Focus, the UPA DC Chapter conference, Washington, DC – September 16, 2011

Duane Degler, Jasmin Phua

Discover how user mental models relate to online search, particularly for more intensive knowledge work or critical information needs. This talk addresses the different types and stages of searching, similarities and differences in user mental models and the effect that may have on what tools and support should be available, and design solutions and patterns that have been employed to support the various search stages and users.

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Presentation

Design Trends for Faceted Search

User Focus, the UPA DC Chapter conference, Washington, DC – October 15, 2010

Duane Degler

Faceted refinement and filtering is now a common part of search results interfaces, and faceted navigation is being used for many other types of interactions. At the same time, the underlying data on the web is changing (with increasing structured data, semantics, and use of more sophisticated categorization), as are the tool sets that can be used to implement facet interfaces “out of the box.” This talk addresses how the increasing availability of data and tools puts the focus even more firmly on the designer to make decisions that affect usability.

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Presentation

Semantics, Search, and Findability

Web CMS and Semantic Web Meetups, Washington, D.C. – September 28, 2010

Duane Degler

Search is changing - we see it in public search and particularly what is possible with individual site searching. But it's more than search — findability is changing! Content relationships and linking, more structure and metadata, richer designs. Semantic Web concepts and techniques are becoming practical, finding their way into authoring tools and site designs. How do we take advantage of this? This is a brief overview of findability and search with a semantic twist, with examples and demos.

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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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