Workshop: Design to Refine: Developing a tunable information architecture

When web sites are failing, site owners do dumb things. The dumbest is also the most common: they engage in expensive, cosmetic redesigns that provide little actual benefit. Worse, these redesigns quickly go stale, and need to be repeated every few years.

But there’s hope: by tuning your site’s information architecture, you can avoid suffering years of endless failed redesigns. Tuning means constantly evaluating the needs of a site’s users, sponsors, and environment, and making sure those needs are met. And because a little will often go a long way toward meeting those needs, tuning is cheap. Best of all, tuning isn’t rocket science; it’s something you can do right now.

In this workshop, Lou Rosenfeld, co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, will show you how to:

• Sample from a balanced menu of regular research and analytics that you can do in-house, rather than commissioning huge, expensive one-off research studies that will end up in a filing cabinet.
• Determine the few critical design tasks that merit the bulk of your attention.
• Gradually improve high-impact areas like contextual navigation and site search, rather than focusing on political hot potatoes like the main page and site-wide navigation.
• Identify and set up ongoing processes so your team can gently curate your site, instead of reacting to an endless flood of projects.
• Keep the work (and the expertise) in-house, rather than paying external agencies to solve their favourite problems.
• Convince senior leadership to do the right thing, rather than redesign (again)

About The Speaker