I recently conducted a training session for our UX team entitled “A Modern Introduction To IA”.  Based on the response, I thought I would share it with you.  I will tell you the kinds of things I covered, and take it in new directions

Why a “Modern” introduction”?  IA has changed over the last 10 years.  Information that used to be on web pages now ends up, sometimes whole but usually in part, on mobile devices, in blogs, feeds, mash-ups, and in fact I may never know where.  Old-school IA with wireframes and taxonomies wasn’t designed to handle this.  So we need some different skills and perspectives, and this is what we will explore, under the two headings of Information Structure and Information Delivery.

In Information Structure, we’ll talk about different approaches for discovering and/or creating information structures.  Like how information structures drop out of user scenarios.  Or how to parse flat web pages and see what’s going on in semantic terms.

In Information Delivery, we’ll talk about different approaches for presenting information.  Like (if we know the user well) predictable access, predictable exploration, and predictable focus.  And how to reuse common patterns to speed up your explorations with your clients and accelerate your design.

So stay tuned for some posts mixing structural and user based lessons learned from the trenches.  In my in-house session, there was lots of discussion and the teacher-learner boundary changed many times.  Hope that happens here too.