UX Irregulars - July 2010: Don Turnbull on "Quantitative IA" & Matthew Milan on "The Structure of Strategy" July 13, 2010

It's July. Summer is here. So is the second Tuesday of the month which means it's time for another edition UX Irregulars. It's an extra-special edition this month that you won't want to miss!

Don Turnbull is visiting Toronto and will speak to us about "Quantitative Information Architecture". Matthew Milan, one of the original UX Irregulars, will give his talk on "The Structure of Strategy". Both were big hits at the 2010 IA Summit and have received critical praise from audiences and industry leaders across North America.

Join your fellow UXers for an evening of networking, peer mentorship and great conversations about user experience design in a relaxed, social atmosphere. All who share an interest in designing and creating great experiences are welcome.

SPACE IS LIMITED. PLEASE BE SURE THAT YOU CAN ATTEND.

PLEASE RSVP at GUESTLIST

http://guestlistapp.com/events/25347

QUANTITATIVE INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

You don't have to be RainMan or Stephen Hawking to use numbers to get things done. Quantitative methods are applicable for IA thinking be it for hypothesis generation, instrumentation, data collection and analysis of information at scales never before possible with insights that are comparable over time, generalizable and extensible.

Quantitative skills can allow IAs to interpret and analyze others' designs and research more readily, as well as combine methods and models for meta-analysis to help IAs move from description to prediction in designing and developing future interfaces and architectures.

This presentation will review why you should use quantitative methods and discuss both foundational and emerging ideas that are applicable for content analysis, behavioral modeling, social media usage, informetrics and other IA-related issues.

THE STRUCTURE OF STRATEGY

If you’re looking for a presentation that links experience design, military
strategy, second-order cybernetics and systems thinking in a new model for strategic thinking and doing, this is the presentation for you.

If you’re looking for a presentation that clearly and simply explains how to
envision and deliver experiences that create value for both individuals and
organizations, then this presentation is also for you.

If there’s one constant in the organizations that we design for, it’s that
change is inevitable and increasingly unmanageable. We live in a world where strategy is a lost art and many organizations are stuck in competitive environments where incrementalism rules and efforts to innovate are increasingly unsuccessful.

What we need is a structural way of looking at strategy; how to think about it, develop it and most importantly how to see its impact on in the environments we work in. “The Structure of Strategy” will explore and attempt to addresses these questions by looking deeply at what strategic success looks like across a range of contexts, how strategy is framed and represented at different conceptual levels and most importantly, how to think about developing the capability to “make” strategy happen.

Building off of the 2008 IA Summit presentation “The Information Architect
and the Fighter Pilot” and the 2009 IA Summit pre-conference workshop
“Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times”, this session will
connect perspectives and practices in fields ranging from business strategy to systems thinking with the goal of providing session attendees with a clear framework for understanding and creating strategies that are actionable and valuable for both organizations and their customers.

ABOUT DON TURNBULL

Don Turnbull, Ph.D. is a consultant specializing in software research and development focusing on search systems, information analytics, user experience design, semantic and knowledge management technologies as well as intellectual property analysis.

Don was recently a professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin where his teaching and research focused on designing Web information architectures, information systems analysis, Information Retrieval, the Semantic Web and Knowledge Management Systems.

Don was the Director of Advanced Development at Outride, Inc., a Xerox PARC spin-off company that specialized in personalized information retrieval applications that was acquired by Google. He is also an author of many research publications, as well as the co-author of Web Work: Information Seeking and Knowledge Work on the World Wide Web published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. He received his doctorate from the University of Toronto focusing on Knowledge Discovery (Data Mining) for Informetric and Behavioral Models of Web Use.

In the nascent days of the World Wide Web, Don was the Lead Technical Architect at IBM Interactive Multimedia, working on the World Book/IBM Multimedia Encyclopedia and other large-scale information architecture, system architecture and development projects. Early in his career, Don worked as a Methodologist at KnowledgeWare, Inc. designing CASE tools for client-server applications as well as doing usability, hypertext and multimedia development research. He also worked on a number of commercial software applications including Uninstaller for Windows.

ABOUT MATTHEW MILAN

Matthew is a designer and entrepreneur who likes to get his hands dirty in as many places as possible. Currently this means a mix of experience design, service design and strategy, but in the past he’s designed everything from spatial technology to ski hills.

He is currently a Partner at Normative, a Toronto-based design strategy studio that helps companies make their products, services and experiences relevant and valuable in an increasingly complex world. Over the last ten years, Matthew has lead large design and strategy teams, slept under his desk at successful startups and tried most of the things he’s been told he couldn’t or shouldn’t. In his free time, he obsesses over soft systems theory, maneuver warfare strategy, urban technologies and the notion of the hacker family.

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ABOUT UX IRREGULARS

UX Irregulars are a rag-tag, fugitive fleet of user experience designers, researchers and strategists who design mostly Web interactions, but also software, and sometimes crazy things like ski hills.
http://groups.google.com/group/UXIrregulars

Official Website: http://groups.google.com/group/UXIrregulars