Date: March 19, 2023
Authors: Joe Elmendorf, Grant Carmichael, Mike White and Emily Claflin
Reading Time: 3 min 55 sec

This month we asked the TUG team to summarize their time at the Information Architecture Conference (IAC) and share the most impactful sessions for them. The team definitely had a few thoughts they brought home with them, and we’re happy to share those with you this month. Our hope is that if you could not attend, you could see the conference through their eyes and what made them think.

Two talks particularly stuck with me. Farai Madzima’s opening keynote and Dorian Taylor’s The Specificity Gradient.

Farai Madzima’s Keynote was about using your One-on-One meetings to manage change and unlock meaningful career progress. Farai shared a high-level overview of Paloma Medina’s research-backed framework, BICEPS, for understanding six core needs that are important for humans. I found this talk both illuminating and convicting. As the head of consulting at TUG, I was confronted with the notion that supporting people in their current work, role, and life situations isn’t enough; I also need to be helping them see how what they’re doing now sets them up for achieving what they want to accomplish in the future. 

I also found Dorian Taylor’s talk, The Specificity Gradient, to be an interesting twist on a notion that I often use to frame relationships—pace layers. While I typically use this framing to highlight the nature of the relationships occurring within a system, Dorian builds on this notion and offers a more-formal and computational spin on things. He proposes a scalable and more-sustainable alternative to storing documentation in documents by acknowledging the differing rates of change that the parts of a document might have. Dorian asserts a structured solution that allows for the pieces that change at different rates to be used together but still respects their unique evolutionary natures. I am encouraged that he is getting a chance to try this out, and I can’t wait to hear how it goes!

And while it might be cheating to include a talk by a TUG IA, I enjoyed hearing Emily Claflin talk about Plain Language. I’ve heard her share on this topic before, but hearing her speak always serves as a good reminder of what we need to do to communicate as clearly as possible. Using plain language is important for communicating complexity clearly, and it should be a conscious part of every communicator’s practice. We’re glad to have Emily on our team to help steer us in the right direction and keep this front of mind in the work we do.

The talks that I caught that I enjoyed were:

• Carrie Hane keynote – The IA superpowers to fill IA-sized holes

• Farai Madzima keynote – Channeled a lot of communication values we aspire to at TUG

• Veronica Erb – on the next steps in IA and life

• Carrieanne Tuckley – had a great condensed list of what captivated our conversations at each IAC over the years

• Duane Degler – IA and AI – I was geeking on his models

The double-edged sword of multitrack events is that you can choose your own adventure, but you’re gonna miss something awesome no matter how hard you try.

Veronica’s talk resonated with me the most. She likened the current state in her life to ‘liminal butterfly goo,’ a chrysalis state where she has yet to become her next stage, one that she feels will differ from where she has been as a UX-er. The pandemic and being a mother have provided a pause and time to ask why we do what we do. And how will we ensure it is for helping, not harming others? So much of the work we do in UX is for the betterment of people, but how often is that not aligned with the values of companies or the people who profit from them? Inertia keeps us on a path, but what should we become instead? Where should we direct our energy? Hers was an inspiring talk about embracing ambiguity and being ok with pauses to think about the next steps that are meaningful to you; making things, building community, and not feeding a machine that can be harmful to others.

I really enjoyed the talk from Wilian Molinari and Ben Lipinski about crafting or customizing card games for exploring different levels of their organizations’ pace layers. It reminded me a bit about the improv games our team has played and made me wonder how we can focus those exercises around specific work topics instead of just for fun.

I also enjoyed learning from Heather Hedden about Knowledge Graphs. I have heard that term thrown around for a couple of years, and it was helpful to hear from her about how KGs are structured and implemented and their benefits compared to relational databases. Before attending IAC, I based my understanding of Knowledge Graphs on their appearance—often represented by beautiful spider-web or street-map-of-Paris visualizations. Now I understand how they work better by defining nodes, their attributes, and the relationships that connect them. The dynamic and flexible nature of Knowledge Graphs makes them a good fit for complex interconnected content, enabling faceted search and personalization in various applications, compared to something more rigidly structured like a Relational Database. I’m excited to continue learning about Knowledge Graphs and how they intersect with my work as an IA.

I was really intrigued by Matt Arnold’s talk on the power of long-form narratives to improve organizational velocity. We can apply the principles of long-form narratives from Matt Arnold’s talk to how we present client work as a potential alternative to the massive slide decks we sometimes assemble. The long-form narrative talk referenced Amazon’s practice of banning slide decks and instead using six-page written documents to present information and share work. Part of the idea behind this is that “Writing is thinking, and that’s why it’s hard.” Crafting a six-page document requires more rigorous thought than putting together a slide deck. Would a well-crafted, three-page written summary of our research, along with a folder of video clips and a few models, be more effective than a 65-slide deck?

I also found the concept of information personas from Mike Doane’s talk intriguing because I’d only heard of the concept of personas applied to people to segment users based on shared characteristics. I’d never seen or thought about dividing groups of information into “personas” based on their shared information characteristics. The talk that included this concept referenced information personas in building a knowledge management system. I’d be curious to see if there are projects at TUG where this might also be a valuable lens for viewing information.