At this year's IA Summit my fellow Mad*Powian, Jamie Thomson, was kind enough to record the talk that I gave with Aaron Irizarry. If you were at IAS but didn't see us, now's your chance. If you weren't there, well, why the heck weren't you? It was awesome!

John Yuda @yuda

semantic HTML (duh!)

WAI-ARIA (ARIA live regions - off, polite, assertive) Assertive is great for AJAX forms, validate form elements during progress

managing focus (not only for opening, but also after you cancel)

I'd never seen Dan Brown present before, but I was familiar with his books and articles.  This was a half-day workshop, and it was really good.

Healthy conflicts aid & infuse design

Dan has a great presentation style which, very engaging, and was 

Notes

BORG (Consistency) vs. Enterprise (Special Audience)

Situations (where conflict happens) | Patterns (behavior, enable people to resolve) | Traits (you are...style/preferences)

Consider on a grid Validity against Momentum

There's not always a right answer, but there is always an answer

Situations - Purpose (where are we going?), Plan (how are we getting there?), Performance (how effective are we?)

Patterns - Empathize (make you feel understood), Involvement (help them contribute), Redirect (shift the focus), Reframe (adopt the same language)

We played Dan's game in two teams on the table.  I had a turn to play "Project Manager", give the situation and award points to the players that used the cards to solve the situation.  It was good fun, but also provides some good tools to manage this all-to-real situations in everyday work.

Problem ---[healthy conflict]---> Solution

Stuff to look up

http://survivingdesignprojects.tumblr.com/

This was the first of two pre-conference workshops I signed up for.  I was familiar with Peter Morville from his books, but I hadn't seen Samantha Starmer before. It was a great workshop and Samantha had some great real-world examples to step through.

Notes (Peter)

We're still making it up

Classic IA

We Strategy (web, mobile, etc.)

Cross-channel (digital/physical)

Ubiquitous IA (intertwingularity - Peters fave new word)

Nodes & links to create environments for understanding - Jorge

The Library of Congress and Macy's are not ready for Cross-channel, though they want to do it.

It's REALLY hard

"Pace layering" adds a an aspect of time to the experience. Peters drawing has NATURE at the bottom and something like FASHION at the top. The lower ones take longer, but have the greater effect.

Nordstrom's added Wi-Fi to their stores to aid access to customer reviews while browsing in-store.

Notes (Samantha)

Excercise

Samantha walked us through her experience with her (then) insurance carrier when she was in an accident.

Proof of Insurance had no information on it to help

Horrible claims experience (fax, postcards, calls, mail)

Did a group discussion on how the experience could've been better.

Target had a good cross-channel experience where she saw a print ad, went to store, used Target app to find the aisle the item was in.

Moments of truth are where you can find/lose the person

Notes (Peter & Samantha)

Frameworks

From the 90's we had "Content, Context, and Users" overlapping in a venn diagram - The Three Circles of Information Architecture. Then Peter came up with The User Experience Honeycomb and now there's the 'Cross-channel crystal'.  And when we think of creating customer stories, we should be thinking of the "5 Somethings":

consistent

convenient

connected

contextual

cross-time

There's also 10 things we can work through to help future projects:

Stakeholder interviews

Field research

Touchpoint matrix

Service inventory

Design games

Co-design

Body storming (RPG approach)

Business origami (@jessmcmullin)

Service blueprint

Experience maps

Slide deck: http://2012.iasummit.org/schedule/design_for_cross-channel_experiences.html

Stuff to look up:

MAYA "Information" (video)

'What's mine is yours' (book)

Verplank's keynote (video)

'CODE/SPACE' from MIT Books (book)

Tyler Tate's posts on Cross-channel blueprints (link)