Semantics, Search, and Findability

Search is changing - we see it in public search and particularly what is possible with individual site searching. But it's more than search — findability is changing! Content relationships and linking, more structure and metadata, richer designs. Semantic Web concepts and techniques are becoming practical, finding their way into authoring tools and site designs. How do we take advantage of this? This is a brief overview of findability and search with a semantic twist, with examples and demos.

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Duane Degler

Enabling Exploratory Discovery Through Taxonomy

Not everything can just be searched. “Aha!” moments deliver value. Exploration leads to insights and surfaces contexts. How do you prepare your content for these user experiences?
Menu Mania: What's Wrong With Menus and How to Fix Them

Menus are ubiquitous in websites and applications of all types. They are critical to accessing the information and actions that users need, yet they can be very frustrating to use. In this presentation we review what we have learned about best practices for designing mega menus, context menus, hamburger menus, full page menus and other types, and share case studies of menu redesigns for enterprise applications, mobile apps, and information-rich websites.
AI Explanations as Two-Way Experiences, Led by Users

How do we craft designs that "explain" concepts and respond to users’ intent? Can AI identify, elicit and apply relevant user contexts, to help us understand AI outputs? How do explanations become two-way, as users can explain their expectations and offer feedback?
Connecting Art & Archives for Research, Discovery, and Storytelling

If you’ve ever sat in on a discussion between a curator and an archivist, then you understand the breadth and richness of stories hidden in collections. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has developed a scalable infrastructure supporting integrated information from art, archival, library and historic home collections. Collections Online is a vital shared resource for the Museum and the public. Exploring rich relationships reveals a wealth of contexts, perspectives, events, and places. Learn about how the Museum is envisioning the future of its publishing and collections-based storytelling.
IA for AI: Shaping the Experience for Human-AI Systems

Participants collaborated in building upon the IA-for-AI framework that was first presented at IAC 2021. We explored what it means to understand, translate, and describe the types of situations where human-machine interaction occurs, and the way the relationship changes in real-time. Participants discussed opportunities and responsibilities that IA brings to human-AI relationships.
Hello, Meet Hola! Design for Mixed-language Interfaces

A global online user population necessitates the exchange of content from different sources, and the ability to aggregate multilingual content is a critical requirement within many research and business contexts. To effectively reach a global audience and provide access to content in multiple languages, we must structure mixed-language content to support its successful presentation and delivery, and provide innovative designs that facilitate exploration. In this interactive session, we provide real-world examples for doing just that.
Guiding Users Towards Action: Empowering Decisions Through Effective Data Design

Good design can help users quickly grasp a situation, make better decisions, and take productive actions. In this session, we provide a framework that describes a progressive evolution of data displays and actions, and share a broad range of examples, from consumer products to enterprise web applications, to discuss ways to design effective data displays and integrate actions.
How IAs Can Shape the Future of Human-AI Collaboration

Sometimes people describe Artificial intelligence (AI) as an “emerging intelligence,” but it is, in truth, the emergent collaboration with humans that fosters positive personal, societal, and environmental outcomes. We outline a framework that Information Architects (IAs) can use to help them think about the key issues in designing for AI systems.
Business as (Un)Usual: How a UX Audit Can Help

It may be the understatement of the century to say that 2020 is not going the way any of us had planned. In the best of times, it can be difficult to justify the allocation of resources to assess and redesign your UX. And in tough times, like now, it can be especially hard to make needed progress, which is where a UX audit can really make a difference.
Sensemaking as a Learned Experience

Human ability to “make sense” in both sensory and information experiences is learned, then developed through attention and practice over time. This talk guides IAs, designers, and developers toward creating supportive environments for sensemaking. It outlines the role of language, symbols, structure, and tools that help us make sense of our interactions with information.
Don’t Document it—Prototype it!

In this article by Michael Owens, she explores the Catch 22 of traditional documentation: that whatever you write is inevitably going to be either too much or too little. Walking the tightrope between providing enough detail to be useful and avoiding too many words to be overwhelming can be a delicate balance to strike for any designer, and that's where prototypes can make all the difference.
The Delicate Art of Facilitation: Preparing for a Facilitation Session

A successful facilitation session is one where participants are empowered to achieve specific outcomes supporting a shared goal. In this blog post, Duane Degler and Karen Bachmann detail the most important aspects of preparing for a facilitation session to ensure that you set out with the right maps, milestones, and possible alternative paths at hand.
The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Collections Website

In this demonstration of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's collection browse website, launched as a beta in September 2019, Duane Degler and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's Rana Chan discuss the project background, linked data architecture approach, and the O'Keeffe team's thoughts on the future. This webinar was presented to the Museum interest group of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) community.
Don’t Document It, Prototype It!

In this DCUX 2019 lightning talk, Michael Owens shares valuable tips about communicating UX requirements to your development team with annotated prototypes.
The Delicate Art of Facilitating a Content Strategy

Good facilitation skills are essential for many content strategy tasks and projects. In this session, Duane Degler discussed techniques and approaches to channel the passions and personal goals of each participant, effectively guiding the group towards successful outcomes. Topics covered include learning how to lead discussions, manage personalities, and adapt to the unexpected to benefit both clients and customers.
Designing More Ethical and Unbiased Experiences

Humans are biased, and sadly, we are not always able to filter our deeply ingrained biases. UX designers and researchers have long understood this, but we need tools to explore and challenge our biases in a productive way to deliver better outcomes. In this session, Karen Bachmann and Carol Smith (Carnegie Mellon University) share ways you can empower yourself and your teams to do the right thing for people.
Linked Information and an Enhancement Ecosystem

In his Information Architecture Conference poster, Duane Degler offers key steps in the theory and practice of managing information as linked data, a framework that supports ongoing enhancement of digital resources, and ways to support cross-silo information resources within, and across, organizations.
User and Information Design Considerations for Effective Semantic Search

Semantic search seeks to enhance the meaning in content, to more closely align the searcher and the available information resources. This means there is a strong user-centered aspect needed to unlock the benefits. In this NFAIS Conference presentation, Duane Degler explores strategies and considerations for best supporting your users through effective semantic search.
Know Thyself, and To Thine Users Be True: Understanding and Managing Biases that Can Influence UX Work

In her UXPA 2018 session, Karen Bachmann explores ways to discover and discuss biases constructively before they undermine work, look at case studies of products that suffered from hidden biases, and consider pragmatic approaches to manage their influence in our projects.
Big Data in Small Graphics: Micro-Visualizations in SaaS and Enterprise Applications

In this UXPA session, Lisa Battle and Rachel Sengers explored the use of micro-visualizations to enhance user experience and how to best design effective visualizations.
How to Design Great Dashboards and Visualizations for SaaS and Enterprise Applications

In their UXPA 2018 workshop, Lisa Battle and Rachel Sengers discussed how to ensure a good user experience for dashboards, brainstorm together on the common building blocks of dashboard design, and generate ideas for visualizations to quickly communicate data.
Listen Up! Improving your Listening Skills and Awareness

In this UXPA Boston 2018 session, Karen Bachmann shares insights, exercises, and practical tips to help you improve your listening skills.
Archives Strengthening Historical Narrative: Sharing Digital And Linked Data Resources For Broader Reach And Sustainability

In their MW2018 panel presentation, Duane Degler joins Mark Coffey and Alan Watts, both from the Texas Coastal Bend Collection, to provide insights into ways oral history and images can be used to assemble flexible topic-based narrative structures. This session provides insight into technical and curatorial approaches, so others don’t have to “start from scratch.”
Going Global: The Intersection of IA and UX in a Multilingual Environment

In their IA Summit talk, Kate Blanch, Rachel Sengers, and Janette Shew discuss how to structure multilingual content to support its successful presentation and delivery, and how to provide innovative designs that facilitate exploration of that content.
No Static: IA for Dynamic Information Environments

In this IA Summit talk, Duane Degler provides an overview of the dynamic information landscape, positions the role of IA firmly at the heart of its ecosystem design, and provides ideas for weaving this into your practice.
Linked Collections and an Enhancement Ecosystem

In their ARLIS/NA poster, Duane Degler and Kate Blanch offer key steps in the theory and practice of managing collection data as linked data, a framework that supports ongoing enhancement of digital resources, and ways to discuss your approach toward digital scholarship.
Integrating Taxonomies and Ontologies into Enterprise Search and Browse

In this Data Harmony User Group 2018 session, Duane Degler outlines approaches for increasing taxonomy integration into search and browse, thus drawing the greatest value from your taxonomies for your users.
Guerrilla Glue: Making Collaborative Digital Innovation Projects Stick

In this MCN2017 session, Duane Degler moderates a panel discussing how institutions and projects are using linked data and modern technologies to achieve long-term outcomes for themselves and others.
Split Focus: Designing Applications for Multiple Monitor Setups

In this UXPA 2017 session, Lisa Battle, Michael Owens, and Rachel Sengers discuss new UX design patterns and challenges that arise in software and web-based application design for multiple monitors, illustrating them with real project examples.
Ethics: A Human-Centered Design Goal

In this UXPA 2017 session, Karen Bachmann addresses about how to talk carrots (value) and not sticks (legality) to make ethics a core human-centered design constraint.
Designing and Evaluating Powerful, Relevant Search and Browse Experiences

In this hands-on course, Duane Degler took participants on a journey through the evolving search landscape, with a particular focus on considerations for designing and evaluating the user experience.
Accessibility 101

In this Baltimore UX Meetup presentation, Michael Owens and Lesley Humphreys explore recent standards, assistive technologies, and the types of deliverables that can be used to specify accessibility compliant interactions.
Micro-Visualizations: Small Visualizations That Make A Big Impact

In this UXDC session, Lisa Battle and Rachel Sengers present examples of several different types of micro-visualizations and discuss how they can be used effectively to improve user experience.
Aligning Your Organization's Strategic Direction, Roadmaps, and Technology

In this session, Duane Degler helps association executives think about how we can better use roadmaps to plan our technology journeys and keep everyone in sync, and provides valuable insights to help coordinate organization and technology goals across parallel initiatives and departments.
User Experience Design Considerations for Multi-Museum Online Collaborations

In this MCN2016 session, Duane Degler and Lesley Humphreys share human-centered user experience considerations and requirements that pertain specifically to the challenges faced by collaborations among multiple collections, sites, and institutions.
Designing Great Dashboards for SaaS and Enterprise Applications

Dashboards present a great opportunity to improve user experience by providing quick answers to users’ common questions, but they are also full of potential pitfalls for design. In this session, Lisa Battle will discuss our approach to ensuring a good user experience for dashboards, focusing on 8 principles of UX design that are particularly relevant and illustrating them with real project examples.
First Impressions Matter: Onboarding for First Time Users

First time user experience, while critical to product success, may not be getting the attention it deserves. In this talk, Lisa Battle presents design principles for great onboarding experiences that engage and inform new users, helping them become productive quickly.
Understanding How Content Is Used in Enterprise Settings

Enabling knowledge management capabilities through search and discovery can benefit from richer data to learn the ways users think about the information they find and use. This article describes an approach we developed to support enterprise search and content synthesis for case management and research in legal and scientific/academic domains. We use an extremely lightweight (yet powerful) mechanism to bridge the silos and establish a network of data around the use of information.
Intelligent Understanding of Content Use

Using a rich network of data about how people actually use content, we can find insights by integrating it with other enterprise information sources. In this article, Duane Degler explores how it becomes a valuable input to governance processes, at both the organizational and content levels.
7 Steps for a More Accessible Association Information Ecosystem

It can be easy for associations to get buried under all the information they produce and curate. Here are seven steps create an information ecosystem in which resources are accessible and up to date.
Creating Personal Profiles Across Time and Distance

Personal data capture and algorithmic modeling of user preferences and interests is maturing. In this talk, Duane Degler explores some of the considerations for longitudinal preference management, how adaptive interfaces might play a role, and how users could interact with a model at a particular time in an application.
8 Tips For Achieving User-Friendly Search

Search is an increasingly important component in desktop and mobile online experiences, yet too often search is not designed to meet the needs of users. Associations have unique challenges that come with serving multiple audiences and delivering a variety of information types through search—for example, balancing the relevance of publications, issue summaries, research papers, membership information, and event information. Here, we offer a practical to-do list to achieve user-friendly search for association websites and apps.
Designing the Next Generation of Search User Experience

Design is coming to the forefront of effective search applications, to help make sense of mobile search, data search, semantic search, enterprise search, federated search, and embedded search. So what do we need to know about designing for search? In this UXPA 2015 session, Duane Degler and Lisa Battle dive into the essentials for a new generation of search design.
Simplicity in Web Application Design

Simplicity is one of the most important principles of design. But, realistically, simplicity isn’t always simple. This talk covers what to try when removing functionality or features isn’t an option, provides practical questions to ask when deciding whether and how to simplify an application, and summarizes proven design techniques to use when simplifying applications.
Emerging Tastes: Considering How Preferences Evolve

Experiencing cultural heritage is a voyage of discovery and learning, where emerging insights and serendipity play a significant role. The experience also happens in a blended personal and social context. At the broader level, engagement is longitudinal – what we learn from modern cultural experiences (daily life in our surroundings) can provide clues to analogous interests in cultural materials, and vice versa. This paper addresses richness of personal experience poses challenges and opportunities for capturing preferences in ways that support a user’s experience with cultural heritage across institutions and over time, both in the digital realm and where digital interaction blends with a physical space.
User Experience for Content Sites

Have you seen those beautiful websites that you can't use? Or the super-cool ones that make it hard to actually accomplish your tasks? There's a better way. Duane Degler joined the DC Web Mavens to cover the landscape of understanding goals, users, tasks, content, and, particularly, context.
Blowing Up the Book: Design Challenges for Online Cultural Heritage Information

In 2009, The Getty Foundation issued a challenge to eight art museums: translate a scholarly catalog rich with cultural heritage data, images, and interpretation into an online resource that strives to reach beyond the limitations of print in creative and useful ways. "Systematic catalogs" are a time-honored and resource-intensive method of publishing the core art historical data and art research associated with the cultural objects that these institutions hold in public trust. And so the Online Scholarly Catalog Initiative (OSCI) was begun with the goal of "blowing up the book"... not to eliminate or destroy, but rather to expand the utility and audience of these important resources.
Now What? Creating Innovative LODLAM Sites and Apps

With the rapid evolution of a semantic web, it is no surprise that many cultural institutions, large and small, are exploring Linked Open Data (LOD) as a means of connecting distributed data across the Web and across internal repositories. This presentation explores the questions, practicalities, and implications related to designing sites and applications for linked open data.
Red Alert! Communicating Status Through Great UX, Graphics and Accessibility

Effective visual design is essential for communicating system and workflow status, alerts, notifications, categories, and prioritization that often must be understood at a glance. Some people believe they can’t use graphics or color for important cues because of accessibility, which is not true. At UXPA’s 2014 conference, we discuss how to create great, visually appealing UX designs that optimize communication of status information for all users.
Enhancement Ecosystems: Enriching Structured Content with User Tagging and Annotation

Formal and informal metadata, classification and descriptions play a significant role in the quality of user experience with content and search. This talk describes “enhancement ecosystems” involving users and content experts.
Sewing the Seams of Sensemaking: A Practical Interface for Tagging and Organizing Saved Search Results

This paper presents a usability-tested interface design that enables time-constrained analysts to organize their search results in a lightweight manner during and immediately following their search sessions. The research literature suggests that users want to lay out search results spatially in overlapping “piles,” but a pilot study with a flexible canvas tool revealed that this design requires too much manipulation and has other drawbacks. This finding led to a novel hybrid design that combines structure with a flexible visual layout and which allows the analysts to quickly triage documents first and organize them later, or interweave these two processes.
Supporting Relevance for Users – A Design Challenge

Presenting “related” content can unfortunately be perceived by users as not relevant to their current needs, particularly in complex knowledge work and interactive applications. At risk is a loss of credibility, which can weaken trust in the application or underlying information, which in turn colors their ongoing experience with an application. Relevance algorithms have gotten more sophisticated, providing designers and developers with useful tools. But from a user experience perspective, relevance is often perceived in the context of a user’s immediate tasks and goals, as much (or more) than it is associated with their prior actions and patterns from similar users.
Design Guidelines: Real-Life Stories

As an organization grows and its products proliferate, how can it maintain a coherent sense of identity and usability across them, while allowing room for flexibility and growth? For a family of online communications channels or applications, design guidelines can document and disseminate the organization’s UX principles and patterns. This presentation offers resources and insights from both practitioners and professionals outside the field who have undertaken these types of projects together.
Developing Style Guidelines for Suites of Applications

Many enterprises grow organically, with diverse products managed by different teams. Style guidelines provide a way for the organization brand itself and ensure consistency across its family of apps while leaving in flexibility to accommodate different contexts of use.
Designing Configurable and Customizable Applications

In complex applications, such as claims processing, learning management, scheduling systems, engineering software, and other such tools, it is common to provide flexibility to modify the user interface (and the underlying processing) to meet widely varying needs, rather than assuming that one size fits all. When working on the user experience design for such products, we need to ensure that it is easy for clients or users to configure the product as they wish, and be mindful of impacts on the overall user experience.
Lemonade out of Lemons: Design increases your data's value to your users

We all want users to gain value from our information and applications. The use of semantic technologies has grown significantly over the last few years, and with that growth has come the challenge of designing clear, useful interactions to help your users find meaning in large and varied datasets. This talk demonstrates that the risk of poor design is that much of the richness of semantically-enabled environments can be lost because the user experiences tend to be overwhelming rather than meaningful and engaging.
Search Mental Models and Interactions

Discover how user mental models relate to online search, particularly for more intensive knowledge work or critical information needs. This talk addresses the different types and stages of searching, similarities and differences in user mental models and the effect that may have on what tools and support should be available, and design solutions and patterns that have been employed to support the various search stages and users.
Design 10:5:2 - 10 Best Practices, 5 Examples, 2 Actions

Are you thinking about how to achieve designs that will get a positive response from your users? Are you wondering how to refine an interface to work well with semantic data? While the ‘magic’ in design can’t be boiled down to a few simple rules, this talk will show you things you can do that will help get your project started on the right path.
Design Trends for Faceted Search

Faceted refinement and filtering is now a common part of search results interfaces, and faceted navigation is being used for many other types of interactions. At the same time, the underlying data on the web is changing (with increasing structured data, semantics, and use of more sophisticated categorization), as are the tool sets that can be used to implement facet interfaces “out of the box.” This talk addresses how the increasing availability of data and tools puts the focus even more firmly on the designer to make decisions that affect usability.
Layered, Adaptive Results: Interaction Concepts for Large, Heterogeneous Data Sets

Some data environments are not well served by current styles of search results presentation. One example of this is large-scale archival, library or museum collections. The range of user goals and interaction needs can be quite broad, and the information itself is highly structured yet very heterogeneous — it spans many subject areas, information types, and presentation/media. Based on the use of semantic web formats for metadata, in this paper we explore how to leverage the semantic relationships to drive aspects of results presentation — to change elements of the UI itself in response to the results data.
Usability Knowledge Online: Discover the BoK

Every professional discipline builds a framework that outlines the overall practice, techniques, and standards. This paper discusses how a framework guides individual practitioners and educators, providing a way of identifying that the professional discipline is delivering on its service aims. The UPA Usability Body of Knowledge site is the source for methods, design techniques, management advice, emerging research, and more! Members provide content, links and ideas; the site features make it easy and relevant.
Achieving Business Value by Integrating Tasks, Topics and Content

“The shortest distance between two points is a relevant keyword.” When users need information, the most direct path returns them to their task as quickly as possible with the knowledge needed to be successful. This requires us to design and write with an understanding of the user's context, task, and need. We then reduce seeking time by carefully defining the 'glue' between applications and supporting information. In this paper, I discuss some 'big picture' ideas for User Assistance practices: understanding the user's context, identifying relevant keywords, and integrating applications and content using techniques from the Semantic Web and Topic Maps.
Delivering Services Online: It’s More Than Forms

New technologies, reduced workforces, and higher expectations from the public are transforming the way that businesses and government agencies deliver online services. However, online services are not just forms. We describe ways to improve user experience by providing integrated services, preventing errors, using appropriate tone and language, and structuring the interaction.
Supporting Aging Citizens and Employees at the Social Security Administration

Both to meet the needs of an aging public and to ensure that staff members nearing retirement age can continue to work productively, information technology must be usable for older adults. Usability specialists have been at the heart of analysis, design and testing activities that help the agency respond, both internally and externally.
Design Patterns and Guidelines for Usable and Accessible Web Applications

Because we are committed to achieving ease of use for all users, we have encountered challenges on real projects that have led us to question the common belief that accessibility benefits all users. Although the user experience goals of accessibility and usability often complement each other, sometimes they are incompatible—the best solution for one user group compromises the needs of another group. This presentation introduces design patterns that specifically address accessibility, and identifies design tradeoffs that suggest the need for alternate views of the user interface.
Policy Content at SSA: Using XML and Semantic Metadata

A new content management and delivery system has been growing over the past years at SSA. From a content perspective, users have been asking for “simple answers, with all supporting information, relevant to my situation.” From an organizational perspective, the role of content is increasingly seen as integrated with transactional systems in order to sustain quality service delivery in an increasingly complex business environment. From a technology perspective, the use of emerging tools based on XML and semantic technologies provides opportunities for simpler systems that control content maintenance more effectively, improve integration, provide easier content access, and allow migration as systems evolve over time. This case study shows the application and discusses design considerations.
Maintaining Ontology Implementations: The Value of Listening

It's hard to argue against the concepts of self-describing data, contextual interfaces, and richer metadata for content that eventually will make up the Semantic Web. However, it is easy to imagine semantic environments suffering from the same challenges that many content management system implementations and the Web itself suffer from: the preoccupation with data could easily leave us drowning in it. This paper focuses on approaches being explored to promote feedback and user involvement for the maintenance of semantic representations, to ensure they remain useful and current.
How to Design User Interfaces to Support Users and Their Tasks

An analysis of users and their tasks typically generates a lot of rich information… but the process of translating that information into design solutions may seem like “magic.” The truth is that user-centered design is iterative, and requires a mixture of art and science — it takes a series of small steps that both transform and refine the collected information into design solutions. This presentation uses the analogy of building a house to illustrate the process from high-level visioning all the way through detailed design.
Can Topic Maps Provide Context for Enterprise-Wide Applications?

Topic maps provide exciting opportunities not just to make information easier to find, but to increase the usability of software. In order to provide users with the information that applies to their particular situations, in forms that they can use, software must be aware of a user’s context (in a broad, multi-dimensional sense). This paper describes how topic maps can serve as the language for linking information to software applications and for sharing information about context among applications.
Knowledge Management in Pursuit of Performance: The Challenge of Context

Much of the current focus on knowledge management is on the acquisition and storage of knowledge resources. Unfortunately, because most knowledge management solutions are developed to stand alone, the context of a person’s need for information when using business applications is often left to the individual. This article discusses ways to merge the best practices of knowledge management and performance support, so that knowledge can be integrated more seamlessly within working applications, and applications can be used to solicit knowledge as a byproduct of people’s work.