Is It Usable Yet?

Forty years on, it's easy to forget that user-centered design and information architecture were once disruptive new ideas. Today, they're both presumed to be kind-of "thrown in" when UX work is being done.

"Of course we're user centered: that's the U in UX!"

"Of course we did the IA - we've got navbars and a site map, don't we?"

But as Peter Morville notes, when something is a part of everybody's job, that thing ends up being nobody's job and it does not get done right.

What's the situation around, and value of, UCD and IA in contemporary UX practice? Find out in a lively Q&A and short presentation on January 28 at Mozilla's office in Portland with Dan Klyn from The Understanding Group. There will be food and drink at the event.

Spoiler: what these things mean today is amazing, essential, transformative and not what you probably expect.

About Dan

Dan Klyn is co-founder of The Understanding Group (TUG), teaches information architecture at the University of Michigan School of Information and serves on the board of the IA Institute. He does IA work for clients including Herman Miller and JSTOR and his research focus is also his hero: Richard Saul Wurman.

Everyone is talking about "Lean UX" -- the last time Julie 'JB' Booth was with us, we did some really fast prototyping.  This time we are going to back up a bit and work on writing simple, clear, testable statements about our users, needs, features and usages.  

Julie 'JB' Booth is a UX geek who is so into providing value to users that it borders on obsession.  Currently at Intel, JB is bringing user centered design into Agile product development teams.