Des Moines 2023

Have you ever gotten lost on a website and thought maybe there's a better way to organize it? Or maybe you think tomatoes are a fruit but everyone else says they're vegetables? On this particular journey, we'll discover a method for discovering your user's mental models so that you can better organize your navigation and content. You'll learn what exactly is card sorting, all the different variations of it, and how to analyze your results so that you can get to the bottom of the tomato debate.

The reality about IA and UX work is that you never actually start from zero. You always begin at some point, in some place, with some thing. In this talk, you’ll learn a flexible framework to help you examine levels of context for a multi dimensional view of projects.

Opportunities to change a product’s IA are full of promise and peril. Aspirations to make things clear and coherent quickly meet a messy behind-the-scenes reality: No one owns the IA, and everybody is a stakeholder. Though we talk about “the IA” as a whole, its parts are all in the hands of different teams responsible for their own feature sets and product areas.The only way through this mess is to turn your IA lens inward. This talk will explore how orientation and wayfinding techniques were applied to design artifacts and team spaces for a major IA project at Mural, resulting in greater participation, more buy-in, and better outcomes.

Jeremy Burton is content design manager at Mural.

Crystal will give a presentation centering on growing your influence and support within an organization and senior leadership, in your role as an individual or leader. It will focus on using metrics and great storytelling to build advocacy and sponsorship based on proven business impact. This will cover topics like team expenses, headcount, budget allocations and exposure to broader business challenges.

Have you been thinking about delving into the world of video? In 2023, the use of video is continuing to grow as a medium for sharing information in an engaging and impactful way. But sometimes, getting started with video might feel overwhelming. Whether you’re in brainstorming mode or you're well on your way to being the next YouTube star, we’re breaking down process and best practices to help you along your path. How do you determine what to share when creating video? How will you store all that data and what systems can you use to keep it organized? We’ll be using both sides of our brains during this session to tackle conceptual and practical considerations, as well as resources and tips, for building a video infrastructure into your organization’s tool belt to reach your users.

Join us on our journey to better understand users’ experience with a symbiosis of quantitative value feedback, qualitative color, and engagement analytics. Inspired by Google’s HEART model, we’ll share how we’re marrying jobs to be done, task success, and longitudinal satisfaction metrics to create our user segmentation and persona strategies.

If design had a pantheon, Clarity would be one of its gods. Oh, Clarity! We name conferences after you, enshrine you in our design principles and voice frameworks, admonish fellow designers for forgetting about you. A thousand odes on Medium have been penned in your honor. But who are you, really? How did you come to be? Are you just the cosmic opposite of your supposed foe, complexity? (Spoiler: no.) And most importantly…how might your boons be summoned when we need them? Join Scott Kubie, content strategy’s King of Swords (it’s a whole thing, you’ll have to ask), as he shares his theory on the true Cause of Clarity, why it’s probably not what you think, and how to benefit from it more reliably in your design and IA work.