TriUPA workshop—Modeling Concepts: New IA Techniques for a Web 2.0 World—September 8th, 2009

Posted Jul 30, 2009   |   0 Comments   |   by Abe Crystal

What: Modeling Concepts: New IA Techniques for a Web 2.0 World

When: full-day workshop: 9am - 5pm | Tuesday 9/8/09 | coffee & lunch included

Where: Council for Entrepreneurial Development in RTP

How: Capacity is limited—Register online now to reserve your spot!

Intended Audience

Senior User Experience Professionals, Information Architects, and Business Analysts.

About the Workshop
A staple in the information architect’s tool chest, the site map, approaches obsolescence faster and faster every day. The site map–a literal representation of every page on a web site–no longer adequately captures the structures behind today’s web sites. Information architects need a new tool.

A concept model can be that tool. While similar to the site map, a concept model avoids confining information architects to a specific framework for representing structures. It provides flexibility for accommodating a range of concepts and objects–not just web pages. It can represent a variety of relationships and easily incorporate contextual information. Modern web sites no longer are a collection of static HTML pages. Instead, they rely on templates, portlets, and complex interactivity. A user’s experience of such sites are hardly linear or hierarchical. Information architects need a visualization tool to capture the range of abstractions that form the foundation of modern sites.

This workshop will help participants adopt concept modeling into their own processes.  Besides introducing the deliverable and providing advice on how to create them, the workshop will help participants understand where and when concept models are appropriate to use. We will discuss the range of problems concept models can address and how to translate a model from an abstract representation of a site’s structure to concrete wireframes.

After providing an overview, the workshop will gradually walk participants through the process of creating a concept model. Working from a sample site, participants will learn and practice…

* gathering concepts
* compiling an initial model
* reviewing with “stakeholders” (played by the facilitator and other participants)
* revising the model
* adding a final visual polish, and turning the model into a screen design.

By the end of this workshop, participants will know:

* When concept models are an appropriate tool.
* How to create concept models to use in the gathering requirements.
* How to create concept models to use in the design process.
* How to design effective visualizations for concept models.

About the Speaker

Dan Brown is founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, a user experience consulting firm based in Washington, DC that has engaged with clients in telecommunications, media, education, health, high-tech, and other sectors. Dan has been practicing information architecture and user experience design since 1995.

Prior to founding EightShapes, Dan consulted with organizations ranging from the US Postal Service, the World Bank, and the Federal Communications Commission to USAirways, FirstUSA, and Fannie Mae. From 2002-2004, Dan was a Federal employee, leading the content management program for the Transportation Security Administration. His portfolio includes work on public-facing web sites, intranets and extranets, and addresses most aspects of the user experience, from information architecture and content strategy to interaction and interface design.

Drawing on his expertise in communicating complex ideas and abstractions through high-quality visual documentation, Dan wrote a book on user experience deliverables: Communicating Design (New Riders, 2006). Amazon reviews call it “authoritative”, “practical, personal, comprehensive” and “a cool nerdbook”.  He’s written more than a dozen articles for Boxes and Arrows, an online journal dedicated to information architecture, on topics ranging from PowerPoint to the information architecture of home audio devices. He’s also written for UX Matters, the CHI Bulletin, and Interactive Television Today.

Filed under: Local Groups

Gig: Joomla implementation

Posted Jul 27, 2009   |   Comments disabled   |   by Abe Crystal

Gig: Joomla implementation for a history reference website.

Contact:
Marek McKenna—marek_mckenna@yahoo.com

Gig description:
I want to house the biggest collection of historical primary sources on one place.  There are several sites that house large collections, but they are maintained on institutional websites and as a result are not updated often and are incomplete.

Here are two examples:

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html

So I think there will be roughly 10,000 documents when this project is completed.  So the database needs to be very robust.

The documents need to be easily organized under lots of categories with the capacity to cross reference.  For example—the 19th Amendment would be under women’s history and Legal History.

Currently a version of JOOMLA! DOCMAN was installed on the site. Perhaps it was not set up right. This might work, but the person that put the site together seems to be out of his depth. His reply to my push back—this is what you need. I uploaded two documents to the same category on docman and it crashed.  Obviously if this can’t handle two documents in the same category there is going to be a problem when there are 10k.  Plus I do not see how to cross reference documents in docman and it requires documents to be converted into pdf.

When uploading or updating the documents I want to copy and paste the document. I do not want to convert them to a pdf file before uploading them. I want my visitors to be able to click on a hyperlink and view the document like on the two sample sites listed above.

Filed under: Jobs