The rise of social media and sharing sites--like YouTube, Digg and Flickr--has meant new challenges for information architects. This full-day workshop will examine the impact of social media and IA, and show participants how they can incorporate user participation into their website and application architectures.
Date: March 22nd, 2007
Location: Information Architecture Summit, Las Vegas, Nevada
Workshop Leaders: Gene Smith, Rashmi Sinha and Thomas Vander Wal
Slides: Social IA (Gene Smith), Designing for Social Sharing (Rashmi Sinha)
The rise of social media and sharing sites--like YouTube, Digg and Flickr--has meant new challenges for information architects. Such sites demonstrate how the information discovery experience is enriched by the addition of a social dimension. IAs working on findability for all sorts of sites must consider adding a social dimension to the information sharing and discovery experience. In addition to their usual bag of tricks, they can
- incorporate new classification techniques like tagging,
- anticipate social uses of information and design for sharability,
- create architectures for user-created content, and
- design feedback loops that change their architecture in response to user input.
This workshop will collect the latest research, techniques and case studies into a one-day session for intermediate and advanced IAs. By the end of the session participants will learn
- social software fundamentals,
- the secrets of successful tagging applications,
- how to design for sharing,
- how to incorporate real-time feedback into their architectures,
- navigation design for social media,
- social IA for intranets, portals and collaborative sites.
This workshop will mix theory with hands-on activities and real-world examples and case studies.