User Experience: the next step for IA's (my Italian IA Summit presentation)

update (March 9, 2005): now includes a link to an illustrated PDF version of the paper submitted to the conference.

At the Italian IA Summit I gave a talk entitled "User Experience: the next step for IA'\s?". In it I discussed a brief history of Information Architecture and its relation with surrounding fields, how I feel that the practitioners of these fields should strive to become t-shaped user experience professionals, and what in my opinion the next steps are for the IA community.

A printable version of the slides of this presentation (750KB .pdf) is available here.

I have also created an illustrated version of the paper (250KB .pdf) that I submitted to the conference.

I hope the presentation contributed to the formation of an Italian national IA community, like the organizers intended.

New job: Senior Experience Designer at Info.nl

The rumours are true: I have changed jobs and am now working for the Amsterdam-based interactive agency Info.nl. My contract says I am an Information Designer but the job opening said Senior Experience Designer and I am sticking to that. In fact, in the following months, I will evaluate the process, tools and techniques used by the Web Development and Interactive Concept teams and in the process might suggest new names for more roles.

To shed some light on the suddenness of this move away from User Intelligence: Late last month I realized rather suddenly that I am not entrepeneur enough to maintain the role of Managing Partner of a young company in need of leadership. Stepping down to become a senior consultant without many additional duties would be unfair to the other employees; everyone has to help build the organization while the company is going through this start-up/build-out phase. So I saw no other option than to leave the company behind.

Now, 3 weeks later, I am happy at work at Info.nl, a company that I have known and occasionally followed since 1995 (when my first company shared a building with them), got to know better in September last year when I did a project for a big insurance company with them, and that now already feels like home.

My personal email address will be the same (peter @ this site), but my work address is peterbo @ info.nl. No flowers please, just nice words ;-)

MeasureMap the next Google application? (confirmed)

If the rumour is true, MeasureMap may soon be a Google application. I like my Google.com, Adsense (click!), Gmail, Google Talk, and Earth, and I'm a happy user of MeasureMap, so I guess I have no objections... (and of course: congrats to Jeff and his team!)

Oh, one thing: Can we get domains listed? I would like to have a little more detail than "6 visitors from Canada": are they comimg from a research facility, a corporation, a personal site, etc.? The domain name would be useful.

Update: It's no longer a rumour, but announced on the Google blog. MeasureMap is now part of Google! Congrats to Jeff and the rest of the team.
Makes you wonder what the next joint project between Adaptive Path and Google will be :-)

One week to profit from early registration prices for IA Summit

This is a reminder to register by February 10, 2006 in order to get the early rates for the 2006 edition of the IA Summit.

Look at the keynotes and some pre-conference workshop:

1. Opening plenary: Dr. David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, as this year's keynote speaker.
   
2. Closing Plenary: Peter Merholz, a regular speaker at Web design and information architecture conferences, including the IA Summit, South by Southwest (SXSW), and the UI Conference.
   
3. Enhancing Your Strategic Influence: Understanding and Responding to Complex Business Problems. Victor Lombardi, John Zapolski, Scott Hirsch, Harry Max, Mark McCormick
   
4. Interaction Design (IxD) Symposium (Full day Thursday). David Heller, Lada Gorlenko, Luke Wroblewski, Lisa deBettencourt
   
5. The Secret Design Strategies for Highly Successful Web Sites (Full day Thursday). Jared M. Spool
   
6. An Introduction to Rapid Design Labs; a Fast, Collaborative
   Approach to Information Architecture and Interface Design (1/2 day Thursday afternoon). Dave Robertson
   
7. Next Horizons for Information Architecture (IA Institute) (Full day Friday). Dan Brown, Harry Max, Aradhana Goel, Paul Gould
   
8. Information Architecture & Findability (Full day Friday). Peter Morville
   
9. Introduction to Information Architecture (1/2 day Friday afternoon) Donna Maurer

Now, go a and register!

Keynoting Italian IA Summit

It's official now, the program has been published: I will be delivering the keynote at the Italian IA Summit! I'll talk about the way IAs are part of the bigger User Experience community, using the development of my T-model for UX as a guide.

Emanuele Quintarelli (co-organizer of the Summit with Luca Rosati) contacted me back in September or October and we've been discussing this in nightly chat sessions over Skype ever since. Given the high number of submissions and prospective attendees (they've had to switch to a room with 340 seats, and even that is fully booked!), I feel deeply honoured to be selected as opening presenter. Despite the fact that I won't be able to follow most of the other contributions, I encourage the decision of the organizers to keep the meeting in Italian.

I want to support European local IA communities in every way I can, and a trip to Rome is a lovely way to do just that. It complements the efforts put in the EURO IA conferences and the Amsterdam IA Cocktail Hours.

I believe the room will be highly connected, so watch out for the blog entries, Wiki items and Flickr streams reporting on the event.